The myth of the “superpredator” would have terrible
consequences for American children, wrote Nathan J. Robinson in the Jacobin. In the mid 1990s, fueled by alarmist
pseudo-scholarship by quack criminologists, a number of politicians sounded the
alarm about a concerning new trend: the rise of a new breed of sociopathic
juvenile delinquent, incapable of empathy and hellbent on robbing, raping, and
terrorizing every decent churchgoing middle American community.
The 1980s and 1990s were a heyday for nationwide moral
panics. The coming of the superpredators was just one of the paralyzing terrors
of the period, which also included widespread fear of
Satanic
abuse at daycares and razorblades in Halloween candy. The
superpredator legend, however, was more deeply insidious.
The term was coined by
John
DiIulio Jr, a professor at Princeton University. DiIulio interpreted rising
juvenile crime statistics to mean that a “new breed” of juvenile offender had
been born, one who was “stone cold,” “fatherless, Godless, and jobless,” and
had “absolutely no respect for human life and no sense of the future.”
DiIulio and his coauthors elaborated that superpredators
were:
Radically impulsive, brutally remorseless youngsters,
including ever more preteenage boys, who murder, assault, rape, rob,
burglarize, deal deadly drugs, join gun-toting gangs, and create serious
communal disorders. They do not fear the stigma of arrest, the pains of
imprisonment, or the pangs of conscience. They perceive hardly any relationship
between doing right (or wrong) now and being rewarded (or punished) for it
later. To these mean-street youngsters, the words “right” and “wrong” have no
fixed moral meaning.
For devising this theory, DiIulio was rewarded with an
invitation to the White House, where he and a group of other experts spent
three and a half hours with President Clinton.
Confirming DiIulio’s analysis was James Q. Wilson, the
conservative political scientist who had devised the theory of “
broken
windows” policing. The broken windows theory posited that minor crimes in a
neighborhood (such as the breaking of windows) tended to lead to major ones, so
police should harshly focus on rounding up petty criminals if they wanted to
prevent major violent crimes.
Put into practice, this amounted to the endless apprehension
of fare-jumpers and homeless squeegee people. It also created the intellectual
justification for totalitarian “stop and frisk” policies that introduced an
exasperating and often terrifying ordeal into nearly every young black New
Yorker’s life.
“Broken windows” had very little academic support (it hadn’t
been introduced in a peer-reviewed journal, but in a short article for
the Atlantic), but Wilson still felt confident in pronouncing on the
“superpredator” phenomenon. He predicted that by the year 2000, “there will be
a million more people between the ages of fourteen and seventeen than there are
now” and “six percent of them will become high rate, repeat offenders — thirty
thousand more young muggers, killers and thieves than we have now.”
DiIulio and Wilson said that it was past time to panic. “Get
ready,” warned Wilson. Not only were the superpredators here, but a lethal
tsunami of them was rising in the distance, preparing to engulf civilization.
As
James
C. Howell documents, just a year later, as crime rates continued to
decrease, DiIulio “pushed the horizon back ten years and raised the ante.”
This time DiIulio projected that “by the year 2010, there will be approximately
270,000 more juvenile super-predators on the streets than there were in 1990.”
Like a Baptist apocalypse forecaster, the moment the sky didn’t fall according
to prophecy, a new doomsday was announced, with just as much confidence as the
last.
So despite all evidence to the contrary, segments of the
Right continued to anticipate “a bloodbath of teenager-perpetrated violence,”
perpetrated by “radically impulsive, brutally remorseless” “elementary school
youngsters who pack guns instead of lunches” and “have absolutely no respect
for human life.”
The notion gained political cache, and was spoken of in
Congress and on the national media. It was even propagated, and given a major
credibility boost, by one or two prominent liberals, perhaps the most prominent
of whom was Hillary Rodham Clinton.
There was always a race element to the superpredator theory,
which is why
The New Jim Crow author
and legal scholar Michelle Alexander says Clinton “used racially coded rhetoric
to cast black children as animals.”
It wasn’t just subtext; DiIulio spoke in explicitly racial
terms. “By simple math,” he wrote, “in a decade today’s 4-to-7-year-olds will
become 14-to-17-year-olds. By 2005, the number of males in this age group will
have risen about 25 percent overall and 50 percent for blacks. [emphasis added]
To some extent, it’s just that simple: More boys begets more bad boys
. . . [The additional boys will mean] more murderers, rapists and
muggers on the streets than we have today.”
