When is 'get tough' too tough on teens?

For most of the past decade, the juvenile violent-crime rate in the United States has moved like an upside-down Internet stock index: down, down, down.

In California, for instance, per capita arrests of those under 18 for homicide dropped some 60 percent from 1991 to 1998, according to Franklin Zimring, a criminologist at the University of California at Berkeley.

Yet in California and the nation as a whole, the good news on juvenile crime has not yet produced any softening of the public mood on crime policy.

That's one reason a measure to go before California voters on March 7 that would further stiffen treatment of juvenile offenders is being closely watched as a timely barometer of public mood.

"This is the absurd outer limit of the get-tough approach" to juvenile crime, says Mr. Zimring. Sniffs another critic: "This is a solution in search of a problem."

For others, though, the measure is a test of the public's will to stay the course toward zero tolerance of juvenile crime. One of the measure's key components is making it easier to transfer juveniles to adult criminal courts for certain violent offenses.

The practice of sending juveniles charged with particularly heinous crimes to the adult-courts system is age-old in the United States. But in recent years, the threshold for such transfers, which doesn't necessarily mean imprisoning juveniles with adults, has been systematically lowered in most states. The usual means is reduction of the minimum age at which teenagers can be transferred and expansion of the list of crimes for which such transfers are allowed or even mandated.

In addition, prosecutors have been given expanded powers in the decision process, rather than juvenile judges. The California proposal follows that pattern, granting prosecutors the power to send juveniles to criminal courts for certain violent offenses.

Advocates see a tougher and more-efficient court system when prosecutors are given these powers. Opponents say judges are less political and thus fairer.

While the American justice system's more-punitive approach toward juveniles has been unfolding for 30 years, pinning down its precise impact is difficult.

Statistical basis

A number of criminologists see no hard evidence yet that it has directly increased public safety. Some surmise the tougher approach is playing a role as a deterrent, but that is not something provable with statistics.

Pointing to two studies, one she co-wrote, Donna Bishop, a Northeastern University professor of criminal justice, says the rate at which convicted juveniles commit new crimes after release from jail is, if anything, higher among juveniles tried as adults than among those that remain in the juvenile system.

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