Killing kids for votes

By Isabel Chang

On March 7 of last year, voters in California passed Proposition 21, otherwise known as the Juvenile Crime Initiative, which sent youth rights advocates everywhere scrambling. Espoused by politicians looking for quick-fix answers to juvenile crime, the initiative brought about a complete overhaul of the state's juvenile justice system. Among the various provisions of the initiative, the most controversial allowed offenders as young as fourteen to be tried as adults for serious crimes such as murder and rape, thus making them eligible for life sentences and the death penalty.

California is just one of many states partaking in a nationwide movement to pin the blame for the nation's crime problem on youth. Within the last two years, almost all 50 states have overhauled their juvenile justice laws to include harsher provisions similar to California's crime initiative, opening the door to harsher sentencing laws and the expansion of various policies in the misguided spirit of "Three-Strikes" and "Zero Tolerance." In specific, the minimum age for a juvenile offender to receive the death penalty has been lowered to 16 or 17 in most death-penalty carrying states, California now carrying the lowest with 14.

Largely fueled by elected officials, media hysteria, corporate fat cats, and aging conservatives, this "war on youth" mentality rests on ignorance surrounding juvenile crime and is fueled by much of the media hype surrounding isolated, episodic violence in U.S. schools. Conservatives seem to believe that the death penalty is a solution to teen crime. They vote for stricter penalty laws on youth offenders rather than support youth rehabilitation programs.

Contrary to popular belief, it is estimated that only 13% of violent crimes are committed by young people, and we are responsible for less than half of one percent of the most serious, violent crimes. Crime among young people is at its lowest since the mid-1980's, declining at double the speed of crime among adults. If we were to take the case of homicide, for example, rates in the 14-17 age bracket dropped steadily from 30.2 per 100,000 in 1993 to 16.5 in 1997. From 1997 to 1998, overall juvenile arrests for violent crimes fell 11% compared to the 5.4% adult crime decline, according to an annual statistical report by the FBI. Though this may not seem like much, realize that this is the widest gap between rates for juvenile and adult crime in a decade. Among academics and criminologists, the general consensus is that youth crime has dropped at a steady rate per year since 1993.

Conventional wisdom dictates that as the number of young people increases, so will our rates of crime. However, on a nationwide scale, youth crime rates are in decline even as our numbers grow. The U.S. teenage population has been steadily growing since the early `90s. California alone is expected to have a 34% increase in young people by the year 2015.

And yet Mr. Politician Man turns a blind eye, and pushes for tougher penalty laws, to keep his aging constituents happy.

Efforts at erasing any distinction between youth offenders and adult offenders contradict the founding principles behind the juvenile justice system itself. The growth of the Progressive movement in the early 1900's fueled renewed interest in criminal justice reform, which ultimately led to the creation of a separate system to deal with youth offenders. The creation of a juvenile justice system served as an alternative to the adult system by emphasizing rehabilitation and prevention, rather than traditional punishment. Its founding fathers believed that young people retain a better chance at rehabilitation than adults, and that all attempts should be made to change the lives of misguided youth.

The death penalty is not an effective deterrent to crime and more specifically, youth crime rates are unaffected by the existence of a juvenile death penalty. Deterrence only works when the threat of punishment and the swiftness of its deliverance seem certain to the offender. Teens don't have a realistic grasp of death and in a sense believe themselves to be immortal. Why would they ever consider the possibility that they could be executed in a decade or two?

A person who has been sitting on death row since the age of sixteen is not the same as they were when they committed their crime. Furthermore, young offenders can sit on death row for over twenty years before they are finally executed, wasting millions of taxpayer dollars on the appeals process.

But most damning of all are the adult-driven messages received by young people everywhere:

We'd rather not deal with you. We've given up on you.