American Youth Violence—A Cautionary

Acts of life-threatening violence by young persons are important and troublesome events in developed nations for a variety of reasons—they are the most serious crimes young persons commit and thus test the degree to which legal principles can mitigate penal responses; they happen at the beginning of social and criminal careers and thus may be signals of protracted dangerousness; they follow closely on periods of child development and dependence so that the crimes of the young also clearly implicate failures of family, government and society. It is therefore no surprise that youth violence has been the focus of scholarly concern in the pages of Crime and Justice on a consistent basis throughout 35 years of publication. But there were three special developments in the United States over the period since 1975 that compelled special scholarly concern with youth violence. The first special feature of the late 20th century was a “baby boom ” which propelled an expansion of children and adolescents all through the 1960s and early 1970s just as crime rates in urban America were also expanding. Youth violence had become a much more important concern simply because there were so many more young people in the American mix. The second special element of the period was an explosion of rates of youth homicide i