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THE STATE OF AMERICA'S CHILDREN YEARBOOK 1998 Act of 1974. This landmark legislation took a giant step forward in seeking to keep children away from adults in jails and prisons and to remove "status offenders" (runaways, truants, and others whose actions would not be criminal if they were adults) from the criminal justice system. The 1974 act required states to separate children from adults as a condition of receiving federal funds for their juvenile justice systems. The law was passed because ofa deep national concern about what happens to children when they are locked up, especially with adult criminals. The Children's Defense Fund helped spotlight the issue by filing a number of lawsuits in the early 1970s involving children in adult jails. In 1973 CDF President Marian Wright Edelman and Judge Justine Wise Polier, head ofCDF's juvenile justice project, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee drafting the juvenile justice reform act. Judge Polier warned the committee that failure to institute reforms would mean giving up on thousands of children, denying them services, and thrusting them back into the criminal courts, jails, and prisons of America. CDF later published Children in Adult Jails, documenting many of the tragedies-sexual assaults, physical abuse, suicides-that had occurred when children were confmed with adult criminals. In 1998 Congress is poised to pass legislation that would turn back the clock and allow children once again to be incarcerated with adults, without adequate safeguards for their well-being. The proposed measures also would more often put runaways and truants in jails rather than community facilities. CertainlY, strong measures are needed to deal with the small percentage of young people who commit violent crimes-D.5 percent of all youths ages 10-17, according to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP). However, subjecting them to abusive conditions in adult jails is not the answer, nor should that be the fate of the nonviolent youths who constitute the vast majority of juvenile offenders. The gun epidemic. Beginning in the late 1980s, guns in the hands ofchildren and those who would harm children became far too prevalent. Children themselves too often have been the victims ofgun violence. In 1973 an average of nine children died from gunfire each day; by 1983 the number had fallen to eight per day. Over the next decade, how- • An overage of 14 children die each day from gunfire in America-approximately one every 100 minutes. • In 1994 there were nearly 200 million firearms in American homes-almost one for every adult and child. • Violent crime by young people peaks between 3 and 7 p.m. • Children in adult prisons ore eight times more likely to commit suicide, five times more likely to be sexually assaulted, and two times more likely to be assaulted by stoff than are children in juvenile facilities. • Each new juvenile correction facility typically costs $102,000 per bed to build. The overage after-school program, by contrast, costs approximately $3,000 per child. 78 CHI L D R EN'S D E FEN S E FUN D
CHILDREN VIOLENCE, -'- AND CRIME -'--;.....;...;...;;. ---1 ever, the number nearly doubled, so that in 1994 an average of 16 children were dying daily. The next year fmally brought a reversal to this deadly trend; in 1995 gun deaths dropped for the first time in 11 years, to a still staggering 14 children dying each day from gunfIre. That meant that almost every 100 minutes, on average, a bullet claimed the life of a child. As the explosion in crack cocaine traffIcking wreaked havoc in many urban communities, children increasingly reported a need to carry a gun for protection. They also found guns easier to obtain. Not surprisingly, gun murders by children rose sharply (until recently). Data from OJJDP show that between 1985 and 1994 such killings quadrupled, from more than 500 to more than 2,000. Meanwhile, the number of murders by children without guns held steady at about 500 annually. National response to this death toll has been minimal, and little has changed in our approach to regulating guns since 1973. According to a 1997 U.S. Department of Justice study, there were nearly 200 million firearms in American homes in 1994-almost one for every adult and child. The good news is that the overall percentage of homes with flfearms has declined slightly since the 1970s; it is now about 35 percent. Two measures-the 1993 Brady Act requiring waiting periods and criminal background checks for handgun purchasers, and the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban outlawing many nonsporting automatic weapons-have moved gun regulation in a commonsense direction. Unfortunately, many other national initiatives to keep children safe have not been enacted. These include bans on cheap, poorly made, nonsporting handguns popular with young people ("junk guns"); limits on the number of handgun purchases allowed in a given period ("one handgun a month") in order to stop bulk purchasers who resell guns illegally to children; and requirements for child safety locks and other consumer protections. Although progress in gun safety has been made at the state and local levels (see later discussion), guns remain an enormous threat to children. Empty after-school hours. Another major change for children in the past 25 years is the amount of time they are left on their own, away from parents and other caring adults. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 1973 half of the mothers of school-age children were in the work force; today 77 percent are. More children now live in households where all the adults work outside the home. Many children spend less time with their parents and are often unsupervised for hours each day before their parents return from work. In total, nearly 5 million school-age children are left home alone each week. Some children are fortunate to have attentive caregivers, after-school lessons or sports, extracurricular clubs, and other positive options to ml their out-of-school hours. Many use television and other media to fill the gap (see box 6.1). Others turn to riskier behavior: juvenile violent crime rates peak between 3 and 7 p.m. More positive opportunities for youth are needed to keep them safe and on track. Declines in Violence by and Against Children One ofthe most welcome pieces of news in 1997 was the report that gun deaths of children had decreased in 1995. In that year, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, such deaths dropped for the flfst time in a decade, and by nearly 10 percent-from 5,820 the previous year to 5,277 (see table 6.1). Reductions in gun deaths among Black males (which had skyrocketed in recent years) drove the decline, falling more than 20 percent. The National Center for Health Statistics also reported a lower incidence ofkillings ofyouths by all causes in 1995, building on a slight dip the previous year (see figure 6.1). Juvenile crime also decreased. New OJJDP data released in 1997 show that arrest rates of young people for violent crimes (murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault) fell in 1996 for the second year in a row-a total drop of more than 12 percent (see fIgure 6.2). Juvenile homicide arrest rates dropped for the third straight year since CHI L D R E 'S D E F ESE FUN D 79
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About CDF he Children's Defense Fun
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Copyright © 1998 by Children's Def
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Acknowledgments Susanne Martinez, d
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THE STATE OF AMERICA'S CHILDREN YEA
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