The Justice Department is establishing a center that will help put fathers leaving prison on a path toward responsible parenthood, President Barack Obama said Monday.

“The idea here is very simple:  to reach fathers right as they’re leaving the criminal justice system and connect them immediately to the employment and services they need to start making their child support payments and reconnecting them with their families,” Obama told D.C. residents at a Father’s Day event attended by Attorney General Eric Holder, who will direct the “Fathering Re-Entry Court” program.

The DOJ has yet to announce the location of the court. In fiscal 2009, the D.C. Courts hosted a “Fathering Reentry Court” pilot program, which was partially supported by DOJ grant money. According to an annual report published by the D.C. Courts last year, the Fathering Reentry Court provides parenting education courses, employment counseling, job training and job placement services for fathers.

The department will assist law enforcement and court officials looking to copy the court program  and provide more effective services for fathers leaving prisons, according to DOJ spokeswoman Hannah August. About 55 percent of men released from prison have children who are minors, and many of the fathers have vast amounts of child support debt, she said.

Responsible fatherhood is a key priority of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. The Attorney General has also focused on fatherhood, calling on black men to be a part of their childrens’ lives in various speeches.

Attorney General Eric Holder’s recent speeches exhorting black men to be responsible fathers stem from a little-noticed  policy initiative of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

Eric Holder and his wife, Dr. Sharon Malone. (Getty Images)

On Sunday, the nation’s top law enforcement officer told worshipers at a Queens, N.Y., church that it was “unacceptable” for men to be absent from their children’s lives. On Tuesday at historically black Morehouse College in Atlanta, he told a town hall meeting that  ”real” men own up to their responsibilities as parents, and that strong family ties reduce crime.

“If we are truly to call ourselves ‘men,’ we must recognize that a defining characteristic of that word is the care and nurturing of those we bring into this world,” Holder said in Atlanta, according to his prepared remarks.”You simply cannot be a real man if you don’t do all that you can to care for those who have the greatest right to depend on you.”

He added: “People sometimes make bad choices. As a result, they end up in prison or jail. But we can’t permit incarceration of a parent to punish an entire family.”

The Atlanta town hall meeting was part of a series of Barack Obama administration-sponsored forums on fatherhood, beginning with an event at the White House this past Father’s Day.

The White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships (FBNP) has also co-sponsored forums in Chicago and Manchester, N.H. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, FBNP Director Joshua DuBois and Michael Strautmanis, chief of staff to Obama’s senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, participated in the events, along with several members of Congress and state and local community leaders.

Obama said in June that the initiative was meant to launch a national conversation “about fatherhood and personal responsibility — about how fathers across America are meeting the challenges in their families and communities, and what government can do to support those who are having a difficult time.”

The discussion about black fathers has a long political and social history. In 1965 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an Assistant Secretary of Labor in the Lyndon Johnson administration, published a report on the social consequences of unwed black mothers called “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” The statistic-heavy report by the future Democratic senator from New York fueled an often polarizing debate about poverty, race and government assistance that lasted decades.

President Bill Clinton, who campaigned for president as a limited government “New Democrat,” enacted welfare reform legislation in 1996 over the objections of many liberals in his party. In 2004, comedian Bill Cosby gave a speech on fatherhood before the NAACP in 2004 that, in sometimes harsh language, criticized black parents who aren’t involved in their children’s lives or set bad personal examples.

Now the country’s first black president and first black attorney general are both striking the same themes, but to little public controversy or even notice.

Attorney General Eric Holder called on absentee black fathers yesterday to take an active role in their children’s lives, Newsday reported today.

Holder, a Queens native and the first black Attorney General, urged the 400 worshippers at the Memorial Presbyterian Church on Baldwin Turnpike in Queens, N.Y., to orchestrate a “spiritual awakening,” according to the New York newspaper. The Attorney General said a father’s involvement in a family can help combat poverty and crime in black neighborhoods, according to Newsday.

Eric Holder ( Ryan J. Reilly / Main Justice)

“Too many men in the black community have created children and left them to be raised by caring mothers. These women do a wonderful job, but we ask too much of them and too little of our men,” Holder told the congregation, which included members of his family, according to Newsday. “It should simply be unacceptable for a man to have a child and then not play an integral part in the raising and nurturing of the child.”

Holder’s comments hearken back to comedian Bill Cosby’s speech before the NAACP in 2004, in which he sparked a national debate by urging African-American fathers to take responsibility for their children. And on Father’s Day 2008, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama gave a speech in which he said “too many fathers” are “missing from too many lives and too many homes.”

The nation’s top federal law enforcement official steered clear of domestic policy matters during his speech in the church, Newsday said. But, outside the church, more than 50 people protested his decision to try 9/11 “mastermind” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other suspected terrorists in a New York City federal court, according to the newspaper.

Holder met with federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York and other officials earlier last week to discuss the upcoming trials.