CENTER ON JUVENILE AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE PRESS RELEASE
		www.cjcj.org

For Immediate Release: March, 1998

Runaway Juvenile Crime?: The Context of Juvenile Crime Arrests

CONTACT: Daniel Macallair
E-mail: [dmacallair@cjcj.org]
Tel: (415) 621-5661 x310

Washington, DC: A new study released today by the Justice Policy Institute found that 93.4% of counties in America experienced one or no juvenile homicides in 1995 up from 92% in 1994. According to the Institute's analysis of FBI arrest data, the juvenile homicide rate has dropped by 30% over the past three years.

This study was released in the wake of a shocking shooting at a middle school in Jonesboro, Arkansas for which an 11 and 13 year-old boy were arrested. The Associated Press reported that two children were killed and another 13 wounded in the incident.

"This case is so tragic as to defy description," noted JPI Director Vincent Schiraldi. "Fortunately, our analysis shows that cases like this are still very much the aberration, and not the norm."

A previous analysis conducted jointly by the Institute and the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives found that 30% of all juvenile homicide arrests occurred in just four cities -- New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles -- which contain only 5.3% of the nation's juvenile population. Six states whose populations have high areas of urban concentration -- Florida, Michigan, Illinois, New York, Texas, and California -- accounted for 56% of all juvenile homicide arrests in 1994.

The Jonesboro shootings were quickly linked in media accounts to school shootings which occurred in 1997 in West Paducah, Kentucky and Pearl, Mississippi. Yet according to the Institute's analysis, all three of these rural communities had no juvenile homicide arrests in the year preceding these highly publicized cases, strongly suggesting that they are idiosyncratic events rather than evidence of a trend. According to the U.S. Department of Education, of 1,234 public schools surveyed in 1997, none reported an incident of murder.

In Jonesboro, for example, the number of juveniles arrested for violent offenses of any kind dropped by 39% between 1993 and 1996, the last year for which data is available. While 82% of counties in America experienced no juvenile homicides in 1994, that number rose to 85% in 1995, according to the Institute's analysis. According to the US Justice Department, each year since 1980, there were fewer than 35 homicide offenders younger than 12 in America, most years fewer than 20.

By contrast, the report, entitled Runaway Juvenile Crime?: The Context of Juvenile Arrests in America , revealed that in 1996, 130 times as many youths were arrested for running away from home or being out after curfew as were arrested for homicide.

Schiraldi stated "We continue to let the tail of a few isolated cases wag the dog of the juvenile justice system. Despite these tragic cases, the fact remains that citizens in rural communities are still very safe from violent juvenile crime."

According to the US Justice Department, four times as many youth were arrested for killing with a gun in 1994 as in 1984, while non-gun homicides by juveniles remained constant during that period. Citing data from the Children's Defense Fund, the Institute noted that children under 15 in the United States die from gunfire at a rate which is 12 times higher than the combined rates of 25 other industrialized countries. Yet Senators Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) specifically rejected several gun control amendments to their Violent and Repeat Juvenile Offender Act of 1997 (S. 10) which passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee last year and awaits a vote by the full Senate this Spring.

"If Senator Sessions was serious about public safety, he would make sure that kids like the ones in Jonesboro, Arkansas, West Paducah, Kentucky, and Pearl, Mississippi no longer had access to guns," stated Institute researcher Jason Ziedenberg.

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