Challenging lies about youth,  an interview with Mike Males

by Tim Allen

A Common portrayal of Youth is that they have life easy. Newsweek's recent edition's lead story "Generation 9/11", boldly pronounced that Youth have grown up in peace and prosperity and the implication was that now they face fear and adversity for the first time in their lives. Is this an accurate portrayal of contemporary youth?

The WTC/Pentagon attack was America’s most shocking event since Kennedy’s assassination. However, it’s fiction to claim youth have been shielded from poverty and adversity.

Kids are prosperous? Even at the peak of the recent economic boom, 37% of children/youth lived in families the 2000 Census lists as low income (less than $27,000 for family of 3), double the level for middle-aged adults. One in four white and six in 10 black and Latino youth live in low-income households. Five million kids live in destitution (family incomes less than $7,000), nearly half the nation’s destitute population. The incomes of young families (18-34) have been stagnant for 30 years, heavily dependent on economic cycles now in downturn, while incomes of older families rose sharply.

Instead of confronting rampant child poverty, more interests today complain that youths have too much money. In 1999, teens age 12-19 spent $153 billion on consumer items (one-third for family needs), drawing widespread condemnation about teenage "affluenza" and ad-driven consumerism. No one mentions that teens account for a whopping 2.4% of U.S. consumer spending, Adults spend five times more on gambling alone than youths do on all items from clothing to school supplies. Tongue-clucking about the excesses of the minority of wealthy kids shouldn’t obscure that "prosperous" apply to youths less than any other group.

More than any past generation, today’s kids are far more likely to grow up with parents who abuse drugs, get arrested, go to prison, disappear, fail to maintain stable families. More youths assume adult roles at younger ages because adult disarray forces them to. They live with tax-defunded schools and universities and huge education debts. They graduate into a service economy comprised mainly of low-wage jobs and home ownership market no longer affordable for the middle class. All this is symptomatic of the adult abandonment and intense hostility youth have grown up with over the last 15 years.

Another common portrayal of youth is that they are out of control. The "average kid" is crazed on dope, sexually irresponsible, maybe even planning to murder their high school teacher. Are youth out of control? And how is their behavior different than that of adults?

Nearly every dire assertion and statistic about youth today reflects one of two things. First, many negative statements about youths’ supposedly "high risk behaviors" and bad attitudes are grossly exaggerated or just made up by some self-interested group, confident no one will challenge them. Those negativisms that are true almost always measure the harsh risks imposed by poverty (see previous answer).

I have been doing detailed studies of California youth risks by race, poverty, and county. Take the typical case of two million-population-plus urban counties at two-hour drive apart: Santa Clara (San Jose), one of the state’s richest, and Sacramento, one of the poorest. Compared to white Anglo youth in San Jose, white Anglo youth in Sacramento are twice as likely to have babies, three times more likely to live in poverty, commit murder, kill or injure with guns, and drop out of school, and five times more likely to contract HIV. The gaps between the two counties for Asian youth are staggering: three to 10-fold differences in poverty, violence, early parenthood, gun killings, and dropout. Same patterns for black and Hispanic youths. Compared to California’s richest youth and ignoring race, the poorest kids are 10 to 40 times more at risk for virtually every bad outcome. All of California’s enormous surge in gun violence in the early 1990s involved its poorest youth; for teens as a group, drug abuse, felony and petty crime, suicide, drunken deaths, births, and other problems have been plummeting for 30 years. These huge risk gaps also apply to other states.

It’s true that if you wait long enough, a rich kid somewhere will do something terrible, and that example can be exploited by those who claim "poverty and racism don’t matter, all kids today are evil." The truly baffling crisis is why exploding numbers of middle-aged adults, mostly white, suffer from drug abuse, criminal arrest, and imprisonment. It’s not young black and Latino men who’re filling prisons; it’s old black and old white men, nearly all addicts. Poverty, disownment, and messed-up adults are by far the biggest problems kids face, and the mystery is why only a relatively small fraction of modern kids are acting dangerously. Yet, most interest groups evade the serious threats to youth well-being and thrive on fun trivialities: fabricating phony youth crises to blame on media violence, MTV, advertising images, video games, junk food, Eminem, Internet porn, and chimerical teenage "developmental deficiencies," "innate risk-taking," and "peer pressure."

At a time of decreasing youth crime what fuels the increasing incarceration and punishment of youth?

