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Law didn't lower juvenile crime rate, expert says
Sunday, March 18, 2001 By Barbara White Stack, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Backers of "adult time" laws for juvenile offenders argue that sharply falling juvenile crime rates prove the statutes have been working.
Nationally, juvenile crime is now at its lowest level since 1988, having fallen 36 percent since its height in 1994. The decline includes a 56 percent drop in juvenile murder arrest rates, to the lowest level since 1966.
Some of that decline, contends Pennsylvania Attorney General Mike Fisher, can be attributed to the deterrent effect of the "get tough" approach. Because teens fear imprisonment, he says, they avoid criminal activity.
That sounds persuasive, except for the fact that juvenile crime began falling in 1995, a year before Pennsylvania's "adult crime" law took effect.
Criminologists say the "adult time" laws have had little to do with falling crime rates.
Alfred Blumstein, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and director of the National Consortium on Violence Research, points out that incarceration has been rising nationwide since the early 1970s, including the period in the 1980s and early 1990s when the crime rate was rising sharply, so jailing criminals obviously didn't slow down crime.
What's different now, writes Blumstein in his new book, "The Crime Drop in America," is that both crack cocaine use and gun carrying by youths have fallen off.
Not surprisingly, they're related. As crack use rose through the 1980s and older crack dealers were arrested, teens drawn by the lure of fast cash began selling the highly addictive form of cocaine.
They carried guns to protect themselves from those who would rob them of their money and precious white rocks. Other teens, Blumstein said, began packing guns to protect themselves from the crack dealers and for the sheer status of it.
Guns in the hands of teens, notorious for their recklessness, were worse than guns in the hands of the older crack dealers, who'd developed a stronger sense of their own mortality, Blumstein said. From 1987 until 1994, the only thing rising faster than homicides by teens was the panic the gunfire caused.
But then, in the mid-1990s, the crack market began dropping off, largely because young people in crack-infested communities saw the devastation it had caused to their parents and older siblings, Blumstein said.
When that happened, the number of gun-packing crack dealers declined.
At the same time, police began vigorously enforcing gun laws, taking deadly force out of the hands of teens.
The end result: fewer young men with weapons and lower teen murder rates.
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