We need to pause and take another look at what has been happening in recent decades and bring the debate back to one framed in research and evidence. A little history is illustrative:
The 1990s were a harshly punitive time for youth justice for both political parties. In 1995, Princeton professor John J. Dilulio, a Democrat, warned of a “rising tide of juvenile superpredators” among Black urban youth who were “fatherless, godless, and without conscience.” Politicians of both stripes quickly adopted this racialized and vitriolic language. Republican Congressman Bill McCollum authored the Violent Youth Predator Act of 1996, which had it been enacted would have allowed youth as young as 13 to be imprisoned alongside adults. First Lady Hillary Clinton said in a speech in New Hampshire during that presidential election year that “they are often the kinds of kids that are called ‘superpredators.’ No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.”
This volatile rhetoric had a tremendous impact. Almost every state passed laws in the 1990s making it easier to try youth as adults. A quarter of a million youth were tried as adults annually during that decade, and by 1997 some 14,500 youth under age 18 were incarcerated in adult jails and prisons on a given night. Imprisonment of children in juvenile facilities also mushroomed, peaking at 108,802 in 2000. Black and brown youth bore the brunt of this increased punishment.
This era of tough-on-youth-crime hysteria was challenging for us as young advocates. But it was much tougher for the millions of young people and families affected by the system as youth suffered abuse and had their outcomes dimmed in our nation’s jam-packed adult and youth correctional facilities.
But then an unusual combination of young people, families, advocates from both right and left, researchers, youth justice administrators and philanthropic institutions began pushing for a more humane and evidence-based approach to youth crime that has gradually taken hold over the past two decades.
Research documented the ways young people were developmentally different from adults and in need of a more individualized and rehabilitative approach; that youth imprisonment caused more violence than it prevented; and that, by contrast, there was a burgeoning array of programs that improved outcomes for young people.
Advocates used this data, along with hair-raising stories of abuse of youth in custody and litigation over conditions of confinement, to enact change. The number of youth in juvenile facilities plunged by 75 percent from its peak and the number of young people in adult facilities cratered by 84 percent.
This has not been a jailbreak. During this same period, youth arrests also plummeted by more than 80 percent. Only 8 percent of arrests for serious violent crimes in 2020 were of juveniles — the rest were of adults.
As we emerged from the pandemic, there was an increase in youth and adult crime that is appearing to be short-lived, with crime now declining again in most jurisdictions. But with this uptick, a backlash over Black Lives Matter protests and a general rightward shift in politics nationally, there has been renewed interest in punishing young people. While there had been a two-decade-long trend toward reducing the numbers of youth tried as adults, two states recently passed laws making it easier to do so, and there has been an increase in young people incarcerated in juvenile facilities. Prosecutors in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland, Calif., have all vowed to try more young people as adults. And in Maryland, which imprisons a larger proportion of its young people in adult prisons than any state except Alabama, legislation authored this year to reduce the propensity to try juveniles as adults died in committee without even getting a vote.
Media coverage of youth crime is, once again, exaggerating the proportion of offenses committed by young people and making claims about increasing youth crime that are questionable or outright false. Media hype of this sort played an important role in fomenting the superpredator era, and as veterans of those battles we fear that a return to exaggerated coverage of youth crime may be leading elected leaders to replay a bad movie.
The past two decades show that we can have a much smaller, safer and more effective youth justice system. But to do so, we’re going to need to listen to data and research — along with basic decency and common sense — rather than platitudes and hyperbole.
Liz Ryan is the former administrator of the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Vincent Schiraldi has been the director of juvenile justice services for Maryland and Washington, D.C. Both left their government roles this year.
Governing’s opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing’s editors or management.
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