The fact that the Right is better positioned than the Left to take advantage of the alarmist anti-youth myths all sides circulate. The public and policymakers don’t know, and don’t care, that youth homicide and crime have fallen to their lowest levels in 30 years because their constituent interest groups, left to right, are busy fanning fears of youth to push their agendas. Progressives are outraged when U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, former California Governor Pete Wilson, and their prosecutor-prison-industry allies inflame the press with false images of rising youth crime to advance draconian youth-crackdowns. But liberal-left political lobbies, culture critics, media, and program advocates (the same entities deploring society’s "criminalization of youth") also unconscionably exploit fears of youth and crime, violence, guns, drugs, and general dangerousness when it suits their purposes. Examples (of many):

-Recently, In These Times promoted gun control by featuring an icy-eyed gun-brandishing white boy on its cover. The Left, which rightly protested Republicans’ and Time magazine’s racist depictions of black men to illustrate violence, seems not to recognize that depicting youth of any color as fear-provoking symbols also is prejudicial. It’s also ridiculous. White kids are about the least likely of any group to kill or die by guns; their murder rate plunged in recent decades to around Canadian levels.

-Common Sense for Drug Policy, Lindesmith Center, and other reformist lobbies assail the War on Drugs as a failure and promote marijuana decriminalization for adults by peddling scary, but phony, images of youth gobbling hard drugs and dying in rising numbers. Their political strategy demonizes youth even though they know young people have shown low, stable drug abuse rates for decades; it’s adult drug addiction and deaths that are skyrocketing.

-The Sentencing Project’s recent study criticized California’s Three Strikes law for imprisoning older convicts and branded young people "in the late teens or early twenties" as the true "known offenders" society should be locking up "to reduce crime." The Sentencing Project’s recycling of the right-wing "demographic fallacy" of crime is ageist, racist, dangerous to a young age group under vicious political attack, and factually dubious. In truth, California’s younger population (which is overwhelmingly nonwhite) has shown plummeting rates of drug abuse and serious crime for three decades, while the older population (which is mostly white) has suffered massive drug addiction and felony explosions.

-Amnesty International and the Brennan Center, championing anti-death-penalty and pro-juvenile-court agendas, demean teenagers as impulsively crime-prone and cognitively deficient. They disregard decades of solid research showing adolescents as a group are as cognitively capable and prudent as adults are. AI’s and Brennan’s "youth incompetence" misrepresentations ultimately promote larger youth repressions, such as curfews, speech restrictions, and parental consent for abortion.

-Mother Jones, Rolling Stone, and liberal culture critics such as Jean Kilbourne attack media and corporate images by slandering youths as perpetrating rising violence and unprecedented risks. All rely on sensational anecdotes, pop-culture assertions, and misstated statistics, and no wonder. In fact, murder, violence, and other unhealthy behaviors declined rapidly among youths as violent TV, video games, rap music, films, and Internet images proliferated. The few problems that are increasing strongly relate to socioeconomic disadvantage and adult misbehaviors, but culture critics rarely discuss these.

-Liberal youth- and school-program advocates spread fearsome images of youth crime, drugs, and sex, one-upping each other with alternating alarms that boys, or girls, are more "at risk." All promote themselves by cynically depicting young people as dangers to society instead of valued citizens who deserve resources.

Liberal-left interests argue their youth-bashing tactics, and their refusal to counter right-wing scare crusades by citing positive trends among youth, are justified in these cold, conservative times to promote policies and programs that benefit young people. I disagree. Progressive groups’ contribution to America’s frightened, "us versus them" attitude toward youth is not just a harmless P.R. fib; it ultimately reinforces the repressive climate of fear they claim to be battling.

Is there any logical, or ethical reason why youth should face curfews, age based laws, restrictions on their right to vote and/ or serve on a jury?

Response: For a 3 year-old, yes. For a youth past the age of puberty, no, with certain refinements. The question is not ethical or logical, but developmental. Are youths as a group so cognitively deficient that they should be custodialized and denied basic rights to protect them from themselves and societal dangers?

Whenever a population is under official attack--as African Americans, Latinos, Asian and Southern/Eastern European immigrants, Jews, women, adolescents, and other non-northern-European-adult-male stock have been over the past 150 years--politically attuned social scientists who lend scientific veneer that the targeted minority is "biological inferior" and the dominant group is superior receive vast attention. Responsible researchers then spend decades debunking their colleagues’ politically-warped nonsense, and another shameful chapter in social science mythology is slowly corrected. Nothing changes except the targets; today’s is adolescents.

A few researchers receiving overhyped attention today claim youths process information through primitive brain regions, and/or lack abstract reasoning, future orientation, operational thinking, whatever abilities adults are presumed to have. Other than glossing over our vast ignorance of brain functioning, these studies (like the race-based studies before them) ignore decades of massive, consistent research and obvious realities. First, on practical tests of cognitive ability, abstract reasoning, and moral development, adolescents beginning at around 12 and older score very similar to adults. Second, in the real world, adolescents behave very much as adults around them do; youth behaviors can be predicted very closely from those of adults of their families and societies, but not from those of youths in other societies. None of today’s teen-incompetence researchers has been able to explain why, if age is such a big deal, European 15 year-olds behave more maturely in virtually every respect than do American 40 year-olds.

