Too Soon to Tell: Deciphering Recent Trends in Youth Violence

Jeffrey Butts and Howard Snyder have written a report for Chapin Hall on the recent rise in violence in the U.S. after 10 years of declining crime. Their conclusions are that while the country’s decade-long crime decline may be coming to an end, it is too soon to predict a new surge in serious violence. They say that it is inappropriate to describe the turnaround in violence crime as a problem of “juvenile” violence. Crime rates among young adults 18 to 24 show the same patterns as do those of juveniles, or youth under age 18.

++++++++++

National Center for Children Exposed to Violence

The mission of the NCCEV is to increase the capacity of individuals and communities to reduce the incidence and impact of violence on children and families. Click on the link above to visit the web site.

++++++++++

National Violent Crime Summit Participants Say Crime Is on the Rise

Police chiefs, mayors and other government officials compared local crime statistics they have not yet shared with the FBI this week and concluded that crime is on the rise around the country and includes new elements:

• Robbers, especially juveniles, are more likely to shoot victims, even when they do not resist in Cincinnati.
• Among youth gangs in New Jersey, shootings are more often tied to “disrespect” or perceived slights than drugs or territory.
• Robberies and shootings increasingly involve members of the same racial or ethnic minority. Thirty-three percent of Boston’s gun crimes were committed in 10 locations, mostly public housing projects where minorities live.

++++++++++

Two More Articles on The Jump in Juvenile Crime

Police in cities across the country are linking the recent jump in the nation’s violent crime rate to an increasing number of juveniles involved in armed robberies, assaults and other incidents. The reasons for the rise in juvenile crime are complex. Tight local budgets and reduced federal spending for police, new anti-terrorism duties, an economy that is slowing down and bringing with it poverty and financial uncertainty are sited as possible reasons for the jump.

Police tie jump in crime to juveniles

Cities grapple with crime by kids

++++++++++

Youth Crime and Incarceration in California

The Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice has released this new study that shows California’s youth crime at its lowest level in almost 30 years and youth incarceration rates to be the lowest in modern state history. The principal author is Mike Males. From the study:

• The state’s youth incarceration rate declined from a 1980 rate of 170 per 100,000 to a 2004 rate of 91 per 100,000.
• During the same period the youth violent crime arrest rate declined from 556 per 100,000 to 348 per 100,000.

15 page pdf file.

++++++++++

Columbine Records: Essays, Diary Entries, Drawings and Other Documents

Nearly 1,000 pages of essays, diary entries, computer files and other documents released last week include a notebook journal kept by Harris’ father that referred to his son’s disciplinary and psychological problems. The pages are filled with profanity, racial slurs and drawings depicting violence or death.

Overview                     Details

++++++++++

Youth Violence Up in Cities Around the Country

The articles below are pretty representative of news I’m seeing in cities across the country about sudden spikes in juvenile violence. Communities are gearing up to address youth violence with initiatives, task forces, and programs that appear very similar to the type of activity the field saw in the 1990s. I’m guessing these spikes aren’t really sudden, but have been building for some time and have now reached a level high enough to attract attention.

Boston Globe – City senses urgency on youth violence
Sacramento Bee – County sees a startling spike in juvenile crime

++++++++++

The Downside of Girl Power

This article examines mounting reports of girl violence and aggression that can be attributed to a number of factors -- among them an increasingly violent culture, the causes of internal and external aggression in both girls and boys, and the role of the media. The article includes an interview with a psychiatrist who, with his wife, adopted children who were victims of physical and sexual abuse. Two of the girls navigated adolescence with little turmoil. The younger girl was a different story.

++++++++++

National Resource on Identify Theft

This would be a good web site to include in your Favorites just in case you should ever need it. It is a one-stop national resource to learn about the crime of identify theft and steps you can take to minimize your risk and the damage if a problem occurs.

++++++++++

Violent Crime Up

The FBI’s preliminary annual crime report showed an overall jump of 2.5% for violence offenses, including increases in homicide, robbery and assault. It was the first rise of any note since 2001. While smaller to medium sized cities showed a marked increase in crime, cities with more the one million residents were the only FBI population category to show a decline in violent crime.

++++++++++

Parents Often Fool Themselves About Firearm Safety

A new study involving 201 parents and an equal number of their children has found that 39% of kids knew the location of their parents’ firearms, while 22% said they had handled the weapons – despite their parents’ assertions to the contrary. The study is the first to compare the responses of parents and their children ages 5 to 14.

A study from last fall by researcher at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) found that more than 1.7 million children live in homes with loaded, unlocked guns. More than 500 children die annually from accidental gunshots. Some shoot themselves while others kill friends or siblings, often after discovering a gun.

