Juv enile Justice Document Table

How we become what we are
The Atlantic Monthly; Boston; Sep 1994;

Abstract:
New studies suggest that some aspects of human personality are inborn and resistant to change. Ironically, this makes the role of environment all the more important in shaping individual lives.

Full Text:

Copyright Atlantic Monthly Company Sep 1994

AN offspring of Cry Havoc and One Tough Cookie, Slick Willy is the second bull terrier fortunate enough to belong to David Lykken, a psychologist interested in temperament. Temperament, which is reflected in a creature's manner of behavior, is personality's biological, enduring, and heritable aspect. It greatly contributes to but does not entirely explain personality, much as innate intelligence contributes to but cannot entirely explain ability. Willy's temperament originated when the English bulldog was deliberately crossed with the white English terrier, almost 200 years ago. The nature of the resulting fearless, tenacious fighting machine requires a different sort of nurture than that of dogs bred for complaisance. When Willy can't resist chomping through a plastic jug with his powerful jaws or taking a few extra laps before responding to a summons, Lykken mostly just grumbles, reserving sterner measures for more serious infractions. Harsh treatment would render the feisty animal vicious; permissiveness or neglect would produce an uncontrollable bully. Willy's good behavior depends on an appreciation of his innate disposition and a judicious balance of carrot and stick.

In a postindustrial culture that holds up a workaholic Mr. Nice Guy as its temperamental ideal, the heroic spirit defined by Alexander the Great has fallen from grace. Time and technology have shrunk the number of acceptable outlets for the daring, aggressive nature that swung the sword and mapped the unknown, until it has come to be associated primarily with criminals. This saddens but doesn't surprise Lykken, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota; his work, some of it conducted with subjects behind bars, convinces him that "the psychopath and the hero are twigs of the same branch."

The history of another bull-terrier owner, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, the legendary nineteenth-century explorer, spy, scholar, and soldier, brings Lykken's observation to life. By the age of nine, the boy who would be the first white man in many parts of Africa and Asia, and who would translate the Kama Sutra, was, according to his biographer Edward Rice, "virtually a hard-core delinquent," more or less ignored by his parents and known for fighting, shooting at tombstones and church windows, lewdness -- and enduring toothache. A prodigy who spoke twenty-nine languages, Burton preferred the army to Oxford. His temperament is summed up by his rationale for visiting the forbidden Muslim city of Harar: no European had successfully entered the city, so visiting it was "therefore a point of honor with me." Had he been born in the gutter rather than in a milieu that provided suitable channels for his aggressiveness, "Ruffian Dick" might have followed his proclivities to the gallows rather than to knighthood. The superficially odd similarity between guys in white hats and guys in black ones, vividly portrayed in Clint Eastwood's recent film Unforgiven, illustrates Freud's observation that although a particular instinct always has the same aim, it may have different objects. What worries Lykken is not the inclination to prevail but how it is directed.

As America reels from a wave of lawlessness, research on the temperamental underpinnings of violence has become increasingly controversial. Because black men compose only six percent of the general population but about half of the imprisoned one, the issue particularly concerns the black community, which is understandably suspicious of biological explanations for behavior. In 1992 a firestorm of protest caused Frederick Goodwin, a psychiatrist and the director of the federal Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration, and the world's authority on manic depression, to resign his job and return to his previous position as director of the National Institute of Mental Health after he drew a parallel between inner-city violence and primate studies showing that young males in the wild were more violent and more sexually active when they had to compete for scarce resources. Black political leaders and others also successfully lobbied the National Institutes of Health to withhold money for a conference, to be held that year at the University of Maryland, on possible genetic components of violent behavior.

Despite the apprehension that research on violence could stigmatize individuals or groups, what it actually shows is that, particularly where natures like Slick Willy's and Richard Burton's are concerned, nurture is the best predictor of good or bad behavior. The demise of the nineteenth-century bourgeois conscience makes no difference to some types of people, but it makes a big one to others. Mostly because of a large increase in illegitimacy since 1970, Lykken says, "across the land, but mainly in the inner cities, thousands of children aren't being brought up by, but only domiciled with, parents who are indifferent, incompetent, or unsocialized themselves." He continues, "We're running a crime factory that turns out little sociopaths." One reason why this white academic chooses to speak out on a socially sensitive issue becomes clear when he gestures toward photographs of two particularly robust babies displayed in his office. "My grandsons are going to be big African-American males, so they're going to face a high risk of attracting violence themselves and of frightening other people. Because of them, and the fact that crime is threatening to destroy all the great improvements in race relations that have come about in my lifetime, I get kind of steamed up about this problem." He concedes that "there's not a prayer in the world" that the solution he favors -- the licensing of people for biological parenthood according to the same criteria that are used for adoption -- will be tested in the near future: "My purpose in making an extravagant suggestion is to start a discussion. The problem is so real, and nobody is talking about the solution."

PREDESTINATION?

AS personal rights and freedoms have expanded during this century, there has been less and less talk about temperament. Throughout most of history, however, people have been regarded less as unique individuals than as variations on a few basic human types. In the fifth century B.C. Hippocrates described four temperaments, which he considered to be linked to various predominant bodily fluids, or humors: the sanguine temperament is optimistic and energetic, the melancholic is moody and withdrawn, the choleric is irritable and impulsive, and the phlegmatic is calm and slow. However quaint this theory may seem, Hippocrates anticipated modern linkages of biochemistry with behavior and astutely described types of people as familiar today as they were in antiquity.

By the 1940s two powerful ideologies diverted scientists' age-old interest in the biological dimensions of personality. First, Freud asserted the overwhelming importance of personal history in determining what his followers called character. Second, revulsion at Nazism's proclamation of inferior and superior genetic types converged with the spread of democratic ideas to focus academe on racial equality and the formative power of environment. Among the few scientists to express interest in temperament was I. P. Pavlov, the dark prince of conditioning, who observed of his dogs that "the final nervous activity present in the animal is an alloy of the features peculiar to the type and of the changes wrought by the environment." "Excitatory," choleric dogs, like Slick Willy, were by nature "pugnacious, passionate, and easily and quickly irritated," while the "inhibitory," or melancholic, animal "believes in nothing, hopes for nothing, in everything he sees the dark side." Of the two stabler sorts that Pavlov observed, one was "self-contained and quiet; persistent and steadfast," and the other "energetic and very productive" but easily bored. Such insights, however, were dwarfed by mountains of literature on what our mothers did to us.

Over the past decade modern genetics has made research into temperament intellectually acceptable again, though it is not well loved in some circles, where it is regarded as a right-wing theory of predestination. Even those who study temperament can be defensive or vaguely apologetic about their findings. Lykken rolls his eyes over his reputation as a "biological fascist." Jerome Kagan, a Harvard developmental psychologist pre-eminent among temperament researchers, and the author of the recently published Galen's Prophecy: Temperament in Human Nature, observes, "Because of my training, politics, and values, in my work I once muted the power of biology and maximized the environment's." Twenty years ago, when he observed a shy toddler, Kagan saw a child influenced by unpleasant social experience; today he sees one who has a certain type of neurochemistry. "I have been dragged, kicking and screaming, by my data to acknowledge that temperament is more powerful than I thought and wish to believe," he says. "That' s where I am, not out of prejudice but out of realism."

FEAR, AGGRESSION, BOLDNESS

LIKE the ghost in the machine or the mind in the brain, temperament is best glimpsed in action. To discern it, watch a person communicate, says Hagop Akiskal, the senior science adviser on affective and related disorders at the National Institute of Mental Health: "It's not just a matter of personality but something more basic that has to do with rhythm, reactivity, emotion." Of all species, Homo sapiens has the most feelings. Just as drives such as hunger and sleep are more flexible than reflexes like the eye blink and the knee jerk, emotions, which are physiological as well as psychological events, give us more behavioral options than do drives. Some emotions are so basic and universal that the psychologist Hans Eysenck, a pioneer of the modern biological study of personality, who conducts research in London at the Institute of Psychiatry, believes that they're nothing less than the lowest common denominators of human experience. "We've done our studies in thirty-six countries," he says, "and everywhere we find the same three ways in which behavior can differ." To varying degrees all people express fear, which helps us avoid danger; aggression, which enables us to fight it; and extraversion, or sociability, which enables us to face it with equanimity. Fundamentally, our temperaments are distinguished by the traits of anxiety, irritability, and elan.

That our natures are organized around our habitual reactions to threat has given Philip Gold, a research psychiatrist who is the chief of the neuroendocrinology branch of the NIMH, a "tragic view of the human condition." Physical or emotional, real or perceived, danger lurks everywhere, and from an evolutionary perspective our species' great asset and, sometimes, liability is an extremely sensitive emotional and physiological arousal system that detects and reacts to it. This is the stress, or "fight or flight," response. The stable sorts of people whom modern researchers describe as uninhibited, bold, or relaxed can cope with life's vicissitudes -- from a snake in the jungle to a fire-breathing boss -- in a manner Gold describes as "philosophical," because their stress response isn't triggered by every little thing and doesn't stay on red alert longer than necessary. These resilient people are innately disposed, Gold says, "to celebrate the beauty of existence and the wonders of an interior life and external connections despite being surrounded by unanswerable questions, ambiguous dilemmas, and the certainty of loss and death."

Those who naturally react to the threatening or the merely unfamiliar with an excess of either the flight or the fight response are in for more trouble. Because their stress response spikes frequently and ebbs slowly, Hippocrates' melancholics, whom scientists now describe as anxious, inhibited, or reactive, are so worn down that they are apt to behave in what Gold calls a depressive way: "Faced with a setback, for example, they say it occurred because they're worthless." To protect themselves, the flight-prone often cultivate an avoidant way of life that worsens their plight. "They're likelier to survive in truly threatening situations," Gold says, "but they have less comfortable lives." Hippocrates' cholerics, like Willy and Burton, respond to stress by going into fight mode. To these people, whom researchers variously call aggressive, impulsive, or irritable, the dark possibility of pain and defeat is so intense, Gold says, "that they can't bear to be accountable for it in a depressive way." Instead they blame it on others, and strike out. Although the bias toward one of these fundamental emotional tones, or temperaments, "has to do with what a person has learned he has to be in order to be loved," Gold says, "it also has to do with genetic factors that biologically predispose him to respond in a certain way to the paradigmatic human situations of pleasure and opportunity, danger and loss." He continues, "In the blood-and-guts world of challenges, these differences in the stress response account for the fundamental parameters of what people are like."

Although some people are so colored by a single emotional tone that they're said to be the inhibited, uninhibited, or aggressive type, most temperaments aren't primary yellow, blue, or red. Their many subtle shades include greens, oranges, and violets blended from lots of different genetic proclivities. Kagan predicts that future research will define many more dispositions and traits, or temperamental characteristics, each with its own physiological substrates; a likely example is a familiar permutation of the reactive temperament known as the obsessive type. What most people consider occasional thoughts or pursuits rivet the neural arousal system of the genius, the collector, and the artist, who vent their obsessions in compulsive activity. Reflecting on Benny Goodman's notorious social insensitivity, a wise musician from his band observed that the celebrated clarinetist, who practiced his instrument eight hours a day, thought not about people but about fingering.

Although scientists disagree about the ultimate number of traits and the temperaments they color, most of the research concerns the three most obvious qualities: fearfulness, boldness, and aggressiveness. Just as the scars that laced Burton's body speak of the way aggressive people operate in the world, the lives of two of his eminent Victorian contemporaries say something about the approaches of the inhibited and uninhibited temperaments. The Queen whose name is synonymous with the effort to dampen arousal described the clockwork progress of an ideal day in the company of her beloved husband: "We walked in the garden. ... At twelve o'clock we had prayers in the drawing-room, which were read by a young clergyman, who preached a good sermon. ... I read to Albert the first three cantos of The Lay of the Last Minstrel, which delighted us both; and then we looked over some curious, fine old prints by Ridinger" Yet even Victoria had days when novelty intruded on her careful plans, trying her sensitive nerves. Despite the efforts of maids and courtiers in a posh Highlands lodge, some missing luggage caused her a rougher night than Burton would have passed in a pestilent swamp: "I disliked the idea of going to bed without any of the necessary toilette," she wrote in her diary. "However, some arrangements were made which were very uncomfortable; and after two I got into bed, but had very little sleep at first; finally, fatigue got the better of discomfort, and after three I fell asleep."

The nocturnal arrangements of Victoria's subject the Honorable Jane Digby El Mezrab, who also doted on her husband -- at least, on her fourth one -- would have greatly perturbed Victoria. With Sheikh Medjuel El Mezrab, this well-traveled, much-married lady passed half each year in a Bedouin tent in the Syrian desert. Arab robes flying and blue eyes rimmed with kohl, she raced camels and horses, went falconing, and even accompanied her lord and master into battle; in quieter moments she served him at meals and washed his feet. After more than a decade of this flared-nostril life, taken up well past the point at which Victoria had abandoned herself to inconsolable widowhood, Jane wrote, "Sixty-two years of age, and an impetuous romantic girl of seventeen cannot exceed me in ardent passionate feelings." Like her Queen, Jane focused on her domestic life, but how she did so throbs with the uninhibited temperament.

"NATURE-NURTURE" EXPERIMENTS

As Hippocrates intuited, such contrasting dispositions reflect very different chemistries. Scientists are just beginning to develop the technology that allows them to eavesdrop on the whisperings of neurotransmitters, the brain' s chemical agents of communication, and learn how these are translated into modulations of behavior. For the most part, the links between particular traits and transmitter levels remain tentative, partly because the former can involve neurochemical choruses, not just solos. So far, the principle that who we are involves our biological as well as our social heritage rests mostly on two types of research. At the University of Minnesota' s Center for Twin and Adoption Research and elsewhere, scientists have established certain traits as genetically rooted by comparing the characteristics of pairs of identical and fraternal twins who have been reared together or adopted separately in infancy and raised apart; the relatively few observed differences in the identicals' personalities must be caused by environment. In longitudinal studies Kagan and others monitor developmental changes in their subjects from infancy in order to search for the biopsychological consistencies that suggest temperamental origins.

Some of the most important, if indirect, insights into human temperament come from classical nature-nurture experiments in which generations of animals are selectively bred for particular traits and then closely monitored in different settings. The research psychologists Stephen Suomi, of the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development, and J. D. Higley, of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, have produced strains of rhesus monkeys that are variously inhibited, uninhibited, or aggressive, and have then tracked their neurobiology through their neurotransmitters' metabolites, or end products, in cerebrospinal fluid. "When you observe groups of primates, they look a lot alike initially," Higley says. "Within a few minutes, though, you identify the solitary, inhibited one, who peeks at you around a corner, and the bold one, who leaves the group and approaches in hopes of a treat. Our monkeys show big differences in these traits, which tend to be the most enduring ones in humans as well."

Like hot and cold or hard and soft, inhibited and uninhibited seem to be extremes on a single spectrum, and scientists who study one trait also study the other. Anxious monkeys have high levels of norepinephrine; bold monkeys have low levels of the same transmitter. It makes sense that the inhibited have lots of something the uninhibited have little of, but that may be too simplistic an etiology for boldness. Suomi and Kagan maintain that uninhibitedness includes but is more than not being anxious, especially at its extreme, and that the other ingredients in its formula have thus far eluded detection. Although the inhibited and the uninhibited, which account for about 10 and 20 percent of the primate population respectively, can be arranged on a continuum of stress responsivity and norepinephrine level, Kagan says that the exercise and its implications are a bit like "putting Mozart on a spectrum with your daughter who's taking piano lessons. He's just better in music?"

Because he works with human babies and children rather than monkeys, Kagan can't examine temperamental neurology as directly as Suomi can. He infers something of how his subjects' nervous systems operate, however, by periodically measuring their behavioral and physiological responses, such as heart rate and blood pressure, to mild stressors such as noise, sour tastes, unfamiliar objects and people, even a mother's frown. Regarding infancy, he has proved what every parent knows: each baby is born with a characteristic mood and style of responding. By the second and third years of life, he has found, some clearly express one of two great temperamental extremes.

About 15 percent of youngsters are plainly inhibited. They differ physiologically from other children in many ways, from their greater incidence of allergies and constipation to their higher heart rates and levels of cortisol, a stress related hormone. They tend to have blue eyes and narrow faces, and slightly more of them are girls. Psychologically, they're constrained and fretful, and have unusual fears-fears, say, of kidnapping rather than of monsters. The stimuli that swamp their sensitive nerves barely stir those of another group of children. Most of the 30 percent of uninhibited youngsters are boys, and boys account disproportionately for the very boldest. Their physiological hallmark is their very low heart rate; their behavior is marked by energy and spontaneity. To these emerging portraits Nathan Fox, a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, adds that very anxious and bold children have stable patterns of right-brain and left-brain activity, as measured by electroencepbalograms. Either type of EEG, he says, is "a very good fingerprint of a particular temperament."

Evidence from twin studies and his subjects' family histories has convinced Kagan that the inhibited and uninhibited natures begin with genes. Yet, at least at the individual level, nature's contribution cannot be quantified; too many parts of the equation, such as epistasis, or the process whereby one gene suppresses the expression of another, elude measurement. When scientists compare personalities within a group, their guesstimates of how much of the variation among individuals is due to biology and how much to learning generally range from 20 percent and 80 percent respectively to 50-50, as the Minnesota team believes. One study has suggested that 40 percent of the difference in inhibition among a group of middle-class children depended on genes, but, Kagan says, "to ask what proportion of personality is genetic rather than environmental is like asking what proportion of a blizzard is due to cold temperature rather than humidity." What the distinctive genetic heritages of anxious and bold children bring about, however, are neurochemical differences in the functioning of the amygdala -- a brain structure that assigns emotion to experience -- and its connections. Thus the same loud noise that scares an inhibited child will intrigue an uninhibited one. As Fox says, "Some children are by and large, across many situations, very fearful, while others, no matter what you throw at them, are happy-go-lucky and approach the world with gusto."

FINDING AN ADAPTIVE NICHE

THE sensitivity of the inhibited nature to things not only threatening but also merely novel makes life an uphill affair. At least one inhibited person is known to have projected this aversion to the unfamiliar into the after-life. For the public celebration of Queen Victoria' s Diamond Jubilee, a statue of one of her predecessors, Queen Anne, was scheduled to be moved from its accustomed position. "Most certainly not!" said Her Majesty. "Why, it might some day be suggested that my statue should be moved, which I should much dislike." Some of the inhibited have an easier time than others, however, because they're not socially constrained, or shy. Although inhibition is linked to norepinephrine, what Higley calls the "nerdiness" of the loner who can't get along goes with low levels of the transmitter serotonin. A person could have a high level of norepinephrine, and so be nervous, yet also have a high level of serotonin, and thus be sociable. The garrulous worrywart that Higley evokes is a familiar character -- think of Victoria or Miles Silverberg on Murphy Brown. Medical literature shows, Higley says, that the capacity of such people to reach out, which many anxious people don't have, helps them counter the effects of stress. He says, "If you're wired to elicit and respond to social stimuli, you may get a lot of support that helps get you through that rotten, worried feeling inside."

To the many parents in the trenches concerned about their offspring's shyness, brashness, or other untoward tendencies, Kagan offers a few pragmatic insights. First, he says, children are born with different temperaments, so new mothers and fathers shouldn't assume that they're mishandling a baby who's neither pleased nor pleasing. Second, a child's disposition is malleable: "Parents shouldn't say, 'God gave me this type of kid -- that's it!' They should acknowledge that some things are harder for the child to control, but should assume he can still exert some control." Finally, Kagan says, "remember that in a complex society like ours, each temperamental type can find its adaptive niche."

