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Five Days That Shook The World:
The Battle for Seattle
and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
with Photos
by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
INSIDE
CounterPunch Coverage of Election 2000
EXCLUSIVE
TO
COUNTERPUNCH
SUBSCRIBERS
Published on December 5
VOTING WHILE
BLACK
How Florida Kept
More than 100,000
Blacks and Other
Minorities From
Voting
CRIMINALIZING
YOUTH
The Unrelenting
War Against
America's Teens
OUR LITTLE SECRETS
Kathryn, Dubya
and Jeb
Al Gore Disses
His Secret Service
Agents
Published on Nov. 1
THE PAY-OFF
The Nader/Green Surge
Has Given Many Young Folk a Taste for the Excitement of Radical
Organizing. People Carry Such Hours and Days with Them for the
Rest of Their Lives
JIM CROW AT
EPA
Carol Browner Heads Up
a Racist Sinkhole
JESSE VENTURA
Fun Guy, But
What's He Done?
OUR LITTLE SECRETS
Studs Terkel
Describes a Dinner
With Churchill
Gen. Wesley Clark
and His '67 Mustang
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Al Gore:
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Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the Press
by Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
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The book the CIA Didn't Want You to Read
New Stories:
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December 20,
2000
Remember
Those "Super-Predators"?
Criminalizing Youth
Ours is not the first era in which adults have
persecuted the young and criminalized them. But in this country
it's not been done before with such methodical zeal, ever since
that salesman of the virtues, Bill Bennett, co-chaired the Council
on Crime in America and issued a 1996 report titled "The
State of Violent Crime in America" containing these ominous
words and utterly inaccurate predictions: "America is a
ticking violent crime bomb. Rates of violent juvenile crime and
weapons offenses have been increasing dramatically and by the
year 2000 could spiral out of control."
These were the years when headline-seeking
criminologists like John DiIulio of Princeton and Northeastern's
James Alan Fox painted lurid scenarios of "superpredators",
meaning urban youth of color, swelling Generation Y by as much
as 24 per cent. In 1997, Congressmen William McCollum of Florida
stated during a floor debate that today's youths are "...the
most dangerous criminals on the face of the Earth."
A slice of the crude, unlovely
obvious: It's not the criminalization of youth, it's the criminalization
of youth from certain neighborhoods, of certain ethnic origins.
Did you know that what neighborhood you live in is now an element
of probable cause? Yes indeed, if you live in a "high crime"
neighborhood, they can search you with less evidence you've done
anything wrong. Hence, people in bad (read: poor) neighborhoods
have less of a 4th Amendment than the rest of us. Three quarters
of the youth who are incarcerated are black or hispanic kids
of color. A black teenager is 6 times more likely to be incarcerated
for a first-time violent offense than a white kid. A black teenager
is 48 times (yes, you read that right, 48) more likely to do
time for a drug offense than a white kid.
"The law has taken many terrible turns in the last few years,
and the pit of the law is the juvenile justice system."
This is Catherine Campbell, a civil rights attorney in Fresno
whose fine piece on "stealing kids" readers may recall
in CounterPunch earlier this year. "It stinks. It's rotten
to the core. It should be wiped away and started over. A lot
of it begins with putting the kids of poor parents into foster
care. That's how authorities inspire hatred, anger, frustration
and feelings of worthlessness. It's the 'I don't give a fuck
zone', and with only a few months of that, most kids are pretty
much destroyed. They are 'criminalized' when their behavior
crosses over the almost unavoidable line of criminal behavior."
We've made criminal behavior
that wasn't criminal ten years ago. Statutory rape is the latest
craze - they had a little trouble figuring out what was wrong
with an 18-year old having sex with a 16-year old, but then they
decided it was too many teenage pregnancies, (Bill and Hillary
Clinton's prime obsession) and bammo, they were out looking for
boys to bring in for statutory rape.
All kids commit crimes. Most
adults commit crimes. We smoke joints, we have stolen if we
don't steal now, we walked the streets in groups (now called
gangs, and just being in one is illegal), we lie on our tax returns,
we commit crimes all the time. The point is not that youth is
criminalized, but that only certain kids are criminalized, and
these are kids from bad neighborhoods.
Campbell again: "The laws
have changed, and they are so awful. Take civil commitment.
Used to be the wisdom was you can't predict criminal behavior.
Now the wisdom is that a criminal is someone who committed a
crime. He's a criminal now, and will be forever. Nowhere is
this theory more controlling than as to sex crimes. I had a
client who at age 15 had sex with a 7-year old. Both boys.
In the bathroom, at church. He was charged and convicted of
lewd and lascivious behavior. He went to California Youth Authority.
