COMMENTARY: A coming crisis in juvenile crime

c. 1996 Religion News Service (Charles W. Colson, former special counsel to Richard Nixon, served a prison term for his role in the Watergate scandal. He now heads Prison Fellowship International, an evangelical Christian ministry to the imprisoned and their families. Contact Colson via e-mail: 71421,1551 at compuserve.com.) (RNS)-Though we have been fixated on the […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Charles W. Colson, former special counsel to Richard Nixon, served a prison term for his role in the Watergate scandal. He now heads Prison Fellowship International, an evangelical Christian ministry to the imprisoned and their families. Contact Colson via e-mail: 71421,1551 at compuserve.com.)

(RNS)-Though we have been fixated on the budget process over the past month, our next president will confront a much more pressing issue: crime.


Yes, I have heard the good news about the dip in overall crime rates and violent crime. This should give us just about enough time to add a few more locks on the door before the problem breaks loose again. And it will break loose in a major way, shaking the very foundations of our society.

This isn’t just my opinion. Earlier this month, the bipartisan Council on Crime in America, a seven-member panel of scholars and government officials, predicted a”coming storm of juvenile crime.” The council, co-chaired by Griffin Bell, attorney general in the Carter administration, and William Bennett, education secretary under President Bush, issued a report titled”The State of Violent Crime in America.”It contends that by the year 2000, juvenile crime and weapons offenses could spiral out of control.

The ferocity of the problem is breathtaking. Studies reviewed by the council’s staff found that”each generation of crime-prone boys is several times more dangerous than the one before it, and that 80 percent of the most serious and frequent offenders escape detention and arrest.” In addition,”more and more violent crime involves strangers and teen-age wolf packs.”What macabre novelist could devise a more frightening scenario?

What can we do? The report makes much of the fact that”over half of the convicted violent felons are not even sentenced to prison. … On any given day, seven offenders are on the streets for every three who are behind bars. … Revolving-door justice is a reality among criminals who are sent to jail.” So, additional use of police and prisons is a must. But let’s not fool ourselves: Our current prison policy cannot measure up to the job before us. Nor is our nation necessarily prepared to take the steps needed to make prison effective in an era of mega-violence.

In order to have any effect on the coming juvenile wave, we would have to become ruthless. I’m not talking about trying 14-year-old murderers as adults. We can do that now. We must be willing to take an 11-year-old who is showing the first signs of being one of the 6 percent who commit more than half of the serious offenses and remove him from the community until his 30s.

Extreme? Of course. But if our goal is to defuse this”time bomb”through the criminal justice system, we must be willing to act on what we know.

Yet for reasons that are fairly obvious-at least for now, and I hope forever-we are unlikely to adopt such measures. First, there is something we call due process guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution: You can’t just take people and lock them up because you believe, even with good reason, that they are going to commit a crime. Second, such policies would overwhelmingly affect children of color.


Criminal justice, ruthlessly applied, can help. But, like aspirin taken for a persistent pain, it won’t cure the disorder. The report says that the”hard social fact is that many youths in this country are growing up in relative poverty.”Many of them are growing up in places”where the institutions of civil society-family, schools, churches, voluntary associations-are proving too weak to keep them on the straight and narrow.” The numbers”counsel that neither more spending by Washington, the states and cities, nor the mere withdrawal of government can prevent today’s at-risk 4-to-7-year-old boys from becoming the next decade’s 14-to-17-year-old predatory street felons or the next century’s first big class of adult criminals.” The council is on the right track. They’ve issued the warning. They’ve described the factors contributing to the crisis. But tougher criminal justice won’t solve the problem. Or, if we do try to solve it that way, we will end up scrapping the Constitution, which is too high a price to pay.

But there are things we can do-there is still time. They require that we as a society set strict standards of moral conduct for our youth, beginning with the public schools, and that those standards extend to the realm of sexual ethics.

Politically correct? Maybe not. But the alternative is a crime spree of unimaginable proportion.

MJP END COLSON

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