Few would wish to be the anxious type, but in an environment filled with predators, or their modern equivalents, having some worriers around is adaptive, at least for the species; that's why they remain in the gene pool. Hans Eysenck, a famously iconoclastic Freud-basher who has scored a zero on his own test of inhibition, says that his wife accuses him of not being afraid enough. "She is exceedingly careful, driving defensively and letting others get ahead. From the point of view of survival, her style is much better."

Again, another name for the anxious or inhibited temperament is "reactive." Among various good things associated with such a quiet, reflective nature, the foremost is intellectual achievement. Inhibited seven-year-olds excel at what Nathan Fox calls "executive functioning"; when they're asked how kids who have only one toy should share it, they offer a strategy such as "Alphabetize their last names, and let the person closest to A go first." Putting theory into practice is hard for them, however, because their sensitive natures and elaborate schemes are unsuited to the heterogeneous rigors of the school yard. Most do not end up with social or psychological problems, and the more fortunate find niches where they can operate successfully, becoming scientists, say, or poets.

A party animal doesn't dash off a Paradise Lost. The same high-strung families much afflicted by moodiness and depression are more likely than others to include writers and dancers, painters and composers. Happily, this strain is hypersensitive not only to stress and danger but also to art and nuance: as Byron wrote, "Of its own beauty is the mind diseased." Hagop Akiskal, after investigating (in collaboration with his wife Kareen Akiskal) what he calls "the romantic idea that mental illness is related to creativity," discovered a link not with disease per se but with a variation on the reactive disposition which he calls the "cyclothymic temperament." People of this type alternate rapidly between high and low levels of mood and activity which are far less marked than those of manic depressives. The "down" spells foster contemplation and reflection; during the "up" spells surging energy, ambition, confidence, and mental puissance drive hard work.

Unlike those burdened with an inhibited nature, the uninhibited have few complaints. Stress that breaks more sensitive spirits merely stimulates theirs. For example, one in five fighter pilots will at some point have eject from his plane, and one in twelve will die in the line of duty exclusive of combat, yet the most elite fliers zealously compete for this hair-raising job. David Lykken has an insight why dare-devils not only cope with but thrive on what most people consider appalling risks. When he tested a group of prison inmates, he found that the boldest didn't readily learn how to escape an avoidable electric shock; they felt it, all right, but they didn't fear it.

The adaptive potential of steel nerves is summed up by a line of dialogue that frequently figures in action-adventure movies: "It's a tough job, but someone's got to do it." Ulysses S. Grant "was not excited by [danger], but was simply indifferent to it, was calm when others were aroused," according to his military secretary. "I have often seen him sit erect in his saddle when everyone else instinctively shrank as a shell burst in the neighborhood." A Union soldier put it thus: "Ulysses don't scare worth a damn." The uninhibited can manifest this same sangfroid in situations, from boardroom conferences to political debates, that entail social rather than physical risk. Grant was equally unperturbed by "the greatest moral emergencies," his aide wrote. "At the surrender of Lee, he was as impassive as on the most ordinary occasion." The insensitivity that is the dark side of boldness can squelch intimate relations. This wasn't so in the case of Grant -- the general was devoted to Mrs. Grant and she to him. Among fighter pilots, however, nine out of ten separations and divorces are initiated by wives.

Having a nervous system that reads "threat" as "thrill" means you might die young, but you'll have fun. It has been said that Jane Digby, a famous equestrian, met a dashing sheikh (who may or may not have been Medjuel) while trying to buy a supposedly untamable horse from him. After she broke it, the Bedouin said his price could not be paid in coin. Jane agreed to be his if he would put away his other wives; should the arrangement turn out to be satisfactory, she said, it could be renewed in three years. Lykken recalls a trapper and bush pilot from northern Minnesota "who had adventures that made my jaw drop," he says. "He didn't brag, but just talked about these things he did that were so interesting, like going to a bear den and pulling out the cubs."

THE FIGHTING SPIRIT

NEITHER Queen Victorias nor Jane Digbys, most people have the middling levels of inhibition that best ensure survival. "That's how biology works," J. D. Higley says. "Not too many temperaments are extreme." The one that seems most extreme is the disposition Hippocrates called choleric and his modern successors call irritable. To Higley, "if inhibition and boldness are the north and south of temperament, equanimity and irritability are the east and west." Although the irritable temperament is the hardest to define, Akiskal says, it's the easiest to see. We in fact pay to see it whenever we watch a movie actor who specializes in portraying restless characters who "express intense, unmodulated emotion that, seemingly out of nowhere, comes on like an avalanche, stirring everyone," Akiskal says. "That's what temperament does, and the irritable one does it most intensely." He deplores the prissy tendency to look askance at the hot-blooded temperament: "Civilized Western behavior assumes its relative absence, but its impact is very useful in some circumstances -- say, in getting a point across quickly. Many people can't express such vivid feelings because they just don't have them -- they lack the color that the intense supply." Although this disposition is potentially the most pathological, it's the least studied, Akiskal says, partly because "it evokes a lot of negative feelings in people."

Some of those negative feelings spring from the fact that although irritability -- the tendency to be easily annoyed -- is not the same as aggressiveness, the two are far from incompatible. As Richmond Lattimore observed, the tragedy of Achilles, the supreme warrior, was that his will was "disturbed by anger." Sir Richard Burton shared the hero's psychic heel: at one Point in his youth he had no fewer than thirty-two affairs of honor pending violent settlement.

Throughout history mankind has deliberately bred the fighting spirit. Slick Willy and the bulls of the corrida are obvious examples of an effort perhaps not limited to animals. From the time of Atreus and his son Agamemnon the aristocracy has traditionally taken more pride in its warriors than in its scholars. In Shakespeare's Henry V the French King Charles VI cautions his overconfident nobles that despite the erst-while Prince Hal's reputation as a wastrel, the young invader "is bred out of that bloody strain/That haunted us in our familiar paths./... This is a stem/Of that victorious stock; and let us fear/The native mightiness and fate of him."

Having bred a strain of aggressive rhesus monkeys, Higley finds that their defining characteristic is in early life irritability, and in later life the unsociability that correlates with the low level of serotonin they've inherited. Although it shows the stability of a temperamental characteristic, appearing early in development and staying late, aggressiveness seems less a single trait than an explosive combination of several. Thus the monkeys who acquire the most wounds over a lifetime -- a pragmatic gauge of a belligerent nature -- are quick-tempered loners who both attract and instigate attacks. Richard Burton was a higher primate of this type; his spectacular gifts brought him little advancement largely because of his flair for provoking the lesser mortals who were his bureaucratic superiors. This explanation makes sense to Higley, who finds that a troop's most aggressive primate isn't usually the leader. That popular figure is apt to be a pacific, high-serotonin back-slapper who knows how to work a crowd. "In stable settings a monkey who tries to run things with force gets kicked out," Higley says. "If the females don't like a male, he's gone."

Partly because the genesis of aggressiveness is more complex than that of inhibition or boldness, Jerome Kagan is uncomfortable with the notion that there is an aggressive temperament per se. In his view, aggressive children are fundamentally characterized by fearlessness; they're bold but badly brought up, so that they become bullies. Nathan Fox was surprised to discover that a few members of a group of unruly young research subjects headed perhaps toward what psychologists call "conduct problems" were described by their mothers as inhibited or anxious. Higley, too, finds some inhibited sorts among his scarred bad actors. Once again, he traces aggressiveness to the tendency to act first and reflect later. Despite the fearfulness associated with these inhibited monkeys' high levels of norepinephrine, Higley says, they are impulsive, a trait that correlates with their low serotonin levels and that means "they don't think way ahead, so they end up in encounters that might have been avoided."

For practical reasons, much of the research on aggressiveness involves people who commit violent crimes. That 90 percent of such people are men implicates masculinity itself, wrought by the hormone testosterone, as a major biological factor in violent behavior. Although they are by no means a homogeneous group, many of the imprisoned have a few sad biographical features in common, including a history of inappropriate aggression from early childhood, an impulsive, angry personality, and a lower-than-average verbal IQ. Some of their troubles may be inherited. An impressive Danish study comparing twins revealed that if one male identical twin was found guilty of a crime, the other was five times as likely as the average Danish man to be a criminal as well; a fraternal twin in the same situation was three times as likely to be a criminal.

Saying that violently aggressive behavior has a genetic component is a far cry from saying there's a "crime gene." In fact the only shred of evidence for such a thing concerns a rare mutation that affects violence-prone males from a single Dutch family. The strongest hypothesis for the way in which genes could help to bring about a violently aggressive disposition rests on considerable data from Scandinavia, where governments keep careful public-health records and social influences such as poverty and drugs figure less in crime. This evidence suggests that people involved in violent crimes that are "hot," or impulsive, rather than "cold," or premeditated, tend to have low levels of serotonin. The finding provides a clue to one type of aggression, but not an explanation for it.

It may have a poor image in the modern world, but Hippocrates' choleric temperament is, like all dispositions, neither good nor evil per se. General Norman Schwarzkopf's family may not relish playing board games with him, but in certain settings Schwarzkopf is the ideal companion. Even in prosaic settings "aggressiveness can be beneficial if it helps you pound the table and say, 'I want justice!" Higley observes. "If a society wants variability, which is what ours espouses, it needs different kinds of individuals."

HOW EXPERIENCE TEMPERS PHYSIOLOGY

RATHER than asking how much of identity derives from genes and how much from learning, Kagan would pose "a better question: What combination of inherited physiology and experience makes a person, say, fearful, or bold?" Because they gloss over half of that combination, sensational headlines about genes that purportedly account for this or that proclivity -- recently, toward violence or homosexuality -- annoy thoughtful researchers, who recognize that experience channels biological proclivities. "This biological-predisposition business has become ridiculous," Kagan says. "Even if there's a genetic component to a person' s behavior, that doesn't mean he has no control over it." Male primates, for example, are biologically predisposed to be promiscuous; because most men can curb that strong urge, Kagan says, wives rarely sanction husbands' adultery. "Many scientists hope to win the Nobel Prize for finding the circuit in the brain responsible for the fact that I can start to do something and then stop," he says. "That's will, which is a special quality of Homo sapiens that allows us to control our behavior -- and it' s part of nature." Although Kagan's research has made him "more permissive" regarding certain human foibles, he says, "this is the most important thing to understand: Don't assume that just because a person has a temperamental quality, he has no conscious control over it. There's always a window of nondeterminism. Think about a species of monkeys, some of whom are raised in the zoo and others in the wild. They have the same genes, but they're very different monkeys. And that's only monkeys."

That a temperamental tendency can be described as genetic doesn't mean it's fixed, or rigidly predictable. Behavior, because it's so complicated to orchestrate, is polymorphic -- it requires the action of many genes in concert. Even in experiments with insects in which both heredity and environment are rigidly controlled, scientists are unable to program behavior uniformly. Human behavior is vastly more baroque, though, and a predisposition to be, say, shy, doesn't mean a person must be reserved but only that he's likelier than others to be.

Although there's no single gene for inhibition, boldness, or aggressiveness, what scientists call gene-environment correlation means that people who inherit those biopsychological tendencies will gravitate toward the kinds of experiences that reinforce the traits. The naturally fearless, for example, live in the fast lane from their diaper days. As soon as they can crawl, they're everywhere at once, exploring, falling, pushing the limits. Later "they climb a few fences, become desensitized, and climb up on the roof," Lykken says. "They'll have all sorts of experiences that other kids won't. Chuck Yeager [the test-pilot hero of The Right Stuff, and the first flier to break the sound barrier] could step down from the belly of the bomber into the rocket ship and push the button not because he was born with that difference between him and me, but because for the previous thirty years his temperament impelled him to work his way up from climbing trees through increasing degrees of danger and excitement. Genes affect the mind indirectly, creating formative experiences."

The long-standing view that early experience in the home inscribes personality on a blank mind has recently been challenged. Research suggesting that the personalities of siblings are hardly more similar than those of unrelated children implies that if the mighty family can't even out more of the differences among those who have half their genes in common, then environment does not much affect temperament. Lykken illustrates the flip side of the point with anecdotes from the University of Minnesota research on identical twins reared separately from birth. Such pairs are eerily alike not only in IQ an traits such as inhibition, boldness, and aggressiveness, but also in idiosyncrasies, such as the way two sisters count themselves to sleep, or the way two brothers have come to prefer the same cologne, hair cream, and imported toothpaste.

To say that nurture doesn't usually remodel nature does not mean that it can't. "Most families are custodial," Lykken says, "so nothing interferes with children's genetic proclivities." Fox agrees that the hands-off spirit of modern mothers and fathers means that children change less than they otherwise might. "Parents usually say, 'This is who my child is," he explains. "Depending on what they do or don't do, that child's biology is either going to express itself or be moderated. Because they're too busy and it's too hard, most parents today don't intervene, so biology mostly creates the kids' environments. But if you expect boys to play football, you're not going to say it's okay for your son to be fearful." Parental intervention, researchers say, is what changes the children who change.

At the cutting edge of research, scientists are learning that certain social experiences that cause juices to surge or subside can change not only behavior but also physiology -- a discovery that means the traditional concept of temperament as inborn must be redefined. When Suomi gives a genetically uninhibited infant monkey to an inhibited foster mother, her potentially upsetting ways just roll off his back and he remains fearless; similarly, uninhibited children rarely become inhibited over time. When a monkey bred to be inhibited is reared by a bold, easygoing foster mother, however, the youngster develops not only her ways but even her low-norepinephrine chemistry. And an infant raised by inept juveniles rather than competent adults will eventually resemble, both behaviorally and physiologically, a troubled monkey selectively bred for a low serotonin level. "Experience can push genetic constitution around," Suomi says. "Its effect is so profound that I'd call it temperament."

So would Megan Gunnar, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota's Institute of Child Development, who defines temperament as "a set of behavioral predispositions that have physiological substrates and experiential components." When toddlers and their mothers encounter a clown in her lab, she says, "Some go 'Whoopee!' and others 'Oh, no!" The uninhibited children forget about their mothers and play with the clown. If an inhibited child has what Gunnar describes as a "secure" relationship with a mother who accepts his fearful reaction, his stress response, measured through the amount of cortisol in his saliva, ebbs, and he too might play. If an inhibited child has an "insecure" tie with an unaccepting mother, however, his agitation is fed by her discomfort; the more she urges him to play with the clown, the greater his stress.

Over time, repeated stressful experiences can literally, not just figuratively, alter the nervous systems of the temperamentally vulnerable. Animal research has shown that when a rat is given a small shock, it shows no marked reaction; when exposed to such stressors for five consecutive days, it shows signs of the stress response; when exposed for seven or eight days, the rat has a seizure, and thereafter this "kindled" animal will seize with little or no provocation. Experiments of this kind are of course not done with people, but Philip Gold and other neuroscientists now think that in human beings, too, by triggering a cascade of chemical reactions, serious chronic stress, particularly in early life, causes changes in the way genes within a brain cell function, permanently altering the neuron's biology. Because they require a particular type of input to turn on or off, only some of a neuron's thousands of genes, each of which is involved in some aspect of cellular structure or communication, are activated at any given moment. When a temperamentally vulnerable person is constantly bombarded with upsetting stimuli, Gold says, the genes that get turned on are those involved in the cellular components of the stress response. Over time the person's nervous system is configured accordingly, becoming a kind of two-way radio that specializes in receiving and transmitting unhappy signals. The concluding chapters in what Gold calls "the natural history of an affective disorder" chronicle the repeated struggles of such people with anxiety or what some call its chronic form, depression.

Many more women than men suffer from these so-called mood disorders, and explaining why is a tricky business. Although similar numbers of males and females are inhibited as infants, more of the latter stay that way. Among human beings, some of the discrepancy could be due to the fact that society discourages the tendency in boys. Primate research suggests that a biological explanation applies as well. After the onset of adolescence, females generally have higher levels of serotonin than males, which correlates with their greater sociability; for them, the greatest stress continues to be trouble with relationships. "After puberty, male monkeys have a much bigger set of challenges to deal with," Stephen Suomi says. "They have to leave home and get into a new troop. To help them do what they must do to survive, evolution may have blunted their response to social stress." In short, many males may be physiologically, not just psychologically, less sensitive to the social issues that upset females.

YOUNG TROUBLEMAKERS

FORTUNATELY, the type of nervous system likeliest to be kindled by a poor environment can be strengthened by a supportive one. Kagan predicts that seventy-five out of a hundred inhibited two-year-olds will eventually have normal social lives. It's probably no coincidence that three quarters of Gunnar' s reactive children, in her estimate, have the secure relationships that will enable them to "learn to be kind to themselves and back off a little in a stressful situation, neither negating nor overdoing their anxiety, until we can't even see the stress response anymore." Gunnar says, "You may be a certain way for the rest of your life, but the big issue is how you manage it -- or not." Gold says about innately inhibited individuals, "In their quiet, introverted way, they can acquire the skills that allow them to be resolute and to endure anxiety and pain. They might look timid but be like a rock. If the fate of the Western world depended on someone not giving up a secret under torture, I'd rather put it in such hands than in those of a seemingly bold person who hadn't had to learn those complex skills." Fox suspects that when inhibited children learn to handle stress, the physiological marker associated with fearfulness might disappear from their EEGs: once again, it appears that experience can modify the brain.

That message is particularly important where the aggressive are concerned. Gene-environment correlation virtually guarantees that raising aggression-prone children in settings that impose few limits -- and such settings have proliferated since the 1950s -- will create mayhem. When so-called "difficult" babies, who are so cranky, demanding, and hard to please that they strain even model parents, are paired with negligent mothers, for example, their risk of developing behavioral problems soars. Where the etiology of crime is concerned, even a "biological fascist" like Lykken blames nurture -- specifically, the sort provided by escalating numbers of incompetent single parents. A few of the young troublemakers who are destroying schools and neighborhoods are psychopaths whose psychobiological peculiarities would challenge the civilizing skills of any parents; but the vast majority, Lykken says, have relatively normal temperaments that are simply unsocialized. "Many little boys are potential criminals who find it perfectly natural to take things, break things, and beat up on people. It's their parents' responsibility to stomp some of that out -- to inhibit antisocial behavior, instill prosocial values, and cultivate the work ethic. Because it's such a tough job, it takes two people. Adoption agencies usually give babies to mature, self-supporting, sane married couples who have no criminal records. Why should there be fewer criteria for starting off a biological child?"

Temperament research shows that good parenting can have potent effects. If it can alter a hypersensitive physiology, Higley reasons, it could affect a belligerent one, too. He plans to rear impulsive, ornery young monkeys with adults "who demand that they behave appropriately, and punish them when they don't," and to monitor changes in their neurochemistry along with changes in their behavior. He suspects that he'll see their low serotonin levels rise. Like many of his biology-minded colleagues, Higley often argues from the other side of the ideological fence, "trying to convince people that having a genetically modified trait doesn't mean that you're programmed." He says, "Someone could be disposed to respond with inappropriate aggression but learn early in life that if he does, he'll get into trouble. He may also learn to like the reinforcement he gets from positive interactions."

As is the case with Slick Willy, praise can sometimes inspire better behavior than punishment, which only makes some tough kids tougher. "If your temperament is such that fear doesn't play a big role in your life," Lykken says, "you're less likely to pay attention to punishment, which depends on the desire to avoid anxiety. That kind of child may care if people stop admiring him, though, so the way to socialize him is by giving him a sense of pride, as successful coaches do."

At a time of fractured families and communities, research on the modification of temperament has very practical applications. Some so-called "resilient" children, who turn out well amid the neglect and poverty that stunt so many others, inherit some of their strength. If early social support can override biology, however, the resilient can be made as well as born.

