Punishing Teens to Protect Them

Among teenagers today, serious crime, murder, violent deaths, traffic crashes and drug and alcohol abuse are far rarer than among the youth of 25 years ago. Yet, Californians continue to believe teenagers perpetrate unheard-of savageries and require ever harsher policing, as voters’ massive approval of Proposition 21 in March indicates. Under that get-tough law, stiffer penalties were imposed for gang-related activities, and juveniles as young as 14 can now be tried as adults.

Not just gang members and delinquents are targeted. Average teens are increasingly shackled with daytime and nighttime curfews, driving curtailments and banishment from movies, music and video games. The question of whether this effort to restrict adolescents is appropriate has been swept aside by the claim that it makes them safer. As one police official declared, “Teens don’t have rights if they’re dead.” Implementation of youth curfews, driving restrictions and similar crackdowns has usually been followed by claims of huge reductions in crime, traffic deaths and other ills--assertions analysis reveals were often dubious.

Here’s an example: In 1994, Monrovia, Calif., imposed a school-day curfew on youths that quickly won wide acclaim. Police credited the curfew with cutting daytime burglaries and thefts by 50% to 60%. President Bill Clinton endorsed it during a 1996 campaign stop. The press trumpeted Monrovia’s “small-town success.” Other cities, seeing this, rushed to impose daytime and nighttime curfews that, if adopted as the White House suggested, would allow youths out in public only a few hours on most days.

Then, in January 1998, a Monrovia police statistician admitted, during a lawsuit deposition and with virtually no publicity, that the figures were wrong. Revised data from police showed a big surprise: Crime had indeed dropped in Monrovia from 1994 to 1997, though no more than in neighboring cities without curfews, but the biggest declines occurred during hours the curfew was not in effect. The crime decrease during summer months (down 43%) and school-year weekends and evenings (down 34%), when youths were allowed in public, was larger than during school-day hours (down 29%) when juveniles were banished.

My 1998 statewide analysis for the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, published in Western Criminology Review, similarly found cities with curfews had no larger declines in crime than cities that let teenagers be in public as they and parents chose. In fact, San Francisco, which abolished its youth curfew in 1992, showed California’s biggest drops in urban violent crime, juvenile homicides and teenage deaths from murder, firearms and other violence.

Why do cities and time periods with large numbers of youths in public--such as San Francisco and the summer months in Monrovia (when an exemplary recreation program draws young people outdoors)--show healthier crime declines? As urban scholar William H. Whyte has stated, “Good places are largely self-policing,” meaning that when many and varied people fill a location, it is less likely crime will occur, so safety is enhanced. Conversely, sweeping security efforts often backfire. A curfew can create vacant neighborhoods, which offer better opportunities for crime, while occupying police with removing law-abiding teenagers from public. In Vernon, Conn., among 400 curfew citations, police reported virtually no criminal activity, intoxication or other misbehavior by youths they cited and sent home.

Another youth-control measure, California’s 1997 teenage-driving law, prohibits new drivers under age 18 from driving alone or with teenage friends unless accompanied by a parent or other adult age 25 and older. Supporters of the law promptly pronounced it a success, but recent figures from the Highway Patrol reveal otherwise.

Before the law took effect, traffic fatalities among 16-year-olds had plummeted 50%, and injury-causing wrecks fell 30% in 10 consecutive years of decline. But in the first year since the new law took effect in July 1998, 16-year-olds suffered a 41% jump in traffic deaths, their biggest increase in decades, and there was no improvement in injury wrecks. This is especially troubling since the law applied almost exclusively to 16-year-olds in its first year.

Some fault for this misdirected policy lies with the state Office of Traffic Safety, whose Youthquake forums in 1997 warned that an “alarming population trend”--meaning more teenagers--would increase highway deaths and drunk-driving accidents. Yet, state figures showed no reason to panic. Teenage traffic deaths had been falling for two decades. In 1977, drivers under age 18 were in 451 fatal wrecks; in 1987, 321; in 1997, 187--60% fewer per driver than in the 1970s. In 1997, a quarter-million more 16-year-olds to 19-year-olds had 6,000 fewer serious crashes than in 1990. In fact, 40-year-olds drunkenly kill and injure far more people than 17-year-olds do; in addition, 40-year-old men cause more drunken highway deaths and injuries than all teenage girls, age 15-19, combined.

While advocates of the new law claimed teens were in peril if allowed to drive alone or with peers, the evidence demonstrates that teens were safer, and improving their record more rapidly, when they and parents (not a sweeping law) made the decision. The best way to improve novices’ driving is to provide intensive, behind-the-wheel professional instruction. That’s more expensive than the new law’s deputizing of any over-25 driver--an age group that caused 1 million serious crashes in California in the 1990s--as an instructor. But wasn’t safety supposedly the goal?

Now, the latest panacea for society seems to be restricting youths’ access to media and entertainment. One leading authority, former West Point psychologist David Grossman, argues that violent video games, movies and music make today’s teens more violent, even murderous. Certainly violent games (or Beatles music or even the Bible) might incite a disturbed individual, but Grossman and other media critics claim they’re warping an entire generation. Yet, the evidence cited is peculiar: Grossman blames violent media for the increase in aggravated assaults over the last 35 years, but he fails to note that assault rates peaked in 1992 and have since fallen sharply.

Indeed, after the violent interactive video games appeared--Mortal Kombat in 1992, Doom in 1993, Quake in 1996--rates of serious teenage crime and other ills plummeted, according to FBI statistics. In California, as video games, gangsta-rap music, R-rated movies and Internet patronage proliferated in the 1990s, teen-murder rates fell by 60% and other violence dropped 20%. Grossman’s thesis that an increase in video games resulted in an increase in youth violence was unfounded, as proved by standard crime statistics.

The panicky authorities who predicted that cataclysmic crime and chaos would accompany increased numbers of teenagers were flatly wrong. From 1990 through 1999, America’s teen population rose by 4 million, yet crime, traffic wrecks and other ills declined to their lowest levels in decades. Analysis shows recent anti-youth clampdowns deserve no credit for positive trends and probably hampered them. In fact, youth behavior improvements began years earlier and were stronger in time periods and areas, such as San Francisco, that permitted youths more freedom.

If it seems contrary to common sense that better teenage conduct accompanies fewer mass restrictions, consider Canada and Western Europe, where teenagers are freer to be in public, drink alcohol and engage in adult behaviors, yet display low rates of mishap. Americans, however, increasingly define “adolescent” not as “adult in progress,” but “abstain from everything.” The result is that U.S. teenagers often avoid grown-ups, promoting the peer cultures that terrify society as a whole. In the end, today’s ineffective, needlessly restrictive controls to protect youth are not intended to promote safety as much as control--and, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, achieve neither. *