As Latinx and Black Americans experience highly disproportionate rates of coronavirus infections, mainstream and progressive commentators correctly conclude that conditions of poverty, including cramped living and working spaces, forced returns to work and less access to quality health care, are responsible for higher case counts in communities of color. When new infections shifted strongly from racially diverse, Democrat-voting to mostly white, Republican-voting states this summer, commentators issued political criticisms but refrained from suggesting innate cognitive or moral problems, even as media reports showed unmasked crowds flouting public health standards.
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Contrast that restraint with the mass blame game that ensued when coronavirus cases rose among young people. Commentators as diverse as California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, MSNBC host Chris Hayes, Dr. Irwin Redlener, New York Times reporters and scores of others hurled epithets such as “selfish,” “reckless,” “partying” and delusional “invincibility” at teenagers and college-age adults to charge them with moral and cognitive defects.
Why the abrupt, often angry change in tone when those infected were young rather than black, brown or older white adults? After all, many of the same challenging conditions apply to young people that apply to people of color.
Young people’s risks for certain behaviors derive from their much higher poverty rates compared to older Americans, not innate recklessness. Young people, like people of color, dominate occupations whose workers are more exposed to infection and are compelled by economic circumstances to return to work. Two-thirds of restaurant workers, half of emergency paramedics and health assistants and nearly half of grocery workers are 34 or younger, Bureau of Labor Statistics show. In California, 85% of coronavirus infections in ages 18–34 and 91% of those under 18 are in people of color.
Meanwhile, studies consistently show young people harbor no more delusions of invincibility than older people. While media images selectively highlighted young people partying (an anecdotal tactic that could be applied to any group in society), they failed to mention more relevant surveys finding young people were more likely to wear face masks in public to curb the virus’ spread than were middle-aged individuals.
Rather, increased infections among the young are more likely result from leaders’ unwise decisions to prematurely reopen businesses, schools and public life, along with increased testing of younger populations with lesser symptoms. “I don’t think it’s helpful to demonize one group or another,” Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, chair of the University of California, San Francisco’s Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, declared.
As with the coronavirus’ spread, authorities and commentators rush to blame crime, violence and other troubles on the supposedly innate tendencies, undeveloped brains and peer cultures of young people rather than the negative conditions imposed on them. While high rates of certain types of crime among, say, Black Americans, inner-city residents and Louisianans have been explained (again, largely correctly) as features of poverty and disadvantage, the young are demonized as “temporary sociopaths,” risk-happy and inherently crime-prone.
Authorities and commentators seem able to recognize the individuality and circumstances of older people who get infected with diseases or commit crimes while stereotyping young people as an undifferentiated, misbehaving mass. Stereotypes damage their targets and misdirect policy, as discussed in previous columns.
Criminal arrests of youth under age 18 per 100,000 population ages 10-17 in 2019
(38 states with at least 75% of jurisdictions reporting, adjusted for reporting rates)
Source: FBI, Crime in the United States, Tables 38 and 69.
The latest FBI crime report for 2019 further evidences the fact that notions of innate youthful criminality stem from misinterpretations of past crime patterns. The peak age for criminal arrest has risen from 16 in 1970 to 19 in 1990, then to the early 20s in 2010 and, now, the late 20s. The FBI’s 2019 tabulation of crimes cleared by arrest showed that youth ages 10-17, who are 10.2% of the nation’s total population, accounted for just 8.5% of violent crimes (including 4.5% of homicides) and 8.4% of property crimes.
As Table 69 of the FBI crime report shows, even in a year with the lowest youth arrest rates ever recorded, the disparity in arrest rates of youth by state remains staggering. After adjusting for reporting rate and including only the 38 states with good reporting, the state with the highest rate, Wisconsin, arrests nearly eight times more youth per capita than the lowest-arrest state, Massachusetts. In contrast, adult arrest rates vary only 3.5-fold from the highest-arrest state (Kentucky) to the lowest-arrest state (Massachusetts).
Disparities in youthful arrests are features not just of race, but geography. The enormous state-by-state discrepancies in youth arrest rates, especially for vaguer, police-discretion situations like “disorderly conduct,” status violations, minor drug and liquor laws and “other” offenses, appear to constitute a civil rights violation. They demand explanation and strong redress.
Mike Males is senior research fellow for the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice in San Francisco. He is author of “Teenage Sex and Pregnancy: Modern Myths, Unsexy Realities.”