![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/plunge-in-juvenile-crime-chart.png\")
<\/a>Source: California Department of Justice<\/p><\/div>\n
Why aren\u2019t mammoth revolutions in youth behavior that make today\u2019s teenagers a uniquely low-crime\u00a0population that reduced gun deaths dramatically headlined in the news and studied excitedly in\u00a0institutional forums?<\/p>\n
Crime, gun killings, and arrest rates<\/a> by youths have fallen faster in California than in any other state over\u00a0the last three to five decades, a trend that apparently horrifies authorities and the news media across\u00a0the political spectrum.<\/p>\n As California\u2019s youth population age 10-17 grew and became more racially diverse (73% now are of\u00a0Color), rates of criminal arrest plunged by 92% since 1995, and 96% since 1975. Teenagers under age 20\u00a0are now much less likely to be arrested<\/a> than Californians ages 50-59, a stunning development that\u00a0overturns decades of assumptions about crime and depresses major interests so much they won\u2019t even\u00a0talk about it. (One exception: the San Francisco Chronicle\u2019s excellent \u201cVanishing Violence\u201d<\/a> series.)<\/p>\n Around 8% of the youthful arrest decline is attributable to the decriminalization of marijuana<\/a> in 2010,\u00a0which reduced arrests for all ages. The COVID pandemic\u2019s shutdown policies may have reduced crime in\u00a02020, but youth arrests continued falling during the return to normalcy in 2021.<\/p>\n But the vast bulk of the decline is due to young people themselves. Violent crime rates<\/a> among youth are\u00a0down 75% over the last three decades, homicide arrests have fallen by 85%, and gun killings among\u00a0youth have fallen by 72% — despite 1990s predictions of coming \u201chordes\u201d of dark-skinned \u201cadolescent\u00a0super-predators\u201d<\/a> and scary recent headlines of a nonexistent youth crime \u201csurge.\u201d<\/a> The crime plunge has\u00a0saved the state over $10 billion in juvenile incarceration costs<\/a> alone since 1995, with eight of 11 juvenile\u00a0facilities closed already and the Division of Juvenile<\/a> Justice slated to close altogether in July 2023.<\/p>\n California\u2019s 35 Democratic-voting counties show larger declines in crime by youth, but both are down\u00a0more than 90% since the early 1990s. Since the early 1990s, youth arrest trends have fallen by 90% in\u00a0San Francisco, 90% in Siskiyou, 91% in Orange County, 92% in Los Angeles, 92% in Sacramento, 94% in\u00a0San Diego, 94% in Santa Clara County (San Jose), 94% in Alameda County (Oakland), 95% in Fresno, 96%\u00a0in Sierra County, and 99% in remote Mono County. California\u2019s large urban counties had declines of 80%\u00a0to 90% in violent crime rates among youth. In the early 1990s, California\u2019s major counties suffered 500-600 firearms homicides<\/a> among teenagers per year; in 2020-21, in a youth population 600,000 larger,\u00a0around 150<\/a> per year \u2013 a rate decline of 80% to the lowest rate in at least 50 years.<\/a><\/p>\n The silence indicates a bad faith in institutional America, not only in protecting the profits of\u00a0youth-crime industries from law enforcement to juvenile justice, treatment facilities, and prisons to\u00a0sensationalist media, but an ego-flattering psychology that insists that adolescents are reckless and\u00a0adults wise and mature. It\u2019s time to abandon the 19th century myths<\/a> that have governed crime\u00a0discussion and move into the amazing opportunities the 21st century youth revolution<\/a> offers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The terrifying plunge in youth crime By Mike Males | February 2023 Why aren\u2019t mammoth revolutions in youth behavior that make today\u2019s teenagers a uniquely low-crime\u00a0population that reduced gun deaths dramatically headlined in the news and studied excitedly in\u00a0institutional forums? Crime, gun killings, and arrest rates by youths have fallen faster in California than in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-160851","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160851","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=160851"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160851\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":160897,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160851\/revisions\/160897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=160851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=160851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=160851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}