Media, fear shouldn’t drive juvenile justice policy
Standing four-foot-six and weighing 68 pounds, Robert “Yummy” Sandifer made an implausible triggerman for the Black Disciples gang in Chicago. After committing murder, arson and armed robbery, the 11-year-old was killed by members of his own gang. His life and death shocked the nation.
YummySandifer never had a chance. At 8, he roamed the streets, stole cars and broke into houses. His mother was strung out; his father, locked up. Before he turned 3, social workers reported cigarette burns and signs of beatings throughout his body. After an arrest for armedrobbery at age 10, a psychological examiner concluded Yummy had “a sense of failure that has infiltrated almostevery aspect of his inner self.”
Sandifer was born in 1983, when juvenile crime had started to rise, as factories closed, schools crumbled, guns became easily available, and crack cocaine decimated neighborhoods. After killing a 14-year-old girl, Sandifer was taken to a railroad underpass by two brothers, ages 16 and 14, and ordered to his knees. He was shot twice in the back of his head on Sept. 1, 1994.
Super-predator myth
A year later, Princeton professor and criminologist John Dilulio Jr. propagated the “super-predator” myth. Impulsive, remorseless, generally urban youth were, he said, spinning out of control, committing brutal crimes and killing without batting an eyelid. Within a decade, he predicted, hordes of super-predators — murderers, rapists, muggers — would create mayhem in the streets and terrorize the nation.
The media were all-in, embedding “super-predator” into the national vocabulary and psyche.
The resulting panic and hysteria demonized an entire generation of young Black men. The juvenile justice system responded with tough-on-crime legislation, pushed by Democrats and Republicans alike, including life-without-parole sentences for juveniles and the Draconian 1994 Crime Bill. Public policy, not crime, boosted incarceration rates. Far more kids, disproportionately Black and brown, were tried as adults and locked up in adult jails.
Even before those oppressive laws rolled out, however, juvenile crime rates nationwide were dropping as fast as they had risen before 1994. Instead of doubling by 2010, the rate dropped by half. By 2020, the number of youth arrests for violent crime, including murder, robbery and aggravated assault, had dropped 78% below the 1994 peak of 140,000, the U.S. Department of Justice reports.
In fact, violent crime in general was dropping across the country during most of that period. Still, polling showed Americans felt increasingly unsafe, probably because of saturated media coverage of high-profile crimes.
Mr. Dilulio eventually recanted his views on the super-predator; by then, it was too late.
Ending youth incarceration
Misinformation, headlines and high-profile crimes, as horrible as they may be, should not drive juvenile justice policy, especially long-term policy. They had disastrous consequences nationally during the mythical superpredator era of the 1990s; and they would have dire consequences for Allegheny County today.
This week, County Executive Rich Fitzgerald announced plans for replacing the Shuman Juvenile Detention Center, which the state shuttered in September 2021 because of repeated child safety violations. Local leaders have connected a recent uptick in highprofile juvenile shootings to the need for a Shuman-like detention center. That’s a mistake.
Mayor Ed Gainey and Mr. Fitzgerald have not, thank God, espoused the hysteria of the super-predator era, but neither do they have an effective strategy for reducing violence.
Allegheny County should have started thinking about whether it needed to replace the Shuman Center — and, if so, with what — immediately after the center closed. When the Shuman Center in Lincoln-Lemington opened in 1974, it held up to 120 boys and girls, but only about 20 were there when it closed. That alone suggests the need for a much smaller program.
A committee of judges, criminal justice experts, family members, children who had been detained, law enforcement and others should have determined what services, resources and sentencing options Allegheny County needs — not only now but over the next 20 years. Public hearings also could have played a role in the planning. It’s not too late. Nationally, the trend is to restrict or end youth incarceration. That should be Allegheny County’s goal as well.
Allegheny County doesn’t need another 120-bed juvenile detention center that will be, in five or 10 years, mostly empty — or, far worse, filled with kids who don’t belong there.