Mike Males, YouthFacts.org
Like Wile E. Coyote blundering off a cliff and thrashing midair to forestall his inevitable plunge, America’s juvenile justice system is staving off demise by pretending the last 30 years never happened.
The juvenile system’s crisis can be summed up in FBI tabulations of arrests of persons under age 18 for criminal offenses:
- 1995: 2,343,000
- 2022: 408,000
Today, far fewer youths than middle-agers in their 50s are being arrested – a mule-kick to the gut of fossilized notions of crime. Adjustments for FBI crime coverage and youth population growth enhance the astounding teenage crime plunge still more.
No one ever imagined that as America’s teenage population grew and went from heavily White to majority of Color (Latinx, Black, Asian, Native, and other Nonwhite), crime and violence would plummet as never before. In fact, experts had predicted the opposite: a generation of Clockwork-Orange-like “teenage super-predators” marauding cities and countryside alike.
Never have experts been so wrong. Now, the 25-year crash in teenage crime – down an astounding 87% in just one generation – is an existential threat to hordes of academics, officers, corporations, agencies, and advocates dependent on masses of youths shooting, robbing, and stealing.
So, to protect themselves, all are burying one of history’s most stunningly important, promisingly hopeful social trends.
That suddenly, teenagers have become less criminal than middle-agers should be stimulating excited crime and social policy debate. It isn’t, because no one important wants you to know about this cataclysmic revolution – or WHY it happened.
This terrifying New World of teens not committing crime
Even oblivious funding agencies are noticing that juvenile halls echo with emptiness, overstaffed probation officers twiddle thumbs, and detention costs are soaring to hundreds of thousands of dollars per youth per year. In California, youths referred to juvenile probation plunged from 207,000 in 1996 to just 16,000 in 2022, juvenile incarcerations fell by 93%, and the state Division of Juvenile Justice budget had been slashed 75% before its 2023 closure.
In response, interests dependent on youths committing more crime are revving up a strategy that has long served them well: the century-old, repeatedly-debunked lie that 12-17 year-olds’ scary “brain development” and “adolescent stage” render all of them “time bombs” and “temporary sociopaths” biologically driven to crime. Now, they’re extending this myth to 18-20 year-olds (and soon, up to age 25) to recruit more young adults to replace dwindling juvenile clients.
Whether in 1995 or 2024, it’s an easy sell to political demagogues and ever-sensational news media that love trashing teens.
Using modern neurobabble to resurrect old bigotry
The Massachusetts high court just issued a decision (Commonwealth vs. Sheldon Mattis) so crude it could have been written a hundred years ago.
The issue was simple: should persons under age 21 be sentenced to life in prison without parole (LWOP)? Sound reasons (including arguments cited in US Supreme Court decisions) dictate the answer should be “no” for defendants of any age (the imperfect justice system should never issue irreversible sentences), and especially for younger ones.
A LWOP sentence is many times harsher for a 20-year-old facing a half-century of imprisonment than for a similarly-offending 70-year-old facing only a few years. Laws do not grant persons under 21 rights equal to older adults’; therefore, society is not justified in subjecting under-21s to ultimate adult punishments.
Instead of invoking sensible, positive arguments, “juvenile” advocates and the Massachusetts court stampeded to an ugly, antiquated myth American institutions still indulge: biodeterminism, the 19th century theory that crime is biologically innate to certain populations, traditionally minorities.
It’s no coincidence that biodeterminism’s visceral racism is being dusted off just as today’s adolescent young becomes majority Nonwhite. And at a time when aging, mostly-White American adults’ crises of crime, drug/alcohol abuse, gun killings, self-destruction, community and family chaos, fanatic politics, and seriously troubled behaviors far exceed those of teens and young adults, requiring mass institutional denial and distraction.
Enter the 19th Century
The Massachusetts high court’s decision revives criminology’s misused “age-crime curve:” “‘Offending by age rises in midadolescence, peaks in the later teen years,’ and begins dropping precipitously ‘around age twenty,’ and ‘[b]y the midtwenties, the rate of offending for most crimes is much lower’.”
The Massachusetts decision recites similar obsolete misnomers on every page: “All of the experts agreed that emerging [under-21] adults are more likely than… older adults to engage in risky behavior… with some experts asserting that this behavior plateaus around twenty-two years of age.” Young adults ages 18-20 “have a lack of impulse control similar to sixteen and seventeen year olds in emotionally arousing situations [and] are more prone to risk taking in pursuit of rewards than… those over twenty-one years.” “Youth… ‘is a time of immaturity, irresponsibility, impetuousness[,] and recklessness…’” On and on.
You can see for yourself that the “experts” the Massachusetts high court relied on were devastatingly and inexcusably wrong (and not just about crime, but drug and alcohol overdose, suicide, homicide, and other major risks). The FBI’s standard, readily available crime tabulation by age is below. Do you see a crime peak in “late teen years”? Do you see any precipitous drop “around age 20,” or “much lower” crime rates “by the midtwenties”?
For both sexes, crime peaks not in the late teens or early 20s, but at ages 30-34, followed by 35-39, then 25-29 – the ages “experts” assure us are brain-developed and biologically disinclined to crime.
That is baffling, but for other reasons. Logically, ages 25-44’s generally greater wealth, Whiter color, and experience getting away with crime should immunize them against getting arrested. Is it older ages, then, that have a brain problem? As one justice pointed out, “Age-related declines in fluid reasoning ability and working memory can compromise the quality of older adults' decision making.” The same “science” applied to juveniles would argue for banning LWOP for middle-agers as well.
