The Culture of Fear (15 page)

The
Telegraph,
along with the rest of the British media, had gotten swept up in speculation about what this murder meant about the decline of civilization. A more reasonable response, Tinsley recommends, is to see young murderers for the exceptions that they are. “A child who has grown up with any love at all, who has had a reasonable amount of self-respect left intact, may succumb to greed or mischief or anger or
panic. But he or she will not see ‘the point’ of gratuitous cruelty, any more than my son did,” she notes. “Our growing fear of children is itself a great social evil,” Tinsley correctly concludes.
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Our fear grows, I suggest, proportionate to our unacknowledged guilt. By slashing spending on educational, medical, and antipoverty programs for youths we adults have committed great violence against them. Yet rather than face up to our collective responsibility we project our violence onto young people themselves, and onto strangers we imagine will attack them.

For young people who go astray the consequences of our projections are dire. The more fearful people are of crime, the more punitive their attitudes toward juvenile criminals, studies show, and politicians capitalize on this correlation to build more and meaner prisons. “We must shift the focus of the juvenile justice system from rehabilitation to punishment,” Bob Dole proposed during the 1996 presidential campaign, ignoring the fact that many juveniles serve longer sentences than adults for the same crimes, and that many juvenile facilities, grossly overcrowded and understaffed, provide rehabilitation services in name only. At $30,000-plus per youth per year and with 100,000 youths behind bars on any given day it is the prison-industrial complex, not American society, that comes out the big winner from laws mandating longer and stiffer sentences for juveniles. In a page-one investigative piece in 1998 on a privately operated juvenile prison in Louisiana that he described as “rife with brutality, cronyism and neglect,”
New
York Times reporter Fox Butterfield noted that some of the worst conditions in juvenile facilities nationally are found among privately operated prisons.
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Other research on private prison companies documents that these firms, which include Corrections Corporation of America, among the half dozen largest gainers on the New York Stock Exchange in the mid- 1990s, achieve their high profitability in large part by economizing, particularly on personnel and rehabilitation programs. Criminologists
have expressed concern about the lengths to which prison companies will go to lobby for harsher sentences and other criminal-justice policies that guarantee high occupancy when crime rates are down.
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But why would the public care about such matters when for every news story about private prisons many more relay tale upon melodramatic tale of killer kids getting off lightly? In a piece typical of the genre, ABC correspondent Jackie Judd, reporting from Warwick, Rhode Island, on “ABC World News Tonight,” informed viewers: “The horror of the community turned to anger when they saw a killer, someone who had taken four lives, committed to only five years in this juvenile detention center.” Once released, Judd said, the fifteen-year-old offender “could buy a gun or apply for a job as a day care worker without anyone knowing his history as a murderer. All of this, because legally Craig Price was a child when he killed.” Judd’s report illustrates how our fear of children has made us unwilling to grant that violently disturbed kids are still kids. “He’s not a child,” a captain with the Warwick police department declares on camera. “When you kill somebody when you’re fifteen years old and you wipe out an entire family and kill in the manner in which he killed, you’re not a child anymore.”
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The commander in chief concurred. Although studies find that young people incarcerated with adults are five times more likely to be sexually assaulted and fifty times more likely to be attacked by a weapon than youth in juvenile facilities, Bill Clinton, in his State of the Union address in 1996, vowed “to seek authority to prosecute, as adults, teenagers who maim and kill like adults.”