TIME AND DIRECTION

TINKERING with adult temperament is more difficult -- so much so that one might consider simply making the best of what one has got. Even if that's not so bad, the satisfaction afforded by a disposition depends greatly on milieu. The inhibition that America finds sissified is part of the national character of Japan, for example, and it has been said that Lord Byron, the hero of the Romantic era, would have been regarded as a madman in the previous Age of Enlightenment. In Twilight of the Golds, a recent Broadway play, characters debate whether a fetus destined to be homosexual should be aborted. When the Human Genome Project is finished, in ten or fifteen years, temperamental traits could inspire similarly chilling discussions. As Kagan says, "When the masses can use genetic information to mate selectively, society will face a big ethical problem."

Partly because social influences have such a profound effect on how we regard temperament, Kagan feels that "whether you should try to change or accept yourself is a political question." He says, "There are many good things about being, say, introverted -- think of Wittgenstein. But now the cultural ideal is Bill Clinton. If you happen to have an unfashionable personality, you suffer the consequences." Sometimes a deeper understanding of why one is the way one is brings peace. Once, after Kagan gave a talk at a scientific conference, the scientist who had spoken before him invited him to lunch. "For sixty years I've been blaming my mother for my introversion,' he said, 'and now I see that it's temperament," Kagan recalls. "Suddenly, he saw his life differently and felt better about it."

The no-frills approach to coping with one's temperament is choosing settings that suit it. Richard Burtons and Jane Digbys don't belong on assembly lines, nor Queen Victorias in used-car lots. "If you have brittle bones," Eysenck says, "there's not a lot you can do about it other than to avoid risky activities like skiing. If you're inclined to be anxious, you can avoid the situations that produce those symptoms."

Sometimes a disposition can be neither accepted nor accommodated. "Temperament casts its longest shadow in those who have a very dour tone," Kagan says. "There are some people who never feel good inside. If we could enter deep into Sylvia Plath's limbic system, and listen, and feel what she felt ..." Kagan allows that psychotherapy -- particularly the behavioral kind, in which the client learns new responses to old stimuli -- has "some modest success in helping people change certain qualities." Akiskal is a bit more positive about the open-ended psychodynamic therapy so often criticized these days. Although its results resist quantification, "the more leisurely treatment helps those who want to be more reflective and insightful," he says. "We may simply not know how to measure its efficacy."

As Peter D. Kramer observes in the bestseller Listening to Prozac, drugs designed to alter the transmitter imbalances linked to depression and other disorders are increasingly touted as temperamental tune-ups for people who are not ill in the conventional sense but want to be bolder, say, or more energetic. Gold dismisses the notion that such medicines can be used as psychic vitamins to pep up a normal personality. "People whose arousal systems are not perturbed do not respond to these agents. The idea that healthy people who take Prozac feel better is absolutely ridiculous." He finds repellent as well as unrealistic the notion that psychiatry will someday provide painless living through chemistry. "To respond to the loss of a loved one or a cherished dream casually is grotesque. To 'feel better' means to feel one's feelings better, including sadness or anger, without getting stuck in them."

The easiest way to experience a change in temperament is to wait. From childhood through old age, our psyches alter along with our bodies, according to inexorable schedules set by our biological clocks. Toddlers and teenagers offer flamboyant examples of this phenomenon, and subtler manifestations may include what Margaret Mead called "post-menopausal zest." Although middle-aged men don't undergo the well-defined endocrinological shift that women do, Auke Tellegen, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota, who devised the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire, suspects that they experience something similar, albeit more gradual. "For lack of hormones," he says, "perhaps a man will be a Zen monk at seventy." Even thrill-seeking psychopaths lose some of what Lykken calls their "lustful vigor" in their forties. Some develop respectable ways of walking on the wild side. After spending much of his earlier life in prison, one of Lykken's subjects succeeded in business and bought a plane. "I set off to go flying with him," Lykken says, "thinking, 'What am I doing? He's going to stand the plane on end and scare me to death.' But he flew like a transport pilot, because his self-esteem is now involved with being licensed to fly jets and do all sorts of things the average amateur can't."

As the high-flying ex-con illustrates, one's mode of involvement may not change much, but one's focus can, creating the possibility of a different kind of life with the same old temperament. Religious conversions are Tellegen's favorite example: "Charles Colson would have beat his grandmother to death when he was with Nixon, but then he was 'born again.' He probably always had a very emotional, intense temperament, but now he has different enemies and friends. His nature didn't change -- he just does something else with all that zeal."

Volume:	274
Issue:	3
Start Page:	38
ISSN:	10727825
Subject Terms:	Psychology Personality Personal development Genetics Biology

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.

An 'R' Rating for Wrestling

By ROBERT STRAUSS

RESEARCHERS in North Carolina say they have found a link between teenagers' watching pro wrestling on television and violence in dating.

The study, by Dr. Robert H. DuRant, professor and vice chairman of the department of pediatrics at Wake Forest University Medical School in Winston-Salem, N.C., followed 2,228 randomly selected North Carolina high school students for a year. For those who
watched wrestling, the study showed a higher incidence of starting a fight with a date, being a victim of a date fight, carrying a gun, driving while intoxicated and nonprescription Ritalin use.

              "It is another case of when you watch violence in the media, the chance of participating in violence is increased," Dr. DuRant said. "What you see in wrestling is a fair amount of men and women hitting each other. There are the large-breasted, scantily clad women who may help their guy out by jumping on the other wrestler or
              kicking him in the groin. Then there are the women who are hit by the wrestlers and even the announcers justifying that it is O.K."
              A spokesman for the World Wrestling Federation called the study insubstantial and overblown. "Even Dr. DuRant admits that there are third variables that may influence his outcome," said Gary Davis, the spokesman. "There may be lots of problems in the home — depression, divorce, academic stresses."

Mr. Davis called attention to a federation Web site (www.wwf parents.com) that asks parents to talk about wrestling programs with their children. Its home page reads in part: "We urge parents who allow younger children to watch our programming to explain that what our superstars do on television should not be emulated or attempted in real life."

              But Dr. DuRant says the problem is that what the federation portrays on the screen reinforces tendencies to violence. Somewhat surprisingly, he said, young women
              who watch wrestling regularly are more susceptible to causing date violence than even those young men who watch — though the number of women in the study was relatively small.
              Dr. Howard R. Spivak, a professor of pediatrics and community health at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston, said he was disturbed by the findings about girls.

"That adds another dimension, but it is consistent with the gender elements that wrestling is portraying," he said. "Women are portrayed in a derogatory manner, as sex objects and violent people. It appears that this modeling is being picked up by teenage girls who are watching it."

QUESTIONING A JUVENILE? PROCEED WITH CAUTION!

Are you questioning a juvenile in relation to a fire? Is he in

custody, necessitating Miranda warnings, or are you gathering

information from a fact witness? A recent court decision discusses the

potential risks presented when interviewing juveniles. Investigators

need to ensure compliance with statutes/standards applicable in their

jurisdiction to ensure juvenile statements are admissible. Failure to

do so risks reversing any delinquency finding or criminal conviction

obtained.

THE "DOE" CASE

In United States of America v. John Doe (9th Cir. 2000) No. 99-50250,

the Court of Appeals reviewed a trial adjudicating a minor delinquent

for importing a controlled substance into the country. He was confined

for 18 months and then placed on probation. The juvenile was entering

the United States in a pickup truck as a passenger. The inspector

noticed unusual features of the gas tank and directed it to a

secondary inspection at 12:35 a.m. A closer examination revealed an

altered gas tank. The driver and juvenile were detained, searched, and

seated on benches at the checkpoint area. They were not questioned.

A drug detection dog alerted on the truck. A subsequent inspection

found drugs at 2:30 a.m. Between 2:50 a.m. and 3:00 a.m., the

inspectors notified the security officers. The juvenile and driver

were then moved to detention cells.

At 6:30 a.m., federal special agents met with the juvenile. They

obtained a telephone number for his parents. He gave them the number

but advised them his parents did not speak English so they should

speak to his sister. One agent left to call the sister, while the

other agent continued to interview the juvenile about his personal

history without complying with Miranda.

The special agent who spoke to the sister advised her that her brother

was arrested for smuggling drugs. The agent did not inform the sister

that the juvenile would be undergoing interrogation, nor did he inform

her of his Miranda rights. The agent promised to call back.

At 6:36 a.m., the agent read the juvenile his Miranda rights. The

agent read through the standardized form and asked him if he

understood the rights. The juvenile indicated he did. The agent asked

the juvenile to waive his rights by reading the waiver form and

signing it. He read and signed the form. The juvenile made several

statements indicating he knew the truck contained drugs and that he

had been offered money to go to Mexico with the driver and bring the

drugs back in the truck. The interrogation lasted about 15 to 20

minutes and ended at 7:00 a.m. The United States Attorney's Office was

later notified of the arrest. After fingerprinting and processing, the

juvenile was booked into a juvenile facility. He was not booked into

the primary facility used by federal authorities because the facility

did not accept juveniles.

It was not until the next day that the juvenile was brought before a

magistrate judge. The U.S. Marshals Service had in place a policy that

juveniles not booked into a federal facility could be brought to the

courthouse only between 7:00 a.m. and 8:00 a.m. By that time, the

juvenile had already been booked into the juvenile facility. Despite a

request by the special agent, no exception was made for the juvenile.

The magistrate did not have a hearing with the juvenile until the next

day, nearly 32 hours after his arrest.

The juvenile moved to suppress his statements on the basis that they

had been obtained in violation of 18 U.S.C. section 5033, the federal

procedures required on arrest of a juvenile. The district court found

the government violated the statute by failing to tell the parents he

was going to be interviewed and that he had certain rights. Further,

the district court found the juvenile was not taken before the

magistrate in a timely manner as required. Nevertheless, the district

court denied the motion to suppress finding that the violations did

not raise to a level of due process or cause prejudice.

Title 18 U.S.C. section 5033 states:

"Custody Prior To Appearance Before Magistrate. Whenever a juvenile is

taken into custody for an alleged act of juvenile delinquency the

arresting officer shall immediately advise such juvenile of his legal

rights, in language comprehensible to a juvenile, and shall

immediately notify the Attorney General and juvenile's parents,

guardian or custodian of such custody. The arresting officer shall

also notify the parents, guardian or custodian of the rights of the

juvenile and of the nature of the alleged offense.

"The juvenile shall be taken before a magistrate forthwith. In no

event shall the juvenile be detained for longer than a reasonable

period of time before being brought before a magistrate."

The juvenile argued the government violated every aspect of the above

noted section. The government failed to immediately notify him of his

rights, failed to immediately notify his parents, failed to inform his

parents that he had Miranda rights, and failed to bring him before a

magistrate forthwith.

The court had to determine whether the juvenile was arrested and taken

into custody to determine application of section 5033. The Ninth

Circuit Court of Appeals held once drugs were found and the juvenile

was placed into a locked cell, no reasonable person would have

believed he was free to leave. Therefore, he was placed into custody

no later than 3:00 a.m.

The juvenile was not read his Miranda rights until 6:36 a.m. Hence, he

had been in custody for 31/2 hours. That delay violated the statute.

The government did not attempt to notify the juvenile's parents until

3 1/2 hours after he was placed into custody. The statute identifies

custody as the triggering event requiring notification, not

interrogation. The government's delay in attempting to contact the

parents also violated the statute.

The court found that the parents were not notified of his Miranda

rights. Lastly, 31 1/2 hours had elapsed between the time the juvenile

was taken under custody and the time he was brought before a

magistrate. The court found no justification for the delay of bringing

the juvenile before a magistrate. Further, the policy in place by the

U.S. Marshal violated the Federal Juvenile Delinquency Act.

The trial court had found that although there were violations of the

statute, the minor's confession did not have to be suppressed. The

Court of Appeals disagreed. The Court of Appeals stated, "Juveniles

need parental involvement during interrogation. The requirement that

parents be advised of their arrested child's rights is surely not for

the purpose of imparting general information in the abstract. Congress

obviously intended that parents be informed of their children's rights

so that they can assist their children in a meaningful way. The court

held that if the juvenile or his parents request to communicate and

confer with each other prior to questioning, such a request may not be

unreasonably refused." The juvenile's sister who had been contacted

testified that if she had been advised of her brother's Miranda

rights, she would have told him to remain silent until they knew what

was going on and found out all the legalities of where he stood. That

would have included her parents' meeting with a public defender or

other legal representative. Hence, the Court found that the government

interfered with the juvenile's right to remain silent. He was

prejudiced because his statements were the sole source of proof of his

knowledge of the drugs.

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR INTERVIEWING JUVENILES

If you are a federal firefighter, special agent, or federal

investigator, and you are questioning a juvenile in a custodial

setting where Miranda applies, compliance with Title 18 U.S.C. section

5033 is mandatory. Failure to comply with section 5033 requirements

can lead to disastrous results, as noted above.

All your hard investigative work can be wasted if the juvenile

delinquency finding is overturned. Fire department personnel and

government agency investigators employed by local or state agencies

must know what the law in their state is on questioning juveniles.

In California, those requirements are discussed in the Welfare and

Institution Code. Section 627.5 of the Welfare and Institution Code

codifies the advice to be given a minor as to constitutional rights.

That section follows standard Miranda warnings. Those warnings are

required to be given when a police officer takes a minor before a

probation officer. The police officer who takes the minor into

temporary custody does so if the minor committed a misdemeanor and is

habitually disobedient or truant or has committed a felony. The police

officer that has a minor in custody may not interrogate him unless

warnings are given and waived. Notice to parents is also critical to

ensure the minor's waiver is effective.

If you are a federal employee conducting a custodial interrogation of

a juvenile, compliance with Miranda and parental notification issues

is critical. As the court noted above, parents need to be informed and

have involvement in the interrogation of their child. If the parent

requests to talk to the child prior to questioning, such a request

should not be unreasonably refused.

