You have to work hard to get excited about crime these days, but the usually sober conservatives at American Enterprise are in quite a tizzy over juvenile delinquency.
Murders, rapes, armed robberies and assaults are still too high in America. But thanks to things like smarter policing, tougher sentencing laws, an aging population and the incarceration of nearly two million citizens, U.S. crime rates are now lower than England’s. In fact, screaming headlines of our blood-thirsty news media to the contrary, since 1985 crime rates have plummeted about 33 percent.
The folks who run The American Enterprise, usually one of the smartest and most readable magazines of the right, are well aware of these true crime statistics.
Trouble is, you’d never know it from their semi-hysterical June cover story, “Delinquents in Suburbia,” which warns that the kind of juvenile criminality heretofore found in inner cities is creeping into middle-class communities.
The five-part package, which includes a ride-along with a cop and a piece on a busy juvenile court judge, works overtime to back-up its premise with horror stories. In the main piece, Scott Walter focuses (often tediously) on about a dozen cases of juvenile delinquency he found in the suburbs of Cape Coral, Fla.
None is novel and/or hideously terrible: Kids stealing cars and robbing homes. Kids doing and selling an array of drugs. As for examples of violent crime, one instance Walter offers is “an eighth grader who attacked his bus driver” (with a Bowie knife or a book bag? Walter doesn’t say).
And, oh yeah – it’s not a problem peculiar to Florida, America’s most crime-ridden state. In Dallas, rich kids are throwing huge parties when their parents go away! In Atlanta, 200 middle-class teenagers had to be treated for possible exposure to syphilis.
Well, yes, that syphilis outbreak was a few years ago. But it helps to exaggerate the point American Enterprise seems desperate to make – that nearly every community, even the wealthiest, has a “significant population of troubled kids in its midst.”
The leading cause, agrees everyone American Enterprise talks to, is “lack of parental engagement.” This is often a result of “family decay” – divorce, unmarried mothers, never-home parents.
It’s also a result of well-to-do parents who are too permissive, too generous, too unwilling or unable to pass on the moral, spiritual and emotional guidance that will keep what Walter calls their “natural barbarism at bay.”
No doubt, there is much truth to this. But unfortunately, American Enterprise doesn’t know when to stop piling on. Its package demonizes drugs at every opportunity, argues hard for continued toughness in the War on Drugs and rebuts those who say our prisons are over-crowded with nonviolent drug offenders.
Its editor, Karl Zinsmeister, frets that “endless drumbeating about police brutality” and those who “propagandize” for the end of capital punishment are undermining political support for cops and the tough-on-crime policies that brought crime rates down.
All this toughness will thrill law-and-order types, cultural conservatives and professional moralists. But it will enrage those of us who suspect that no matter what trouble our kids are up to, we are over-burdened by too many bad laws and not everyone in prison deserves to be there.
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