Marriage and the single black woman

There are no figures here for the UK, but the potential parallel with the USA is intriguing. Have a look: Lexington: Sex and the single black woman | The Economist. Here, it seems to me, is the guts of the matter: "after crunching the census numbers, they found that a one percentage point increase in the male incarceration rate was associated with a 2.4-point reduction in the proportion of women who ever marry. Could it be, however, that mass incarceration is a symptom of increasing social dysfunction, and that it was this social dysfunction that caused marriage to wither? Probably not. For similar crimes, America imposes much harsher penalties than other rich countries. Mr Charles and Mr Luoh controlled for crime rates, as a proxy for social dysfunction, and found that it made no difference to their results. They concluded that “higher male imprisonment has lowered the likelihood that women marry…and caused a shift in the gains from marriage away from women and towards men.”"
What the article doesn't really explore is the wider ramifications for culture and social policy It's probably worth us looking at potential parallels with societies which have 'lost' many eligible young men in warfare and it is complicated by the interaction of social mores to do with sex, marriage, polygyny etc. However, we should note that the figures point to a similar, albeit less marked, effect among working class whites. Probably we should then note that this is a collateral effect of 'order and law' policies and consider that we need to weigh up incarceration and other approaches in part with their effects on the culture relating to marriage and childrearing. The irony for conservatives seems to be that the 'stronger' you are on 'locking 'em up' the more you undermine marriage and stable partnerships thus helping to perpetuate a bunch of other social outcomes you hate.