The family behind bars.

In the spirit of the current publishing trend of tell-all memoirs recounting family dysfunction, perversion, and abuse, I'd like to share some painful moments from my own family history. When my daughter was less than two years old, she cold-bloodedly attempted the murder of her infant brother, only two days home from the hospital. In a fit of jealous rage at the attention the little intruder was getting, she snuck into his room and attempted to drag him from his cradle and commit unspeakable acts of violence against him. Luckily she was stopped in time. Somehow she managed to grow up and become a productive citizen, despite her early criminal tendencies. For this we all thank our (then) Higher Power, Dr. Spock.

This was not the only incident in which one of my children revealed violent or anti-social tendencies during childhood and adolescence. I'd forgotten about these occurrences, but they were brought to mind recently, after an evening of CNN and Court TV that left me trembling at my family's narrow escape from the jaws of the criminal-justice system and the glaring spotlight of media infamy.

In one news story and trial report after another, I saw terrifying "there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I" examples of an alarming media trend: the criminalization of the American family. Or, to be perfectly accurate, the criminalization of the poorer, more downwardly mobile elements of the American family.

First came the stories about children in the single-digit range being arrested for acts of violence. There was an update on a six-year-old who had killed a smaller child, followed by one about an even younger child who attempted a similar act. Should these children be tried as adults, we were asked? Certainly the Republicans, prosecutors, and police officers interviewed thought so. And the Democrats who were interviewed also concurred, evidently following the lead of the White House, which these days strikes a tone more sorrowful and less fire-breathing, but adopts a policy every bit as punitive as the Republicans'.

I watched in horror the Court TV trial of a white, middle-class couple named Provenzino that had, it was alleged, failed to keep its sixteen-year-old from committing various crimes: a series of burglaries and the growing of an illegal marijuana plant. The son, who was already serving a year in juvenile detention, testified for his shell-shocked parents. But to no avail; they were convicted of irresponsibility after failing to convince a jury that they had done everything they could to keep the kid in line. A collective shiver must have passed through all of Middle America that night. "It's eleven o'clock; do you know where your kids are?"

There is a rage across the land, and unless you are very highly placed, or have wisely committed your kids to a tough military academy or convent, you had best be looking over your shoulder for the cops and Hard Copy.

How did this happen? Why the growing demonization of kids and relatively powerless parents, while the rich and powerful are allowed to get away with murder--mass murder, quite often, in the case of corporate and government crimes that endanger or destroy millions at a shot?

The media have a lot to do with it. For while this trend begins in Washington politics, it is television's role in framing political issues that has ensured the emotional effectiveness of this targeting of families and kids as the source of all evil.

From the start, TV has focused attention on family life and "family values" as the basis for morality and social order. It has willfully distracted us from the larger political and economic arenas. It rarely lets us see who determines the policies and who provides (or doesn't provide) the funds for the jobs and services that make properly functioning family life possible.

Of course, TV's motives have been primarily economic, not political: The main point of commercial television is to sell things. And in a consumer-driven market, in which most shopping is done for family consumption, it is not surprising that television has always addressed its audience as essentially family members.

We in Television Land are always assumed to be a mom, a dad, or a kid. And our main job is always assumed to be consuming. Buy this cereal; buy that soap; buy this home computer so your kids can go to college; buy that car so your family can vacation in style and comfort. The popular bumper sticker that reads I SHOP, THEREFORE I AM aptly reflects the bearer's exemplary internalization of this most basic demand of consumer society.

But there is a politically revealing contradiction between the ways families and kids are portrayed in commercials (and in the sitcoms and soaps and dramas that commercials fund) and the way they are portrayed in news and tabloid shows.

Family-based TV programming since the 1950s has been based on a view of human nature that is sunny, benevolent, and, apparently, effortlessly self-regulating. Because of this, the guiding rules of family order and discipline are excessively permissive. There is little that families, and especially kids, on commercials and sitcoms don't have, or don't easily get. Nor is this unchecked impulse to instant gratification seen as problematic, either morally or practically. Needs are filled easily--without resorting to crime--because money, it seems, grows on trees.

Kids on these shows, and in most commercials, need little parental guidance. Indeed, they are often, and annoyingly, prone to give their parents advice and to cutely--always cutely--disrespect and contradict them. They are angelic, clean-scrubbed, smiling, and seem to stay happily on track.

And why not? The track they travel is so easy and pleasant to navigate. When they do go astray, it takes little more than a brief parental word--always in the final moments of the segment--to remind them of the wisdom of the title of their generic ancestor: Father Knows Best.

This permissive, narcissistic image of human nature as endlessly and effortlessly in search of easily attained pleasure is in perfect sync with the media's ultimate goal: to prime kids to want, strive for, and buy, buy, buy the things hawked in commercials.

