TEEN CRIME WAVE NEVER HAPPENED

SOCIETY: The horde of "super-predators" predicted in the '90s never
showed, and teen crime is down sharply. 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 would 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 annually 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 a third since
1980 for kids ages 10-18, according to the Justice Department's 2006
National Report on Juvenile Offenders and Victims, due out later this month.

Today, criminologists say the real question is what went right in the
long period of relative peace that dawned in the mid-'90s. 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."

Drugs' Effect

The rise and fall of crack cocaine was the biggest factor, most
juvenile-crime experts agree. Others include aninner-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.

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-'80s when kids took over
drug gangs from adult dealers who had 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, 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 said, "Reasonably aggressive policing took the guns
from the kids."

Tight Security

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.

Seals and vice principal Linda Wanner agreed that today's kids are
more serious strivers than those of the '80s. They also said parents
are more involved now in their kids' school lives, and are more
likely to show up promptly when summoned.

Why's that?

"They've all got cell phones," Seals said.

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 a 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 lock-ups 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 per 1,000 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.