PROTECTING THE INVESTIGATION RESULTS

Appropriate interviewing of juveniles ensures obtained statements are

admissible in a juvenile or adult proceeding. Further, compliance with

applicable state statutes and regulations promotes public confidence

in the integrity of fire officials and law enforcement personnel. At a

time when some are skeptical of the criminal justice system, it is

better to err on the side of caution than to have the results of a

diligent investigation lost for failure to comply with procedural

safeguards adopted to protect juveniles.

~~~~~~~~

By Peter A. Lynch , SFPE (FELLOW)

PETER A. LYNCH is a member of the national law firm of Cozen and

O'Connor practicing in its San Diego regional office. He is the legal

advisor to the San Diego County Wide Arson Task Force and a legal

columnist for the California Conference of Arson Investigators.

_________________

Co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or

posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written

permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for

individual use.

Source: Fire Engineering, Feb2001, Vol. 154 Issue 2, p166, 3p.

Item Number: 4108198

Monday, May 7, 2001

Study finds Phila. homicides often black-on-black crimes

By Barbara Boyer and Thomas J. Gibbons Jr.

INQUIRER STAFF WRITERS

More than three-fourths of those arrested on suspicion of murder in Philadelphia - and more than

half of those killed are young, black males, according to a newly published study obtained by

The Inquirer.

The study examines 1,460 homicides and 1,038 arrests in Philadelphia from 1996 to 1999.

The report also includes an analysis of 100 random homicides and arrests in the 25th Police

District, headquartered in Kensington. It shows that more than half of those arrested in killings -

54 percent - were on probation, awaiting trial, or awaiting sentencing for other crimes at the time they allegedly committed murder.

"This is a shocking indictment of our criminal justice system," Police Commissioner John F.

Timoney wrote in the report. "But it also poses a tremendous challenge for all of us in the system."

Because of the city's high homicide rate, Timoney commissioned the report to identify patterns of violent crime. The report was financed privately by the William Penn Foundation, a public interest group, and published by Public/Private Ventures, a national nonprofit research group.

But the 42-page report argues that the problem cannot be solved simply by putting more people in jail. According to the report, 45,000 adults are on probation in Philadelphia. An additional 9,000 are fugitives. The prison capacity in the city is 6,200, and although the state's capacity is 26,000, Pennsylvania houses 38,000 inmates.

Additionally, the report notes that while homicide rates have dropped since a peak in 1990, when 500 people were murdered in the city, there was an 8 percent increase in 2000, with 319 killings compared with 296 in 1999.

The report points out that in 1998, Philadelphia ranked among the highest among major cities for

its homicide rate with 26 murders for every 100,000 residents - more per capita than New York City and Los Angeles. According to FBI statistics, Detroit and Chicago ranked higher.

"Among the most shocking findings in this research is the fact that so many alleged murderers were involved with the justice system at the time of their crime," according to the report.

"Clearly the time is ripe for a closer look at the systems that oversee offenders, in particular, the

probation system."

Among other findings in the study:

Nine out of 10 suspects were men.

More than half of those who killed were younger than 25.

At least 67 percent of those killed were younger than 35.

At least 77 percent of those killed were shot with handguns.

About 25 percent of all homicides were drug-related.

Of the 100 suspects in the random study, nine out of 10 had criminal histories.

Of the victims, 52 percent had criminal histories.

Of all the homicides studied from 1996 through 1999, 75 percent of the victims were African

American, 13 percent were Latino, 11 percent were white, and 2 percent were Asian American.

Of those charged with murder, 76 percent were African American, 17 percent were Latino, 5

percent were white, and 2 percent were Asian American.

The study also notes that from 1996 to 1999, African American males aged 18 to 24 made up 2 percent of the city's population, 24 percent of its murder victims, and 40 percent of murder

suspects.

"Looking at the statistics, we can say where the next murder is going to be - almost. We can say

when, and even why - almost. We can say who is going to be involved on each side of the trigger

- almost," the study reports. "But do we know enough to actually step between the killer and his

victim and stop the crime? No."

The study suggests that to reduce the homicide rate, the problem must be contained by

rehabilitating probation, diverting young people from violent patterns before the patterns turn fatal, and holding those within public safety more accountable.

An April 20 incident fits a typical profile in Philadelphia: a young, African American male on probation allegedly using a gun to kill another young, African American male on a weekend in one of the city's poorest neighborhoods.

At age 17, James McAllister already had a three-year criminal history and was on probation

when, authorities say, he leveled his gun during a street fight and took the life of a bystander a

block away.

The teenager, who was on probation for aggravated assault and robbery when he allegedly killed19-year-old Nafes Johnson in Point Breeze, is a prime example of the problems that arealaw-enforcement officials face in bringing down Philadelphia's high homicide rate, authorities say.

McAllister turned himself in yesterday at police headquarters.

Barbara Boyer's e-mail address is bboyer@phillynews.com.

CHAPTER 63. JUVENILE MATTERS

The Juvenile Act

Subchapter A. General Provisions

Subchapter B. Jurisdiction and Custody

Subchapter C. Procedures and Safeguards

Subchapter D. Disposition of Children Generally

Subchapter E. Dispositions Affecting Other Jurisdictions

[Note: Pennsylvania Rule of Civil Procedure No. 1915.24, readopted November 8, 1982, provided that Chapter 63 shall not be deemed suspended or affected by Rules 1915.1 through 1915.25 governing actions for custody, partial custody and visitation of minor children.]

SUBCHAPTER A - GENERAL PROVISIONS

¤ 6301. Short title and purposes of chapter.

¤ 6302. Definitions.

¤ 6303. Scope of chapter.

¤ 6304. Powers and duties of probation officers.

¤ 6305. Masters.

¤ 6306. Costs and expenses of care of child.

¤ 6307. Inspection of court files and records.

¤ 6308. Law enforcement records.

¤ 6309. Juvenile history record information.

¤ 6310. Parental participation.

¤ 6301. Short title and purposes of chapter.

(a) Short title.--This chapter shall be known and may be cited as the "Juvenile Act."

(b) Purposes.--This chapter shall be interpreted and construed as to effectuate the following purposes:

(1)To preserve the unity of the family whenever possible or to provide another alternative permanent family when the unity of the family cannot be maintained.

(1.1) To provide for the care, protection, safety and wholesome mental and physical development of children coming within the provisions of this chapter.

(2) Consistent with the protection of the public interest, to provide for children committing delinquent acts programs of supervision, care and rehabilitation which provide balanced attention to the protection of the community, the imposition of accountability for offenses committed and the development of competencies to enable children to become responsible and productive members of the community.

(3) To achieve the foregoing purposes in a family environment whenever possible, separating the child from parents only when necessary for his welfare or in the interests of public safety.

(4) To provide means through which the provisions of this chapter are executed and enforced and in which the parties are assured a fair hearing and their constitutional and other legal rights recognized and enforced.

¤ 6302. Definitions.

The following words and phrases when used in this chapter shall have, unless the context clearly indicates otherwise, the meanings given to them in this section: "Aggravated circumstances."

Any of the following circumstances:

1. The child is in the custody of a county agency and either:

i. the identity or whereabouts of the parents is unknown and cannot be ascertained and the parent does not claim the child within three months of the date the child was taken into custody; or

ii. the identity or whereabouts of the parents is known and the parents have failed to maintain substantial and continuing contact with the child for a period of six months.

2. The child or another child of the parent has been the victim of physical abuse resulting in serious bodily injury, sexual violence or aggravated physical neglect by the parent.

3. the parent of the child has been convicted of any of the following offenses where the victim was a child:

i. criminal homicide under 18 Pa.C.S. Ch. 25 (relating to criminal homicide);

ii. a felony under 18 Pa.C.S. ¤ 2702 (relating to aggravated assault), 3121 (relating to rape), 3122.1 (relating to statutory sexual assault), 3123 (relating to involuntary deviate sexual intercourse), 3124.1 (relating to sexual assault) or 3125 (relating to aggravated indecent assault).

iii. A misdemeanor under 18 Pa.C.S. ¤ 3126 (relating to indecent assault).

iv. An equivalent crime in another jurisdiction.

4. The attempt, solicitation or conspiracy to commit any of the offenses set forth in paragraph (3).

5. The parental rights of the parent have been involuntarily terminated with respect to a child of the parent.

"Aggravated physical neglect."

Any omission in the care of a child which results in a life-threatening condition or seriously impairs the child's functioning.

"Child."

An individual who:

1. is under the age of 18 years;

2. is under the age of 21 years who committed an act of delinquency before reaching the age of 18 years; or

3. was adjudicated dependent before reaching the age of 18 years and who, while engaged in a course of instruction or treatment, requests the court to retain jurisdiction until the course has been completed, but in no event shall a child remain in a course of instruction or treatment past the age of 21 years.

"County agency."

The term as defined in 23 Pa.C.S. ¤ 6303 (relating to definitions).

"Court."

The court of common pleas.

"Court-appointed special advocate" or "CASA."

An individual appointed by the court to participate as an advocate for a child who is dependent or alleged to be dependent.

"Custodian."

A person other than a parent or legal guardian, who stands in loco parentis to the child, or a person to whom legal custody of the child has been given by order of a court.

"Delinquent act."

1. The term means an act designated a crime under the law of this Commonwealth, or of another state if the act occurred in that state, or under Federal law, or under local ordinances.

2. The term shall not include:

i. The crime of murder.

ii. Any of the following prohibited conduct where the child was 15 years of age or older at the time of the alleged conduct and a deadly weapon as defined in 18 Pa.C.S. ¤ 2301 (relating to definitions) was used during the commission of the offense which, if committed by an adult, would be classified as:

(A) Rape as defined in 18 Pa.C.S. ¤ 3121 (relating to rape).

(B) Involuntary deviate sexual intercourse as defined in 18 Pa.C.S. ¤ 3123 (relating to involuntary deviate sexual intercourse).

(D) Robbery as defined in 18 Pa.C.S. ¤ 3701(a)(1)(i), (ii) or (iii) (relating to robbery).

(E) Robbery of motor vehicle as defined in 18 Pa.C.S. ¤ 3702 (relating to robbery of motor vehicle).

(F) Aggravated indecent assault as defined in 18 Pa.C.S. ¤ 3125 (relating to aggravated indecent assault).

(G) Kidnapping as defined in 18 Pa.C.S. ¤ 2901 (relating to kidnapping).

(H) Voluntary manslaughter.

(I) An attempt, conspiracy or solicitation to commit murder or any of these crimes as provided in 18 Pa.C.S. ¤¤ 901 (relating to criminal attempt), 902 (relating to criminal solicitation) and 903 (relating to criminal conspiracy).

iii. Any of the following prohibited conduct where the child was 15 years of age or older at the time of the alleged conduct and has been previously adjudicated delinquent of any of the following prohibited conduct which, if committed by an adult, would be classified as:

(A) Rape as defined in 18 Pa.C.S. ¤ 3121.

(B) Involuntary deviate sexual intercourse as defined in 18 Pa.C.S. ¤ 3123.

(D) Robbery of motor vehicle as defined in 18 Pa.C.S. ¤ 3702.

(E) Aggravated indecent assault as defined in 18 Pa.C.S. ¤ 3125.

(F) Kidnapping as defined in 18 Pa.C.S. ¤ 2901.

(G) Voluntary manslaughter.

(H) An attempt, conspiracy or solicitation to commit murder or any of these crimes as provided in 18 Pa.C.S. ¤¤ 901, 902 and 903.

iv. Summary offenses, unless the child fails to comply with a lawful sentence imposed thereunder, in which event notice of such fact shall be certified to the court.

v. A crime committed by a child who has been found guilty in a criminal proceeding for other than a summary offense.

"Delinquent child."

A child ten years of age or older whom the court has found to have committed a delinquent act and is in need of treatment, supervision or rehabilitation.

"Dependent child."

A child who:

1. is without proper parental care or control, subsistence, education as required by law, or other care or control necessary for his physical, mental, or emotional health, or morals. A determination that there is a lack of proper parental care or control may be based upon evidence of conduct by the parent, guardian or other custodian that places the health, safety or welfare of the child at risk, including evidence of the parent's, guardian's or other custodian's use of alcohol or a controlled substance that places the health, safety, or welfare of the child at risk;

2. has been placed for care or adoption in violation of law;

3. has been abandoned by his parents, guardian, or other custodian;

4. is without a parent, guardian, or legal custodian;

5. while subject to compulsory school attendance is habitually and without justification truant from school;

6. has committed a specific act or acts of habitual disobedience of the reasonable and lawful commands of his parent, guardian or other custodian and who is ungovernable and found to be in need of care, treatment or supervision;

7. is under the age of ten years and has committed a delinquent act;

8. has been formerly adjudicated dependent, and is under the jurisdiction of the court, subject to its conditions or placements and who commits an act which is defined as ungovernable in paragraph (6);

9. has been referred pursuant to section 6323 (relating to informal adjustment), and who commits an act which is defined as ungovernable in paragraph (6); or

10. is born to a parent whose parental rights with regard to another child have been involuntarily terminated under 23 Pa.C.S. ¤ 2511 (relating to grounds for involuntary termination) within three years immediately preceding the date of birth of the child and conduct of the parent poses a risk to the health, safety or welfare of the child.

"Facility designed or operated for the benefit of delinquent children."

A facility that either identifies itself by charter, articles of incorporation or program description as solely for delinquent children.

"Protective supervision."

Supervision ordered by the court of children found to be dependent.

"Shelter care."

Temporary care of a child in physically unrestricted facilities. A facility approved by the Department of Public Welfare to provide shelter care may be located in the same building as a facility approved to provide secure detention services provided that children receiving shelter care services are segregated from the children receiving secure detention services as required by the department.

"Serious bodily injury."

Bodily injury which creates a substantial risk of death or which causes serious, permanent disfigurement or protracted loss or impairment of the function of any bodily member or organ.

"Sexual violence."

Rape, indecent contact as defined in 18 Pa.C.S. ¤ 3101 (relating to definitions), incest or using, causing, permitting, persuading or coercing the child to engage in a prohibited sexual act as defined in 18 Pa.C.S. ¤ 6312 (a) (relating to sexual abuse of children) or a simulation of a prohibited sexual act for the purpose of photographing, videotaping, depicting on computer or filming involving the child.

[Note: Section 31 of Act 53 of 1978 limits the liability of counties for costs of operating new shelter care programs for dependent children classified under paragraph (6) of the definition of "dependent child."]

¤ 6303. Scope of chapter.

(a) General rule.--This chapter shall apply exclusively to the following:

1. Proceedings in which a child is alleged to be delinquent or dependent.

2. Transfers under section 6322 (relating to transfer from criminal proceedings).

3. Proceedings arising under Subchapter E (relating to dispositions affecting other jurisdictions).

4. Proceedings under the Interstate Compact on Juveniles, as set forth in section 731 of the act of June 13, 1967 (P.L.31, No.21), known as the Public Welfare Code.

5. Proceedings in which a child is charged with a summary offense arising out of the same episode or transaction involving a delinquent act for which a petition alleging delinquency is filed under this chapter. The summary offense shall be included in any petition regarding the accompanying delinquent act. Upon finding a child to have committed a summary offense, the court may utilize any disposition available to the minor judiciary where a child is found to have committed a summary offense, including a finding of guilt on the summary offense.

(b) Minor judiciary.--No child shall be detained, committed or sentenced to imprisonment by a district justice or a judge of the minor judiciary unless the child is charged with an act set forth in paragraph (2)(i), (ii), (iii) or (v) of the definition of "delinquent act" in section 6302 (relating to definitions).

¤ 6304. Powers and duties of probation officers.

(a) General rule.--For the purpose of carrying out the objectives and purposes of this chapter, and subject to the limitations of this chapter or imposed by the court, a probation officer shall:

1. Make investigations, reports, and recommendations to the court.

2. Receive and examine complaints and charges of delinquency or dependency of a child for the purpose of considering the commencement of proceedings under this chapter.

3. Supervise and assist a child placed on probation or in his protective supervision or care by order of the court or other authority of law.

4. Make appropriate referrals to other private or public agencies of the community if their assistance appears to be needed or desirable.

5. Take into custody and detain a child who is under his supervision or care as a delinquent or dependent child if the probation officer has reasonable cause to believe that the health or safety of the child is in imminent danger, or that he may abscond or be removed from the jurisdiction of the court, or when ordered by the court pursuant to this chapter or that he violated the conditions of his probation.

6. Perform all other functions designated by this chapter or by order of the court pursuant thereto.

(b) Foreign jurisdictions.--Any of the functions specified in subsection (a) may be performed in another jurisdiction if authorized by the court of this Commonwealth and permitted by the laws of the other jurisdiction.

¤ 6305. Masters.

(a) General rule.--The governing authority may promulgate rules for the selection and appointment of masters on a full- time or part-time basis. A master shall be a member of the bar of this Commonwealth. The number and compensation of masters shall be fixed by the governing authority, and their compensation shall be paid by the county.

(b) Hearings before masters.--The court of common pleas may direct that hearings in any case or class of cases be conducted in the first instance by the master in the manner provided in this chapter. Before commencing the hearing the master shall inform the parties who have appeared that they are entitled to have the matter heard by a judge. If a party objects, the hearing shall be conducted by a judge.

(c) Recommendations of masters.--Upon the conclusion of a hearing before a master, he shall transmit written findings and recommendations for disposition to the judge. Prompt written notice and copies of the findings and recommendations shall be given to the parties to the proceeding.

(d) Rehearing before judge.--A rehearing before the judge may be ordered by the judge at any time upon cause shown. Unless a rehearing is ordered, the findings and recommendations become the findings and order of the court when confirmed in writing by the judge.

¤ 6306. Costs and expenses of care of child.

The costs and expenses of the care of the child shall be paid as provided by sections 704.1 and 704.2 of the act of June 13, 1967 (P.L.31, No.21), known as the "Public Welfare Code."

¤ 6307. Inspection of court files and records.

All files and records of the court in a proceeding under this chapter are open to inspection only by:

(1) The judges, officers and professional staff of the court.

(2) The parties to the proceeding and their counsel and representatives, but the persons in this category shall not be permitted to see reports revealing the names of confidential sources of information contained in social reports, except at the discretion of the court.

(3) A public or private agency or institution providing supervision or having custody of the child under order of the court.

(4) A court and its probation and other officials or professional staff and the attorney for the defendant for use in preparing a presentence report in a criminal case in which the defendant is convicted and who prior thereto had been a party to a proceeding under this chapter.

(5) A judge or issuing authority for use in determining bail, provided that such inspection is limited to orders of delinquency adjudications and dispositions and petitions relating thereto, orders resulting from disposition review hearings and histories of bench warrants and escapes.

(6) The Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts.

(6.1) The judges, officers and professional staff of courts of other jurisdictions when necessary for the discharge of their official duties.

(7) With leave of court, any other person or agency or institution having a legitimate interest in the proceedings or in the work of the unified judicial system.

¤ 6308. Law enforcement records.

(a) General rule.--Law enforcement records and files concerning a child shall be kept separate from the records and files of arrests of adults. Unless a charge of delinquency is transferred for criminal prosecution under section 6355 (relating to transfer to criminal proceedings), the interest of national security requires, or the court otherwise orders in the interest of the child, the records and files shall not be open to public inspection or their contents disclosed to the public except as provided in subsection (b); but inspection of the records and files is permitted by:

1. The court having the child before it in any proceeding.

2. Counsel for a party to the proceeding.

3. The officers of institutions or agencies to whom the child is committed.

4. Law enforcement officers of other jurisdictions when necessary for the discharge of their official duties.

5. A court in which the child is convicted of a criminal offense for the purpose of a presentence report or other dispositional proceeding, or by officials of penal institutions and other penal facilities to which he is committed, or by a parole board in considering his parole or discharge or in exercising supervision over him.

(b) Public availability.--

1. The contents of law enforcement records and files concerning a child shall not be disclosed to the public except if the child is 14 or more years of age at the time of the alleged conduct and if any of the following apply:

i. The child has been adjudicated delinquent by a court as a result of an act or acts which include the elements of rape, kidnapping, murder, robbery, arson, burglary, violation of section 13(a)(30) of the act of April 14, 1972 (P.L.233, No.64), known as The Controlled Substance, Drug, Device and Cosmetic Act, or other act involving the use of or threat of serious bodily harm.

ii. A petition alleging delinquency has been filed by a law enforcement agency alleging that the child has committed an act or acts which include the elements of rape, kidnapping, murder, robbery, arson, burglary, violation of section 13(a)(30) of The Controlled Substance, Drug, Device and Cosmetic Act, or other act involving the use of or threat of serious bodily harm and the child previously has been adjudicated delinquent by a court as a result of an act or acts which included the elements of one of such crimes.

2. If the conduct of the child meets the requirements for disclosure as set forth in paragraph (1), then the court or law enforcement agency, as the case may be, shall disclose the name, age and address of the child, the offenses charged and the disposition of the case. The master or judge who adjudicates a child delinquent shall specify the particular offenses and counts thereof which the child is found to have committed and such information shall be inserted on any law enforcement records or files disclosed to the public as provided for in this section.

1. Law enforcement officers shall have the authority to take or cause to be taken the fingerprints or photographs, or both, of any child who is alleged to have committed an act designated as a misdemeanor or felony under the laws of this Commonwealth or of another state if the act occurred in that state or under Federal law.

2. Fingerprint and photographic records may be disseminated to law enforcement officers of other jurisdictions, the Pennsylvania State Police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation and may be used for investigative purposes.

3. Fingerprints and photographic records of children shall be kept separately from adults and shall be immediately destroyed upon notice of the court as provided under section 6341(a) (relating to adjudication) by all persons and agencies having these records if the child is not adjudicated delinquent or not found guilty in a criminal proceeding for reason of the alleged acts.

(d) Pennsylvania State Police registry.--

1. The contents of law enforcement records and files concerning a child shall not be disclosed to the public except if the child is 14 years of age or older at the time of the alleged conduct and if any of the following apply:

i. The child has been adjudicated delinquent by a court as a result of any offense enumerated in 18 Pa.C.S. ¤ 6105 (relating to persons not to possess, use, manufacture, control, sell or transfer firearms).

ii. A petition alleging delinquency has been filed by a law enforcement agency alleging that the child has committed any offense enumerated in 18 Pa.C.S. ¤ 6105 and the child previously has been adjudicated delinquent by a court as a result of an act or acts which included the elements of one of such crimes.

iii. The child is a dangerous juvenile offender.

2. (Repealed).

¤ 6309. Juvenile history record information.

(a) Applicability of Criminal History Record Information Act.--Except for 18 Pa.C.S.¤¤ 9105 (relating to other criminal justice information), 9112(a) and (b) (relating to mandatory fingerprinting) and 9113 (relating to disposition reporting by criminal justice agencies), the remaining provisions of 18 Pa.C.S. Ch. 91 (relating to criminal history record information) shall apply to all alleged delinquents and adjudicated delinquents whose fingerprints and photographs are taken pursuant to section 6308(c) (relating to law enforcement records) and to any juvenile justice agency which collects, maintains, disseminates or receives juvenile history record information.

(b) Central repository.--The Pennsylvania State Police shall establish a Statewide central repository of fingerprints, photographs and juvenile history record information of alleged delinquents and adjudicated delinquents whose fingerprints and photographs are taken pursuant to section 6308(c).

(c) Fingerprints and photographs.--The arresting authority shall ensure that the fingerprints and photographs of alleged and adjudicated delinquents whose fingerprints and photographs have been taken by the arresting authority pursuant to section 6308(c) are forwarded to the central repository as required by the Pennsylvania State Police.

(d) Disposition reporting.--The division or judge of the court assigned to conduct juvenile hearings shall, within seven days after disposition of a case where the child has been alleged to be delinquent, notify the arresting authority of the disposition of the case. In addition, it shall collect and submit to the Juvenile Court Judges' Commission the disposition of cases where a child has been alleged to be delinquent, including the disposition of cases resulting in adjudication of delinquency which shall be submitted for inclusion in the central repository within 90 days of an adjudication of delinquency as required by the Juvenile Court Judges' Commission.

(e) Definitions.--As used in this section, the following words and phrases shall have the meanings given to them in this subsection: "Criminal history record information."

In addition to the meaning in 18 Pa.C.S. ¤ 9102 (relating to definitions), the term includes the meaning of juvenile history record information as defined in this subsection.

"Juvenile history record information."

Information collected pursuant to this section concerning alleged delinquents and adjudicated delinquents whose fingerprints and photographs are taken pursuant to section 6308(c) and arising from the filing of a petition of delinquency, consisting of identifiable descriptions, dates and notations of arrests or other delinquency charges and any adjudication of delinquency or preadjudication disposition other than dismissal arising therefrom. This information shall also include the last known location and the juvenile court jurisdiction status of each adjudicated delinquent. Juvenile history record information shall not include intelligence information, investigative information, treatment information, including medical and psychiatric information, caution indicator information, modus operandi information, wanted persons information, stolen property information, missing persons information, employment history information, personal history information or presentence investigation information.

¤ 6310. Parental participation.

(a) General rule.--In any proceeding under this chapter, a court may order a parent, guardian or custodian to participate in the treatment, supervision or rehabilitation of a child, including, but not limited to, community service, restitution, counseling, treatment and education programs.

(b) Presence at proceedings.--The court may, when the court determines that it is in the best interests of the child, order a parent, guardian or custodian of a child to be present at and to bring the child to any proceeding under this chapter.

(c) Contempt.--A person who, without good cause, fails to comply with an order issued under this section may be found in contempt of court. The court may issue a bench warrant for any parent, guardian or custodian who, without good cause, fails to appear at any proceeding.

(d) Intent.--The General Assembly hereby declares that every parent, guardian or custodian of a child who is the subject of a proceeding under this chapter and a court-ordered program under this chapter should attend the proceeding and participate fully in the program.

(e) Limitation.--Nothing in this section shall be construed to create a right of a child to have his parent, guardian or custodian present at a proceeding under this chapter or participate in a court-ordered program.

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Pennsylvania Consolidated Statutes

JUDICIARY AND JUDICIAL PROCEDURE (TITLE 42)

PART VI. ACTIONS, PROCEEDINGS AND OTHER MATTERS GENERALLY

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CHAPTER 63. JUVENILE MATTERS

Subchapter A. General Provisions