Thus, in "family-viewing" hours, the line between commercials and shows blurs confusingly. The shows themselves are powerful models of the consumer lifestyles and aspirations that the commercials tout only more blatantly. (That's why Procter & Gamble, in the 1950s, was so quick to put a stop to shows like The Life of Riley, The Goldbergs, and The Honeymooners--that idealized working-class and immigrant life--and replace them with fathers who knew best and earned and consumed in appropriate corporate style.)

Bill Cosby's Heathcliff Huxtable--who headed one of the rare black sitcom families--exemplifies this model of family life and the assumptions about human nature that drive it. Cosby easily jollies his kids into obedience in a way that can only make most parents do a resentful double take. He and his kids are always on the same wavelength, living and striving for ever more up-to-date and fashionable clothing, furniture, and gadgets.

"No fourteen-year-old needs to have a $95 shirt, unless he is onstage with his four brothers!" says Cosby to his son as he demands that such a shirt be returned to the store. But all the kids--and Cosby himself--are already wearing clothes that cost at least that much. And they are so happy, and seem to do so little, to acquire it all. Adam Smith must surely be smiling down on these characters and admiring the work of his Higher Power, the Invisible Hand.

But there is a flip side to this sunny media message about families and kids. The other, darkly demonic version of kids and families is the one on the news, on crime shows, and more recently on the tabloids, filled with poor families who could never legally enjoy the bounty of consumer society, and so were never pictured in the sitcoms and commercials that pushed it so hard.

On these shows we see a more Hobbesian vision of families and youth and human nature in which kids, and increasingly parents, are out of control, inherently antisocial, and prone to unprovoked violence. These kids and families live in a world where life is indeed nasty, brutish, and short, and the lust for things needs to be kept in check by ever stronger and more inhumane methods.

There is a far-from-subtle color and uniform code in the media to help viewers figure out which images and messages apply to them. Except that lately the lines and codes seem to be blurring. For the media--following the lead of politicians--now feel compelled to broaden their warnings to an ever-greater demographic range, as more and more people are finding it harder and harder to keep up with the program of work, clean living, and consumption that drives the wheels of progress.

Now many white and middle-class kids and parents, like the poor Provenzinos, are depicted being dragged off to jail or subjected to humiliating interrogations in Kafkaesque courtrooms.

This is a real media contradiction, which would be funny if it weren't so scary: The media primes us to lust unrestrainedly after things seen on television, even as the political and economic forces have been making it harder for even the middle classes to gratify those desires.

Bill and Hillary Clinton, my old comrades of anti-Vietnam-war days, would probably have little sympathy for parents like me in today's political climate.

She is fast losing patience with those of us who couldn't make our marriages stick. She urges cracking down on divorce now, in an effort to preserve family values and so drive down youth crime.

And he has a whole laundry list of youth-oriented ideas to solve our social crisis. Kids like mine will wear uniforms and be home by eight. They won't smoke. They won't drink or do drugs. They won't listen to rock or rap. They won't watch TV. Or, if they must, they will be monitored by a V chip. And they certainly won't have sex or produce kids of their own before they are properly married and employed. For kids unfortunate enough to have parents on welfare, there is a more draconian, even Dickensian, list.

Nor will age be an excuse (and here is where I see visions of my infant daughter, diapered and drooling, with nothing but a pacifier to comfort her, as she rots in prison as a hard case). Even kids too young to have any conception of right or wrong, much less "crime," will be rounded up and placed in twenty-three-hour lockdown with mass murderers, it seems. And if the current "Dr. Spocks" don't help parents avoid such mishaps, they, too, will find themselves on the evening news, being dragged off to the slammer.

Will this solve the problem of juvenile crime and the breakdown of family values? Dole and Clinton are in eerie agreement that it will. The trouble is that the media version of juvenile crime is grossly misrepresented. According to The Real War on Crime, the newly released report of the National Criminal Justice Commission, most kids who land in juvenile courts and detention centers have committed an offense neither violent nor serious. Only six out of 100 juvenile arrests are for violent crimes of any kind. And only one-half of 1 percent are in for rape and murder, the acts most often, and most sensationally, thrown at us by the media.

Kids don't do well behind bars. A full 11,000 of the 65,000 kids incarcerated engaged in "suicidal acts" while in "protective custody." Which leads one to wonder just who should be brought up on charges in this system.

It is unsettling to think that so much that is problematic in family and youth behavior is now being deemed "criminal" and dealt with by the law. And it is worth looking a bit more closely at the media's role in this, before swallowing whole their version of the problem, which demonizes kids and parents while letting corporations and policymakers off the hook.

As the National Criminal Justice Commission's study shows, most crime--juvenile and adult--is against property, and only tangentially, and far less frequently against persons.

Perhaps it would be more reasonable to run massive campaigns against images of glamorous, expensive consumer goods on TV, and skip the jeremiads against media violence and family and moral breakdown, which sound so good and accomplish so little.

As this eye-opening study demonstrates, most crime is rooted in the need or greed for things in an age when the pressures of growing economic uncertainty and hardship, combined with an ever-intensifying push by the media to instill insatiable commodity lust, make the impulse to commit such crimes harder and harder to resist.