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Moreover, the Council warned, America is now home to about 57 million children under age 15, some 20 million of them aged four to eight. The teenage population will top 30 million by the year 2006, the highest number since 1975. Thus, "no one," the Council concluded, "should feel certain that recent declines in crime will continue into the next century," and we must resist any temptation to "ignore or trivialize our nation's present and future youth crime dilemmas."³

Indeed, the nation's two most widely respected criminologists, Professor James Q. Wilson of UCLA and Professor Marvin E. Wolfgang of the University of Pennsylvania, have both expressed deep concerns about present and impending youth crime and delinquency patterns and trends. According to Wilson, average Americans of every race, creed and region are right to "believe that something fundamental has changed in our patterns of crime," namely, the tangible threat of unprecedented levels of youth crime and substance abuse, including acts of violence committed by youngsters who "afterwards show us the blank, unremorseful stare of a feral, pre-social being."⁴ Likewise, Wolfgang has observed that today's juvenile offenders probably do about three times as much serious crime as did the crime-prone boys born in the 1940s and 1950s, and could represent a new and especially challenging "subculture of violence."⁵

The expert understandings, statistics and warnings about youth crime and substance abuse seem broadly consistent with the well-founded worries of young Americans themselves. Any juvenile between ages 12 and 17 is more likely to be the victim of violent crime than are persons past their mid-twenties, and about half of all crimes of violence committed by juveniles are committed against juveniles.⁶ A 1994 survey asked teenagers "How much of the time do you worry about being the victim of a crime?" In response, about 36 percent of white teenagers and 54 percent of black teenagers said "A lot or some of the time."⁷ Apparently, the number of youngsters who are growing up scared in America--scared of other juveniles, that is--has been increasing for some time now. A 1995 Gallup Youth Survey found that between 1977 and 1994 the fraction of teenagers who regularly fear for their physical safety at school increased by 38 percent to one in four. And one teen in four said there was at least one time in the past year when they feared for their physical safety while in school classrooms or hallways, on playgrounds, or walking to and from school.⁸

Sticking to the Basics Acting Now

The good news is that we do know a lot about youth crime and substance abuse that is relevant to saving at-risk youth--and acting now. Strategically, the key to preventing youth crime and substance abuse among our country's expanding juvenile population is to improve the real, live, day-to-day connections between responsible adults and young people--period. Whether it emanates from the juvenile justice system or from the community, from government, agencies or from civil institutions, from faith-based programs or secular ones, from nonprofits or for-profits or public/private partnerships, from structural theorists or cultural theorists, from veteran probation officers or applied econometricians, no policy, program, or intervention that fails to build meaningful connections between responsible adults and at-risk young people has worked, or can.

It is all well and good to acknowledge both the multivariate character of social problems, and the myriad legal, political, administrative, financial and other difficulties of replicating what works. But it is also all too easy to let such intellectually de rigeur acknowledgments of social complexity become convenient covers for academic excuse-mongering, inaction and, of course, calls for more grants for more basic research, more research symposia, more conferences--more of everything save more human and financial support of people and existing programs that actually put responsible adults into the daily lives of the at-risk kids of inner-city Detroit, Philadelphia, and other major metropolitan regions.

James Q. Wilson has argued that uncovering "the subtle interaction between individual characteristics and social circumstances requires policy-related research of a sort and on a scale that has not been attempted before"⁹ I agree. But there is already a voluminous private foundation-funded literature on understanding and reducing violence.¹⁰ There is also a huge and still-growing government-funded literature on the literally dozens of "contexts and factors" that determine crime patterns.¹¹

Besides, easily the most persistent, policy-relevant and common-sensical finding of the literature is that most disadvantaged youth who commit crimes and abuse drugs begin as neglected or maltreated children in need of responsible adults. In the words of a 1996 draft report of an American Society of Criminology task force on juvenile delinquency:

Of all the factors we have found as contributing to delinquency, the clearest and most exhaustive evidence concerns the adequacy of parenting. Parents who are incompetent, abusive, or rejecting, parents who fail to maintain adequate supervision over their children, and parents who, indeed, are little more than children themselves, have direct effects on anti-social behavior of their children.

