This is the fourth in an ongoing series of analyses. Although violent crime by youth in 1998 was at its lowest point in the 25-year history of the National Crime Victimization Survey, 62% of poll respondents felt that juvenile crime was on the increase.
In an environment in which fear of youth crime and actual youth crime are so out of sync, policies affecting young people are bound to be impacted. Since 1992, 47 states have made their juvenile justice systems more punitive by eroding confidentiality protections or making it easier to try juveniles as adults.
Our objective with this report was to compile and examine the best social science that has analyzed the content of crime news to answer the question: does the current approach to covering youth and crime in the media maximize public understanding of reality?