Surely the flaw in this line of reasoning is obvious: acting like an adult doesn’t make someone an adult. Otherwise, teens eager to grow up would be well advised to smoke cigarettes and have babies. Yet the zeal with which politicians and those who vote for them go after the criminal young seems to know no bounds. In nearly half of the states ten-year-olds can be tried as adults, and in a Gallup poll in 1994 60 percent of people said they favor the death penalty for teenage killers—more than five times as many as in the 1960s.
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On the same “World News Tonight” broadcast with Jackie Judd’s story about Rhode Island was a report about the Colorado legislature
having passed ten new laws in five days in response to media hoopla over a series of shootings. The legislation included provisions to send violent kids to boot camps and adult prisons. “It’s an iron fist,” the Denver district attorney said proudly, apparently unaware or unconcerned about a preponderance of evidence that such harsh penalties fail to deter other kids from committing crimes. In states such as New York, Illinois, Florida, and California, which enacted similar legislation earlier, juvenile crime rates increased. Nor do longer or more severe sentences appear to deter those kids who receive them. On the contrary, attorneys, criminologists, and the youths themselves point out that in adult prisons kids learn to survive by intimidating others. They tend to lose whatever respect they had for authorities and for themselves. Once released, they engage in more or worse crimes.
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As for boot camps, thirty states built them between the late 1980s and mid-1990s, for a total of about 7,000 beds. Money that would have been better spent on education, housing, job development, or nutrition for young people at risk got diverted into hiring former drill sergeants, busing in convicts, shaving their heads, subjecting them to predawn marches and endless rounds of push-ups, and teaching them to say “Sir” and “Ma’am” to everybody. The result? Great photo opportunities for tough-on-crime politicians. Studies show that graduates of boot camps were just as likely to commit future crimes as parolees from regular detention facilities.
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We adults have developed a pair of theories to justify both our fear of children and our maltreatment of them. One holds that the world is worse than it ever was. The other holds that some kids are just born defective.

According to the first of these theories, a unique set of social realities has conspired to turn today’s children into monsters. “The world has changed in the nearly 20 years Judge Lacey has been on the bench,” the Times asserted, referring to the judge in the juvenile court where little Jacob Gonzales awaited trial. “There was a time when men could
look forward to a job on the automobile assembly line, when the majority of inner-city children were born to married women, not single mothers, when people fought with fists, not guns, and crack did not exist.”
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This sort of statement validates an observation attributed to Harry Truman: “There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.” In actuality, violent youth have always been with us. “A new army of six million men are being mobilized against us, an army of delinquents. Juvenile delinquency has increased at an alarming rate and is eating at the heart of America,” a juvenile court judge warned in 1946. Earlier, in nineteenth-century America, hordes of teens and preteens, labeled “predatory beasts” by police and the press, ran wild in city streets, dodging authorities, “gnawing away at the foundations of society,” as a commentator put it at the time. In 1850 alone New York City recorded more than 200 gang wars fought largely by adolescent boys. In 1868 in San Francisco a gang of teenagers robbed a Chinese man and then beat him, sliced up his face, and branded parts of his body with hot irons. Violence by teens against Chinese immigrants was common during this period in U.S. history.
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Earlier still, in 1786, a Connecticut girl murdered a baby in her care. Twelve years old, she holds the distinction of being the youngest American ever to receive the death penalty.
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In support of the idea that the world is worse today than ever before much bogus evidence has been put forward. An example was a pair of lists, reprinted in the
Wall Street Journal
in 1992, comparing “top problems in the public schools as identified by teachers” in 1940 and 1990. The contrast was shocking. The main problems in 1940 were talking, chewing gum, making noise, running in the halls, getting out of turn in line, wearing improper clothing, and not putting paper in wastebaskets. By 1990 the leading problems had become pregnancy, suicide, drug and alcohol abuse, rape, robbery, and assault.