Subchapter B. Jurisdiction and Custody

Subchapter C. Procedures and Safeguards

Subchapter D. Disposition of Children Generally

Subchapter E. Dispositions Affecting Other Jurisdictions

SUBCHAPTER B - JURISDICTION AND CUSTODY

¤ 6321. Commencement of proceedings.

¤ 6322. Transfer from criminal proceedings.

¤ 6323. Informal adjustment.

¤ 6324. Taking into custody.

¤ 6325. Detention of child.

¤ 6326. Release or delivery to court.

¤ 6327. Place of detention.

¤ 6321. Commencement of proceedings.

(a) General rule.--A proceeding under this chapter may be commenced:

(1) By transfer of a case as provided in section 6322 (relating to transfer from criminal proceedings).

(2) By the court accepting jurisdiction as provided in section 6362 (relating to disposition of resident child received from another state) or accepting supervision of a child as provided in section 6364 (relating to supervision under foreign order).

(2.1) By taking a child into custody in accordance with the provisions of section 6324 (relating to taking into custody).

(3) In other cases by the filing of a petition as provided in this chapter. The petition and all other documents in the proceeding shall be entitled "In the interest of.........................., a minor," and shall be captioned and docketed as provided by general rule.

(b) Venue.--A proceeding under this chapter may be commenced:

1. In the county in which the child resides.

2. If delinquency is alleged, in the county in which the acts constituting the alleged delinquency occurred.

3. If dependency is alleged, in the county in which the child is present when it is commenced.

1. If the child resides in a county of this Commonwealth and the proceeding is commenced in a court of another county, the court, on motion of a party or on its own motion made after the adjudicatory hearing or at any time prior to final disposition, may transfer the proceeding to the county of the residence of the child for further action. Like transfers may be made if the residence of the child changes during the proceeding. The proceeding may be transferred if the child has been adjudicated delinquent and other proceedings involving the child are pending in the court of the county of his residence.

2. Certified copies of all legal and social documents and records pertaining to the case on file with the court shall accompany the transfer.

¤ 6322. Transfer from criminal proceedings.

(a) General rule.--Except as provided in 75 Pa.C.S. ¤ 6303 (relating to rights and liabilities of minors) or in the event the child is charged with murder or any of the offenses excluded by paragraph (2)(ii) or (iii) of the definition of "delinquent act" in section 6302 (relating to definitions) or has been found guilty in a criminal proceeding, if it appears to the court in a criminal proceeding that the defendant is a child, this chapter shall immediately become applicable, and the court shall forthwith halt further criminal proceedings, and, where appropriate, transfer the case to the division or a judge of the court assigned to conduct juvenile hearings, together with a copy of the accusatory pleading and other papers, documents, and transcripts of testimony relating to the case. If it appears to the court in a criminal proceeding charging murder or any of the offenses excluded by paragraph (2)(ii) or (iii) of the definition of "delinquent act" in section 6302, that the defendant is a child, the case may similarly be transferred and the provisions of this chapter applied. In determining whether to transfer a case charging murder or any of the offenses excluded from the definition of "delinquent act" in section 6302, the child shall be required to establish by a preponderance of the evidence that the transfer will serve the public interest. In determining whether the child has so established that the transfer will serve the public interest, the court shall consider the factors contained in section 6355(a)(4)(iii) (relating to transfer to criminal proceedings).

(b) Order.--If the court finds that the child has met the burden under subsection (a), the court shall make findings of fact, including specific references to the evidence, and conclusions of law in support of the transfer order. If the court does not make its finding within 20 days of the hearing on the petition to transfer the case, the defendant's petition to transfer the case shall be denied by operation of law.

(c) Expedited review of transfer orders.--The transfer order shall be subject to the same expedited review applicable to orders granting or denying release or modifying the conditions of release prior to sentence, as provided in Rule 1762 of the Pennsylvania Rules of Appellate Procedure.

(d) Effect of transfer order.--Where review of the transfer order is not sought or where the transfer order is upheld the defendant shall be taken forthwith to the probation officer or to a place of detention designated by the court or released to the custody of his parent, guardian, custodian, or other person legally responsible for him, to be brought before the court at a time to be designated. The accusatory pleading may serve in lieu of a petition otherwise required by this chapter, unless the court directs the filing of a petition.

(e) Transfer of convicted criminal cases.--If in a criminal proceeding, the child is found guilty of a crime classified as a misdemeanor, and the child and the attorney for the Commonwealth agree to the transfer, the case may be transferred for disposition to the division or a judge of the court assigned to conduct juvenile hearings.

¤ 6323. Informal adjustment.

(a) General rule.--

1. Before a petition is filed, the probation officer or other officer of the court designated by it, subject to its direction, shall, in the case of a dependent child where the jurisdiction of the court is premised upon the provisions of paragraph (1), (2), (3), (4), (5) or (7) of the definition of "dependent child" in section 6302 (relating to definitions) and if otherwise appropriate, refer the child and his parents to any public or private social agency available for assisting in the matter. Upon referral, the agency shall indicate its willingness to accept the child and shall report back to the referring officer within three months concerning the status of the referral.

2. Similarly, the probation officer may in the case of a delinquent child, or a dependent child where the jurisdiction of the court is permitted under paragraph (6) of the definition of "dependent child" in section 6302, refer the child and his parents to an agency for assisting in the matter.

3. The agency may return the referral to the probation officer or other officer for further informal adjustment if it is in the best interests of the child.

(b) Counsel and advice.--Such social agencies and the probation officer or other officer of the court may give counsel and advice to the parties with a view to an informal adjustment if it appears:

1. counsel and advice without an adjudication would be in the best interest of the public and the child;

2. the child and his parents, guardian, or other custodian consent thereto with knowledge that consent is not obligatory; and

3. in the case of the probation officer or other officer of the court, the admitted facts bring the case within the jurisdiction of the court.

(c) Limitation on duration of counsel and advice.--The giving of counsel and advice by the probation or other officer of the court shall not extend beyond six months from the day commenced unless extended by an order of court for an additional period not to exceed three months.

(d) No detention authorized.--Nothing contained in this section shall authorize the detention of the child.

(e) Privileged statements.--An incriminating statement made by a participant to the person giving counsel or advice and in the discussions or conferences incident thereto shall not be used against the declarant over objection in any criminal proceeding or hearing under this chapter.

¤ 6324. Taking into custody.

A child may be taken into custody:

1. Pursuant to an order of the court under this chapter.

2. Pursuant to the laws of arrest.

3. By a law enforcement officer or duly authorized officer of the court if there are reasonable grounds to believe that the child is suffering from illness or injury or is in imminent danger from his surroundings, and that his removal is necessary.

4. By a law enforcement officer or duly authorized officer of the court if there are reasonable grounds to believe that the child has run away from his parents, guardian, or other custodian.

5. By a law enforcement officer or duly authorized officer of the court if there are reasonable grounds to believe that the child has violated conditions of his probation.

¤ 6325. Detention of child.

A child taken into custody shall not be detained or placed in shelter care prior to the hearing on the petition unless his detention or care is required to protect the person or property of others or of the child or because the child may abscond or be removed from the jurisdiction of the court or because he has no parent, guardian, or custodian or other person able to provide supervision and care for him and return him to the court when required, or an order for his detention or shelter care has been made by the court pursuant to this chapter.

¤ 6326. Release or delivery to court.

(a) General rule.--A person taking a child into custody, with all reasonable speed and without first taking the child elsewhere, shall:

1. notify the parent, guardian or other custodian of the apprehension of the child and his whereabouts;

2. release the child to his parents, guardian, or other custodian upon their promise to bring the child before the court when requested by the court, unless his detention or shelter care is warranted or required under section 6325 (relating to detention of child); or

3. bring the child before the court or deliver him to a detention or shelter care facility designated by the court or to a medical facility if the child is believed to suffer from a serious physical condition or illness which requires prompt treatment. He shall promptly give written notice, together with a statement of the reason for taking the child into custody, to a parent, guardian, or other custodian and to the court.

Any temporary detention or questioning of the child necessary to comply with this subsection shall conform to the procedures and conditions prescribed by this chapter and other provisions of law.

(b) Detention in police lockup generally prohibited.--Unless a child taken into custody is alleged to have committed a crime or summary offense or to be in violation of conditions of probation or other supervision following an adjudication of delinquency, the child may not be detained in a municipal police lockup or cell or otherwise held securely within a law enforcement facility or structure which houses an adult lockup. A child shall be deemed to be held securely only when physically detained or confined in a locked room or cell or when secured to a cuffing rail or other stationary object within the facility.

(c) Detention in police lockup under certain circumstances.--A child alleged to have committed a crime or summary offense or to be in violation of conditions of probation or other supervision following an adjudication of delinquency may be held securely in a municipal police lockup or other facility which houses an adult lockup only under the following conditions:

1. the secure holding shall only be for the purpose of identification, investigation, processing, releasing or transferring the child to a parent, guardian, other custodian or juvenile court or county children and youth official, or to a shelter care or juvenile detention center;

2. the secure holding shall be limited to the minimum time necessary to complete the procedures listed in paragraph (1), but in no case may such holding exceed six hours; and

3. if so held, a child must be separated by sight and sound from incarcerated adult offenders and must be under the continuous visual supervision of law enforcement officials or facility staff.

(d) Conditions of detention.--Notwithstanding other provisions of law, a child held in nonsecure custody in a building or facility which houses an adult lockup may be so held only under the following conditions:

1. the area where the child is held is an unlocked multipurpose area which is not designated or used as a secure detention area or is not part of a secure detention area; or, if the area is a secure booking or similar area, it is used only for processing purposes;

2. the child is not physically secured to a cuffing rail or other stationary object during the period of custody in the facility;

3. the area is limited to providing nonsecure custody only long enough for the purposes of identification, investigation, processing or release to parents or for arranging transfer to another agency or appropriate facility; and

4. the child must be under continuous visual supervision by a law enforcement officer or other facility staff during the period of nonsecure custody.

(e) Reports regarding children held in custody.--Law enforcement agencies shall provide information and reports regarding children held in secure and nonsecure custody under subsections (c) and (d) as requested by the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency.

(f) Enforcement of undertaking to produce child.--If a parent, guardian, or other custodian, when requested, fails to bring the child before the court as provided in subsection (a), the court may issue its warrant directing that the child be taken into custody and brought before the court.

¤ 6327. Place of detention.

(a) General rule.--A child alleged to be delinquent may be detained only in:

1. A licensed foster home or a home approved by the court.

2. A facility operated by a licensed child welfare agency or one approved by the court.

3. A detention home, camp, center or other facility for delinquent children which is under the direction or supervision of the court or other public authority or private agency, and is approved by the Department of Public Welfare.

4. Any other suitable place or facility, designated or operated by the court and approved by the Department of Public Welfare.

Under no circumstances shall a child be detained in any facility with adults, or where the child is apt to be abused by other children.

(b) Report by correctional officer of receipt of child.--The official in charge of a jail or other facility for the detention of adult offenders or persons charged with crime shall inform the court immediately if a person who is or appears to be under the age of 18 years is received at the facility and shall bring him before the court upon request or deliver him to a detention or shelter care facility designated by the court.

(c) Detention in jail prohibited.--It is unlawful for any person in charge of or employed by a jail knowingly to receive for detention or to detain in the jail any person whom he has or should have reason to believe is a child unless, in a criminal proceeding, the child has been charged with or has been found guilty of an act set forth in paragraph (2)(i), (ii), (iii) or (v) of the definition of "delinquent act" in section 6302 (relating to definitions).

(d) Transfer of child subject to criminal proceedings.--If a case is transferred for criminal prosecution the child may be transferred to the appropriate officer or detention facility in accordance with the law governing the detention of persons charged with crime. The court in making the transfer may order continued detention as a juvenile pending trial if the child is unable to provide bail.

(e) Detention of dependent child.--A child alleged to be dependent may be detained or placed only in a Department of Public Welfare approved shelter care facility as stated in subsection (a)(1), (2) and (4), and shall not be detained in a jail or other facility intended or used for the detention of adults charged with criminal offenses, but may be detained in the same shelter care facilities with alleged delinquent children.

(f) Development of approved shelter care programs.--The Department of Public Welfare shall develop or assist in the development in each county of this Commonwealth approved programs for the provision of shelter care for children needing these services who have been taken into custody under section 6324 (relating to taking into custody) and for children referred to or under the jurisdiction of the court.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Visit/Return to Home Page of Pennsylvania District Court 15-4-

March 26, 2002

YOUTH COURTS: A NATIONAL YOUTH JUSTICE MOVEMENT

Youth courts, also called teen courts, are a rapidly expanding

voluntary alternative to the juvenile justice system for young people

who have committed their first misdemeanors and/or offenses. Youth

court: strive to promote in juveniles feelings of self-esteem and

the desire for self-improvement, and to foster a healthy attitude toward

rules and authority. Youth courts also offer civic opportunities for

young people to become volunteer members of the court. Youth courts

are operated by schools, police departments, probation departments,

juvenile and family courts, and nonprofit organizations. In most

cases, youth courts operate as a joint venture among several

agencies.

The most successful courts are those that are community-based and

include participation from a wide range of organizations and

agencies within that community.

Youth court proceedings include juvenile offenders and youths who

volunteer to be jurors and members of the court, often in the roles

of judge, prosecutor, defender, clerk/bailiff and jury foreperson.

Sentencing is designed to hold youths accountable within the context

of the recognition that peer pressure exerts a powerful influence on

adolescent behavior. Cases generally are referred by judges, police

and probation officials, and schools to adult coordinators who

oversee the program. Typical cases that may be heard in a youth court

include larceny, criminal mischief, vandalism, minor assault, possession of

alcohol, minor drug offenses and truancy.

Youth courts provide communities with an opportunity to provide

immediate consequences for first-time youthful offenders, while

providing a peer-operated sentencing mechanism that constructively

allows young people to take responsibility, be held accountable and

make restitution for committing crimes. Additionally, while

providing constructive consequences for juvenile offenders, youth courts offer

a civic opportunity for other young people in the community who want

to actively participate in the community decision-making processes for

dealing with juvenile delinquency. As a result, they gain hands-on

knowledge of the juvenile and criminal justice systems. A critical

aspect of the program is that youth courts allow peers to determine

the appropriate sentencing for other youths. If peer pressure

contributes to juvenile delinquency, some experts believe that it

can be redirected to become a force that leads juveniles into

law-abiding behavior, according to the Federal Probation article, "Teen Court:

Juvenile Justice for the 21st Century?"

Youth court programs have been in existence for more than 25 years,

but recently, they have increasingly become a fixture in many

communities. In 1994, there were only 78 youth court programs

operating in the United States. Currently, there are more than 825

towns and cities operating youth court programs nationwide and

approximately 100 additional youth court programs that now are in

developmental stages. Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey and Rhode

Island are the only states that do not have youth courts. Most of

the youth court programs are grassroots community efforts, which

reflects the fact that youth courts are increasingly seen as an effective

means for holding youths accountable for delinquent and criminal behaviors

within the community.

The national youth court movement across America is offering

teenagers an opportunity like none other. More than 250,000 youths have

participated as both offenders and volunteers in youth courts during

recent years, according to a 2001 survey conducted by the National

Youth Court Center. By all indications, officials only see this number

increasing at a rate consistent with the rapid establishment of

youth courts.

New York's Colonie Youth Court

One well-known program in the United States is the Colonie Youth Court

located in the town of Colonie in Albany, N.Y. Colonie is the largest

municipality in the Capital District of New York. The Colonie Youth

Court was established in 1993, as a nonprofit corporation.

Nationally,

there are four recognized models of youth courts: Adult Judge, Youth

Judge, Peer Jury and Tribunal Model. The Colonie Youth Court

operates

as the Youth Judge Model, which means youths not only act as members

of the jury, but also as the judge, attorneys and clerk/bailiff.

Since 1995, the Colonie Youth Court has adjudicated more than 650

juvenile cases for disposition and has a 99.5 percent successful

completion rate. In 1996, the program, which involves more than 500

youths who volunteer to serve as judges, defenders, prosecutors,

clerks and jurors per year, was selected to serve as the model for

additional 30 youth court programs in New York. The program is

overseen by a volunteer board of directors that includes members

from

the Town of Colonie Police Department and Albany County Probation

Department, local schools and the U.S. attorney's office for the

Northern District of New York.

The program operates on a $60,000 annual budget and includes a

full-time program director and a part-time community service

coordinator. The budget is provided through grants by the state and

county bar associations, New York State Division of Criminal Justice

Services and the Administration for Children, Youth and Families, and

the local municipality. The Colonie Youth Court was established as a

demonstration program with state formula funds from the U.S. Justice

Department's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention

(OJJDP).

What Happens in Court?

Colonie Youth Court Inc. is a voluntary alternative to the criminal

justice system for young people who have committed crimes or

offenses.

The goal of the Colonie Youth Court is to intervene in early

anti-social, delinquent and criminal behaviors, and to reduce the

incidence and prevent the escalation of such behaviors. In youth

court, a youth who has admitted guilt to a crime or offense appears

for a sentencing hearing before a jury of his or her peers. The jury

is presented with evidence relevant to sentencing, and then

deliberates and passes sentence. Sentences, which stress

rehabilitative goals, typically include community service and

counseling.

Who Participates?

Youth court proceedings often involve youth volunteers who serve as

jurors and members of the court. Typically, each of the volunteers

younger than 18, and all adult serves as coordinator. The offender

must complete the sentence imposed by the jury and, in addition,

must

agree to serve as a juror on the case of another juvenile offender

the final two hours of community service. The remaining jurors are

drawn from a pool of young people who wish to volunteer. Jurors do

not

take a course of instruction. Rather, they often hear and see

evidence, listen to the judge's instructions, retire and deliberate

private, and agree on a sentence.

Members of the Colonie Youth Court consist of high school students

who

have successfully completed eight weeks of a youth court membership

training program. Areas of instruction include an overview of the

criminal and juvenile justice systems, causes of crime and

delinquency, goals of sentencing, penal law and operation of youth

courts. The training program concludes with mock hearings to prepare

members for participation in youth court proceedings. Colonie Youth

Court members assume five roles on a rotating basis:

* Judge: Presides over the sentencing hearing, explains criminal

charges to the jury, instructs the jury on what evidence and factors

to consider in determining a sentence, and sentences the offender in

accordance with the jury's verdict.

* Prosecutor: Represents the interests of the community,

investigates

the circumstances of the offense and background of the offender,

presents evidence at the sentencing hearing and makes a sentencing

recommendation to the jury.

* Defender: Represents the interests of the offender, investigates

the

circumstances of the offense and background of the offender,

presents

evidence at the sentencing hearing, including mitigating

circumstances, and makes a sentencing recommendation to the jury.

* Clerk/Bailiff: Maintains accurate records, ensures smooth

operation

of court proceedings and administers oaths.

* Jury Foreperson: Leads jury deliberations, ensures participation

all jurors and that all appropriate sentencing factors are

addressed,

mediates disputes among jurors, calls for a vote during

deliberations

and announces the verdict.

Volunteer youth members who serve in these youth court roles gain

valuable knowledge and skills that strengthen their ability to

become

responsible citizens. As a result of their participation in youth

court, these youths often have improved articulation, and social and

application skills. Volunteer service in youth court is increasingly

being seen as an opportune area when schools require youths to

complete a particular number of community service hours for high

school graduation. As a result of the many benefits youths gain

through volunteer participation in youth court, some schools provide

half semester of high school social studies credit for two

consecutive

years of participation.

Juvenile offenders of the Colonie Youth Court are required to meet

the

criteria to be eligible for the program. Offenders must be younger

than 18, admit guilt and have committed their first misdemeanors

and/or violations. The final component of their community service --

serving as jurors on a subsequent case -- allows for positive

participation by offenders in the criminal justice system. These

offenders gain valuable lessons by accepting responsibility for

their

actions by participating in community service projects and

educational

classes, and by having their peers send a strong message that they

displayed poor judgment.

Volunteer youth jurors of the Colonie Youth Court are young people

grades seven to 12 who wish to volunteer on a jury and decide the

punishment of an offender. Registered jurors are not required to

complete the youth court membership training program that members

must

complete. Instead, each juror is randomly selected from a pool of

400

to 450 jurors to participate in a hearing.

Youth Court Cases

Cases appropriate for youth court generally are referred by judges,

police, probation officials and school personnel to the youth court

coordinator, who accepts cases meeting established criteria. Youth

court programs accept a wide range of cases for disposition.

Determining the types of cases a youth court will handle is the

decision of the program organizers in collaboration with the local

school, court, and police and probation departments. Most cases

handled in youth court include violations and misdemeanors, and some

nonviolent felonies. Typically, juvenile offenders are younger than

18.

Cases that may be handled in youth court include:

* Shoplifting/theft;

* Alcohol possession;

* Criminal mischief;

* Vandalism/property damage;

* Possession of small amounts of marijuana;

* Traffic offenses;

* Disorderly conduct; and

* Other offenses deemed appropriate.

Cases not traditionally considered for youth court include:

* Sex offenses;

* Violent crimes;

* Driving under the influence of alcohol; and

* Distribution and/or felony possession of narcotics.

Sentencing

Sentences vary for each youth court. Community resources, program

development, the victim, the offender and the type of crime are

several factors that contribute to the sentence that may be imposed.

Some youth court programs have a limit on the number of community

service hours that can be imposed for a particular crime and others,

such as the Colonie Youth Court, do not set a limit. Some programs

similar to Colonie Youth Court operate their own community service

programs during the evenings and on Saturdays, while other programs

use existing community service agencies for monitoring completion of

assigned community service hours. Because youth courts handle cases

youths at young ages, this also must be taken into consideration

when

designing youth courts' community service programs.

Typical community service sentences imposed in youth court include:

* Community service hours (typically between 20 and 50 hours);

* Letters of apology;

* Essays;

* Youth court jury duty;

* Restitution; and

* Educational awareness classes.

The jury cannot sentence youths to a detention facility or jail.

Obtained Benefits and Waived Rights

By agreeing to proceed in the Colonie Youth Court, offenders obtain

certain benefits and waive certain rights that would otherwise apply

in the criminal and juvenile justice systems. Benefits include

receiving a decision by a jury of peers aimed at assisting youths in

ending criminal conduct and participating positively in the criminal

and juvenile justice systems, rather than being the object of those

systems. Rights waived in youth court may include the right to an

attorney, to a trial for determination of guilt and to request

closed

proceedings for youths under 16.

Operating Budget

Youth court programs are one of the least expensive intervention and

prevention programs to operate. The reason for this is the large

number of volunteer youths and adults who assist in the operation of

these youth courts. Most youth court programs employ one full-time

part-time employee. Some youth courts can operate on a budget of

$10,000, while another may have a budget of $75,000, according to

the

National Youth Court Center.

Factors that contribute to the size of a youth court's budget

include:

* Jurisdiction size;

* Crime rates in the community;

* Availability of other diversion programs for first-time offenders;

* Whether the youth court operates its own community service

program;

* Whether the program is operated by a school, a municipality or a

nonprofit organization; and

* How often the court will convene and the estimated number of cases

to be handled.

With support and collaboration from the U.S. Department of

Transportation's National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration,

OJJDP established the National Youth Court Center in 1999.

The National Youth Court Center is operated by the American

Probation

and Parole Association and three affiliated agencies, including the

American Bar Association, the Constitutional Rights Foundation and

Street Law Inc. The center's primary goal is to support the national

infrastructure of youth courts through the development of technical

assistance resources and training to establish or enhance youth

court

programs.

For more information about the National Youth Court Center, contact

Tracy Godwin, Director, c/o American Probation and Parole

Association,

P.O. Box 11910, Lexington, KY 40578-1910; (859) 244-8193; fax (859)

244-8001; e-mail: nycc@csg.org; Web site: www.youthcourt.net.

TYPES OF OFFENSES

Possession of Marijuana 62%

Tobacco 67%

Assault 71%

Alcohol 75%

Disorderly Conduct 81%

Vandalism 87%

Theft 95%

OTHER TYPES OF OFFENSES

Traffic 42%

School Disciplinary 48%

Curfew 56%

Who Administers Teen Court

Nonprofit 28%

Juvenile/Municipal Court 16%

Law Enforcement 15%

City/County Government 13%

Probation 13%

Schools 5%

Other 10%

PHOTO (COLOR): Colonie Youth Court Judge Vagar Kban calls court to

order.

PHOTO (COLOR): Clerk C.J. Barber swears in Erik Skantze.

REFERENCES

Godwin, T.M., M.E. Heward and T. Spina. 2000. National youth court

guidelines. Lexington, Ky: American Probation and Parole

Association,

National Youth Court Center.

Lockart, P., W. Pericak and S. Peterson. 1996. Youth court: The

Colonie New York experience. Journal for Juvenile Justice and

Detention Services, 11(2):79-82.

Spina, T. and D.R. Homer. 1994. Youth court training manual. Youth

courts of the Capital District Inc. Latham, N.Y.

Williamson, Deborah, Michelle Chalk and Paul Knepper. 1992. Teen

court: Juvenile justice for the 21st century? Federal Probation,

54(June):54-58.

