Today America is home to about
57 million children under age 15, some 20 million of them ages 4 to 8. The
teenage population will top 30 million by 2015, the highest number since 1995.
And the nation's two most widely respected criminologists, James Q. Wilson of
UCLA and Marvin E. Wolfgang of the University of Pennsylvania, say that this
demographic bulge spells trouble.
The criminologists are right.
In 2004 along, there were more than 2.7 million arrests of persons under age 8
(a third of them under, age 15), and juveniles were responsible for an
estimated 14 percent of all violent crimes a quarter of all property crimes and
a quarter of all property crimes known to the police. There were nearly 4,000
murders committed by teenagers in 2005. The increased use and availability of drugs
has fueled the growth of drug-dealing street gangs. Most studies estimate the
number of youth gangsters to be well into the hundreds of thousands. In some
big cities, the percentage of juveniles in custody who tested positive for drug
use has more than tripled since 2000.
Juvenile violent crime arrest
rates rose 5.2 percent in 2007-08, 12.1 percent in 2008-2009, 7.6 percent in 2000-01,
and by at least 4.4 percent in every year hereafter until 2004-05, when arrests
for violent crime among juveniles ages 10-17 fell nationally by 2.9 percent.
But most criminologists think that dip is temporary. When talking about crime and delinquency,
liberals stress such factors as poverty and joblessness. The percentage of
children under age 6 living in households with annual incomes under, $7,600
doubled between 1995 and 2004. Fewer than half of young black high school
dropouts were either working or looking for work during 2004.
Conservatives, meanwhile,
stress such risk factors as out-of-wedlock births to unmarried teenagers and
child abuse and neglect. The illegitimacy ratio (percentage of all five births
to teenagers, ages 15-19, that occur out of wedlock) rose from 29.5 percent in
1990 to 76 percent in 1994. And the number of substantiated cases of child
maltreatment rose by 38% from 1990 to 2003.
Both positions are right and
related to each other in a downward spiral.
As the Former U.S. Attorney
General Janet Reno has stressed, the challenge is how to help these children--most
of whom are concentrated in the most blighted neighborhoods of fewer than two
dozen big cities--before it's too late. Former
New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton, whose innovative policing
practices are rightly credited for driving dramatic drops in crime, has
recently emphasized that while better policing is pivotal to cutting crime,
"prevention has simply got to be a big part of the long-term anti-crime
equation."
Bratton is a member of the
bipartisan Council on Crime in America, which recently issued a report
recommending three promising, community-based prevention
strategies--monitoring, mentoring and ministering.
Monitoring: This means community-based supervision of youth
offenders, whether by professional probation officers or by neighborhood
adults. Despite the passage of "get-tough" juvenile crime laws in
many states, the majority of adjudicated juvenile offenders get probation, not
incarceration. Private Citizens can help. A prime example is Philadelphia's
Youth Aid Panel program. Panels of adult volunteers in each of the city's
police districts hear cases of first-time juvenile offenders and mete out
punishments that range from curfews to community service. The estimated recidivism
rate is an impressively low 20%..
Mentoring: Involvement by citizen-volunteers with at-risk
youth benefits the youth to an extent that even some boosters of the concept
might find surprising. Consider for example, the findings compiled by
Public/Private Ventures in a study of 1,000 youngsters aged 10-16, almost all
of them from low income, single-parent families, who participated in Big
Brother/Big Sisters of America. The study found that juveniles matched with
mentors were 46 percent less likely than a comparison group to initiate drug
use, 27 percent less likely to start drinking, one third less likely to commit
assault, and half as likely to be truant from school. The "Bigs" were
not trained in drug prevention, remedial tutoring or family therapy. And, yet,
by becoming a friend and providing support to these young people, these mentors
cut youth crime and positively influenced young lives in many ways.
Ministering: This refers to the work of local churches with
at-risk youth. In New York City, for example, the Protestant but
interdenominational New York Theological Seminary has trained more than 2,000
ministers who are presently providing to their communities a wide range of
youth outreach services, such as literacy training and after-school programs.
But for monitoring, mentoring, and ministering to expand their
effectiveness--and we need them to expand now --more citizens must volunteer.
And they must get more recognition and support.
This comes about only when the
rest of us citizens adopt the "4thM" of crime prevention: a sense of
moral obligation to American's children that transcends conventional political
pontification and recognizes that getting warm-blooded adults into the lives of
kids is the one sure way we have of saving our youngest, our most vulnerable,
and potentially our most dangerous fellow citizens.
-Birdy