The “age-crime curve” has disappeared
True, if one goes back 25 to 50 years to Boomer, Xer, and older Millennial generations, crime does indeed peak in late teens and declines thereafter (Figure 1). Back then, the same FBI tabulations show, an 18-year-old was 4 to 5 times more likely to be arrested for a criminal offense than a 40-year-old; today, substantially less likely. Figure 1 uses California’s tabulations of crime, more complete, detailed, and consistent than national tabulations but still very similar.
What happened? Did teenagers’ brain biology miraculously evolve in a generation or two while middle-aged brain biology deteriorated? Why can’t all these modern, enlightened “experts” attune themselves to this fantastic new reality?
Instead, the Massachusetts court’s 2024 ruling wallowed in cliches of 40 to 100 years ago advanced by advisors like psychologist Lawrence Steinberg (“Adolescence is a time of heightened sensation seeking and immature self-regulation”).
The obsolete non-science of the Massachusetts decision and juvenile justice advocacy is further discredited by their citations of outdated functional Magnetic Resonance Imagings (fMRIs) as “new and sophisticated brain imaging techniques.” Was this a joke? For a decade, scientific reviews have discredited tens of thousands of fMRIs as unreliable, unreplicable, and vulnerable to subjective biases.
Does a good end justify bad means?
Still, liberal reformers might think: Oh, well. Whatever bad information drove the Massachusetts decision, the result was good. Young adults were exempted from LWOP.
While that might benefit a few 18-20 year-olds (of 300,000 Massachusetts 18-20 year-olds, just 5 were arrested for homicide in 2022) who might go from permanent prison to permanent parole, the unnecessarily cruel prejudices underlying the Massachusetts ruling harm tens of millions of youths and young adults by justifying mass denial of jobs, rights, and public participation.
The mass damage is shown by lawmakers’ exploitation of advocates’ anti-youth biodeterminism to inflict arbitrary banishments of otherwise qualified teenagers, including adult teens required by law to financially support themselves, from access to tens of millions of entry-level jobs in alcohol, tobacco, gun, law enforcement, transportation, and other major fields as well as from personal lodging, vehicle rental, credit access, and culture. The rights of under-18 youths, our poorest, most racially-diverse age group, to freely participate in politics, civic life, culture, health care, and even to be in public are abrogated for no purpose other than irrational age-based prejudices.
Then, as in the Massachusetts decision, these same pointless banishments are recited as “evidence” that equally pointless legal stigmas must be imposed on teens based not on their individuality, circumstances, or offenses, but solely due to their age. Advocates would never accept this tradeoff (curtailed sentences for a few murderers at the expense of truncated rights for millions) for their own grownup demographics.
One horrific effect of baseless negative stereotyping of teenagers is exposed in the US Supreme Court’s barbaric Jones v. Mississippi (2021) decision. Both conservative and liberal justices ignored the tragic individual circumstances of the defendant, age 15 when he murdered his grandfather after suffering years of appalling violence, abuse, and abandonment by family adults. Instead, justices squabbled over bigoted generalizations about adolescence with no relevance to the case to uphold their pre-conceived politics.
So, here’s a radical notion: why not tailor justice individually? Isn’t that what courts, judges, and juries given the case specifics involving vastly differing defendant characteristics, histories, situations, behaviors, crimes, and crime circumstances are tasked with doing?
Why did teenagers stop committing crimes?
The emergence of a teenage generation that is neither criminal nor risk-happy demolishes the resurrected 19th century myth that young people are innately crime- and risk-prone, just as research has refuted identical biodeterminist myths that branded certain races or ethnicities as innately crime-prone.
Over the last 25 to 30 years, America has benefitted from two natural experiments that drove the massive teenage crime plummet now causing justice-system interests so much consternation. From the early 1990s through 2021, federal tax-credit and environmental regulations reduced the poverty rate among teens by 80% (from 27% to 5%) and the toxic lead content in young bodies by 90% (from 20-25mcg/dl to 2). Poorer inner-city teens were particularly damaged by poverty and toxins. At their early-1990s peaks, more than one-fourth of youths grew up in abject poverty and 15% with dangerous childhood levels of poisonous lead.
Note in the table above that Massachusetts, a wealthy state with low poverty, has a much lower crime rate among teens age 15-19 than US 50-agers, and lower among early-20s adults than US adults ages 45-49. The last 30 years powerfully confirm that teenagers and young adults are not innately driven to crime but respond to the conditions imposed on them.
In particular, the behaviors associated with lead poisoning – lack of impulse control, strong responses to arousal, recklessness – are exactly the same ones experts claim are innate to teenaged brains. (Actually, “the teenage brain on lead,” environmental economist Rick Nevin points out.)
The Massachusetts court, experts, and advocates had ample reasons to argue for banning LWOP, especially for young people, that would have affirmed their rights, recognized their massive improvements, and avoided stigmas. Why did they unanimously ignore positive arguments affirming sound economic and environmental policies, and, instead, resurrect destructive biological prejudices?
Unfortunately, arguments that maximize contempt, fear, and hostility toward all young people appear the most effective stratagem to restock a juvenile justice system that, time-served-on-sentence reports show, historically confined youths for longer times than adults for the same offenses while failing to actually rehabilitate. Don’t pretend any of this is for the benefit of young people.
