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San Francisco Chronicle
HEADLINE: Oakland's murders not 'youth violence'

DATE: November 27, 2002 Thursday
BYLINE: Mike Males [mmales@earthlink.net]

When everyone agrees, watch out. Turns out Oakland's murder surge is not due to young people. Newly released Oakland Police Department statistics through Oct. 31, together with press reports through Tuesday, show murder victims and suspects are considerably older than in the past.

Of 36 Oakland murder suspects identified so far in 2002, only two are youths. One is a 14 year-old who stabbed his mother's 32 year-old lover to death in October. He was not charged after police determined the boy acted to save his mom from violent beatings.

Only three of Oakland's murder arrestees this year are under age 20; just one-third are under age 25. That is a big drop from the 1990s, when teenagers comprised one-fourth, and people under age 25 half, of those arrested for murder.

Far from "exploding," homicide by Oakland teens and young adults appears to be declining. Around a dozen Oakland teenagers were arrested for homicide every year in the last couple of decades, on average. Barring a cataclysmic next five weeks, no more than four or five teens will be arrested for murder this year, a record low.

So what explains the universal reflex on all sides to blame "youth" and "young people" for Oakland's murder increase? One reason is that 11 teens have been murdered in Oakland this year. Understandably, the killing of a young person is seen as a tragedy motivating intense community concern. What is forgotten is that only one of the Oakland teens whose murder resulted in arrest was killed by another teenager. The suspects in the other teens' deaths are considerably older, ranging in age from 22 to 30. The fact that an innocent teenager gets in the way of a bullet fired by an older grown-up does not indicate "rising youth violence."

Publicizing the mistaken image of an explosion in murderous adolescents invites a frightened public and legislative reaction to restrict and punish youths with harsher policing, long prison terms, or even execution.

Fear-mongering toward youth also obscures a crucial reality. Oakland's homicide increase involves murderers who are older, more likely to be recently paroled from prison and more drug-addicted than murderers of past years. We may be seeing the first echo of the state's huge imprisonment boom, in which the number behind bars, according to the California Department of Corrections, rocketed from 20,000 in 1980 to 160,000 today.

Nearly all those who enter prison will be released. In 2000 and 2001, a record quarter-million California prisoners returned to the streets, according to the CDC. Due to budget cutbacks, most had received little job training, education, drug treatment or rehabilitation while in prison. Given their poor prospects for securing legitimate employment and reintegration into society, paroled felons gravitate to the poorest, most crime-prone areas of cities. Ninety thousand parolees wind up back behind bars every year after committing new crimes.

To punctuate California's rapidly changing crime scene, according to the CDC's Criminal Justice Statistics Center, youths remain a bright spot, as they have for two decades. While felony arrests of California teenagers dropped from 148,000 in 1980 to 106,000 in 2001, felony arrests of Californians over age 30 leaped from 75,000 in 1980 to 210,000 in 2001.

The failure of California to adjust to the rapid aging of the state's drug- abusing, felon-committing, prison-serving and paroled population has crippled reasoned policies. We face a new crime order in 2002. Continuing to fixate on 1990s "youth violence" mythology and its crowd-pleasing litany of dubious causes -- "peer pressure," television violence, video games, gangs, kids and guns, single black mothers, adolescent impulsiveness, moral decline -- is worse than useless.

Mike Males, a researcher for San Francisco's Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, teaches sociology at the University of California at Santa Cruz. E-mail him at mmales@earthlink.net.

©2002 San Francisco Chronicle. Page A - 25

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