Juvenile Violent Offenders

A part of the super predator rhetoric was the prediction of a coming bloodbath of juvenile violent crime as the number of juvenile super predators grew substantially with the expected growth in the general juvenile population into the twenty-first century. The events of the recent past show this argument to be flawed. In the period between the 1985 and 1998, when juvenile violence crime soared and then declined, when the number of murders by juveniles doubled and then fell back to its original level, the size of the juvenile population did not change significantly. Therefore, the level of juvenile violence can change substantially with no change in the juvenile population. The fact is that nothing in the juvenile population trends in the 1980s and 1990s predicted the growth and the decline in juvenile violence experienced during this period. The juvenile population in the United States is expected to grow by one percent per year in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Any effect of this small population change on the level of juvenile violence can easily be dwarfed by the influence of other factors, as was seen in the mid-1990s. The simple truth is, given our current knowledge of the processes that affect changes in the levels of juvenile violence, any attempt to predict the future of juvenile violence crime is foolhardy.