Something has gone terribly 【C1】______ with our once proud American way of life. It has happened in the area of values. A key 【C2】______ is disappearing, and I think I know what it is: accountability
Accountability isn't hard to 【C3】______ It means that every person is responsible for his or her actions and 【C4】______ for their consequences. Of the many 【C5】______ that hold civilization together-honesty, kindness, and so on-accountability may be the most important.
My job as a police officer is to impose accountability on people who 【C6】______ , or have never learned, to impose it on themselves. 【C7】______ as every policeman knows, external controls on people's behavior. are far less effective than internal 【C8】______ such as guilt, shame and embarrassment.
【C9】______ , there are still communities-smaller towns, usually-where schools maintain 【C10】______ and where parents hold up standards that proclaim: "In this family certain things are not 【C11】______ -they simply are not done! "
Yet more and more, especially in our larger cities and suburbs, these 【C12】______ restraints are loosening. The main cause of this breakdown is a radical shift in 【C13】______ Thirty years ago, if a crime was 【C14】______ , society was considered the victim. Now, in a shocking 【C15】______ , it's the criminal who is considered victimized: by his underprivileged upbringing, by the school that didn't teach him to read, by the church that 【C16】______ to reach him with moral guidance, by the parents who didn't provide a 【C17】______ home.
I don't believe it. Many others in equally disadvantaged circumstances choose not to 【C18】______ in criminal activities. If we free the criminal, even partly, 【C19】______ accountability, we become a society of endless excuses 【C20】______ no one accepts responsibility for anything.
We in America desperately need more people who believe that the person who commits a crime is the one responsible for it.
【C1】

A. faulty
B. defective
C. mistaken
D. wrong