The thing is, the government in general and you in particular, have no control over the choices that people make, and once the choices are made, allowing people to starve as bad examples is not possible and would not work if it were. Deprived people do desperate things: not all of them just crawl away, wither and die, per leaving a message to future generations that their errant ways not be imitated.
Yeah, sure, it would be nice if all marriages were perfect and all parents were caring and attentive and all children were born to loving parents who graduated from school. But that is not the case and that will never be the case.
There will always be fatherless children, especially in a country where war is endemic like the USA and where the main solution for aberrant behavior, much of which is called by mental illness, it to throw people, most of whom are men, in jail for long sentences.
For three years I taught college courses in a state prison. It paid a third of the already low salary that my regular classes paid, and Dade Correctional was 40 miles through heavy traffic from the main campus. It was npot a bad drive, because I carpooled with an Accounting Prof who had all sorts of aming tales. We graduated about 150 students with BA degrees in that time, and then the program was defunded by the idiotic Republicans in the FL State Legislature, because some bozo said that since we did not provide college education for law-abiding Floridians, we should not provide it for convicts, either. Of course, the main goal of the program was to make employable, tax paying citizens of a rather small minority of convicts who had finished HS or a GED and had accumulated the good conduct points to voluntarily enroll in the program.
The State was too cheap to do any follow ups on recidivism, but the woman who was in charge of the program told me that nearly all the graduates found jobs after leaving DCI.