DiIulio speculated that “the demographic bulge of the next
10 years will unleash an army of young male predatory street criminals who will
make even the leaders of the Bloods and Crips — known as OGs, for ‘original
gangsters’ — look tame by comparison . . . ” DiIulio explained that
these boys traveled in “wolf packs,” and that black violence “tended to be more
serious” than white violence, “for example, aggravated assaults rather than
simple assaults, and attacks involving guns rather than weaponless violence.”
Michelle Alexander may therefore overstate the extent to
which the superpredator language was “coded” in the first place; the theory’s
most prominent advocate was openly stating that the “wolves” in question were
black. He could only have been more explicit about his meaning if he had simply
written the “n-word” over and over on the op-ed page of the Wall Street
Journal.
In the years since, nearly everyone has abandoned the
superpredator story, for the essential reason that it was, to put it simply,
statistically illiterate race-baiting pseudoscience. As a group of
criminologists explained in a brief to the Supreme Court, “the fear of an
impending generation of superpredators proved to be unfounded. Empirical
research that has analyzed the increase in violent crime during the early- to
mid-1990s and its subsequent decline demonstrates that the juvenile
superpredator was a myth and the predictions of future youth violence were
baseless.”
In fact, the criminologists had “been unable to identify any
scholarly research published in the last decade that provides support for the
notion of the juvenile superpredator.” Among the criminologists who filed the
brief were John DiIulio and James Q. Wilson, who humbly conceded that their
findings had been in error.
The harm done to young people, however, was incalculable.
Having been scientifically diagnosed as remorseless and
demonic, poor children accused of crimes were increasingly given the kind
of
harsh
punishments previously reserved for adults. New York University
criminologist Mark Kleiman says there was a direct link between that single
“fallacious bit of science” and the expansion of the use of the adult justice
system to prosecute children.
“Based on [the superpredator theory],” Kleiman writes,
“dozens of states passed laws allowing juveniles to be tried and sentenced as
adults, with predictably disastrous results.” As the Equal Justice
Initiative has observed, “the superpredator myth contributed to the dismantling
of transfer restrictions, the lowering of the minimum age for adult prosecution
of children, and it threw thousands of children into an ill-suited and
excessive punishment regime.”
In early 1996, the Sunday Mail described the panic
that was overtaking Illinois:
“It’s Lord of the Flies on a massive scale,” Chicago’s Cook
County State Attorney Jack O’Malley said . . . We’ve become a nation
being terrorized by our children . . . ” Already, the State of
Illinois has introduced new laws to deal with this terrifying new “crime bomb,”
ruling that children as young as 10 will be sent to juvenile jails. The State
is rushing construction of its first “kiddie prison” to replace the
traditional, less punitive “youth detention facility” to enforce the get-tough
policy of jail cells instead of cozy dormitories.
The shift to viewing kids as comparable to the worst adult
offenders allowed all manner of abuses to be inflicted on young people for whom
the effects are especially damaging.
Juvenile solitary
confinement has been routinely used in American prisons, despite
having been recognized as a form of torture by United Nations Human Rights
Committee. Kids have been held in tiny cells for twenty-three hours per day,
leading to madness and suicide.
The practice produces stories such as that of
Kalief
Browder, who was sent to Rikers Island jail at the age of sixteen, spending
two years in solitary confinement awaiting trial for stealing a backpack, and
ultimately killing himself after finally being released and having the charges
dropped. A joint
report by
the ACLU and Human Rights Watch, which interviewed over one hundred people who
had been held in solitary confinement while under the age of eighteen,
summarized some of the intense psychological torment inflicted:
Many of the young people interviewed spoke in harrowing
detail about struggling with one or more of a range of serious mental health
problems during their time in solitary. They talked about thoughts of suicide
and self-harm; visual and auditory hallucinations; feelings of depression;
acute anxiety; shifting sleep patterns; nightmares and traumatic memories; and
uncontrollable anger or rage. Some young people, particularly those who
reported having been identified as having a mental disability before entering
solitary confinement, struggled more than others. Fifteen young people
described cutting or harming themselves or thinking about or attempting suicide
one or more times while in solitary confinement.
