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567 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 8 (2000)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0567 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE In the spring of 1998, Valparaiso University, in Indiana, was preparing for its first annual criminology conference. It seemed that, nationally, we were in the midst of a wave of school violence of some magnitude, the ramifications of which had not yet become fully apparent. The violence began on 1 October 1997 in Pearl, Mississippi, when 16-year-old Luke Woodham, after killing his mother at their home, went to school and shot 10 of his classmates, killing 3. Just two months later, on 1 December 1997, 14-year-old Michael Carneal of West Paducah, Kentucky, killed 3 fellow students while they were in a prayer meeting at his high school. Jonesboro, Arkansas, on 24 March 1998: 13-year- old Mitchell Johnson and 11-year-old Andrew Golden opened fire on their schoolyard, killing a teacher and 4 classmates. Precisely one month later, on 24 April 1998, 14-year-old Andrew Wurst killed a teacher at a high school dance in Edinboro, Pennsylvania. The next month, on 21 May, we heard of the massacre in Springfield, Oregon, in which 15-year-old Kip Kinkel shot 24 fellow students in the school cafeteria, after first killing both parents at his home. We decided to focus our conference on school violence rather than the broader issue of juvenile crime. That decision proved to be wise, though of questionable direct value in the face of the wave of high-profile school vio- lence the nation was experiencing. Neither our regional conference, held on 2 October 1998, nor President Clinton's nationwide teleconference, held just two weeks later, would make a difference to the subsequent events, not least to the killing by 17-year-olds Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold of 12 students, a teacher, and themselves on 21 April 1999 at Columbine High School in Little- ton, Colorado. In the closing years of the twentieth century, the American school system had witnessed the most profound shock since its founding in the 1800s: 25 dead in 1997, 42 dead in 1998, and, to date in 1999, 24 more, making 211 in all since 1992. American education would never be the same. Our conference was designed to bring together academic researchers (whose presentations form the majority of the contributions to the present volume) and practitioners to discuss the nature, scope, causes, and policy implications of the growing trend of school violence. Together parents, teach- ers, administrators, and experts in crime and society struggled to understand the roots of school violence and explored how to develop systems that would prevent it. Participants took the stance that, as a society, we urgently need to go beyond simple law enforcement and disciplinary responses to deal with the causes of this growing crisis. The organization of the conference, reflected in the organization of this Annals volume, was to consider three broad dimen- sions: (1) the nature, scope, and extent of the problem; (2) its source, including microlevel psychological and interactional causes, mesolevel (midlevel) organizational causes, and macrolevel cultural and structural causes; and (3) the implications of these causes for policy and practice. The optimistic aim 8

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