Superpredator

In 1995, John DiIulio coined the term super-predator for an article for The Weekly Standard, where he sought to convey an increase in violence among juveniles and the insufficiency of the juvenile justice system. In this article, he claimed that juvenile crime was rising in big cities because of kids with "absolutely no respect for human life and no sense of the future". Moreover, Dilulio attributed the rise of super-predators to extreme moral poverty, which he which he claimed was the result of children lacking adults in their lives who could teach them proper moral behavior. He theorized that there would be 30,000 new super-predators by the year 2000, that most of the crime would occur in Black inner-city neighborhoods, and that investing in religious institutions would help stop juvenile crime and moral poverty. == Criticisms ==

This theory was criticized when crime significantly decreased in the following years. Additionally, several people began criticizing the idea that moral poverty caused the increase in juvenile crime. Legal scholars such as Franklin Zimring suggested that the greater access to guns was more likely to have increased the amount of juvenile homicides, while American journalists such as Kevin Drum proposed that the use of leaded gasoline could have caused the high crime rates of the 1980s and 1990s. Moreover, the arguments of proponents were eventually criticized for multiple errors in logic. == History ==

United States politics has pursued a tough-on-crime approach through the policies they have created, rising significantly in the 1970s. The motivation for such policies was to reduce crime by criminalizing individuals with harsher sentences to keep them in prison and off the streets where there was potential to commit crimes. The harsher sentences made it more difficult to challenge a wrongful conviction, giving birth to the ideal conditions to attack minorities disproportionately. With the tough-on-crime approach during the war on drugs, there was a deterrence approach where harsher penalties were hoped to deter individuals from the use of cocaine. This contributed to America's mass incarceration, leading to mainly minority communities filling up the prison systems, with 1 in 4 African American males being incarcerated or on parole by 1989. On November 27th, 1995, John Dilulio shared his theory about super-predators in his article for The Weekly Standard. According to Michael E. Jennings, this caused stereotypes about African American men to be reinforced, leading to the public's conclusion that African American males were predators that society needed to deal with. On September 28th, 1999, the Senate Subcommittee on Youth Violence for the 106th Congress held its first session to examine funding for juvenile crime prevention programs so that groups that received funding would work in coordination with the juvenile justice system. In the opening statement for this session, Senator Jeff Sessions acknowledged that people saw the juvenile court system as a punishment system. In 2001, Dilulio acknowledged that his theory was flawed and apologized for the consequences that it wrought. Following this incident, Clinton received more criticism for her use of the term, as well as for her support of the 1994 Crime Bill, ultimately leading to her giving an apology for her language, but not her support of the Crime Bill, on February 25, 2016. == Impact ==

The super-predator theory reinforced stereotypes about Black Americans and encouraged the development of tough-on-crime legislation. At the time, the newer sentencing laws impacted more than 2,000 children, with 70% being of color. == References ==