Juvenile Crime Takes Off
In the late 1980s roughly one-third of serious and violent crimes in the U.S. were committed by juveniles under the age of 18. In the eight years between 1986 and 1994 the number of violent crimes committed by juveniles went from 600,000 to 1.05 million. A major contributor to the high juvenile crime rate over this period was the emergence of Columbian cocaine smuggled by South American gangs into U.S. and marketed by heavily armed street gangs. Juveniles made up a significant cohort of the members of these gangs, who were constantly at war with rival gangs over marketing territory. In large urban centers juvenile gang members played a major role in moving crack-cocaine and punishing rivals. At that time state laws written in the 1950s to deal with teen-aged joyriders and petty thieves with short stays in Juvenile Hall and rehabilitation programs, were inadequate to deal with hardened 17-year-old drug dealers carrying automatic weapons. Drive-by shootings, violent carjackings, and murders over a victim’s wristwatch or tennis shoes became regular occurrences in big cities and juveniles were often the perpetrators.