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Imprisoning America’s young criminals won’t build safe communities
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In 1997, Congressman Bill McCollum, then chairman of the House Subcommittee on Crime, said that the nation’s young people were “the most dangerous criminals on the face of the Earth.” Citing hysterical predictions of a wave of crime from a generation of “super-predators,” he led Republicans to introduce “The Violent and Repeat Youth Offender Act,” legislation designed to try and imprison more youth in the adult criminal justice system.
Thankfully, those politically charged predictions of “super-predators” turned out to be super-wrong. In fact, crime survey shows that adolescent and teen violence has fallen by more than 64 percent since 1975, making violent crime the lowest it has been in decades. Legislators at the time had the good sense to not pass the anti-youth legislation.
Eight years later, the anti-youth advocates are back, this time under a different guise – the “Gang Deterrence and Community Protection Act of 2005.” In this strategy, members of Congress have subtly reintroduced the “super-predator” threat of the ‘90s, conveniently replacing the word super predator with “gang.”
The Gang Deterrence Act is designed to punish young people by lowering the age at which youth can be tried as adults, funding more prosecutors, and expanding ways for the federal government to arrest, detain, and imprison young people. Ironically, a conservative Congress that promotes the idea of getting government out of our lives is expanding federal jurisdiction on youth crime – something traditionally left up to states and local communities.
They were wrong about “super-predators” then, and they are wrong about what they are calling “super-gangs” now. Research shows young people who are prosecuted as adults are more likely to commit a greater number of crimes upon release than youth who go to the juvenile justice system. Unlike a stream of proven community-based interventions that treat and meet young people’s needs close to their homes and families, locking young people up in adult prisons actually compromises public safety.
While we know that trying youth as adults aggravates crime, we know very little about the amorphous category of gang “related” crime. The National Crime Information Center casts a wide net over America’s youth, defining gangs as three or more people engaged in criminal or delinquent conduct – something so broad that three young people misbehaving in the way many of their parents did would today be classified as gang activity.
An analysis of the known circumstances in which homicides occur shows that four times as many people were killed in relation to an “argument” than were killed in relation to a “gang,” and less than 10 percent of homicides in which the circumstances were known were “gang” related.
Still, communities that suffer high rates of crime deserve to have action taken to make their neighborhoods healthy and safe. But federalizing youth crime, and targeting gang crime in this way will not solve the real problems that create social instability. Rather than dumping resources into policies that have been proven to harm youth and communities, legislators should examine the impact of deteriorating schools, reduced spending on youth inventions and services, and expand employment programs. As Father Gregory Boyle, the founder of Homeboy Ministries, a ministry that serves gangs members in east Los Angeles, says, “Nothing stops a bullet like a job.”
Rather than pass a highly punitive youth crime bill that throws away the key to many young people’s future, Congress should prevent the Bush administration from pressing ahead with budgetary plans to cut funding to prevent youth crime, and cut health and human service programs that assist youth development. Instead of promoting the latest hysterical anti-youth threat, Congress should work to fund programs that are proven to reduce crime and build communities.
ABOUT THE WRITER
Jason Ziedenberg is the executive director of the Justice Policy Institute. Readers may write to him at: Justice Policy Institute, 4455 Connecticut Avenue NW, Suite B-500, Washington, D.C. 20008; Web site: www.justicepolicy.org.
Jason Ziedenberg
Guest Opinion