++++++++++

Kids Who Murder Their Parents

Kathleen M. Heide, a Florida professor of criminology, says  in a newspaper interview that most parents who are killed by their children are killed by adult children. When the killer is a child, she said, the child most often kills out of desperation or terror. A second category involves children with severe mental illness and appears more often in cases involving adult children. The third category Heide found was that of children with severe antisocial tendencies. Heide says the killing of parents is about 2% of all homicides. She said most commonly, children who killed a parent were abused at home, particularly among parricides involving a child under 18.

++++++++++

Teenage Girls Kept Quiet in the Face of Murder by Boys They Knew

Back in January, a surveillance video captured an early-morning attack on a homeless man by teen boys. Several teenage girls knew the boys who attacked three homeless men and knew what happened but did nothing about it. Experts say girls’ attraction to dangerous, even violent boys, and their ability to emotionally detach themselves from the boys’ crimes is typical of adolescence and symptomatic of modern teen life. 

++++++++++
In Defense of Broken Windows

Writing in the National Review, William Bratton and George Kelling defend the success of the broken windows approach to crime in the face of a number of scholarly reports that it doesn’t work. They point to other research that supports broken windows.

++++++++++The Teen Crime Wave That Never Happened

Knight Ridder Newspapers asks what happened to the predicted horde of juvenile “super predators” that were supposed to have numbered 200,000 by now. Instead of a wave of juvenile crime the country is experiencing the sharpest decline in teen crime in modern history.

• Juvenile homicide arrests are down from 3,000 annually to fewer than 1,000 and only a handful of those homicides occur in schools.
  
• Arrest rates for robbery, rape and aggravated assault are down a third since 1980 for kids aged 10-18, according to the 2006 National Report on Juvenile Offenders and Victims, due out later this month. (The report is the product of our research branch, the National Center for Juvenile Justice.) 

Experts say  a combination of factors operated to bring down the juvenile crime rate, and no one is really certain about which ones they were.

According to Melissa Sickmund, one of our NCJJ researchers, perhaps the question we should ask ourselves is “Why is it that as adults we want to think our kids are the worst kids ever?”  Robert Shepherd, University of Richmond law professor, provides some answers in this sidebar  to the main article.

++++++++++Co-Offending and Patterns of Juvenile Crime

This NIJ Research in Brief addresses a particularly important aspect of juvenile crime.  Ignoring co-offending when computing crime rates may produce severely misleading reports about crime and the effects of incarceration. Co-offenders provide a basis for multiple reports of single crime events (for recordkeeping purposes, each participant is shown as a single criminal event, not as one among a number of participants in a single crime.) Does that make sense? The report does it better. 20 page pdf file.

++++++++++The Cost of Being a Criminal

The New York Times reports on the fees associated with almost every encounter with the criminal justice system. The fees are intended to help offset some of the enormous costs of operating the criminal justice system, but can be devastating for people who emerge from prison with no money, credit or prospects, and who live in fear of being sent back for failing to pay.  ( This article will be available to read online free for one more day. If you want to read it and you're too late, get in touch with me and I'll send you a hard copy from my files.)

++++++++++Progress Hearing for Nathaniel Abraham

In slightly over a year Nathaniel Abraham will be potentially eligible to be released into society. Judge Eugene Arthur Moore, the Michigan juvenile court judge who has overseen his progress over the past eight years, will decide whether he is ready to be released or should be held until he is 21. Abraham, by the time he is released, will have spent nearly half of his 21 years in a juvenile facility. In 1999, at the age of 13, he was the youngest person convicted of murder in the United States.

++++++++++Attacks on the Homeless Reported Nationwide

Dozens of homeless people are attacked each year, most often by white men under 20. Baseball bats are the favored weapon as well as rocks, bricks, fists and feet, pellet guns and knives. The National Coalition for the Homeless has documented 386 attacks on the homeless over the past six years, including 156 deaths.

++++++++++Teens Sent to Prison for Lynching

Five white South Carolina youths admitted their roles in an attack on a black teen and received prison sentences. The five accosted a black teen as he walked along a rural road last July. South Carolina legally defines lynching as a mob attack against an individual where the victim survives.

++++++++++Canada’s Gun Control Debate

Toronto posted a 15 year high in its firearms homicide rate in 2005 and the press and the public fear that it is becoming infected by U.S. style violence. Last year Toronto had 52 gun-related homicides. Chicago and Los Angeles, comparable in size, had 338 and 366. Canada’s overall homicide rate is about one-third of that of the United States.

In Canada, other than law enforcement and military personnel, only target shooters, collectors and a small group of trappers and bush pilots may legally own handguns.

++++++++++Non-Lethal Strangulation is now a Felony in a Growing List of States

Six states (North Carolina, Missouri, Idaho, Minnesota, Nebraska and Oklahoma) now have a felony statute on strangulation, a terrifying crime that research has shown affects in about one of every five battered women. The laws have emerged along with a growing recognition across the country that non-lethal strangulation assaults are one of the “red flags” of deadly family violence.

+++++++++++