General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsAsked my granddaughter how she felt about the term "super predator?"
This discussion thread was locked as off-topic by BooScout (a host of the General Discussion forum).
I let her listen to the audio of Hillary's comments that included those word and "bring them to heel."
She said she really didn't know what to think about it except she knows that she is not a criminal who robbed and attacked people and she would never be a gang member...so the term doesn't even apply to her.
psychmommy
(1,739 posts)driving while black. They don't know you are a nice church going girl, when you "fit the description" of a someone who just committed a crime. Believe it or not, the discussion was about all of us.
Nitram
(22,794 posts)... at the time. It wasn't a racist term.
A documentary by Retro Report, The Superpredator Scare, tells the story of how influential criminologists in the 1990s issued predictions of a coming wave of "superpredators": "radically impulsive, brutally remorseless" "elementary school youngsters who pack guns instead of lunches" and "have absolutely no respect for human life." Much of this frightening imagery was racially coded.
In 1995, John DiIulio, a professor at Princeton who coined the term "superpredator," predicted that the number of juveniles in custody would increase three-fold in the coming years and that, by 2010, there would be "an estimated 270,000 more young predators on the streets than in 1990." Criminologist James Fox joined in the rhetoric, saying publicly, "Unless we act today, we're going to have a bloodbath when these kids grow up."
These predictions set off a panic, fueled by highly publicized heinous crimes committed by juvenile offenders, which led nearly every state to pass legislation between 1992 and 1999 that dramatically increased the treatment of juveniles as adults for purposes of sentencing and punishment.
As DiIulio and Fox themselves later admitted, the prediction of a juvenile superpredator epidemic turned out to be wrong. In fact, violent juvenile crime rates had already started to fall in the mid-1990's. By 2000, the juvenile homicide rate stabilized below the 1985 level.
http://www.eji.org/node/893
BooScout
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