American Youth Violence

In the past decade, alarming reports of youth violence have appeared with increasing frequency in the news media. Legislators across the United States have responded to this sense of national emergency by changing many of the laws designed to cope with juvenile offenders. But are we really in the midst of a surge in youth violence? More to the point, what causes youth violence and what should we do about it? Franklin Zimring offers the definitive examination of adolescent violence in the United States both as a social phenomenon and a policy problem. This book covers the range of youth violence issues in the 1990s, from crime statistics to demographic projections to new legislation. The result is a thorough debunking of Congressional predictions of "a coming storm of juvenile violence" and the half-baked policy proposals that accompany such warnings. The book sets forth comprehensive and dispassionate analyses of three key areas of youth violence policy: adolescent firearms possession and use, standards for transfer from juvenile to criminal court jurisdiction, and legal sanctions for adolescents who kill. Throughout the book, the core issues of youth violence in the 1990s are examined with an unprecedented degree of analytic rigor. Zimring also offers an appropriate set of responses to youth violence that are consistent with a positive future for the juvenile court and for America's children. Timely and authoritative, American Youth Violence gives students, scholars, and policy makers a much-needed tool with which to fashion a constructive response to one of the nation's most disturbing social ills.

James F. Quinn

This book is a scholarly critique of dire predictions of an imminent "blood bath" of teen violence made by a few academicians and many politicians. Part one scrutinizes data on the rate and nature of violence by modern American juveniles and examines the veracity of predictions about the future nature and rate of juvenile violence. Part two examines the policies that have resulted from popular beliefs about youth violence in this decade. The last two chapters look at the future of the juvenile court and youth policy. Scientific criminology and democratic jurisprudence should already be operating on the basis of the ideas and data put forth so meticulously in this work. It is an important refutation of right wing academics and politicians. Its contents deserve to be presented in every course offered on juvenile delinquency and justice policy in the nation. Zimring is as eloquent and cogent a legal scholar as he is a skilled empiricist. This book is exactly the kind of product that we have come to expect from him over the years. However, the language and style of scholarship are little competition for the drama of modern media and the over generalizations of politicians. This is not a book that will fascinate either undergraduates or the general public. Its pace is slow and its language sophisticated. The very fact that it will not rank as a bestseller may be indicative of the reactionary pathology of postmodern America.

Franklin E. Zimring is William G. Simon Professor of Law and Director of the Earl Warren Legal Institute at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of The Changing Legal World of Adolesence (1982) and co-author of many books on law and legal institutions, including Incapacitation: Penal Confinement and the Restraint of Crime (1995) and Crime Is Not the Problem: Lethal Violence in America (with Gordon Hawkins, Oxford, 1997).