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The problem was "the numbers were never there," says Zimring, who has studied crime statistics for 30 years. In fact, Zimring says, while alarmists were testifying to Congress about superpredators, the juvenile crime rate was dropping by half. Statistics from the Justice Department and the non-partisan think tank RAND show juvenile arrests have gone down -- both nationally and in California.

"What it indicates," Zimring says, "is the aptitude for catastrophic error that we have when we project our fears on to future patterns of violent crime."

"Juvenile crime is a success story," says Peter Greenwood, a senior researcher at RAND. "The consensus for anybody who looks at the data is that crime has been going down much more for juveniles than it has for anybody else."

While RAND does not take positions on political initiatives, Greenwood says he can't make sense of Prop. 21 or the numbers being used to support it. "Prop. 21 is written as if we're in some sort of wave of juvenile crime." In fact, he says, the opposite is the case: "We had a wave of juvenile homicide and violence that peaked around 1991 and '92 and it's gone down dramatically."

"A law that gives prosecutors more power just doesn't make a whole lot of sense given that the current systems seem to have worked very well," Greenwood says.

But it may be that the public understands its fears about superpredators were never well-founded. National surveys show that the get-tough-on-teens approach might be giving way to a growing concern for the welfare of teens. A poll conducted last July by Opinion Research Corporation International found that 90 percent of people believe America could reduce juvenile crime by investing in prevention, and 81 percent felt that prevention programs were equally as important as locking up young criminals in combating teen crime.

"People are really torn about these things," says Michael Decorsey Hinds, a vice president of Public Agenda, a national public opinion think tank. Hinds has found in his research on crime and public opinion that "Americans support a blend of solutions that cross ideological lines. Some are conservative in saying that it's more important for the government to be tough on crime than it is to protect the rights of the accused."

Hinds still believes public opinion favors retribution -- even when the criminal is a juvenile. "The whole attitude of 'three strikes and throw away the key' is creeping backwards in age," he says. And while more people support prevention programs and gun control, they are more willing to spend money on building new prisons than on rehabilitation.

Zimring is more optimistic. "The folks who won the 'war on crime' now want to bring it to the juvenile court, and they're having more trouble than they thought," he says. "People are funny about kids -- they're ambivalent. The wells of public ambivalence and mixed feelings around make this issue extremely interesting."
salon.com | March 3, 2000

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