The nation lost a visionary earlier this month when Pulitzer-prize winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks passed away at 83. Brooks may be remembered most fondly for her ability to portray the experience of America's young black people with honesty and compassion. Last week the U.S. Department of Justice released new statistics demonstrating that juvenile crime has dropped for the sixth straight year. From 1993 to 1999 there was a 68 percent decline in the juvenile arrest rate for murder, while the arrest rate for violent crime dropped 36 percent from 1994 to 1999. Sadly, the public's perceptions of juvenile crime completely miss the encouraging reality described by the Justice Department.
Polls help measure the degree of public confusion.
Even though in fact less than 17 percent of arrests in California that year involved people under age eighteen. In 1998 a national poll by the Justice Policy Institute found that 62 percent of respondents believed youth crime was on the rise. Even though a U.S. Census Bureau survey that year documented that youth crime had fallen to its lowest rate since 1973. This divide between perception and reality causes us to shrink from the young people Ms. Brooks lived with and embraced. We are quick to attach ferocious, explosive labels to adolescents that purport to explain their behavior but instead reinforce our impulse to pull away from our kids.