ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, December 30, 1996 TAG: 9612300080
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
OVERALL, crime rates have fallen during the 1990s. But that happy news is offset by the fact that juvenile crime has continued to increase in both seriousness and frequency - and the size of the juvenile population is growing.
Unfortunately, observes demographer Michael A. Spar of the University of Virginia's Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, Virginia is no stranger to those national trends.
First, as in the rest of the country, Virginia's juvenile population is growing - from 640,000 in 1990, to more than 680,000 in 1995, to a projected 765,000 in the year 2000, to nearly 800,000 by 2010.
And from 1990 to 1995, while the adult arrest rate in Virginia for all crimes was dropping by 15.2 percent, the arrest rate for juveniles was rising by nearly 30 percent.
Take your pick - violent crimes vs. property crimes, or serious crimes vs. less serious crimes - and adult arrest rates in Virginia declined from 1990 to 1995 while juvenile arrest rates rose, Spar reports in the latest issue of the center's University of Virginia News Letter,
Sometime between 1992 and 1993, Spar notes, there occurred an important watershed. For the first time in memory, the juvenile arrest rate in Virginia for all crimes had risen enough to exceed a declining adult arrest rate. By 1995, the juvenile rate was nearly 8,000 per 100,000 population, up from about 6,000 in 1990 (and double the rate in 1983). Meanwhile, Virginia's adult arrest rate had dropped by 1995 to less than 7,000 per 100,000 population, down from a peak of 8,000 at the beginning of the decade.
Not all the news is bad. Virginia's juvenile arrest rate for homicide declined by 32 percent from 1990 to 1995; nationally, that rate has been falling since its peak in 1993. But if you go back 15 years instead of five, the state's juvenile arrest rate for homicide in 1995 was up 26 percent.
The occasional blip notwithstanding, the general long-term trend is all too clear. There has been, writes Spar, "an incredible rise in juvenile crime [in Virginia] in recent years."
Other than to note that some changes in the juvenile-justice system obviously are needed, demographer Spar takes no particular stand on the likely effectiveness of Virginia's recent shift under Gov. George Allen to a more punitive stance toward juvenile offenders, particularly violent ones. But the causes of the increase in juvenile crime seem so tangled, at least, as to make sterile-seeming the old nature-nurture and punishment-prevention debates.
While a propensity toward juvenile criminality is linked to material poverty, it ensues also from the moral poverty created when a family and community are too disorganized to transmit traditional values to new generations. And while juvenile offenders offer greater hope of rehabilitation than do adult offenders, that possibility diminishes with the age of the offender and the seriousness of the offense. The clearest lesson, unfortunately, is all too often ignored: The earlier the intervention, the better.
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