Super Predators No More?

Although 1999 was the year of the Columbine shooting in Littleton, Colo. and mass anxiety about youth crime, it also was the year that juvenile arrests for murder fell to their lowest rate since 1966.

Is this an example of millennial inversions, of discrepancies inexplicable and strange? According to Howard N. Snyder, author of the just-released U.S. Justice Department report, Juvenile Arrests 1999, "It is very difficult to determine the cause of rates in murder, rape, robbery and assault from year to year."

But given the results of his number-crunching: that, among Americans under 18, robbery dropped 53 percent from 1991 to 1999; that rape went down 31 percent from 1991 to 1999; that burglary decreased 60 percent from 1980 to 1999; and that crime in almost every category -- assault, larceny, motor vehicle theft and arson -- fell by more than 23 percent over the last six to 10 years, it is difficult to believe there are no general causes.

One of the most obvious is the economy. When times are good, crime rates tend to go down. The other is the relationship between federal policy, such as handgun and imprisonment legislation, and crime. This may seem like simplistic thinking, but in the world of policy makers and criminologists, making such connections is the stuff of political tightrope walking.

"Nobody mentioned crime during the federal welfare debate, for example," said Vincent Schiraldi, director of the Justice Policy Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC, which studies crime rates closely. "The reason is that since the '80s criminologists have taken a beating from the right wing. The right views human beings as completely responsible actors, unaffected by racism, poverty, unemployment and education, and this thinking has seeped from academia to think tanks to practically everywhere."

The other reason juvenile crime rates are a political hot potato is because they can say quite a lot about the state -- healthy or sick -- of American culture. In 1995, 20/20 aired a report titled "Super Predators." Its subject was the early 1990's rise in juvenile crime, and among its leading commentators was John DiIulio, a Princeton sociologist, who claimed youth crime spelled a crisis in American morals.

"These kids are fatherless," DiIulio said. "Godless and without conscience. They have no hope, no direction and no future. We're not dealing with kids who are economically poor ... we're dealing with kids who are spiritually poor."

To learn more about the dissemination of information on youth crime as well as the Justice Department's new report, AlterNet spoke with Vincent Schiraldi of the Justice Policy Institute.

AlterNet: Why has the rate of juvenile crime dropped in almost every category over the past decade?

Schiraldi: It's always difficult to try to simplify the complex factors that contribute to crime into one or two causes. Having said that, if I had to pick two factors, I'd pick guns and poverty. The sharp increases in youth homicides we saw from the mid-1980s to the early '90s came during a time when handgun availability was escalating and the economy was reeling. This, in turn, created the climate -- particularly in inner city areas of concentrated poverty -- in which the crack-cocaine epidemic flourished.

Since the mid-1990s, two things have happened that have doubtless contributed to the decline in youth crime. Domestic production of civilian firearms, particularly handguns, peaked in 1993. The number of families with children below the poverty level peaked in 1993. And juvenile homicides peaked in 1993. All three have simultaneously plummeted, so that today there are a quarter fewer families with children in poverty, over a thousand fewer guns put into circulation annually and 68 percent fewer youth homicide arrests -- the lowest juvenile homicide arrest rates since the 1960s. It defies the imagination to think that those powerful factors have simply coincided.