~~~~~~~~

By Scott B. Peterson and Michael J. Elmendorf II

Scott B. Peterson is a program officer with the Office of Juvenile

Justice and Delinquency Prevention. He is former director of the

Colonie Youth Court and former director of Youth Courts of the

Capital

District Inc. Peterson may be contacted at (202) 616-2368; e-mail:

peterson@ojp.usdoj.gov. Michael J. Elmendorf II is special assistant

to New York Gov. George E. Pataki. He was a founder of Colonie Youth

Court and serves as executive vice president of Colonie Youth Court

Inc. Elmendorf also is a member and acting chairman of the New York

State Juvenile Justice Advisory Group.

_________________

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Source: Corrections Today, Dec2001, Vol. 63 Issue 7, p54, 6p, 2c.

Item Number: 5843885

May 18, 2002

Killers of Dartmouth Professors Dreamed of Adventure but

Settled for Murder

CONCORD, N.H., May 17 — The two Vermont teenagers who pleaded guilty to killing two

Dartmouth College professors envisioned themselves as explorers but decided on a life of crime

after concluding that every place had been explored, according to transcripts of prosecutors' interviews

with one of them.

Since the killings of the professors, Half Zantop, 63, and his wife, Susanne Zantop, 55, on Jan. 27,

2001, questions about the killers' motives had gone largely unanswered. The transcripts, which were

released today, offered some insight.

The teenager who was interviewed, James Parker, was 16 when he and his best friend, Robert

Tulloch, then 17, drove to Hanover, N.H., and stabbed the professors.

In the interview, Mr. Parker outlined the schemes the two had contemplated and a complicated plot to

get $10,000 by robbing and killing people for their A.T.M. cards so they could move to Australia.

Besides talking about becoming explorers, Mr. Parker said, they discussed joining military special

forces but concluded that the training would be too arduous.

In the two years before the killings, the teenagers' activities included elaborate pranks and crimes. One

night they scaled the Vermont State House in Montpelier and hit golf balls off the dome, Mr. Parker

said.

He said the two held long discussions about the morality of killing people and plotted such crimes as

car thefts, bank robberies and boat hijackings before settling on a regional crime spree and concluding

they would have to kill everyone they robbed to eliminate witnesses.

Mr. Parker said he and Mr. Tulloch were prepared to kill children.

"We assumed it would be a couple," he said, "and somebody might have to go somewhere else and

grab the other person and bring them into the same room, and if there were any kids we would have to

do the same thing."

Yet he drew the line when Mr. Tulloch suggested harming animals.

"He would hit his dog sometimes," he said. "Just because it was a stupid dog. I was totally against that.

I thought it was terrible. The thing with killing for me is that I was doing it for money, and that was kind

of the reason I thought maybe we do need to get used to this, but we're not going to practice on

animals or anything like that."

In his statement Mr. Parker gives the impression that he was the follower and that Mr. Tulloch was

always trying to figure out how to turn the world to his advantage.

"Ever since we became best friends we were doing all this adventurous stuff and we considered

ourselves better than everybody else," Mr. Parker said.

"We were smarter than everybody else. People didn't see things the way that we did. We thought what

everybody was doing was silly, like going to school and wasting half your life with education that you're

not even going to use."

Mr. Parker said Mr. Tulloch discussed with him the concept that perhaps the entire world was like a

giant computer game and there were "cheat codes" that could allow you to take a shortcut to success.

They discussed traveling around the world and "starting a life of crime" but had fanciful views of what

that would be like.

Mr. Parker said his friend convinced him that they would have to kill people to prove they were tough.

He said he "wasn't really interested in that aspect of it" but "thought it was a good point." Mr. Parker

added that he was more attracted to the notion of getting the money, traveling to a different country

"and, you know, kind of having fun."

The great disruption
The Atlantic Monthly; Boston; May 1999; Francis Fukuyama;

Abstract:
Fukuyama argues that the social ills of recent times constitute a great disruption in prevailing social values throughout the industrialized world. They have been brought on by the information age.

Full Text:

[Headnote]
HUMAN NATURE AND THE RECONSTITUTION OF SOCIAL ORDER

[Headnote]
The shift to the information age has been accompanied by social disorder throughout the industrialized world. But new forms of stability may already be in the making

OVER the past half century the United States and other economically advanced countries have made the shift into what has been called an information society, the information age, or the post-industrial era. The futurist Alvin Toffler has labeled this transition the "Third Wave," suggesting that it will ultimately be as consequential as the two previous waves in human history: from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies, and from agricultural to industrial ones.

A society built around information tends to produce more of the two things people value most in a modern democracy-freedom and equality. Freedom of choice has exploded, in everything from cable channels to low-cost shopping outlets to friends met on the Internet. Hierarchies of all sorts, political and corporate, have come under pressure and begun to crumble.

People associate the information age with the advent of the Internet, in the 1990s, but the shift from the industrial era started more than a generation earlier, with the deindustrialization of the Rust Belt in the United States and comparable movements away from manufacturing in other industrialized countries. This period, roughly the mid-1960s to the early 1990s, was also marked by seriously deteriorating social conditions in most of the industrialized world. Crime and social disorder began to rise, making inner-city areas of the wealthiest societies on earth almost uninhabitable. The decline of kinship as a social institution, which has been going on for more than 200 years, accelerated sharply in the second half of the twentieth century. Marriages and births declined and divorce soared; and one out of every three children in the United States and more than half of all children in Scandinavia were born out of wedlock. Finally, trust and confidence in institutions went into a forty-year decline. Although a majority of people in the United States and Europe expressed confidence in their governments and fellow citizens during the late 1950s, only a small minority did so by the early 1990s. The nature of people's involvement with one another changed as well-although there is no evidence that people associated with one another less, their ties tended to be less permanent, looser, and with smaller groups of people.

These changes were dramatic; they occurred over a wide range of similar countries; and they all appeared at roughly the same period in history. As such, they constituted a Great Disruption in the social values that had prevailed in the industrial-age society of the mid twentieth century. It is very unusual for social indicators to move together so rapidly; even without knowing why they did so, we have cause to suspect that the reasons might be related. Although William J. Bennett and other conservatives are often attacked for harping on the theme of moral decline, they are essentially correct: the perceived breakdown of social order is not a matter of nostalgia, poor memory, or ignorance about the hypocrisies of earlier ages. The decline is readily measurable in statistics on crime, fatherless children, broken trust, reduced opportunities for and outcomes from education, and the like.

Was it simply an accident that these negative social trends, which together reflect a weakening of social bonds and common values in Western societies, occurred just as the economies of those societies were making the transition from the industrial to the information era? The hypothesis of this article is that the two were in fact intimately connected, and that although many blessings have flowed from a more complex, information-based economy, certain bad things also happened to our social and moral life. The connections were technological, economic, and cultural. The changing nature of work tended to substitute mental for physical labor, propelling millions of women into the workplace and undermining the traditional understandings on which the family had been based. Innovations in medical technology leading to the birth-control pill and increasing longevity diminished the role of reproduction and family in people's lives. And the culture of individualism, which in the laboratory and the marketplace leads to innovation and growth, spilled over into the realm of social norms, where it corroded virtually all forms of authority and weakened the bonds holding families, neighborhoods, and nations together. The complete story is, of course, much more complex than this, and differs from one country to another. But broadly speaking, the technological change that brought about what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called "creative destruction" in the marketplace caused similar disruption in the world of social relationships. Indeed, it would be surprising if this were not true.

But there is a bright side, too: social order, once disrupted, tends to get remade, and there are many indications that this is happening today. We can expect a new social order for a simple reason: human beings are by nature social creatures, whose most basic drives and instincts lead them to create moral rules that bind them together into communities. They are also by nature rational, and their rationality allows them to spontaneously create ways of cooperating with one another. Religion, though often helpful to this process, is not the sine qua non of social order, as many conservatives believe. Neither is a strong and expansive state, as many on the left argue. Man's natural condition is not the war of "every man against every man" envisioned by Thomas Hobbes but rather a civil society made orderly by the presence of a host of moral rules. These assertions, moreover, are empirically supported by a tremendous amount of research coming out of the life sciences in recent years, in fields as diverse as neurophysiology, behavioral genetics, evolutionary biology, ethology, and biologically informed approaches to psychology and anthropology. The study of how order arises-not as the result of a top-down mandate by hierarchical authority, whether political or religious, but as the result of self-organization on the part of decentralized individuals-is one of the most interesting and important intellectual developments of our time.

The idea that social order has to come from a centralized, rational, bureaucratic hierarchy was very much associated with the industrial age. The sociologist Max Weber, observing nineteenth-century industrial society, argued that rational bureaucracy was, in fact, the very essence of modern life. We know now, however, that in an information society neither governments nor corporations will rely exclusively on formal bureaucratic rules to organize people. Instead they will decentralize and devolve power, and rely on the people over whom they have nominal authority to be self-organizing. The precondition for such self-organization is internalized rules and norms of behavior, a fact that suggests that the world of the twenty-first century will depend heavily on such informal norms. Thus although the transition into an information society has disrupted social norms, a modern, high-tech society cannot get along without them and will face considerable incentives to produce them.

THE disruption of social order by the progress of technology is not a new phenomenon. Particularly since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, human societies have been subject to a relentless process of modernization, as one new production process replaced another. The social disorder of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in America and Britain can be traced directly to the disruptive effects of the so-called first Industrial Revolution, when steam power and mechanization created new industries in textiles, railroads, and the like. Agricultural societies were transformed into urban industrial societies within the space of perhaps a hundred years, and all the accumulated social norms, habits, and customs that had characterized rural or village life were replaced by the rhythms of the factory and the city.

This shift in norms engendered what is perhaps the most famous concept in modern sociology-the distinction drawn by Ferdinand Tonnies between what he called Gemeinschaft ("community") and Gesellschaft ("society"). According to Tonnies, the Gemeinschaft that characterized a typical premodern European peasant society consisted of a dense network of personal relationships based heavily on kinship and on the direct, face-to-face contact that occurs in a small, closed village. Norms were largely unwritten, and individuals were bound to one another in a web of mutual interdependence that touched all aspects of life, from family to work to the few leisure activities that such societies enjoyed. Gesellschaft, on the other hand, was the framework of laws and other formal regulations that characterized large, urban industrial societies. Social relationships were more formalized and impersonal; individuals did not depend on one another for support to nearly the same extent, and were therefore much less morally obligated to one another.

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Many of the standard sociological texts written in the middle of the twentieth century treated the shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft as if it were a one-shot affair: societies were either "traditional" or "modern," and the modern ones somehow constituted the end of the road for social development. But social evolution did not culminate in middle-class American society of the 1950s; industrial societies soon began transforming themselves into what the sociologist Daniel Bell has characterized as post-industrial societies, or what we know as information societies. If this transformation is as momentous as the previous one, we should hardly be surprised that the impact on social values has proved equally great.

Whether information-age democracies can maintain social order in the face of technological and economic change is among their greatest challenges today. From the early 1970s to the early 1990s there was a sudden surge of new democracies in Latin America, Europe, Asia, and the former Communist world. As I argued in The End of History and the Last Man (1992), there is a strong logic behind the evolution of political institutions in the direction of modern liberal democracy, based on the correlation between economic development and stable democracy. Political and economic institutions have converged over time in the world's most economically advanced countries, and there are no obvious alternatives to the ones we see before us.

This progressive tendency is not necessarily evident in moral and social development, however. The tendency of contemporary liberal democracies to fall prey to excessive individualism is perhaps their greatest long-term vulnerability, and is particularly visible in the most individualistic of all democracies, the United States. The modern liberal state was premised on the notion that in the interests of political peace, government would not take sides among the differing moral claims made by religion and traditional culture. Church and State were to be kept separate; there would be pluralism in opinions about the most important moral and ethical questions, concerning ultimate ends or the nature of the good. Tolerance would become the cardinal virtue; in place of moral consensus would be a transparent framework of law and institutions that produced political order. Such a political system did not require that people be particularly virtuous; they need only be rational and follow the law in their own self-interest. Similarly, the market-based capitalist economic system that went hand in glove with political liberalism required only that people consult their long-term self-interest to achieve a socially optimal production and distribution of goods.

The societies created on these individualistic premises have worked extraordinarily well, and as the twentieth century comes to a close, there are few real alternatives to liberal democracy and market capitalism as fundamental organizing principles for modern societies. Individual self-interest is a lower but more stable ground than virtue on which to base society. The creation of a rule of law is among the proudest accomplishments of Western civilization-and its benefits become all too obvious when one deals with countries that lack one, such as Russia and China.

But although formal law and strong political and economic institutions are critical, they are not in themselves sufficient to guarantee a successful modern society. To work properly, liberal democracy has always been dependent on certain shared cultural values. This can be seen most clearly in the contrast between the United States and the countries of Latin America. When Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and other Latin American countries got their independence, in the nineteenth century, many of them established formal democratic constitutions and legal systems patterned on the presidential system of the United States. Since then not one Latin American country has experienced the political stability, economic growth, or institutional efficacy enjoyed by the United States, though most, fortunately, had returned to democratic government by the end of the 1980s.

There are many complex historical reasons for this, but the most important is a cultural one: the United States was settled primarily by British people and inherited not just British law but British culture as well, whereas Latin America inherited various cultural traditions from the Iberian peninsula. Although the U. S. Constitution enforces a separation between Church and State, American culture was decisively shaped in its formative years by sectarian Protestantism. Sectarian Protestantism reinforced both American individualism and the tendency of the society to be self-- organizing in a myriad of voluntary associations and communities. The vitality of American civil society was crucial both for the stability of the country's democratic institutions and for its vibrant economy. The imperial and Latin Catholic traditions of Spain and Portugal, in contrast, reinforced dependence on large, centralized institutions like the State and the Church, weakening an independent civil society. Similarly, the differing abilities of Northern and Southern Europe to make modern institutions work were influenced by religious heritage and cultural tradition.

