Crackdown on Kids
In the wake of Jonesboro, every child has become a suspect
September/October 1998
by Leoro Broydo
Kids used to play post office. Now they're just going postal, or so it seems. You can't open the newspaper these days without reading about a disturbed, devil-worshipping, gun-brandishing tot who turns a quiet town into a blood bath. It's a Norman Rockwell painting gone horribly wrong.
RELATED CONTENT
Guess who suffers when welfare reform merges with the Bush economy...
The Millennium Project's web site claims worldwide support, but American opinion is conspicuously a...
One of the first activists to insert race and class into the environmental debate, this too-often u...
Kim Bobo Executive Director, Interfaith Worker JusticeUtne Reader visionaryNovember December 2009by...
Spies might miss the Cold War, but they’re getting plenty of work tracking activists...
How to deal with this evil gurgling forth from the American playground? Politicians and bureaucrats, both federal and state, are calling for ever harsher punishments: "adult crime, adult time" has become the mantra of the day. In Congress, Senator Orrin Hatch used the recent shootings in Jonesboro, Arkansas, and Springfield, Oregon, to plug a bill that would, in exchange for federal grants, require states to try juveniles 13 and older as adults, and eliminate the separation of juveniles and adults in prison. In Texas, State Representative Jim Pitts is proposing to lower the state's death penalty qualifying age to 11. And all across the land—in juvenile courts, public schools, on city streets—officials are adopting "zero tolerance" policies designed to crack down on kid violence. As Annette Fuentes writes in the Nation (June 15, 1998) "to be young is to be suspect."
But are such draconian measures warranted? Though recent events seem to indicate a disturbing downward spiral, a youth culture that is getting more violent with each passing day, the numbers tell a different story. A 1997 study by the National Center for Juvenile Justice concluded that "today's violent youth commits the same number of violent acts as his/her predecessor of 15 years ago." And violent juvenile offenders, according to a 1997 Justice Department report, "are not significantly younger than those of 10 or 15 years ago." In fact, there were 6 percent fewer juvenile arrests for violent crime in 1996 than in 1995.
In light of the data, our eagerness to crack down on troublesome kids is curious. Even more curious is our use of the aberrations in Springfield and Jonesboro as the basis for putting the screws to young people. "It's as if a handful of children . . . are absolving adults of having to deal with the problems of children," comments Robin Templeton in Pacific News Service (May 22, 1998).