Giving up on the young.

• Author: Males, Mike
• Position: Effects of social policies and attitudes on juvenile crime rate - Crackdown on Kids - Cover Story

Madness is the word Stephen Bruner uses to describe the summer of 1992. "The things I did, things I had done to me. ... Madness." It was the summer after eighth grade. He and his gang Panic Zone hung out where the rural black community of Spencer intersects the southeast Oklahoma City suburb of Midwest City. He rattles off the names of a dozen gangs - Hoover Street, Westside, Candlewood, 6-0 - that inhabit the district.

For his contribution to the madness, Bruner spent his ninth grade in an Oklahoma juvenile lockup. Now Bruner works as an intern for Wayne Thompson at the Oklahoma Health Care Project in Founder's Tower overlooking the city's opulent northwest side. Thompson himself spent three years in prison in the 1970s at Terminal Island and Lompoc for armed bank robbery on behalf of the San Francisco Black Panther chapter.

Madness, Thompson suggests, is "the natural, predictable reaction" of youths to the "larger, hostile adult culture that is anti-youth, particularly anti-African-American youth."

Twenty thousand more Oklahoma City children and teenagers live in poverty than a quarter of a century ago. "These kids are at risk of extinction if they depend upon adults to protect them," Thompson says. It is not just parents who fail them, but an adult society increasingly angry and punishing toward its youth. "That is the perception of the young people who are being ground up in this culture and the grinder of the juvenile-justice system. Their perception of their situation is very correct."

Today, state after state is imposing harsher penalties on juveniles who run afoul of the law. "The nationwide trend is to get tough on juvenile crime," says Gary Taylor of Legal Aid of Western Oklahoma. Rehabilitation and reintegration into the community are concepts that have already fallen out of fashion for adult criminals. Now they are fast becoming passe for juveniles, as well. Instead of prevention and rehabilitation programs, more prisons are being built to warehouse juveniles along with adults. The trend began in California; it is now sweeping the nation.

Juveniles are being waived into adult court at lower and lower ages. In Wisconsin, ten-year-olds can now be tried as adults for murder. Juveniles convicted of drug offenses in adult court receive lengthy mandatory sentences. In California, studies by the state corrections department show that youths serve sentences 60 percent longer than adults for the same crimes. Oklahoma wants to try thirteen-year-olds as adults and petitioned the Supreme Court to allow executions of fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds.

And it's not just the states. It's the Clinton Administration, too. The New York Times reported in December that "proposals by the Administration would allow more access to juvenile records and give federal prosecutors discretion to charge serious juvenile offenders as adults."

In short, we are giving up on human beings at a younger and younger age.

Juvenile crime is on the rise. But the reason is not media violence, rap music, or gun availability - easy scapegoats that have little to do with the patterns of violence in real life. Rather, the reason is rising youth poverty.

Sensational press accounts make it seem as though juvenile crime is patternless. It is hardly that. Juvenile crime is closely tied to...