Housing juveniles in adult facilities can be an equally inhumane
practice in itself. As the weakest members of the population, juveniles housed
in adult facilities are likely to be brutally raped by older inmates, and are
at an increased risk of suicide.
T. J. Parsell was
sent to prison in Michigan at the age of seventeen for robbing fifty-three
dollars from a one-hour photo store using a toy gun. He describes his arrival:
On my first day there — the same day that my classmates were
getting ready for the prom — a group of older inmates spiked my drink, lured me
down to a cell and raped me. And that was just the beginning. Laughing, they
bragged about their conquest and flipped a coin to see which one of them got to
keep me. For the remainder of my nearly five-year sentence, I was the property
of another inmate.
Teenagers like Parsell were being housed in adult facilities
long before the “superpredator” horror stories. But the more young offenders
are dehumanized, the more dilapidated becomes the thin barrier of empathy that
keeps society from inflicting psychological, physical, and emotional torment on
the weak. As
Natasha
Vargas-Cooper writes, while “the scourge of the super-predators never
came to be … the infrastructure for cruelty, torture, and life-long captivity
of juvenile offenders was cemented.”
But to say the “superpredator” notion has been “discredited”
is to overestimate the extent to which it was accepted in the first place, and
risks exonerating those who recited the term during the mid nineties. The
moment the “superpredator” concept was introduced, reputable criminologists
stepped forward to rebut it. Few serious scholars gave the notion any credence,
and they made their objections loudly known.
“Everybody believes that just because it sounds good,” the
research director of the
National
Center for Juvenile Justice told the press in 1996. Harvard government
professor David Kennedy said that “What this whole super-predator argument
misses is that [increasing teen violence] is not some inexorable natural
progression” but rather the product of “very specific” social dynamics such as
the easy availability of guns.
Other public policy experts called the idea “unduly
alarmist” and said its proponents “lack a sense of history and comparative
criminology.” DiIulio himself didn’t try to persuade the rest of his field;
the Toronto Star reported that “asked recently to cite research
supporting his theory, DiIulio declined to be interviewed.”
The political conservatism of the theory was hardly smuggled
in under cover of night. DiIulio’s “Coming of the Super Predators” first
appeared in
William
Kristol’s conservative Weekly Standard, and the handful of
scholars who peddled the theory had strong, open ties to right-wing politics,
so it was plainly partisan rather than scholastic.
Even the language used by the professors, of “Godless” and
“brutal” juveniles without “fixed values,” was plainly the talk of Republican
Party
moralists,
rather than dispassionate social scientists. Nobody in the professional circles
of a “children’s rights” liberal like Hillary Clinton would have given the
“superpredator” concept a lick of intellectual credence, even when it was at
the peak of its infamy.
It was therefore deeply wrong to spread the lie even when it
was most popular. Yet to defend it in 2016, as Bill Clinton did, is on another
level entirely.
When Bill Clinton said in Philadelphia that he didn’t know
how else one would describe the kids who got “thirteen-year-olds hopped up on
crack and sent them out to murder” other kids, he revived an ugly legend that
led to the incarceration and rape of scores of young people.
Speaking this way can still have harmful ripple effects.
When Washington Post writer
Jonathan
Capehartreported Hillary Clinton’s apology for her remark, he implied that
superpredators did exist, but that they didn’t include upstanding young people
like the Black Lives Matter activist who had challenged Clinton. Folk tales are
slow to die, and people’s fear of teen superpredators is easily revived.
It took years to debunk this tale the first time around;
once people believe that young people are potential superpredators, they become
willing to impose truly barbaric punishments on kids who break the law.
After all, if such offenders are not actually children, but
superpredators, one need not empathize with them. One can talk in terms like
“bring them to heel,” which is the sort of thing one says about a dog.
It may have been surprising, given that Hillary Clinton has
made a strong effort to connect with African-American voters, that Bill Clinton
would have revived a nasty racist cliché about animalistic juveniles. But in
fact, this simultaneous maintenance of warmth toward individual African
Americans and support for policies that hurt the African American community has
been a consistent inconsistency throughout Bill Clinton’s political career.
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