Inadequacy of parenting cannot be viewed in isolation as the sole cause of delinquency. However, its association with other factors is critical in predicting future delinquency.¹²

Likewise, in a magisterial, still unsurpassed and only slightly dated 500-plus-page summary of the scientific literatures on criminal behavior, Wilson and the late Richard J. Hernstein concluded that "after all is said and done, the most serious offenders are boys who begin their careers at a very early age."¹³ Numerous empirical studies have indeed found that most juveniles who engage "in frequent criminal acts against persons and property come from family settings characterized by high levels of violence, chaos, and dysfunction."¹⁴ For example, a study that compared the family experiences of more violent and less violent incarcerated juveniles found that 75 percent of the former group had suffered serious abuse by a family member, while "only" 33 percent of the latter group had been so abused; and 78 percent of the more violent group had been witnesses to extreme violence, while 20 percent of the less violent group had been witnesses.¹⁵

Similarly, a recent ethnography of nearly 200 young West Coast street gangsters and felons found that, almost without exception, the kids' families "were a social fabric of fragile and undependable social ties that weakly bound children to their parents and other socializers." Nearly all parents abused alcohol or illegal drugs or both. Most young street criminals and drug abusers had no father in the home; many had fathers who were in prison or jail. Parents who were present in the home often "beat their sons and daughters--whipped them with belts, punched them with fists, slapped them, and kicked them."¹⁶ Much the same was found in a 1996 study that reconstructed the entire juvenile and adult criminal histories of a randomly selected sample of 170 Wisconsin prisoners from Milwaukee: "Most inmates were raised in dysfunctional families…. Drug and alcohol abuse was common among inmates, their parents, and siblings."¹⁷

Of course, today's at-risk child in need of meaningful connections with responsible adults is also tomorrow's young adult in need of a meaningful, living-wage job. At least with respect to the crime- and drug-abuse-reduction value of legitimate work opportunities, "liberal and conservative criminologists do not differ all that much about the causes of street crime."¹⁸ There is almost universal agreement among crime analysts that "jobs matter," and that in the big-city neighborhoods that so many at-risk youth and the adults in their lives call home, jobs have virtually disappeared.¹⁹ And there is also almost complete agreement among employment and training experts that, regardless of how bright or bleak general economic conditions may be, the most effective way--and perhaps the only way-to help no- and low-skill urban youth get and keep jobs is to "stick to basics: adult caring and guidance, plenty of legitimate things to do in a youth's spare time, and real help in connecting to employers. This is the stuff of successful human, citizen and worker development."²⁰

Unfortunately, on youth crime, substance abuse and related social problems, sticking to the basics is anything but common, and anything but easy. The very conceptual and moral simplicity of the hard work that needs to be done--that is, the hard person-, place-, and institution-specific work of building meaningful connections between responsible adults and at-risk young people--makes getting it done very hard indeed. One little-acknowledged reason is that in the elite social policy, foundation and research communities, most financial, reputational and other rewards have been, and continue to be, skewed in favor of peddling "original" and esoteric (if often emptily erudite) ideas and "comprehensive" (if hardly feasible) top-down program strategies and designs.

But if we really care about getting a handle on our present and impending youth crime and substance abuse problems, then the time has come to proceed inductively, building meaningful connections between at-risk youth and responsible adults via existing community-based programs focusing on the highly particular and often banal barriers to helping at-risk youth in particular places with particular people at particular times; having the money to fix a broken pipe that flooded the inner-city church basement where a "latch-key" ministry operates; finding a way to transport a young job-seeker from a public housing site to a private job site; getting police and probation officers in a particular neighborhood to work together on a daily basis; funding an incremental expansion of a well-established national or local mentoring program; and so on.

In fact, the youth crime and delinquency problem is highly concentrated where America's most severely at-risk youth are concentrated, namely, on the predominantly minority inner-city streets of places like Newark, New Jersey, not on the predominantly white tree-lined streets of places like Princeton, New Jersey. This is hardly a new social fact. For example, in 1969, a presidential commission on violent crime broadcast it far and wide.²¹ Still, the concentration of at-risk youth and associated social ills in America's big cities easily ranks among the most often ignored, distorted or forgotten of all policy-relevant social realities.

