ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, January 7, 1996 TAG: 9601110040
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: B-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The New York Times
Despite recent reports that crime is decreasing, violent crime in the United States is a ``ticking time bomb'' that will explode in the next few years as the number of teen-agers soars, an organization of prosecutors and law-enforcement experts said in a report issued Friday.
The group, the Council on Crime in America, painted a bleak portrait of the criminal justice system, maintaining that it remained a ``revolving door'' that allowed large numbers of violent felons to go free and commit more crime.
About a third of all violent crimes in the United States are committed by people who, though technically ``under supervision,'' are on probation, parole or pretrial release, the report said.
The council suggested that state governments needed to ``reinvent probation and parole'' by devoting far more resources to them and, in the process, finding ways that are more restrictive to monitor felons under supervision. According to the report, state governments currently spend only about $200 a year per probationer, compared with $25,000 per prison inmate.
The council is a nonpartisan group headed by William Bennett, who served the Reagan administration as director of national drug control policy and then as education secretary, and Griffin Bell, the attorney general in the Carter administration.
Bennett spoke at a news conference in Washington, D.C., where the report was issued Friday.
The report was compiled by John DiIulio Jr., a professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University.
DiIulio referred to recent reports from New York, Houston and a number of other large cities that their crime rates have dropped in the last few years. He said that this was, at least in part, a result of new, more aggressive police tactics. But he cautioned that crime remained ``at a historically high level.''
Moreover, drawing on the work of James Alan Fox, dean of the College of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University, DiIulio said that, given demographic trends, he was concerned that ``we are in the lull before the crime storm.''
Between now and 2005, the number of 14- to-17-year-old males will increase by 23 percent. This coming jump in the youthful population is worrisome, DiIulio said, because criminologists have found that while adults are committing fewer violent crimes, the rate among teen-agers has skyrocketed in the last decade.
As a result, the report recommended that governments attach much more importance to preventing youths who are at particular risk of becoming criminals from turning into juvenile delinquents.
The report also offered a scathing indictment of the criminal justice system, suggesting that the first responsibility of government, and one that all Americans can agree on, is to protect its citizens. At that, it said, governments around the country are failing.
The total cost of crime to victims in the United States is now about $450 billion a year, the report said. Further, it said, real crime rates are actually as much as 5.7 times as high as those reported by the police, and each generation of teen-agers since the 1950s has been more violent than the last.
In addition, in one of its most controversial findings, the report concluded that the high cost of building and operating prisons actually saved taxpayers money when compared with the price of crime. For every dollar it costs to keep the typical prisoner behind bars, ``society saves $2.80 in the social costs of crime averted,'' it said.
But Franklin Zimring, the director of the Earl Warren Legal Institute at the University of California at Berkeley, challenged a number of those economic findings.
Zimring said the figure of $450 billion in total costs of crime was based on hypothetical judgments that juries might award in personal injury cases.
``The problem is,'' he said, ``if you ask what is it worth not to be raped or murdered, you can add up to a figure greater than the gross national product pretty quickly.''
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