Fear of teen crime based in ignorance, and 
vilifying kids doesn't help matters

by Vincent Schiraldi, Justice Policy Institute President

By now, we've all heard the stories. Two Virginia elementary school students tried on felony charges for putting hand soap into their teacher's coffee as a prank. A pair of New Jersey kindergartners expelled from school for pointing their fingers at one another and saying "bang-bang." Two elementary school students in Fayette County, Ga., suspended for making a list of people they'd like to see dead, including Barney the Purple Dinosaur and the Spice Girls. And the latest lunacy in the war against America's youth --- the arrest and handcuffing of a 12-year-old District of Columbia girl for eating french fries on the subway.

The common thread throughout these stories is that the zero-tolerance response to youthful misbehavior makes zero common sense. But these unfathomable reactions become understandable when you consider that most Americans believe juvenile crime is an increasing threat, when it is actually lower than it's been for a generation. It is our fears of our children that are driving us to expel, handcuff and incarcerate a generation, not their behavior. 

Data released this month by the Justice Department show that youth homicide arrests have fallen by more than two-thirds to fewer than 1,000 in 1999 from more than 3,000 in 1993. For the last 25 years, the Census Bureau's National Crime Victimization Survey has asked more than 40,000 respondents about their victimization. Their most recent report found that youth crime was at its lowest rate in the history of that survey. 

Still, Americans are increasingly fearful of children and consistently exaggerate the proportion of crime that young people commit. In 1998 --- the same year that the Census Bureau found youth crime at its lowest ever --- nearly two-thirds of respondents to a poll conducted for the Building Blocks for Youth Initiative stated that 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 percent of respondents indicated they thought it was likely that a school shooting would happen in their community. Yet according to National School Safety Center data, there was a one-in-2-million-chance of being killed in one of America's schools that year. 

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. Florida Rep. Bill McCollum wrote a bill titled the "Violent Youth Predator Act" and stated that "they're not children anymore. They're the most violent criminals on the face of the earth." 

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 youth "committed most crime nowadays" overwhelmingly passed an initiative to try juveniles as young as age 14 in adult court. This despite the fact that, during the 1990s in California, youth crime fell at a greater rate than adult crime did. 

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 school students were suspended or expelled from schools in 1997 --- twice the rate of the worse-behaving crop of teenagers I grew up with. 

When I was a teenager in the 1970s, my agemates were more likely to take drugs, more likely to binge drink, more likely to have out-of-wedlock births and more likely to commit crimes. But to their credit, the media and elected leaders of the time didn't vilify us. When it came time to set public policy, they built schools and universities for us to attend, crafted a juvenile justice system that held kids accountable without crippling their chances for future success, and created programs like Head Start and Job Corps to give young people a leg up, not a slap in the face. 

As we look at today's young people, it's important that we see hope, not despair, and craft public policy building on their assets instead of punishing them for our ignorance.

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