The concentration of crime and delinquency among low-income urban minority youth is especially striking for crimes of violence, including murder. In 1995, a nationwide total of 21,597 murders were reported to police, a total 7 percent lower than the 1994 total, and representing a national murder rate of 8 per 100,000 inhabitants. But 77 percent of murder victims in 1995 were males, 48 percent were black, and 12 percent were under age 18. Moreover, recent studies find that males ages 14 to 24 are roughly 8 percent of the country's total population, but they constitute over a quarter of all homicide victims and nearly half of all murderers. Between 1985 and 1992, for example, black males ages 14-24 remained just above 1 percent of the population but increased from 9 to 17 percent of the murder victims and from 17 to 30 percent of the assailants.²²

One thing is tragically clear: "Homicide for young black males is very concentrated geographically," and remained so throughout the epidemic increases of the last decade.²³ As a 1994 study of youth violence concluded: "The violence now occurring within our cities is a national scourge. The fact that minority youth are disproportionately its victims makes it a tragedy as well as a disgrace.²⁴

There is growing evidence of a substantial overlap between the highly concentrated populations of young crime victims and the highly concentrated populations of young offenders. For example, in an ongoing analysis of youth homicides in Boston, Professor Anne Morrison Piehl of Harvard University has found that about 75 percent of both offenders and victims of youth homicides (victim age 25 or younger) have criminal histories consisting of at least one arraignment. "In fact," Piehl observes, "among those with criminal histories, the victims and offenders were virtually indistinguishable in terms of criminal records. This finding suggests several things: the distribution of victimization may be even more concentrated than commonly believed, and strategic innovations based on law enforcement may be able to diffuse violent situations because there is leverage over both potential victims and potential offenders."²⁵

Few "Guppies". Few "Great Whites"

But, as you well know, most juvenile offenders with whom the justice system deals are neither violent nor incorrigible.²⁶ Metaphorically speaking, today the system must handle relatively more young "Great White Sharks" (serious, violent, and predatory juvenile criminals) and relatively fewer "Guppies" (mere first-time misdemeanants or delinquents) than it did in previous decades. Still, most juvenile offenders are neither Great Whites nor Guppies, and, for that reason, and even with the passage of so-called get-tough laws in many states, the system still rightly responds by putting the vast majority of juvenile offenders on probation not behind bars.

For example, in 1993 public juvenile detention, correctional and shelter facilities held a total of over 60,000 juveniles (89 percent of them male, 43 percent of them black)--the largest number of juveniles in such public facilities on any given day since these data on juveniles in public facilities were first compiled in 1974. There were 1,025 facilities with a median population capacity of 24 and a mean capacity of 57--clearly not the huge, 500-plus bed juvenile reformatories of old. From 1991 to 1993, the one-day population of juveniles in publicly operated facilities increased by 5 percent. And note: the one-day population figures grossly minimize the actual amount of traffic in and out of these facilities each year. In 1993, for example, about 674,000 juveniles were admitted to these facilities. and 669,000 were released from their custody.²⁷

Still, even today, it is probation authorities, not custodial institutions, that remain the true "workhorses" of the juvenile justice system. In 1993, 520,600 cases disposed by juvenile courts resulted in probation--a 21 percent increase over the 428,500 cases handled via probation in 1989. Probation has long been, and continues to be, the most severe disposition in over half (56 percent) of adjudicated delinquency cases. Between 1989 and 1993, the number of adjudicated juvenile cases placed on formal probation rose by 17 percent to 254,800. Over the same period, the number of juvenile probation cases involving a "person offense" such as homicide, rape, robbery, assault or kidnapping, soared by 45 percent to 53,900.²⁸

As you also are well aware, alcohol, illegal drugs and substance abuse are clearly implicated in youth crime. The trouble almost always begins--both for the at-risk children and often for their parents as well--with child maltreatment in the home or a severe lack of positive adult-child relationships. Recently, a number of popular books have spoken to this harsh social reality in the vivid way that only first-rate journalism can.²⁹ In one such account, we are treated to the following summary of the research on at-risk youth, juvenile crime and related social ills:

Boiled down to its core (the research teaches) that most adolescents who become delinquent, and the overwhelming majority who commit violent crimes, started very young. . They were the impulsive, aggressive, irritable children.. If children know someone is watching them and that they may get caught, they are less likely to get into trouble.³⁰

Even some older children who have gone badly astray and gotten "caught" (even incarcerated) can be saved if they are not only watched or monitored in the future, but mentored or ministered to as needed by responsible adults. Weigh the following synopses of a representative armful of relevant research monographs published over the last decade or so:

