TEEN CRIME

Congress made an agreeable discovery three years ago. Early in 1994, in an abrupt statistical spike, voters in large numbers started saying that crime was their No. 1 concern. So when the House and Senate passed the omnibus crime bill later that year, people actually noticed. Which is one reason why, in a sluggish political summer, when Washington is competing with Mars and Mike Tyson for some quality time with the rest of America, Congress is going after crime again. In May the House passed a bill that would give $1.6 billion to states that agree to toughen their handling of kids who commit serious felonies, in part by making it easier to try them as adults. Last week the Senate Judiciary Committee was pushing forward on a similar bill, in the hope of bringing it to a vote this month. "People are expecting us to do something about these violent teenagers," committee chairman Orrin Hatch complained as he tried to speed through more than 100 proposed amendments. "We've got to move on this."

In truth, the problem isn't quite as pressing as it was a few years ago. With crime rates dropping, so is juvenile crime. But felonies by kids had exploded over the previous 10 years, a legacy of the crack trade and armed gangs, so the recent decline is still a dip in a high plateau. From 1985 to 1995, juvenile arrests for violent crimes rose 67%. Perhaps a fifth of all violent crimes is the work of teens. "In America today, no population poses a greater threat to public safety than juvenile criminals," says Representative Bill McCollum, the Florida Republican who wrote the House version of the bill.

Some criminologists are also warning that a new wave of "superpredators" will soon hit the streets. In fatherless households and fractured neighborhoods, millions of four- to seven-year-olds, the baby boomers' own mini-boom, are headed for their teens. So Congress wants to make it easier to try juveniles accused of violent crimes as adults--and to incarcerate them in adult prisons. Under both the Senate bill and the House bill, states that want the federal dollars would have to make prosecutors and not judges the ones who decide whether a teenager charged with a serious violent felony or drug offense should be tried as an adult. To demonstrate that crimes really do carry punishments, states would also have to impose a rising scale of "graduated sanctions" for all juvenile offenses, beginning with the first, and keep adult-style criminal records on juvenile offenders. Under the present system, most such records are often closed, meaning prosecutors can't learn whether an accused youth is a repeat offender. "The juvenile justice system isn't working," says McCollum. "This bill puts consequences back into the law."

Over the past five years, however, every state except Hawaii has decided to allow some kids to be tried in adult criminal courts. Altogether, some 12,300 youths are prosecuted as adults each year in state courts. That is about 9% of all juveniles arrested for violent crimes and a 70% increase over the number who were tried as adults a decade ago. But if the bills become law, those numbers would climb further. Child-welfare advocates say that would effectively dissolve the separate system of justice for kids that dates to 1899, when Chicago established the nation's first juvenile court.