The teenage population will top 30 million by 2006, the highest number since 1975. And the nation's two most widely respected criminologists, James Q. Wilson of UCLA and Marvin E. Wolfgang of the University of Pennsylvania, say that this demographic bulge spells trouble. The criminologists are right. There were nearly 4,000 murders committed by teenagers in 1995. The increased use and availability of drugs has fueled the growth of drug-dealing street gangs.
Most studies estimate the number of youth gangsters to be well into the hundreds of thousands.
In some big cities, the percentage of juveniles in custody who tested positive for drug use has more than tripled since 1990. But most criminologists think that dip is temporary. When talking about crime and delinquency, liberals stress such factors as poverty and joblesness. Fewer than half of young black high school dropouts were either working or looking for work during 1994. And the number of substantiated cases of child maltreatment rose by 20 percent from 1990 to 1993.