Barry O’Neill, a professor at Yale, revealed in 1994 in an expose published by the
New York Times
that by the time
the Journal
printed the two lists they had already been in wide circulation. Passed around in fundamentalist Christian circles since the early 1980s, they first
appeared
in a national magazine in 1985, when
Harper’s
published them as a curiosity piece. Two years later in his
Newsweek
column George Will printed the lists as factual, and they were quickly picked up by CBS News. In the late 1980s and early 1990s the lists appeared in literally hundreds of news outlets, books, and political speeches authored by luminaries as disparate as Anna Quindlen, Ann Landers, Joycelyn Elders, and William Bennett.
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“They have become the most quoted ‘results’ of educational research, and possibly the most influential,” O’Neill reported in the
Times
(a paper that had cited the bogus lists six times itself and did so yet again, without comment, two years later when it quoted them in full from a speech by presidential candidate Ross Perot). The best O’Neill could determine, the original source for the later list of problems was a survey conducted in 1975 by the National Center for Education Statistics. That survey, which was of principals rather than teachers, asked about crimes, not general problems. When teachers
have
been asked about the biggest problems in their schools, they responded with items such as parent apathy, lack of financial support, absenteeism, fighting, and too few textbooks—not rape and robbery. In a nationwide survey in 1996 almost half of teachers said that textbook shortages prevented them from assigning homework; one in five reported that classroom disruptions had resulted from students being forced to share textbooks.
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Public schools are safer, studies show, than other locations where kids hang out, such as cars and homes. Attacks of all types against kids occur far more often away from schools than inside them. So do the bulk of non-crime-related injuries and accidents, the exception being sports injuries, a majority of which are sustained at school.
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Municipalities do not raise taxes, however, to buy state-of-the-art safety equipment for student athletes. They raise them to buy more surveillance cameras and metal detectors, and to station more police officers in schools. A few years ago the city of Dallas built a $41 million school that includes a high-tech command center where officers scan thirty-seven cameras that monitor nearly every inch of the building. Some of the school’s 2,100 students complained that the five full-time
security officers and numerous teacher-monitors invade their privacy. Teachers and parents raised questions about diverting so much money from educational programs into policing and about what one Dallas newspaper referred to as the “authoritarian style” of the school’s leadership. But Dallas officials defend the facility as a haven from the ills of the larger community.
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Another way we adults justify our excessive fears and brutal policies toward the nation’s children is by shifting the blame to nature. We convince ourselves that millions of children are born defective. Children whom adults find frightening and difficult to control are said to suffer from various psychological or biomedical disorders.

Melvin Konner, a physician and anthropologist at Emory University, has suggested that, were Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn alive today, they’d be diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and put on Ritalin (methylphenidate). The drug of choice for kids who talk back, can’t sit still, get in trouble, and are easily bored, Ritalin is taken daily by more than 1 million children in the United States. The number of kids on Ritalin quadrupled between the mid- 1980s and the late 1990s. With more than 11 million prescriptions written each year—up from 4.5 million in the early 1990s—this country uses five times as much Ritalin as the rest of the world.
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The upsurge may have resulted from greater recognition and treatment of ADHD symptoms among parents, teachers, and doctors in recent years, as a report from the American Medical Association’s Council on Scientific Affairs concluded, or from overdiagnosis and overmedication, as other research suggests. Either way, crucial questions remain, central among them: At what cost do we choose to view hyperactive children as neurologically and chemically damaged? The point at issue was put well by the psychologist Kenneth Gergen of Swarthmore College. “As we have so painfully learned in recent years, whether homosexuality is or is not a disorder is essentially a matter of cultural politics. Similarly, children may vary biologically in their activity
levels, but whether we view a high level of activity as Attention Deficit Disorder depends on our conception of the ideal classroom,” Gergen wrote in a journal article in 1997.
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Our view depends as well on conceptions of the ideal medical practice, as other social scientists and medical ethicists suggest. From the point of view of managed care companies in the 1990s this ideal sometimes boils down to spending as little as possible to remove a patient’s symptoms. Why provide expensive individual or family therapy to address a child’s emotional, developmental, or family problems when with a simple prescription you can dispose of the behaviors that distress the child’s parents and teachers? Medical ethicist Lawrence Diller points out in an article in the
Hastings Center Report
that reliance on Ritalin relieves all sorts of adults—doctors, parents, teachers, and policy makers alike—from having to pay attention to children’s social environments, which may worsen as a consequence. “Should dysfunctional family patterns and overcrowded classrooms be tolerated just because Ritalin improves the child’s behavior?” Diller asks.
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