This hearing of the Subcommittee on Crime will come to order. Today, notwithstanding violent juvenile crime dropping over the last three years, juvenile crime remains at unacceptably high levels. Indeed, it has more than doubled over the last 3 decades.
Teenagers account for the largest portion of all violent crime in America.
Today in America today no population poses a larger threat to public safety than juvenile offenders. And given the demographic trend involving a large youth cohort beginning to move through the crime-committing age group of 15 to 24 years, many criminologists project that juvenile crime may escalate substantially in the near future. At the same time that we face the prospect of increased juvenile crime, juvenile justice systems around the country are overburdened and, therefore, unable to ensure appropriate interventions and sanctions for nonviolent offenses. Their limited resources are, understandably, focused on the more serious and violent offenders. In this way, many juvenile justice systems themselves are unintentionally contributing to the development of more hardened youthful offenders.