• Since 1986, the National Institute of Justice and the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism have been conducting an ongoing examination of 1,575 child victims identified in court cases of abuse and neglect from 1967 to 1971. By 1994, almost half the victims (most of whom were then in their late twenties or early thirties) had been arrested for some type of non-traffic offense. About 18 percent had been arrested for a violent crime. Substance abuse rates were elevated, especially among women who were maltreated as children. Blacks who had been abused or neglected as children had higher crime rates than whites with the same background: 82 percent of black males had been arrested for some type of non-traffic offense; half of black males had at least one arrest for violence. For all child victims, in terms of future criminality, neglect appeared to be as damaging as physical abuse. The rate of arrest for violent crimes of those who had been neglected as children was almost as high as the rate for those who had been physically abused. Overall, maltreatment of children increased their chances of delinquency and crime by about 40 percent.³¹

• A 1985 study based on a representative national sample of 7,514 adolescents aged 12 to 17 compared delinquency rates of children in single-parent (mother-only) households to rates of children in two-parent households. Delinquency was measured in terms of number of arrests, school disciplinary problems (truancy, for example), and similar indicators. By all measures, the children in single-parent households were more likely to be delinquent.³²

• A major re-analysis of data from a classic study of crime and delinquency confirmed the primacy of family factors: "Despite controlling for these individual difference constructs, all family effects retained their significant predictive power. And once again mother's supervision had the largest of all effects on delinquency, whether official or unofficial. A major finding of our analysis is that the family process variables are strongly and directly related to delinquency….. family processes of informal social control still explain the largest share of variance in adolescent delinquency."³³

• A study of the relationship between adolescent motherhood and the criminality of her offspring revealed a birds-of-a-feather phenomenon. About "25 percent of boys with criminal fathers also have a criminal mother, compared to 4 percent in the case of non-criminal fathers. Similarly, 67 percent of boys with criminal mothers also have a criminal father, compared to just 19 percent when the mother is not convicted....Our results suggest that the children latest in the birth order of women who begin childbearing early are at greatest risk of criminality. This finding appears to reflect the coming together of the deleterious impacts of poor parenting and role modeling and diminished resources per child."³⁴

• A study of urban street criminals concluded: "An abundance of scholarly research shows that anti-social and delinquent tendencies emerge early in the lives of neglected, abused, and unloved youngsters, often by age nine. My ethnographic data support these findings and show that, once these youngsters leave home and go on the street, they are at best difficult to extricate from street culture...³⁵

Four decades ago, child psychologist Emmy Werner began studying the offspring of desperately poor, alcoholic and abusive Kauai, Hawaii parents. She was hoping to discover how these dysfunctions were passed from one generation to the next. Instead, she found that about a third of the children reached adulthood virtually unscathed--healthy, happy, employed, without substance abuse problems, and so on. So she shifted her attention to these abuse-and-neglect survivors, hoping to discover what made them so resilient and capable of beating the social odds. In 1992, a major storm flattened Kauai, leaving over 15 percent of its residents homeless and many others scrambling to find money for repairs, avoid bankruptcy, and fend off deep depression. But most of the study's resilient youth, then in their thirties, were not among the homeless, the foreclosed, or the depressed. They had heeded storm warnings, prepared their properties, saved for a stormy day, and bought insurance. For them, successfully riding out the storm was, as it were, an old habit. During the social hurricanes of their early lives, Kauai's resilient youth had responsible nonparental adults enter their lives, and through relationships with these adults the children had developed not only a sense of self-worth and respect for others, but, in Werner's words, personalities as "planners and problem solvers and picker-uppers." As she argued in her book, the crux of the Kauai story is consistent with the bottom line of the basic research on resilient youth: caring adults are the bedrock of a young person's behavior toward self and others, as well as the primary avenue for securing those skills, services, and opportunities (such as jobs) that are key to a civil and self-sufficient life.³⁷

Thus, our brisk walk through the literatures on the concentrations and causes of youth crime and substance abuse returns us to the core strategic principle: no approach that does not build connections between responsible adults and at-risk youth has worked. or should rationally be expected to work. Again, no one can reasonably deny that, whatever the state of adult-child relationships, growing up in neighborhoods with few opportunities for healthy play and employment is a breeding ground for youth crime and substance abuse. But improving those opportunities, without first ensuring that there is adequate parental or nonparental adult caring, supervision, guidance and support, is unlikely to prevent or reduce youth crime and substance abuse, and hence unlikely to forestall the adult dysfunctions and criminal activities that fuel the "cycle of violence."

