Tolerating Youth Crime
Kevin J. Mullen
San Francisco’s juvenile probation chief and a leading Children’s advocacy group have lined up against a police proposal to track chronic juvenile offenders, saying it would unfairly target minority youths.
-- Examine, May 14, 1993.
A recently published Police Department report claims the city has the highest rate of juvenile arrests for violent crime in the state, yet ranks last in the rate of offenders committed to the California Youth Authority. As a result, the department recommended a “Serious Habitual Offender Program” to track 140 (some say fewer) habitual offenders identified as responsible for most of the violent juvenile crime in the city.
Predictably, “youth advocates” don’t think much of the idea. “Since young black and minority youth are arrested in a disproportionate rate,” says Chief Juvenile Probation Officer Fred Jordan, the caseload would be mostly minority. “I’m sensitive to how minorities would receive this.” In other words, a system that perpetuates the continued release of viscous criminals back into the mostly minority communities must not be changed out of fear of offending racial sensibilities .
In some respects, we have been down this path before. A fundamental lesson of the 150-year criminal justice history of San Francisco is that without concrete sanctions against criminal violence, society’s bullies will victimize their more timid fellows. First were the Hounds in 1849, a gang of young ruffians who terrorized the Gold Rush city in a civic atmosphere where all looked out for their own interest and the public good “be damned.” A generation later, San Francisco added the word “hoodlum” to the national urban lexicon. Residents suffered through years of terror at the hands of the youthful gangs. In his book “The Barbary Coast,” Herbert Asbury says: “Usually the hoodlum was accorded comparatively gentle treatment.”
The Hounds were brought up short in July 1849, by the first of San Francisco’s popular tribunals. The hoodlums were finally brought under control, says Asbury, when San Francisco police learned “that the best cure for hoodlumism is the frequent application of locust or hickory to the hoodlum’s skull.” Actually the solution to the hoodlum problem was more complex than Asbury understood. Still, the lesson to be learned is that criminal violence grows in a climate of tolerance. No one has yet devise a means of curbing youth violence, at lest for the short term, without somehow impressing on its practitioners that such behavior is unacceptable.
There are similarities between the juvenile criminals of old and the youthful offenders of today, but one significant difference stands out. The Hounds and the hoodlums were white – many of them Irish Americans, the truth to be told. And when society finally decided to do something about conditions, there was no attempt to shield offenders from the consequences of their behavior on the grounds of their ethnicity. Today, because of population changes and for a host of social and economic causes, many of which mimic 19th century urban experience, the malefactors are disproportionately nonwhite. Consequently, any attempt to get tough on crime is seen by many as an attack on minorities.
The effective result is that the justice system is paralyzed into inactivity. The failure of society to impose meaningful sanctions on those few youthful offenders responsible for most of the violent crime merely assures that the problem will not go away. It amounts to racism of a most pernicious kind. With what we know about what is happening in America, the situation has gone far beyond “benign” neglect.
Examiner May
23, 1993