What teenagers lack is not mental capacity, but experience, a need adults best help them with by guidance, not bans. I see no justification for curfews, parental consent laws for abortion or denial of voting rights, jury rights, access to alcohol or other adult instruments, or other basic adult rights for anyone around 16 and older (although, ideally, we would allow families to decide these on individual bases). If we have no confidence in families, adults probably are incompetent to exercise rights as well. Further, I believe phasing in of rights is preferable to abrupt, age-based transitions. For example, novice driver laws (applied to all ages), requiring professionally supervised on-the-road training, are reasonable before driver’s licenses are granted.

The problem is that interest groups on all sides approach the issue of teenage competence in an unprincipled manner. Adolescents are portrayed as incompetent when convenient, and as competent (even super-competent, as in our demand for absolute moral standards from teens we would never demand of adults) when convenient. Conservatives brand 16 year-olds as insufficiently developed to consent to their own abortions but think it’s fine to hold them fully accountable even for capital crimes; liberals indulge the reverse hypocrisy. Most states would execute a 16 year-old they treat as too immature to smoke a last cigarette. I’ve worked with teenagers and adults in the same settings, and I see what decades of research confirms: differences in maturity, cognitive capability, or competence are individual, not age-based. The cynical manipulation of perceptions of teenage maturity occurs because interest groups across the spectrum do not see young people as having interests, rights, or value beyond promoting the group’s narrow agenda.

If the traditional liberal argument that children are not cognizant or capable of understanding the ramifications of their actions is wrong, then why shouldn't kids be tried in adult courts when they commit heinous crimes?

Developmental studies consistently show most youths acquire adult cognitive and moral reasoning capabilities around 13-14, and nearly all by age 16. The U.S., however, does not allow adolescents to determine who they are supervised by, where and how they spend their time, their own freedom of speech and association, or their exercise of most fundamental adult rights. A society that denies youths basic power to control their lives cannot morally hold them fully accountable for their actions.

Youths should begin the transition to full adult rights in early adolescence, commensurate with evidence of individual maturity, as they do in other Western nations. Youths accorded adult rights should be subject to adult responsibility and punishments. But there are refinements to this point no one has discussed.

First, while juvenile courts deny youths adult due process in exchange for the promise of more lenient, individualized treatment, alarming figures from California show juvenile courts sentence youths to longer imprisonment than adult courts mete either to adult or juvenile defendants convicted of the same offenses. Youths are better off being tried in adult courts, where they enjoy more rights and receive lesser sentences. Juvenile court advocates (who claim to "protect children") should be shrieking about this travesty, but they remain silent.

Second, studies show chronic criminals of all ages are far less likely than non-criminals to plan for the future, foresee consequences of acts, and avoid addiction. Fitness to be held accountable for behaviors has more to do with individual characteristics than age and should be individually assessed.

Finally, why do conservatives want to try youths as adults? It’s the adult criminal court, not the juvenile court, that has failed to protect society. The explosion in imprisonment of 30- and 40-agers, especially for drug offenses, has not reduced (and probably exacerbated) their explosion in addiction and crime. Rather than trying youths on the adult model, we should try more adults on the juvenile model--judicial flexibility to examine defendant circumstances and individualized tailoring of punishment and services (such as addiction treatment) rather than mandatory prison terms. Instead of facing these compelling new realities, however, "get tough" conservatives and "protect children" progressives debate demeaning, outdated dogmas over whether teenagers are evil or incompetent. Like adults, they’re neither; they’re diverse, and we should expect judges and courts to make individualized decisions.

What should leftists be advocating and fighting for when it comes to youth?

Virtually everything I’ve found about youth problems validates traditional Left concerns over socioeconomic and racial inequality. Poorer youths, regardless of race but affecting youth of color the most, are vastly more at risk of nearly every bad outcome we call the "youth crisis." Unfortunately, much of the Left has sabotaged this vital issue in a false-egalitarian effort to appear "non-racist" by insisting white and affluent youth suffer the same or worse dangers as poorer youth. Wrongheaded claims that "suburban kids are in just as much trouble as poorer kids" inevitably rely on rare but sensational anecdotes (suburban school shootings), harmless "sins" (occasional drug use), and psychobabble about "hidden crises" afflicting affluent youth. Meanwhile, the massive surplus of deaths, injuries, disease, school dropout, unemployment, AIDS, early pregnancy, homicide, and other real outcomes among poorer youth are ignored. Much of the Left has succumbed to today’s political rules that render poverty and domestic violence against children and youth loser issues.

The Left, in addition to putting poverty and inequality back on the table, should stress that social problems are founded in the values and behaviors of mainstream America, not marginal groups. Example: the Left’s adamant refusal to publicize the rampant drug abuse and crime explosion among middle-agers, mostly whites -- apparently because such a radical reframing would jeopardize their strategy to legalize marijuana for grownups by misrepresenting drugs and crime strictly as "youth problems"-- is a travesty of what progressivism is supposed to represent.

This interview was found on the following web site: http://www.zmag.org/malesint.htm