ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, August 14, 1996 TAG: 9608140022
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A13 EDITION: METRO
THE EXPLOSIVE rise in serious youthful crime over the past decade - even as adult crime rates fell - has loomed like a thundercloud over America. It is scary in itself and scary for what it could portend for a nation whose juvenile population is growing.
The sky is a bit brighter, however, with good news last week from the FBI. Preliminary figures show that juvenile rates fell last year for both violent crime generally and murder specifically. Not since 1983 had both fallen in the same year, though this is the second year in a row that the juvenile murder rate has declined.
Actually, the juvenile-crime cloud all along has had a silver lining or two. The worst of such crime, for example, tends to be concentrated among a few groups in a few places. Less than half of 1 percent of America's juvenile population is responsible for all the nation's violent juvenile crime. In 1994, just four cities - Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and Detroit - accounted for 30 percent of the nation's juvenile homicide arrests.
Indeed, say some experts, the explosion of serious juvenile crime is attributable less to broad societal forces than to a couple of specific events: the introduction in 1985 of crack cocaine into distressed minority communities in inner-city neighborhoods, and the subsequent arming of the gangs that distribute it.
While the concentration of juvenile crime is horrible for the people who must live in the middle of it, it does make possible a targeting of crime-reduction resources that may be starting to pay off. New York City, where the juvenile murder rate dropped 27 percent last year, has adopted a strict-enforcement policy for minor offenses like loud music and public drinking, not so much to make arrests as to set a standard for proper youthful behavior. Boston has launched a multi-agency initiative to separate youth gangs from their guns.
Moreover, youthful offenders are more responsive than adult wrongdoers to intervention, supervision and rehabilitation techniques. America is beginning to accumulate information about what works and what doesn't, as researchers analyze the results of various state and local initiatives.
After surveying such research in a report last month, the nonpartisan Campaign for an Effective Crime Policy concluded that mandatory sentencing, longer confinement and transfer of juvenile offenders into the adult criminal-justice system have more political than practical effect. They are costly, ineffective at best and at worst counterproductive.
More effective, says the report, are comprehensive programs that hold young offenders accountable for criminal acts early on; provide community-based sanctions for all but "the truly violent few"; reduce the supply of and demand for guns among young people; prevent crime in the first place via parent training and high-school-graduation incentives; and recognize public safety as the responsibility not only of the police but of the entire community.
Much work remains: Even after two years of decline, for example, the juvenile murder rate for 1995 was nearly double the rate 10 years earlier. But just maybe the worst of the bad weather is over.
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