"The Origins of the Superpredator: The Child Study Movement to Today"

The title of this post is the title of this notable new report from the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth.  Here is its introduction:

The 1995 superpredator narrative is often called out as the impetus for our nation's harmful sentencing policies for Black children.  After all, 75 percent of all kids sentenced to life without parole (JLWOP) were sentenced in the 90s or later, and 70 percent of this population are kids of color (60 percent Black).  But the pseudo-scientific, unsubstantiated, and racialized superpredator theory is actually part of an American tradition of deeming some children something other than children.

The term superpredator first appeared in a publication by American political scientist John J. DiIulio, Jr. in 1995. DiIulio predicted that a wave of teenagers driven by "moral poverty" numbering in the tens of thousands would soon be on the streets committing violent crime. These "hardened, remorseless juveniles" were framed in the article as a pressing "demographic crime bomb."  DiIulio's narrative used racist tropes to further stoke fear — broadly attributing "moral poverty" to "Black inner-city neighborhoods" and families and specifically and repeatedly calling attention to gang violence and "predatory street criminals" among "Black urban youth." 

Five years later, DiIulio renounced the superpredator theory, apologizing for its unintended consequences.  While Dilulio predicted that juvenile crime would increase, it instead dropped by more than half.  Conceding that he made a mistake, Dilulio regretted that he could not “put the brakes on the super-predator theory” before it took on a life of its own.

Despite his later distancing from the idea, DiIulio's terminology spread like wildfire through major news outlets and academic circles.  Coming just a few years after headlines using "wilding" and "wolf pack" to describe five teenagers convicted and later exonerated of raping a woman in Central Park, the rhetorical dehumanization of youth suspected of violence was not new, but DiIulio's coining of "superpredator" lent new credibility and energy.  The superpredator myth reinforced and sought to legitimize longstanding fears of Black criminality, disguised as developmental science and resting on pseudo-scientific assumptions that certain children are not children at all.

While the widespread adoption and popularization of DiIulio's rhetoric and the broader tough on crime atmosphere of the 1990s is instructive in examining our extreme sentencing policies, it is important to place them in the context of our long history of only regarding some children as worthy of protection.  This report highlights the superpredator theory as one manifestation of a longstanding practice in which policymakers, lawyers, and academics classify children on the basis of moral and racial beliefs.  These classifications permit racially biased perceptions of deviance to replace chronological age as the defining characteristic of youth.

This report takes as its jumping off point the Child Study movement of the 19th century, which had long lasting impact on the contours of academic inquiry and the American legal system.  The Child Study movement itself was of course rooted in a deeply racist culture, profoundly influenced by the justifications used to uphold slavery and Jim Crow, and with its own ideological predecessors dating back to the Enlightenment of the 18th century.