American Youth Violence: A Cautionary Tale

Abstract

AbstractViolence by young offenders has long been a concern of students of juvenile delinquency. Until the 1980s, juveniles had high rates of committing less serious assaults but accounted for less than 10 percent of homicides, a proportion to which they have since returned. But the late 1980s produced an epidemic of gun homicides by juveniles and young adults, which led in the mid-1990s to warnings about an emerging group of “superpredators” and to fabulously inaccurate predictions of “a coming storm of juvenile violence.” Just as the rhetoric was reaching its crescendo, youth homicide rates began their largest drop in modern history. Several problematic assumptions underlay the faulty predictions and offer lessons about how to avoid catastrophic errors in the prediction of crime rates. Some of the same problems reappear in more recent scholarly analyses.