The single most consistent and powerful finding in the evaluation literature on youth development interventions is that positive effects accrue while at-risk children are in the programs, and sometimes for a few years thereafter, but diminish or dwindle to nothing by the time the child reaches adulthood. Many have met this finding as a counsel of despair. Logically, however, all the finding says is that the young generally do better when they are being helped by adults than when that help has stopped--better with and while in Head Start than without and after it; better when they stay in structured drug treatment than when they drop out of it; better during a summer education and training program than two summers later when they are older, more challenged, and unhelped by responsible adults; and so on. Many social programs do not so much "fail" as "stop." The obvious need, therefore, is to translate a series of short-term, non-stop positive adult-child connections into that long-term developmental success known as responsible, self-sufficient adulthood. To employ a football metaphor, winning at at-risk youth development is impossible when your most ill-equipped players have coaches or quarterbacks but only on alternate game days, are only occasionally given playbooks or schedules, and, should they even bother to keep playing, get invited to take the field as a team only during the first and third quarters of a four-quarter game. Or, shift the context from at-risk youth in need of responsible adults to children living with both parents in the best of all possible emotional, material and cognitive early life circumstances. Even for well-loved, advantaged children in their teens, we know that when their circumstances change for the worse--when, for example, their family breaks up or falls suddenly on economic hard times--the youth are more likely to experience a wide variety of life troubles than are comparable youth who remained, as it were, in the 'advantaged childrens' program. In short, the plural of short-term is long-term.

Likewise, many well-intentioned persons have concluded that unless interventions into the lives of at-risk youth are quite early, intensive and expensive. not much good can come of them. To some, "early" means while still in dirty diapers, and certainly no later than ages seven or eight. This perspective is, to be sure, a useful corrective to unfettered optimism about social programs, especially, perhaps, where our country's most severely at-risk youth are concerned. But there are, alas, few unfettered optimists still walking the social planet, and the "dirty diapers or doom" perspective is grossly inconsistent with recent findings on the efficacy of mentoring programs like Big Brothers Big Sisters. Moreover, it is largely beside the point: whether or not we think we can help at-risk youth who are out of dirty diapers, the fact is that there are millions of them out there and on the way. In particular, intellectual confidence that these children are beyond help even if it were justified (and I think it is most certainly not justified), would constitute no real answer to challenges posed by youth criminals and substance abusers--our youngest, most needy, and potentially our most dangerous fellow citizens.

The 3 M's of Youth Crime and Substance Abuse Prevention

The nation's at-risk youth population, including the segment of it that is involved in illegal activities, is not an undifferentiated mass. The best way, I believe, to think about and relate to present and potential juvenile offenders is with respect to their varying needs for adult supervision and guidance.

Specifically, I believe that some at-risk juveniles--for example, truants, petty thieves or kids who have had non-violent run-ins with their peers, neighbors and the law--need little more than a dedicated probation officer or a caring adult volunteer looking over their shoulder. They need monitoring. Other at-risk juveniles need responsible adults in their lives on a deeper, more intensive level, helping them with their personal problems, offering a sympathetic ear and a guiding hand. They need mentoring. Still other juveniles are among the nation's most severely at-risk children--abused and neglected as infants and toddlers, exploited for sex, drugs and money as adolescents, and already involved in (or quite likely to become involved in) serious, organized or predatory street crime as teenagers and young adults. Their badly broken lives and spirits cry out for a type and a degree of adult help that is holistic, personal and challenging. They need some type of ministering.

1National Research Council, Panel on High-Risk Youth, Losing Generations national Academy Press, 1995), p.5.

9James Q. Wilson, On Character (American Enterprise Institute), p. 179; also see Wilson et al., Understanding,: and Controlling Crime (Springer-Verlag, 1986), and Wilson and Joan R. Petersilia, eds., Crime op. cit.

10For example, see 1993 Report of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation: Research for Understanding,: and Reducing Violence. Aggression and Dominance (The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, 1993).