(2 of 5)
During the past six years, there has been a significant increase in juvenile crime in the most serious categories: murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault. Homicide arrests of kids ages 10 through 14 rose from 194 to 301 between 1988 and 1992. In 1986 a majority of cases in New York City's Family Court were misdemeanors; today more than 90% are felonies. Though killers under the age of 15 are still relatively rare -- over the past three years in L.A., for instance, those 14 or younger accounted for just 17 of the 460 homicides committed by kids under 18 -- younger kids are increasingly involved in deadlier crime. "There is far more gratuitous violence and far more anger, more shooting," says Judge Susan R. Winfield, who presides over the Family Division of the Washington, D.C., Superior Court. "Youngsters used to shoot each other in the body. Then in the head. Now they shoot each other in the face."
Gunfire has become sufficiently common in and around classrooms, mostly in the inner city, that an astonishing number of schools have started to treat their own corridors as potential crime scenes. Some are tearing out lockers to deny hiding places for handguns or banning carryalls and bookbags for the same reason.
No segment of society is immune to the problem. The most famous youthful offenders of the '90s, Erik Menendez, at 19, of Beverly Hills, California, and Amy Fisher, at 17, of Merrick, Long Island, came from mostly white communities of nice houses. But it's in the inner cities where an interlocking universe of guns, gangs and the drug trade has made mayhem a career path for kids and equipped them with the means to do maximum damage along the way. Children ) involved in the drug trade get guns to defend themselves against older kids who want their money. For the ones still on a piggy-bank budget, the streets offer rent-a-guns for $20 an hour. Who can be surprised, then, that on a typical day last year about 100,000 juveniles were in lockup across the country?
With the omnibus crime bill that just squeezed through Congress, the Federal Government made its partial gesture toward a solution. Under the new law, it's a crime for juveniles to possess a handgun or for any adult to transfer one to them except in certain supervised situations. It also provides for programs -- like those that keep schools open later -- intended to discourage kids from finding trouble.
Those were the very provisions that some Republicans denounced as "pork." Yet while crime control can be one of the most contentious issues in American life, there is something resembling an emerging ideological consensus on one thing: some kids are beyond help. You can hear it even when talking with Attorney General Janet Reno, who believes crime has its roots among neglected children. She still stresses the need for "a continuum" of government attention that begins with prenatal care and includes the school system, housing authorities, health services and job-training programs. But she also recognizes that the continuum will sometimes end in an early jail cell. "It's imperative for serious juvenile offenders to know they will face a sanction," she says. "Too many of them don't understand what punishment means because they have been raised in a world with no understanding of reward and punishment."