The problem with most modern liberal democracies is that they cannot take their cultural preconditions for granted. The most successful among them, including the United States, were lucky to have married strong formal institutions to a flexible and supportive informal culture. But nothing in the formal institutions themselves guarantees that the society in which they exist will continue to enjoy the right sort of cultural values and norms under the pressures of technological, economic, and social change. Just the opposite: the individualism, pluralism, and tolerance that are built into the formal institutions tend to encourage cultural diversity, and therefore have the potential to undermine moral values inherited from the past. And a dynamic, technologically innovative economy will by its very nature disrupt existing social relations.

It may be, then, that although large political and economic institutions have long been evolving along a secular path, social life is more cyclical. Social norms that work for one historical period are disrupted by the advances of technology and the economy, and society has to play catch-up in order to establish new norms.

SINCE the 1960s the West has experienced a series of liberation movements that have sought to free individuals from the constraints of traditional social norms and moral rules. The sexual revolution, the feminist movement, and the 1980s and 1990s movements in favor of gay and lesbian rights have exploded through the Western world. The liberation sought by each of these movements has concerned social rules, norms, and laws that unduly restricted the options and opportunities of individuals-whether they were young people choosing sexual partners, women seeking career opportunities, or gays seeking recognition of their rights. Pop psychology, from the human-potential movement of the 1960s to the self-esteem trend of the 1980s, sought to free individuals from stifling social expectations.

Both the left and the right participated in the effort to free the individual from restrictive rules, but their points of emphasis tended to be different. To put it simply, the left worried about lifestyles and the right worried about money. The left did not want traditional values to unduly constrain women, minorities, gays, the homeless, people accused of crimes, or any number of other groups marginalized by society. The right, on the other hand, did not want communities putting constraints on what people could do with their property-or, in the United States, what they could do with their guns. Left and right each denounced excessive individualism on the part of the other: those who supported reproductive choice tended to oppose choice in buying guns or gas-guzzling cars; those who wanted unlimited consumer choice were appalled when the restraints on criminals were loosened. But neither was willing to give up its preferred sphere of free choice for the sake of constraining the other.

As people soon discovered, there are serious problems with a culture of unbridled individualism, in which the breaking of rules becomes, in a sense, the only remaining rule. The first has to do with the fact that moral values and social rules are not simply arbitrary constraints on individual choice but the precondition for any kind of cooperative enterprise. Indeed, social scientists have recently begun to refer to a society's stock of shared values as "social capital." Like physical capital (land, buildings, machines) and human capital (the skills and knowledge we carry around in our heads), social capital produces wealth and is therefore of economic value to a national economy. But it is also the prerequisite for all forms of group endeavor that take place in a modern society, from running a corner grocery store to lobbying Congress to raising children. Individuals amplify their own power and abilities by following cooperative rules that constrain their freedom of choice, because these also allow them to communicate with others and to coordinate their actions. Social virtues such as honesty, reciprocity, and the keeping of commitments are not worthwhile just as ethical values; they also have a tangible dollar value and help the groups that practice them to achieve shared ends.

The second problem with a culture of individualism is that it ends up being bereft of community. A community is not formed every time a group of people happen to interact with one another; true communities are bound together by the values, norms, and experiences their members share. The deeper and more strongly held those common values, the stronger the sense of community. The trade-off between personal freedom and community, however, does not seem obvious or necessary to many. As people have been liberated from their traditional ties to spouses, families, neighborhoods, workplaces, and churches, they have expected to retain social connectedness. But they have begun to realize that their elective affinities, which they can slide into and out of at will, have left them feeling lonely and disoriented, longing for deeper and more permanent relationships.

A society dedicated to the constant upending of norms and rules in the name of expanding individual freedom of choice will find itself increasingly disorganized, atomized, isolated, and incapable of carrying out common goals and tasks. The same society that wants no limits on its technological innovation also sees no limits on many forms of personal behavior, and the consequence is a rise in crime, broken families, parents' failure to fulfill obligations to children, neighbors' refusal to take responsibility for one another, and citizens' opting out of public life.

WHAT HAPPENED

BEGINNING in about 1965 a large number of indicators that can serve as negative measures of social capital all started moving upward rapidly at the same time. These could be put under three broad headings: crime, family, and trust.

Americans are aware that crime rates began sometime in the 1960s to climb very rapidly-a dramatic change from the early post-Second World War period, when U. S. murder and robbery rates actually declined. After declining slightly in the mid-1980s, crime rates spurted upward again in the late 1980s and peaked around 1991-1992. The rates for both violent and property crimes have dropped substantially since then. Indeed, they have fallen most dramatically in the areas where they had risen most rapidly-that is, in big cities like New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles.

Although the United States is exceptional among developed countries for its high crime rates, crime rose significantly in virtually all other non-Asian developed countries in approximately the same time period. Violent crime rose rapidly in Canada, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. With regard to crimes against property, a broader measure of disorder, the United States is no longer exceptional: Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and Sweden have ended up with theft rates higher than those in the United States over the past generation.

Of the shifts in social norms that constitute the Great Disruption, some of the most dramatic concern those related to reproduction, the family, and relations between the sexes. Divorce rates moved up sharply across the developed world (except in Italy, where divorce was illegal until 1970, and other Catholic countries); by the 1980s half of all American marriages could be expected to end in divorce, and the ratio of divorced to married people had increased fourfold in just thirty years. Births to unmarried women as a proportion of U. S. live births climbed from under five percent to 32 percent from 1940 to 1995. The figure was close to 60 percent in many Scandinavian countries; the United Kingdom, Canada, and France reached levels comparable to that in the United States. The combined probabilities of single-parent births, divorce, and the dissolution of cohabiting relationships between parents (a situation common in Europe) meant that in most developed countries ever smaller minorities of children would reach the age of eighteen with both parents remaining in the household. The core reproductive function of the family was threatened as well: fertility has dropped so dramatically in Italy, Spain, and Germany that they stand to lose up to 30 percent of their populations each generation, absent new net immigration.

Finally, anyone who has lived through the 1950s to the 1990s in the United States or another Western country can scarcely fail to recognize the widespread changes in values that have taken place over this period in the direction of increasing individualism. Survey data, along with commonsense observation, indicate that people are much less likely to defer to the authority of an ever-broader range of social institutions. Trust in institutions has consequently decreased markedly. In 1958, 73 percent of Americans surveyed said they trusted the federal government to do what is right either "most of the time" or "just about always"; by 1994 the figure had fallen as low as 15 percent. Europeans, although less anti-statist than Americans, have nonetheless seen similar declines in confidence in such traditional institutions as the Church, the police, and government. Americans trust one another less as well: although 10 percent more Americans evinced more trust than distrust in surveys done in the early 1960s, by the 1990s the distrusters had an almost 30 percent margin over those expressing trust. It is not clear that either the number of groups or group memberships in civil society declined overall in this period, as the political scientist Robert Putnam has suggested. What is clear, however, is that what I call the radius of trust has declined, and social ties have become less binding and long-lasting. (Readers can obtain more detailed statistical information on the Great Disruption at http://mason.gmu.edu/~ffukuyam/.)

SOME PROPOSED CAUSES

OF THE DISRUPTION

CHANGES as great as these will defy attempts to provide simple explanations. However, the fact that many different social indicators moved across a wide group of industrialized countries at roughly the same time simplifies the analytical task somewhat by pointing us toward a more general level of explanation. When the same phenomena occur in a broad range of countries, we can rule out explanations specific to a single country, such as the effects of the Vietnam War or of Watergate.

Several arguments have been put forward to explain why the phenomena we associate with the Great Disruption occurred. Here are three: They were brought on by increasing poverty and income inequality. They were products of the modern welfare state. They were the result of a broad cultural shift that included the decline of religion and the promotion of individualistic self-gratification over community obligation. The Great Disruption was caused by poverty and inequality. The idea that such large changes in social norms could be brought on by economic deprivation in countries that are wealthier than any others in human history might give one pause. Poor people in the United States have higher absolute standards of living than many Americans of past generations, and more per capita wealth than many people in contemporary Third World countries with more-intact family structures. Poverty rates, after coming down dramatically through the 1960s and rebounding slightly thereafter, have not increased in a way that would explain a huge increase in social disorder.

Those favoring the economic hypothesis argue, of course, that it is not absolute levels of poverty that are the source of the problem: modern societies, despite being richer overall, have become more unequal, or else have experienced economic turbulence and job loss that have led to social dysfunction. A casual glance at the comparative data on divorce and illegitimacy rates shows that this correlation cannot possibly be true in the case of family breakdown. If one looks across the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, there is no positive correlation between the level of welfare benefits aimed at increasing economic equality and stable families. Indeed, there is a weak positive correlation between high levels of welfare benefits and illegitimacy, tending to support the argument advanced by American conservatives that the welfare state is the cause of and not the cure for family breakdown. The highest rates of illegitimacy are found in Sweden and Denmark, egalitarian countries that cycle upwards of 50 percent of their gross domestic product through the state. The United States cycles less than 30 percent of GDP through the government and has higher levels of inequality, yet it has lower rates of illegitimacy. Japan and Korea, which have minimal welfare-state protections for poor people, also have two of the lowest rates of divorce and illegitimacy in the OECD.

The notion that poverty and inequality beget crime is a commonplace among politicians and voters in democratic societies who seek reasons for justifying welfare and poverty programs.

But although there is plenty of evidence of a broad correlation between income inequality and crime, this hardly constitutes a plausible explanation for rapidly rising crime rates in the West. There was no depression in the period from the 1960s to the 1990s to explain the sudden rise in crime; in fact, the great American postwar crime wave began in a period of full employment and general prosperity. (Indeed, the Great Depression of the 1930s saw decreasing levels of violent crime in the United States.) Income inequality rose in the United States during the Great Disruption, but crime has also risen in Western developed countries that have remained more egalitarian than the United States. America's greater economic inequality may to some degree explain why its crime rates are higher than, say, Sweden's in any given year, but it does not explain why Swedish rates began to rise in the same period that America's did. Income inequality, moreover, has continued to increase in the United States in the 1990s, while crime rates have fallen; hence the correlation between inequality and crime becomes negative for this period.

The Creat Disruption was caused by mistaken government policies. The second general explanation for the increase in social disorder is one made by conservatives; it has been primarily associated with Charles Murray's book Losing Ground, and before that with the economist Gary Becker. The argument is the mirror image of the left's: it maintains that the perverse incentives created by the welfare state itself explain the rise in family breakdown and crime. The primary American welfare program targeted at poor women, the Depression-era Aid to Families with Dependent Children, provided welfare payments only to single mothers, and thereby penalized women who married the fathers of their children. The United States abolished AFDC in the welfare-reform act of 1996, in part because of arguments concerning its perverse incentives.

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There is little doubt that welfare benefits discourage work and create what economists call "moral hazard." What is less clear is their impact on family structure. Welfare benefits in real terms stabilized and then began to decline in the 1980s, whereas the rate of family breakdown continued unabated through the mid-1990s. One analyst suggests that no more than perhaps 15 percent of family breakdown in the United States can be attributed to AFDC and other welfare programs.

The more fundamental weakness of the conservative argument is that illegitimacy is only part of a much larger story of weakening family ties-a story that includes declining fertility, divorce, cohabitation in place of marriage, the separation of cohabiting couples, and the like. Illegitimacy is primarily though not exclusively associated with poverty in the United States and most other countries. Divorce and cohabitation, however, are much more prevalent among the middle and upper classes throughout the West. It is very difficult to lay soaring divorce rates and declining marriage rates at the government's doorstep, except to the extent that the state made divorce legally easier to obtain.

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Similarly, rising crime is seen by many conservatives as a result of the weakening of criminal sanctions, which occurred in the same period. Gary Becker has argued that crime can be seen as another form of rational choice: when payoffs from crime go up or costs (in terms of punishment) go down, more crimes will be committed, and vice versa. Many conservatives have argued that crime began to rise in the 1960s because society had grown permissive and the legal system was "coddling criminals." By this reasoning, the tougher enforcement undertaken by communities across the United States in the 1980s-stiffer penalties, more jails, and in some cases more police officers on the streets-was one important reason for falling crime rates in the 1990s.

Although improved policing methods and stronger penalties may well have had a lot to do with declining crime rates in the 1990s, it is hard to argue that the great upsurge in crime in the 1960s was simply the product of police permissiveness. It is true that the United States constrained its police forces and prosecutors in the interests of the rights of criminal defendants through a series of Supreme Court decisions in the 1960s, most notably Miranda v. Arizona. But police departments quickly learned how to accommodate what were perfectly legitimate concerns over police procedure. A great deal of recent criminological theory ascribes crime to poor socialization and impulse control relatively early in life. It is not that potential criminals do not respond rationally to punishment; rather, the propensity to commit crimes or to respond to given levels of punishment is heavily influenced by upbringing. What may be more relevant to understanding a sudden upsurge in crime is changes in mediating social institutions such as families, neighborhoods, and schools that were taking place in the same period, and changes in the signals that the broader culture was sending to young people.

The Great Disruption was caused by a broad cultural shift. This brings us to cultural explanations, which are the most plausible of the three presented here. Increasing individualism and the loosening of communal controls clearly had a huge impact on family life, sexual behavior, and the willingness of people to obey the law. The problem with this line of explanation is not that culture was not a factor but rather that it gives no adequate account of timing: why did culture, which usually evolves extremely slowly, suddenly mutate with extraordinary rapidity after the mid-1960s?

In Britain and the United States the high point of communal social control was the last third of the nineteenth century, when the Victorian ideal of the patriarchal conjugal family was broadly accepted and adolescent sexuality was kept under tight control. The cultural shift that undermined Victorian morality may be thought of as layered: At the top was a realm of abstract ideas promulgated by philosophers, scientists, artists, academics, and the occasional huckster and fraud, who laid the intellectual groundwork for broad-based changes. The second level was one of popular culture, as simpler versions of complex abstract ideas were promulgated through books, newspapers, and other mass media. Finally, there was the layer of actual behavior, as the new norms implicit in the abstract or popularized ideas were embedded in the actions of large populations.

The decline in Victorian morality can be traced to a number of intellectual developments at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, and to a second wave that began in the 1940s. At the highest level of thought, Western rationalism began to undermine itself by concluding that no rational grounds supported universal norms of behavior. This was nowhere more evident than in the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, the father of modern relativism. Nietzsche in effect argued that man, the "beast with red cheeks," was a value-creating animal, and that the manifold "languages of good and evil" spoken by different human cultures were products of the will, rooted nowhere in truth or reason. The Enlightenment had not led to self-evident truths about right or morality; rather, it had exposed the infinite variability of moral arrangements. Attempts to ground values in nature, or in God, were doomed to be exposed as willful acts on the part of the creators of those values. Nietzsche's aphorism "There are no facts, only interpretations" became the watchword for later generations of relativists under the banners of deconstructionism and postmodernism.

In the social sciences the undermining of Victorian values was first the work of psychologists. John Dewey, William James, and John Watson, the founder of the behavioralist school of psychology, for differing reasons all contested the Victorian and Christian notion that human nature was innately sinful, and argued that tight social controls over behavior were not necessary for social order. The behavioralists argued that the human mind was a Lockean tabula rasa waiting to be filled with cultural content; the implication was that human beings were far more malleable through social pressure and policy than people had heretofore believed. Sigmund Freud was, of course, enormously influential in promulgating the idea that neurosis originated in the excessive social repression of sexual behavior. Indeed, the spread of psychoanalysis accustomed an entire generation to talking about sex and seeing everyday psychological problems in terms of the libido and its repression.

The cultural historian James Lincoln Collier points to the years on either side of 1912 as critical to the breakdown of Victorian sexual norms in the United States. It was in this period that a series of new dances spread across the nation, along with the opinion that decent women could be seen in dance clubs; the rate of alcohol consumption increased; the feminist movement began in earnest; movies and the technology of modern mass entertainment appeared; literary modernism, whose core was the perpetual delegitimization of established cultural values, moved into high gear; and sexual mores (judging by what little empirical knowledge we have of this period) began to change. Collier argues that the intellectual and cultural grounds for the sexual revolution of the 1960s had already been laid among American elites by the 1920s. Their spread through the rest of the population was delayed, however, by the Depression and the Second World War, which led people to concentrate more on economic survival and domesticity than on self-expression and self-gratification-which most, in any event, could not afford.

The crucial question about the changes in social norms that occurred during the Great Disruption is therefore not whether they had cultural roots, which they obviously did, but how we can explain the timing and speed of the subsequent transformation. We know that culture tends to change very slowly in comparison with other factors, such as economic conditions, public policies, and ideology. In those cases where cultural norms have changed quickly, such as in rapidly modernizing Third World societies, cultural change is clearly being driven by socioeconomic change and is therefore not an autonomous factor.

So with the Great Disruption: the shift away from Victorian values had been occurring gradually for two or three generations by the time the disruption began; then all of a sudden the pace of change sped up enormously. It is hard to believe that people throughout the developed world simply decided to alter their attitudes toward such elemental issues as marriage, divorce, child-rearing, authority, and community so completely in the space of two or three decades without that shift in values being driven by other powerful forces. Those explanations that link changes in cultural variables to specific events in American history, such as Vietnam, Watergate, or the counterculture of the 1960s, betray an even greater provincialism: why were social norms also disrupted in other societies, from Sweden and Norway to New Zealand and Spain?

If these broad explanations for the Great Disruption are unsatisfactory, we need to look at its different elements more specifically.

WHY RISING CRIME?

ASSUMING that increases in the crime rate are not simply a statistical artifact of improved police reporting, we need to ask several questions. Why did crime rates increase so dramatically over a relatively short period and in such a wide range of countries? Why are rates beginning to level off or decline in the United States and several other Western countries?

The first and perhaps most straightforward explanation for rising crime rates from the late 1960s to the 1980s, and declining rates thereafter, is a simple demographic one. Crime tends to be committed overwhelmingly by young males aged fifteen to twenty-four. There is doubtless a genetic reason for this, having to do with male propensities for violence and aggression, and it means that when birth rates go up, crime rates will rise fifteen to twenty-four years later. In the United States the number of young people aged fifteen to twenty-- four increased by two million from 1950 to 1960, whereas the next decade added 12 million to this age group-an onslaught that has been compared to a barbarian invasion. Not only did greater numbers of young people increase the pool of potential criminals, but their concentration in a "youth culture" may have led to a more-than-proportional increase in efforts to defy authority.

The Baby Boom, however, is only part of the explanation for rising crime rates in the 1960s and 1970s. One criminologist has estimated that the increase in the U.S. murder rate was ten times as great as would be expected from shifts in the demographic structure alone. Other studies have shown that changes in age structure do not correlate well with increases in crime cross-nationally.

A second explanation links crime rates to modernization and related factors such as urbanization, population density, opportunities for crime, and so forth. It is a commonsense proposition that there will be more auto theft and burglary in large cities than in rural areas, because it is easier for criminals to find automobiles and empty homes in the former than in the latter. But urbanization and a changing physical environment are poor explanations for rising crime rates in developed countries after the 1960s. By 1960 the countries under consideration were already industrialized, urbanized societies; no sudden shift from countryside to city began in 1965. In the United States murder rates are much higher in the South than in the North, despite the fact that the latter tends to be more urban and densely populated. Indeed, violence in the South tends to be a rural phenomenon, and most observers who have looked closely into the matter believe that the explanation for high crime rates there is cultural. Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore are among the most densely populated, overcrowded urban environments in the world, and yet they did not experience rising crime rates as that urbanization was occurring. This suggests that the human social environment is much more important than the physical one in determining levels of crime.