There he was diagnosed by diabolical, incompetent shrinks as
a sexual psychopath, and they kept him in two years longer than
his sentence based on our state's new civil commitment laws
that allow that to happen. He finally got out when some shrink
(he won't last) said the kid's gay, let him go. They extended
this kid's term every time he had sex (he lived with other gay
boys) or masturbated! Can you imagine? Six more months in the
slammer for jacking off?
"They get them, and then
if they're the right kind, if they're poor, of color, angry,
and unsuccessful in school, they keep them. Through all means
available, they keep them in the system. They search them, harass
them, follow them, watch who they talk with, what they wear.
The most minor infraction, they are back in jail, then they
are sent away, or placed on probation, and then they are watched
more."
Do people realize how many "crimes"
are committed in jails, juvenile facilities and prisons. A kid
can go to CYA for a burglary when he's 16, and 4 years later
he gets his third strike and he's never even seen the streets.
His entire adult life will be prison. There are no middle-class
gangs, there are only lower-class gangs. And it's a crime to
be in a gang, and it's more time in jail or prison if a crime
is gang-related. You can't really survive on the streets in
those bad neighborhoods without being in a gang (if you're male)
so you're criminal just because you're alive and leave the house.
Walk out the door, commit a crime. And of course the age at
which you are an adult for jail and prison eligibility is lower
every year. That's part of that ugly companion to California's
Three-Strikes, Proposition 21, the anti-youth crime bill.
The drug laws are of course
key to criminalizing youth. The trick is to take something almost
everybody does, and then make it a crime. That way you can pick
and choose who you want to mess with. Kids from all backgrounds
use drugs, but again only kids from bad neighborhoods get criminalized
for it. It gets a kid into the system, and once in he won't get
out unless he's exempt, and an exemption is given to the kids
with aggressive, middle class parents, who have good or passable
grades.
The hysteria and lies about
youthful criminals goes virtually unchallenged. There are some
worthy souls, like UC Irvine's Mike Males who published the excellent
Scapegoat Generation, America's War on Adolescents, back in 1996
and who has run a one-man truth squad on the actual stats ever
since.
"Now," Males writes,
"the latest panacea for society seems to be restricting
youths' access to media and entertainment. One leading authority,
former West Point psychologist David Grossman, argues that violent
video games, movies and music make today's teens more violent,
even murderous. Certainly violent games (or Beatles music or
even the Bible) might incite a disturbed individual, but Grossman
and other media critics claim they're warping an entire generation.
Yet, the evidence cited is peculiar: Grossman blames violent
media for the increase in aggravated assaults over the last 35
years, but he fails to note that assault rates peaked in 1992
and have since fallen sharply.
"A curfew can create vacant
neighborhoods, which offer better opportunities for crime, while
occupying police with removing law-abiding teenagers from public.
In Vernon, Conn., among 400 curfew citations, police reported
virtually no criminal activity, intoxication or other misbehavior
by youths they cited and sent home."
Back in 1997 California's Office of Traffic Safety,
warned that an "alarming population trend"--meaning
more teenagers--would increase highway deaths and drunk-driving
accidents. But teenage traffic deaths had been falling for two
decades.
In fact, violent juvenile crime
rates have plunged during the 1990s. Today's teenagers, Males
points out "are not more criminally prone than past generations.
Youth felony arrest rates declined by 40% in the last 20 years
while felony arrest rates for over age 30 adults increased. In
addition, California's general population aged by three years
from 1978 to 1998, but its violent and felony arrestee population
aged by six years. In 1978, the average violent crime arrestee
was 21.5 while in 1998 the average violent crime arrestee was
27.7. Juveniles comprised 30% of California's felony arrestees
in 1978 but comprised less than 15% in 1998." Elsewhere
Males notes that "older white adults display drug overdose
death rates five to seven times higher than younger people of
color, including for the major illicit drugs such as heroin,
cocaine (including crack), methamphetamine, and hallucinogens.
However, young people of color are three times more likely to
be arrested for drugs and sent to prison for drug offenses than
older white adults. The result is that at all ages, a Californian
of color is four to five times more likely to be imprisoned for
a drug offense than a white compared to their rates of drug abuseIn
fact, young people of color display the largest declines and
lowest rates of drug abuse of any group."
You've heard about the race to the bottom. How
about the race to the cradle? An AP dispatch, November 16, from
Columbus, Ohio: "Youth Jail for 10-year-olds OK'd; Taft
expected to sign bill. Pushing hard on legislation before year's
end, Ohio lawmakers yesterday approved bills that would jail
children as young as 10." California's legislators had better
look to their laurels. CP
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