TEEN CRIME ON THE DECLINE

WASHINGTON - A new generation of brutal and remorseless teens was
about to savage the nation, leading authorities on juvenile crime
warned a decade ago. Millions of Americans believed them.

Conservative criminologist John DiIulio called the fearsome horde
"super-predators." He estimated that they'd number nearly 200,000 by
now. Even unflappable Attorney General Janet Reno foresaw violent
crime doubling among kids.

It never happened. Instead, Americans are experiencing the sharpest
decline in teen crime in modern history. Schools today are as safe as
they were in the 1960s, according to Justice Department figures.
Juvenile homicide arrests are down from 3,800 a year to fewer than
1,000, and only a handful of those homicides occur in schools. Arrest
rates for robbery, rape and aggravated assault are off one-third since
1980 for kids aged 10-18, according to the Justice Department's 2006
National Report on Juvenile Offenders and Victims, due out later this
month.

"Kids now are less violent than you were," James Rieland, the
director of juvenile court services in Pittsburgh's Allegheny County,
tells new prosecutors.

Today, criminologists say the real question is what went right in the
long period of relative peace that dawned in the mid-1990s. Their hope
is to prolong the era of amity -- or at least know what works the next
time juvenile crime goes up.

As it is, teen crime declines leveled off in 2002 and 2003, the latest
years for which solid numbers are available. Simple assaults are up,
especially among girls, according to the upcoming Justice Department
report, and teen drug arrests, while off their peaks, never fell as
far as violent and property crimes.

That's the bad news, said criminologist Franklin Zimring of the
University of California-Berkeley School of Law. "The good news," he
added, "is that juvenile crime overall is staying at the lowest level
it's been in 36 years."

The rise and fall of crack cocaine was the biggest factor, most
juvenile-crime experts agree. Others include an inner-city influx of
relatively peaceable Latino families, a thriving economy, improved
strategies for dealing with real and potential delinquents, more adult
imprisonment, smarter policing and better school-parent
partnerships.

Drug gangs

According to criminologist Alfred Blumstein of Carnegie Mellon
University in Pittsburgh, teen crime's decline is largely the downside
of a rise that started in the mid-1980s when kids took over drug gangs
from adult dealers who'd been imprisoned under toughened state and
federal laws. The teens needed guns "because crack was a street
market and you had to protect yourself," Blumstein said. "And they
didn't have the restraint that older folks do."

Jeffrey Seals, then and now a freezer-sized school security guard,
watched it play out at Montgomery Blair High School in Washington's
Maryland suburbs. It's a big, polyglot school whose students in those
days included drug-dealing Jamaican posse members.

If you sold crack back then, recalled Seals, 46, "you went to jail,
you got deported, you got killed or you got smart."

Many got smart, Blumstein said. "Kids saw what crack was doing to
their siblings, friends and parents and turned away from it." At the
same time, he added, "reasonably aggressive policing took the guns
from the kids."

It helped that crack's street price dropped in the mid-1990s,
according to economist Steven Levitt, the author of the bestseller
"Freakonomics," which includes an examination of teen crime's decline.

Sharpest drop

No surprise: The sharpest drops in teen crime since 1993 were among
black males, who once dominated crack sales.

But crack's fade is just part of the story, because teen crime also
fell sharply in suburbs where crack was scarce and in rural
communities where there was none.

Most of those areas saw a dramatic surge in school security, mainly
after the Columbine High School shootings in Littleton, Colo., in
April 1999. That's long after teen crime started dropping, so the
question is whether school security upgrades are keeping it down.

In truth, there's not much real crime to keep down. Only 10 percent of
schools reported any serious crime in a pre-Columbine (1997-98)
National Education Association survey, and nearly 9 out of 10 students
declared their schools safe. In addition, the contribution of school
security officers is hard to distinguish from what the rest of a local
police force accomplishes.

Phil Bailey, vice president of the National Association of School
Resource Officers, said its members effectively deterred bullying,
hate crimes and drug use and kept small problems from growing.

That's the theory at Blair High's new 3,600-student campus, where 50
security cameras and 10 security officers -- three times the size of
the force when Seals joined it -- keep the screws on. Students seem to
assume rather than question the heavy surveillance.

"I think the security makes kids more aware of their behavior," said
Pria Anand, co-editor of the student paper. But the cameras don't
inhibit her, she added, "and I can't see why they would change a
behavior that wasn't illegal."

Seals and Vice Principal Linda Wanner agreed that today's kids are
more serious strivers than those of the '80s. They also said parents
were more involved now in their kids' school lives.

Contributing factors

Probably more important than tighter school security, criminologists
said, were these factors:

* Good economic times. In the decade of economic expansion that ended
in 2000, the number of older teens who were neither in school nor at
full-time jobs dropped by nearly one-third, according to the U.S.
Bureau of Labor Statistics. Prosperity, in other words, gave teens
more and better options to crime.

* Population shifts. The Latino population in central cities swelled
as teen crime declined, according to Jeff Roth, a University of
Pennsylvania criminologist. Their influx, Roth said, brought more
intact families, stronger values, higher religious participation --
and lower crime rates. At the same time, many of the black families
they replaced moved to suburbs where poverty was less concentrated.
"Kids once confined to the inner city started seeing lifestyles other
than the street," Roth said.

* Learning what works. Criminologists decided in the '90s to track
what worked and what didn't in dealing with teen crime. Boot camps
didn't work, they found. Nor did trying juveniles in adult courts. Big
Brother and Big Sister mentoring worked. Foster care for delinquents
worked better than lockups if foster parents were well-trained and the
goal was to return the delinquents to well-coached biological parents.
Suspending delinquent kids from school or leaving them back didn't
work. One happy surprise: They found that if one parent is strong and
consistent, the second isn't missed when it comes to preventing
delinquency.

* Imprisoning adults. The incarceration rate rose from 1 per 1,000
adults to 4 from the '80s to today, and it has many foes. But
Blumstein, who's among them, and others think that jailing more adults
sharply reduced the number of teens who commit crimes with adult
accomplices.

* Abortion. Predictably, there's disagreement on this point. Economist
Levitt attributes teen crime's sharp drop to a reduction in unwanted
children, which began with the Supreme Court's Roe vs. Wade decision
in 1973. Criminologist Zimring, among others, thinks it contributed
but isn't as big a factor as Levitt argues.