If you wish to be snarky, as is evidenced by your first sentence, “I used the word “statistics, twice”, then be forewarned, I give as good as I get. So you can be civil, or the gloves come off. I am a fellow Conservative, and deserve only civilty.
Your error is believing that statistics prove every scenario. There is no evidence that she did not do everything to dissuade this kid from this path. The presence of a male does not mean there was not one. She might be a widow.
My views are based on personal experience. My parents (father: career Navy, mother: professional hair stylist) raised my sister and me in the same way. I am the oldest and stayed on the straight and narrow. My sister strayed. Thankfully, she got her moral compass back on true, and is a fine mother, teacher, sister, and friend. A role model.
I used the expression, “I used the word “statistics, twice”, because you had twice used the expression that “You are assuming”.
No, I was not assuming. I was citing statistics.
It is not being snarky at all to suggest that you were hoping that she had been a good parent, and it just didn’t work. And, I will add, that this is a common conservative hope, to assume the best in people, so I am not attacking you on those grounds.
However, my point was that the odds of what you hope for are far smaller than the odds of what I suspect. What the statistics indicate.
So you are a hopeful conservative, and I am a measured cynical conservative. Do not be too quick to condemn those of us who both do not assume the best in those involved with crime and their families, and condemn them and their upbringing as well.
Oddly enough, I see a parallel in an old American Indian myth of magical men who could change their appearance to be like animals. It came with the warning that while someone could become a bear, for example, and have the strengths of a bear, were they to die while in the form of a bear, they would die as a bear, not a man.
Were that boy who robbed to escape, he could have found redemption, perhaps. But he died as a robber, so a robber is all he ever was.