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33 Wake Forest L. Rev. 727 (1998)
The Youth Violence Epidemic: Myth or Reality

handle is hein.journals/wflr33 and id is 739 raw text is: THE YOUTH VIOLENCE EPIDEMIC: MYTH OR REALITY? * Franklin E. Zimring This article searches the arrest statistics of the period 1980- 1996 for evidence of trends in juvenile violence in the United States. No consistent long term trends appear for g of the four Part I violent crimes (homicide, rape, aggravated assault, and robbery). Only two of the four offenses have arrest rates higher than in 1980. Aggravated assault arrests have in- creased substantially, but most of this is due to reclassification by police instead of changes in youth behavior. There is no long-term trend in youth violence to project forward to the twenty-first century. Conventional wisdom has it that rates of juvenile violence are an ominous exception to the good news of declining crime in the United States in the 1990s. Rates of serious adolescent violence are reported as increasing.1 These recent increases are the basis for projecting higher rates of juvenile arrests in the future.2 Congress- man McCollum of Florida, the chief sponsor of sweeping federal ju- venile justice legislation, sums up the common sentiments as such: In recent years, overall crime rates have seen a modest decrease .... Nevertheless, this general decline masks an unprecedented surge of youth violence that has only begun to gather momentum. A version of this article will appear as Chapter 3 of American Youth Vio- lence, to be published by Oxford University Press in 1998. Copyright Franklin E. Zimring. William F. Simon Professor of Law and Director of the Earl Warren Legal Institute at the University of California at Berkeley. 1. See WILLIAMu J. BENNETT ET AL., BODY COUNT 20 (1996) (noting that vio- lence among American youth has been soaring); JAMEs ALAN Fox, TRENDS IN JUVENILE VIOLENCE: A REPORT TO THE UNITED STATES ATTORNEY GENERAL ON CURRENT AND FUTURE RATES OF JUVENILE OFFENDING 1-2 (1996) (observing that, since 1985, homicide by teenagers aged fourteen to seventeen has increased 172%). 2. See HOWARD N. SYNDER & MELISSA SICKM-UND, NAT'L CTR. FOR JUVENILE JUSTICE, JUVENILE OFFENDERS AND VICTIMS: A NATIONAL REPORT 111 (1995) (estimating that by the year 2010, juvenile arrests will increase by 145%). 727

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