Some folks seem unable to make the connection between our declining public morality and our growing prison population. Our willingness as a community to accept behavior that only a few years ago we found unacceptable is a big part of the reason our prisons and jails are full.

As a child, my family, my church, my school and the police officer who patrolled our neighborhood all spoke with the same voice. It was a simple, clear and moral message: Love God, love your neighbor and work hard to support yourself and your family.

It was a message that, for the most part, produced productive, law-abiding citizens and peaceful communities.

Compared to today, crime was rare. Even in the city where I grew up, locking our doors was unnecessary. We knew our neighbors, and we helped one another.

For many in my generation, being on welfare was embarrassing. To take a handout from anyone was a hard enough blow to our pride; to take it from the government was even worse. In those days, if you got on welfare, you worked to get off it as quickly as possible.

My mother raised three kids without a father in the home. I don’t know how she managed to keep the food on the table and the roof over our heads, or how she found us new clothes for Easter Sunday or supplies for the start of school.

Somehow, our birthdays were always observed with an abundance of gifts, and Christmas was a wonderland of presents from Santa and a roast turkey dinner with all the trimmings.

I do know this. My mother, now in her 80s, made many sacrifices to keep our family together.

She slept on the couch so that each of us could have our own bedroom. She worked at a succession of low-paying jobs rather than go back on welfare. She kept track of every penny she spent, and worked hard to get us out of public housing and into a decent house in a decent neighborhood.

She put her own dreams on hold for the sake of her family. She was, and still is, my first role model. If I need to know what love and unselfishness looks like, all I have to do is look at her. Her example taught me how a human being should live.

I don’t remember his exact words, but Thomas Jefferson once wrote that our experiment in self-government will fail when enough people discover that they can get handouts from the government. He was right. Just as water always seeks the easiest course downhill, so people who have not been taught the ways of unselfishness and hard work will seek the easiest path to comfort.

My wife has had numerous conversations with women in prisons and jails over the years, concerning the morality of manipulating the system and making others pay your living expenses when you are entirely capable of supporting yourself.

She had another one just recently with a small group of incarcerated women, expert manipulators of the government’s entitlement system, who could not understand why many people who work for a living and pay taxes are upset with them because they don’t.

Here is a typical scenario: A young woman has given birth to a child or two, usually by different fathers who are no longer around, so that she can qualify for welfare and public housing and get away from her parents.

She quickly learns how to manipulate the system to create a comfortable life style, often neglecting her children in the process. To get a bigger check, she will have another child, or she may go after child support from the men who are dumb enough to make her pregnant.

With public housing, welfare, food stamps and other government benefits to cover her basic needs, she may then deal drugs herself or hook up with a man who deals drugs in order to get the money — all tax-free — for other things she wants: the brand new car, the huge digital TV set — well, you get the idea.

She gets busted for the drugs, and we meet her in jail. She thinks she’s done nothing wrong.

There is no way to sugar coat this; we get what we pay for. As long as government rewards people for having babies without being married, we will continue to get more single mothers and children without fathers.

Children who grow up without fathers are far more likely to use drugs and embrace a criminal lifestyle than children who come from stable homes with a mom and dad who are married to one another. If we continue to reward people for behavior that makes things worse, then why are we surprised when things get worse?

Today we are dealing with third- and fourth-generation drug dealers — kids as young as 13 years old who have been taught by the example of their one and only parent and the people around them that crime and manipulation is the best way to get ahead in life and get what you want. The cycle of crime and incarceration, rooted in selfishness and ignorance, is passed along to another generation, and each generation becomes harder to reach.

Fifteen years ago, the new trend was young criminals who lacked empathy. They did not have the ability to put themselves in someone else’s shoes and feel their pain. They lacked empathy because they were not taught empathy.

A new trend has now appeared among a new generation of young offenders — a lack of empathy, wedded to an unlimited capacity for violence. This is not good, and it will get worse.

As a society, we have drastically lowered our standards of morality, and now we are reaping what we have sown. Today, the child of an inmate has a 70 percent chance of becoming one, too. Given the circumstances, I am surprised that this figure is so low.

Can we put the genie back in the bottle? First, we must connect the dots.