MANCHESTER, Conn.

NEW HAVEN these days is getting shot up and disintegrating as much as Hartford is. So as Hartford Mayor Eddie Perez is pursuing professional hockey as if it might restore his city, a member of the New Haven Board of Aldermen, Joyce Chen, is proposing that her city enact a curfew for everyone under 18.

Chen says her idea is not just to punish roaming teenagers, who would be fined for repeat violations. She says the curfew is meant also as "outreach, to assist our young people and link them with potential services." She cites mentoring programs, clubs, and mental-health and addiction treatment.

New Haven's police want nothing to do with the curfew idea. "Police officers have enough to do right now besides baby-sit for other people's children," says the police-union president, Sgt. Louis Cavaliere. Making the police enforce a curfew, he adds, would just "create more hostility between our cops and the kids."

Mayor John DeStefano, the Democratic nominee for governor, seems inclined to agree with the police. "Parental responsibility has to come into the picture," the mayor says. "We can't expect the police to enforce the rules that really have to begin in the home."

So that's the choice in New Haven: Either give every troublesome kid his own social worker or rely on parents to do their job, when, of course, the main problem of the cities is that most kids have no parents, in the traditional sense -- just a hapless, unskilled, and often drugged-out mother.

The curfew approach is of doubtful legality anyway. Three years ago a federal court nullified as unconstitutional a curfew ordinance in Vernon like the one proposed in New Haven. While other federal courts have upheld curfews, constitutional or not they are mass punishment, wherein the innocent are deprived of rights along with the guilty. That kind of thing should be reserved for declarations of martial law -- and maybe Connecticut urban policy would be there already if anyone in authority really cared about the daily mayhem in the cities. At least martial law would be more effective and cheaper than pretending that kids can be raised by social work or left to imaginary parents.

Short of martial law, if Connecticut ever really wanted to address its urban problem, it would first have to identify it: not a lack of hockey or a lack of curfews but childbearing outside marriage, fatherlessness, what used to be known as broken homes. Most of the troublesome young men and women who have made Connecticut's cities uninhabitable by the middle class and who are burrowing their way into the suburbs are fatherless.

Fatherlessness was even cited as mitigation the other day by Hartford Superior Court Judge Thomas Miano as he imposed sentence in suburban Manchester's "Clockwork Orange" case. In that case, two young men, 20 and 18, and a 12-year-old boy last year savagely assaulted a 21-year-old college student and a 13-year-old boy whose offenses were only to have been walking by. The college student was blinded in one eye and brain-damaged; he survives with metal plates in his head. The 13-year-old victim was lucky to escape with a ripped-up face and convulsions.

The judge said that the perpetrators were "time bombs . . . just marauders running around looking to beat up people." He sentenced the two older ones to 12-year terms. The disposition of the 12-year-old perpetrator, like so much else in Connecticut's court system, is being kept secret as a matter of law. (Mustn't embarrass the young predators and the families that failed them.)

If they ever tired of hockey, curfews, social workers and infinite "programs," Connecticut's authorities might try to determine exactly what about public policy over the last 40 years -- the duration of the ever-failing "war on poverty" -- has encouraged, facilitated and subsidized childbearing outside marriage, and what sort of policy might discourage it. The authorities might try to determine which is more anti-social, ingesting contraband drugs or having children one is unprepared to raise and support, and why law and policy are brought to bear against the former but not the latter.

Of course even the slightest change in policy might be portrayed as harsh, if only because huge industries have grown up around subsidizing childbearing outside marriage and suppressing the use of contraband drugs (the "war on drugs" having achieved no more success than the "war on poverty"), industries whose maintenance long ago replaced the supposed objectives of the policies that called them into being. And of course any reversal in policy might be portrayed as draconian.

But the indifference of Connecticut's leaders to the failure of all policy here is worse. It is leaving government to its expensive irrelevance and the state to the predators.

Chris Powell, a frequent contributor, is managing editor of The Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.