NCJ Number
174183
Date Published
1998
Length
38 pages
Annotation
This article examines the characteristics of the youth violence epidemic in the United States.
Abstract
The epidemic of youth violence that began in the mid-1980s has been demographically concentrated among black male youths. One of every four or five serious crimes of violence, and one of 10 homicides, are committed by juveniles under age 18. However, the proportion of arrests for violent crimes that involved juveniles was about the same in 1965 as in 1994. Youths kill more often than they are killed and there is much crossover killing (in both directions) between adolescents and other people. There was clear evidence of increased gun availability during the epidemic. The claim that the explosion in youth violence can be attributed to "superpredators," with each cohort having greater prevalence of such offenders than the last, does not accord well with available data. While the sizes of successive youth cohorts are increasing and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, that is not a sound basis for predicting that the volume of youth violence will also increase. Notes, figures, tables, references