Here are the facts and some commentary.
John
December 20, 2000
HEADLINE: Americans overreact to youth crime
BYLINE: VINCENT SCHIRALDI
Data released just last week by the <Justice Department> show that youth homicide arrests have fallen by more than two-thirds, from more than 3,000 in 1993 to fewer than 1,000 in 1999.
Over the last 25 years, the Census Bureau's National Crime Victimization Survey has asked more than 40,000 crime victims about their cases. The bureau's most recent report found that youth crime was at its lowest rate in the survey's history.
Still, Americans are increasingly fearful of children and consistently exaggerate the proportion of crime that young people commit. In 1998, the same year the Census Bureau found youth crime at a new low, nearly two-thirds of those responding to a questionnaire said they believed youth crime was increasing.
Sixty percent of respondents to a 1996 California survey conducted by Fairbanks, Maslin and Associates reported that they believed youths "committed most crime nowadays." In reality, more than four out of every five arrests in California in 1996 were of adult offenders.
Nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in the area of adults' fear of <school violence.> In a 1999 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, 71% of respondents indicated that they thought it was likely a school shooting would happen in their community. Yet according to National School Safety Center data, the chance of being killed in America's schools that year was 1 in 2 million.
During the mid-1990s, it became fashionable in some academic and political circles to stereotype young people as thugs. For example, Princeton professor John DiIulio graphically warned of a "rising tide of juvenile superpredators" waiting to engulf America.
Rep. Bill McCollum (R-Fla.) authored a bill titled the "Violent Youth Predator Act" and stated that such juvenile predators aren't children anymore. "They're the most violent criminals on the face of the Earth," McCollum said.
The media responded in kind. From 1992 to 1996, there was a 721% increase in coverage of homicides on network evening newscasts, despite a 20% decline in America's homicide rate. Research by the University of California-Los Angeles and the Berkeley Media Studies group found that young people are depicted by the media as violent crime suspects in excess of their share of violent crime arrests.
The vilification of teenagers has found its way into legislation affecting young people throughout the country. For example, since 1992, when the national juvenile crime drop began, nearly every state in the country passed laws to make it easier to try children as adults.
In California, the same voters who believed that youths "committed most crime nowadays" overwhelmingly passed an initiative to try juveniles as young as 14 in adult court. This despite the fact that, during the 1990s in California, youth crime fell faster than adult crime.
In America's schools, this information gap has driven funds away from education and toward surveillance, as cash- strapped schools in even very safe locations dole out scarce funds for metal detectors, cameras and security personnel. The result: 3 million of America's students were suspended or expelled in 1997, twice the rate of the worst- behaving crop of teenagers with whom I grew up.
As we look at today's young people, it's important that we see hope, not despair, for their future and craft public policy building on their assets, instead of punishing them for our ignorance.
------------
Vincent Schiraldi is president of the Justice Policy Institute, a research and public policy organization in Washington.