A third category of explanation is sometimes euphemistically labeled "social heterogeneity." That is, in many societies crime tends to be concentrated among racial or ethnic minorities; to the extent that societies become more ethnically diverse, as virtually all Western developed countries have over the past two generations, crime rates can be expected to rise. The reason that crime rates are frequently higher among minorities is very likely related, as the criminologists Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin have argued, to the fact that minorities are kept from legitimate avenues of social mobility in ways that members of the majority community are not. In other cases the simple fact of heterogeneity may be to blame: neighborhoods that are too diverse culturally, linguistically, religiously, or ethnically never come together as communities to enforce informal norms on their members. But only part of the blame for rising crime rates in the United States can be placed on immigration.

A fourth explanation concerns the more or less contemporaneous changes in the family. The currently dominant school of American criminology holds that early-childhood socialization is one of the most important factors determining the level of subsequent criminality. That is, most people do not make day-to-day choices about whether or not to commit crimes based on the balance of rewards and risks, as the rational-choice school sometimes suggests. The vast majority of people obey the law, particularly with regard to serious offenses, out of habit that was learned relatively early in life. Most crimes are committed by repeat offenders who have failed to learn this basic self-control. In many cases they are acting not rationally but on impulse. Failing to anticipate consequences, they are undeterred by the expectation of punishment.

WHY RISING DISTRUST?

IN the realm of trust, values, and civil society, we need to explain two things: why there has been a broad-based decline in trust both in institutions and in other people, and how we can reconcile the shift toward fewer shared norms with an apparent growth in groups and in the density of civil society.

The reasons for the decline of trust in an American context have been debated extensively. Robert Putnam argued early on that it might be associated with the rise of television, since the first cohort that grew up watching television was the one that experienced the most precipitous decline in trust levels. Not only does the content of television breed cynicism in its attention to sex and violence, but the fact that Americans spend an average of more than four hours a day watching TV limits their opportunities for face-to-face social activities.

One suspects, however, that a broad phenomenon like the decline of trust has a number of causes, of which television is only one. Tom Smith, of the National Opinion Research Center, performed a statistical analysis of the survey data on trust and found that the lack of it correlates with low socioeconomic status, minority status, traumatic life events, religious polarization, and youth. Poor and uneducated people tend to be more distrustful than the well-to-do or those who have gone to college. Blacks are significantly more distrustful than whites, and there is some correlation between distrust and immigrant status. The traumatic life events affecting trust include, not surprisingly, being a victim of crime and being in poor health. Distrust is associated both with those who do not attend church and with fundamentalists. And younger people are less trusting than older ones.

Which of these factors has changed since the 1960s in a way that could explain the decrease in trust? Income inequality has increased somewhat, and Eric Uslaner, of the University of Maryland, has suggested that this may account for some of the increase in distrust. But poverty rates have fluctuated without increasing overall in this period, and for the vast majority of Americans the so-called "middle-class squeeze" did not represent a drop in real income so much as a stagnation of earnings.

Crime increased dramatically from the mid-sixties to the mid-nineties, and it makes a great deal of sense that someone who has been victimized by crime, or who watches the daily cavalcade of grisly crime stories on the local TV news, would feel distrust not for immediate friends and family but for the larger world. Hence crime would seem to be an important explanation for the increase in distrust after 1965, a conclusion well supported in more-detailed analyses.

The other major social change that has led to traumatic life experiences has been the rise of divorce and family breakdown. Commonsensically, one would think that children who have experienced the divorce of their parents, or have had to deal with a series of boyfriends in a single-parent household, would tend to become cynical about adults in general, and that this might go far toward explaining the increased levels of distrust that show up in survey data.

Despite the apparent decline in trust, there is evidence that groups and group membership are increasing. The most obvious way to reconcile lower levels of trust with greater levels of group membership is to note a reduction in the radius of trust. It is hard to interpret the data either on values or on civil society in any other way than to suggest that the radius of trust is diminishing, not just in the United States but across the developed world. That is, people continue to share norms and values in ways that constitute social capital, and they join groups and organizations in ever larger numbers. But the groups have shifted dramatically in kind. The authority of most large organizations has declined, and the importance in people's lives of a host of smaller associations has grown. Rather than taking pride in being a member of a powerful labor federation or working for a large corporation, or in having served in the military, people identify socially with a local aerobics class, a New Age sect, a co-dependent support group, or an Internet chat room. Rather than seeking authoritative values in a church that once shaped the society's culture, people are picking and choosing their values on an individual basis, in ways that link them with smaller communities of like-minded folk.

The shift to smaller-radius groups is mirrored politically in the almost universal rise of interest groups at the expense of broad-based political parties. Parties like the German Christian Democrats and the British Labour Party take a coherent ideological stand on the whole range of issues facing a society, from national defense to social welfare. Though usually based in a particular social class, these parties unite a broad coalition of interests and personalities. Interest groups, on the other hand, focus on single issues such as saving rain forests or promoting poultry farming in the upper Midwest; they may be transnational in scope, but they are much less authoritative, both in the range of issues they deal with and in the numbers of people they bring together.

Contemporary Americans, and contemporary Europeans as well, seek contradictory goals. They are increasingly distrustful of any authority, political or moral, that would constrain their freedom of choice, but they also want a sense of community and the good things that flow from community, such as mutual recognition, participation, belonging, and identity. Community therefore has to be found in smaller, more flexible groups and organizations whose loyalties and membership can overlap, and where entry and exit entail relatively low costs. People may thus be able to reconcile their contradictory desires for autonomy and community. But in this bargain the community they get is smaller and weaker than most of those that have existed in the past. Each community shares less with neighboring ones, and has relatively little hold on its members. The circle that people can trust is necessarily narrower. The essence of the shift in values at the center of the Great Disruption, then, is the rise of moral individualism and the consequent miniaturization of community. These explanations go partway toward explaining why cultural values changed after the 1960s. But at the Great Disruption's core was a shift in values concerning sex and the family-a shift that deserves special emphasis.

MEN BEHAVING BADLY

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ALTHOUGH the role of mother can safely be said to be grounded in biology, the role of father is to a great degree socially constructed. In the words of the anthropologist Margaret Mead, "Somewhere at the dawn of human history, some social invention was made under which males started nurturing females and their young." The male role was founded on the provision of resources; "among human beings everywhere [the male] helps provide food for women and children." Being a learned behavior, the male role in nurturing the family is subject to disruption. Mead wrote, But the evidence suggests that we should phrase the matter differently for men and women-that men have to learn to want to provide for others, and this behaviour, being learned, is fragile and can disappear rather easily under social conditions that no longer teach it effectively.

The role of fathers, in other words, varies by culture and tradition from intense involvement in the nurturing and education of children to a more distant presence as protector and disciplinarian to the near absence possible for a paycheck provider. It takes a great deal of effort to separate a mother from her newborn infant; in contrast, it often takes a fair amount of effort to involve a father with his.

When we put kinship and family in this context, it is easier to understand why nuclear families have started to break apart at such a rapid rate over the past two generations. The family bond was relatively fragile, based on an exchange of the woman's fertility for the man's resources. Prior to the Great Disruption, all Western societies had in place a complex series of formal and informal laws, rules, norms, and obligations to protect mothers and children by limiting the freedom of fathers to simply ditch one family and start another. Today many people have come to think of marriage as a kind of public celebration of a sexual and emotional union between two adults, which is why gay marriage has become a possibility in the United States and other developed countries. But it is clear that historically the institution of marriage existed to give legal protection to the mother-child unit, and to ensure that adequate economic resources were passed from the father to allow the children to grow up to be viable adults.

What accounts for the breakdown of these norms constraining male behavior, and of the bargain that rested on them? Two very important changes occurred sometime during the early postwar period. The first involved advances in medical technology-that is, birth control and abortion-- that permitted women to better control their own reproduction. The second was the movement of women into the paid labor force in most industrialized countries and the steady rise in their incomes-hourly, median, and lifetime-relative to men's over the next thirty years.

The significance of birth control was not simply that it lowered fertility. Indeed, if the effect of birth control is to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies, it is hard to explain why its advent should have been accompanied by an explosion of illegitimacy and a rise in the abortion rate, or why the use of birth control is positively correlated with illegitimacy across the OECD.

The main impact of the Pill and the sexual revolution that followed it was, as the economists Janet Yellen, George Akerlof, and Michael Katz have shown, to dramatically alter calculations about the risks of sex, and thereby to change male behavior. The reason that the rates of birth-control use, abortion, and illegitimacy went up in tandem is that a fourth rate-the number of shotgun marriages-declined substantially at the same time. By these economists' calculations, in the period 1965-1969 some 59 percent of white brides and 25 percent of black brides were pregnant at the altar. Young people were, evidently, having quite a lot of premarital sex in those years, but the social consequences of out-of-wedlock childbearing were mitigated by the norm of male responsibility for the children produced. By the period 1980-1984 the percentages had dropped to 42 and 11, respectively. Because birth control and abortion permitted women for the first time to have sex without worrying about the consequences, men felt liberated from norms requiring them to look after the women they got pregnant.

The second factor altering male behavior was the entry of women into the paid labor force. That female incomes should be related to family breakdown is an argument accepted by many economists, and elaborated most fully by Gary Becker in his work A Treatise on the Family (1981). The assumption behind this view is that many marriage contracts are entered into with imperfect information: once married, men and women discover that life is not a perpetual honeymoon, that their spouse's behavior has changed from what it was before marriage, or that their own expectations for partners have changed. Trading in a spouse for someone new, or getting rid of an abusive mate, had been restricted by the fact that many women lacking job skills or experience were dependent on husbands. As female earnings rose, women became better able to support themselves and to raise children without husbands. Rising female incomes also increase the opportunity costs of having children, and therefore lower fertility. Fewer children means less of what Becker characterizes as the joint capital in the marriage, and hence makes divorce more likely.

A subtler consequence of women's entering the labor force was that the norm of male responsibility was further weakened. In divorcing a dependent wife, a husband would have to face the prospect of either paying alimony or seeing his children slip into poverty. With many wives earning incomes that rivaled those of their husbands, this became less of an issue. The weakening norm of male responsibility, in turn, reinforced the need for women to arm themselves with job skills so as not to be dependent on increasingly unreliable husbands. With a substantial probability that a first marriage will end in divorce, contemporary women would be foolish not to prepare themselves for work.

The decline of nuclear families in the West had strongly negative effects on social capital and was related to an increase in poverty for people at the bottom of the social hierarchy, to increasing levels of crime, and finally to declining trust. But pointing to the negative consequences for social capital of changes in the family is in no way to blame women for these problems. The entry of women into the workplace, the steady closing of the earnings gap with men, and the greater ability of women to control fertility are by and large good things. The most important shift in norms was in the one that dictated male responsibility for wives and children. Even if the shift was triggered by birth control and rising female incomes, men were to blame for the consequences. And it is not as if men always behaved well prior to that: the stability of traditional families was often bought at a high price in terms of emotional and physical distress, and also in lost opportunities-- costs that fell disproportionately on the shoulders of women.

On the other hand, these sweeping changes in gender roles have not been the unambiguously good thing that some feminists pretend. Losses have accompanied gains, and those losses have fallen disproportionately on the shoulders of children. This should not surprise anyone: given the fact that female roles have traditionally centered on reproduction and children, we could hardly expect that the movement of women out of the household and into the workplace would have no consequences for families.

Moreover, women themselves have often been the losers in this bargain. Most labor-market gains for women in the 1970s and 1980s were not in glamorous Murphy Brown kinds of jobs but in low-end service-sector jobs. In return for meager financial independence, many women found themselves abandoned by husbands who moved on to younger wives or girlfriends. Because older women are considered less sexually attractive than older men, they had much lower chances of remarrying than did the husbands who left them. The widening of the gap among men between rich and poor had its counterpart among women: educated, ambitious, and talented women broke down barriers, proved they could succeed at male occupations, and saw their incomes rise; but many of their less-educated, less-ambitious, and less-talented sisters saw the floor collapse under them, as they tried to raise children by themselves while in low-paying, dead-end jobs or on welfare. Our consciousness of this process has been distorted by the fact that the women who talk and write and shape the public debate about gender issues come almost exclusively from the former category.

In contrast, men have on balance come out about even. Although many have lost substantial status and income, others (and sometimes the same ones) have quite happily been freed of burdensome responsibilities for wives and children. Hugh Hefner did not invent the Playboy lifestyle in the 1950s; casual access to multiple women has been enjoyed by powerful, wealthy, high-status men throughout history, and has been one of the chief motives for seeking power, wealth, and high status in the first place. What changed after the 1950s was that many rather ordinary men were allowed to live out the fantasy lives of hedonism and serial polygamy formerly reserved to a tiny group at the very top of society. One of the greatest frauds perpetrated during the Great Disruption was the notion that the sexual revolution was gender-neutral, benefiting women and men equally, and that it somehow had a kinship with the feminist revolution. In fact the sexual revolution served the interests of men, and in the end put sharp limits on the gains that women might otherwise have expected from their liberation from traditional roles.

RECONSTRUCTING

SOCIAL ORDER

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HOW can we rebuild social capital in the future? The fact that culture and public policy give societies some control over the pace and degree of disruption is not in the long run an answer to how social order will be established at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Japan and some Catholic countries have been able to hold on to traditional family values longer than Scandinavia or the English-speaking world, and this may have saved them some of the social costs experienced by the latter. But it is hard to imagine that they will be able to hold out over the coming generations, much less re-establish anything like the nuclear family of the industrial era, with the father working and the mother staying at home to raise children. Such an outcome would not be desirable, even if it were possible.

We appear to be caught, then, in unpleasant circumstances: going forward seems to promise ever-increasing levels of disorder and social atomization, at the same time that our line of retreat has been cut off. Does this mean that contemporary liberal societies are fated to descend into increasing moral decline and social anarchy, until they somehow implode? Were Edmund Burke and other critics of the Enlightenment right that anarchy was the inevitable product of the effort to replace tradition and religion with reason?

The answer, in my view, is no, for the very simple reason that we human beings are by nature designed to create moral rules and social order for ourselves. The situation of normlessness-what the sociologist Emile Durkheim labeled "anomie"-is intensely uncomfortable for us, and we will seek to create new rules to replace the ones that have been undercut. If technology makes certain old forms of community difficult to sustain, then we will seek out new ones, and we will use our reason to negotiate arrangements to suit our underlying interests, needs, and passions.

To understand why the present situation isn't as hopeless as it may seem, we need to consider the origins of social order per se, on a more abstract level. Many discussions of culture treat social order as if it were a static set of rules handed down from earlier generations. If one was stuck in a low-- social-capital or low-trust country, one could do nothing about it. It is true, of course, that public policy is relatively limited in its ability to manipulate culture, and that the best public policies are those shaped by an awareness of cultural constraints. But culture is a dynamic force, one that is constantly being remade-if not by governments then by the interactions of the thousands of decentralized individuals who make up a society. Although culture tends to evolve more slowly than formal social and political institutions, it nonetheless adapts to changing circumstances.

What we find is that order and social capital have two broad bases of support. The first is biological, and emerges from human nature itself. There is an increasing body of evidence coming out of the life sciences that the standard social-- science model is inadequate, and that human beings are born with pre-existing cognitive structures and age-specific capabilities for learning that lead them naturally into society. There is, in other words, such a thing as human nature. For the sociologists and anthropologists, the existence of human nature means that cultural relativism needs to be rethought, and that it is possible to discern cultural and moral universals that, if used judiciously, might help to evaluate particular cultural practices. Moreover, human behavior is not nearly as plastic and therefore manipulable as their disciplines have assumed for much of this century. For the economists, human nature implies that the sociological view of human beings as inherently social beings is more accurate than their own individualistic model. And for those who are neither sociologists nor economists, an essential humanity confirms a number of commonsense understandings about the way people think and act that have been resolutely denied by earlier generations of social scientists-for example, that men and women are different by nature, that we are political and social creatures with moral instincts, and the like. This insight is extremely important, because it means that social capital will tend to be generated by human beings as a matter of instinct.

The biological revolution that has been under way in the second half of the twentieth century has multiple sources. The most startling advances have been made at the level of molecular biology and biochemistry, where the discovery of the structure of DNA has led to the emergence of an entire industry devoted to genetic manipulation. In neurophysiology great advances have been made in understanding the chemical and physiological bases of psychological phenomena, including an emerging view that the brain is not a general-purpose calculating machine but a highly modular organ with specially adapted capabilities. And finally, on the level of macro behavior, a tremendous amount of new work has been done in animal ethology, behavioral genetics, primatology, and evolutionary psychology and anthropology, suggesting that certain behavioral patterns are much more general than previously believed. For instance, the generalization that females tend to be more selective than males in their choice of mates proves to be true not only across all known human cultures but across virtually all known species that reproduce sexually. It would seem to be only a matter of time before the micro and macro levels of research are connected: with the mapping of complete gene sequences for fruit flies, nematodes, rats, and eventually human beings, it will be possible to turn individual gene sequences on and off and directly observe their effects on behavior.

The second basis of support for social order is human reason, and reason's ability to spontaneously generate solutions to problems of social cooperation. Mankind's natural capabilities for creating social capital do not explain how social capital arises in specific circumstances. The creation of particular rules of behavior is the province of culture rather than nature, and in the cultural realm we find that order is frequently the result of a process of horizontal negotiation, argument, and dialogue among individuals. Order does not need to proceed from the top down-from a lawgiver (or, in contemporary terms, a state) handing down laws or a priest promulgating the word of God.

Neither natural nor spontaneous order is sufficient in itself to produce the totality of rules that constitutes social order per se. Either needs to be supplemented at crucial junctures by hierarchical authority. But when we look back in human history, we see that self-organizing individuals have continuously been creating social capital for themselves, and have managed to adapt to technological and economic changes greater than those faced by Western societies over the past two generations.

PERHAPS the easiest way to get a handle on the Great Disruption's future is to look briefly at great disruptions of the past. Indices of social order have increased and decreased over time, suggesting that although social capital may often seem to be in the process of depletion, its stock has increased in certain historical periods. The political scientist Ted Robert Gurr estimates that homicide rates in England were three times as high in the thirteenth century as in the seventeenth, and three times as high in the seventeenth as in the nineteenth; in London they were twice as high in the early nineteenth century as in the 1970s. Both conservatives decrying moral decline and liberals celebrating increased individual choice sometimes talk as if there had been since the early 1600s a steady movement away from Puritan values. But although a secular trend toward greater individualism has been evident over this long time period, many fluctuations in behavior have suggested that societies are perfectly capable of increasing the degree of constraint on individual choice through moral rules.

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The Victorian period in Britain and America may seem to many to be the embodiment of traditional values, but Victorianism was in fact a radical movement that emerged in reaction to widespread social disorder at the beginning of the nineteenth century-a movement that deliberately sought to create new social rules and instill virtues in populations that were seen as wallowing in degeneracy.

It would be wrong to assert that the greater social order that came to prevail in Britain and America during the Victorian period was simply the result of changing moral norms. In this period both societies established modern police forces, which replaced the hodgepodge of local agencies and poorly trained deputies that had existed at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In the United States after the Civil War the police focused attention on such minor offenses against public order as public drinking, vagrancy, loitering, and the like, leading to a peak in arrests for this kind of behavior around 1870. Toward the end of the century many states had begun to establish systems of universal education, which sought to put all American children into free public schools-a process that began somewhat later in Britain. But the essential change that took place was a matter of values rather than institutions. At the core of Victorian morality was the inculcation of impulse control in young people-the shaping of what economists today would call their preferences-so that they would not indulge in pleasures like casual sex, alcohol, and gambling.

There are other examples from other cultures of moral renovation. The feudal Tokugawa period in Japan-when power was held by various daimyo, or warrior lords-was one of insecurity and frequent violence. The Meiji Restoration, which took place in 1868, established a single centralized state, and stamped out once and for all the kind of banditry that had taken place in feudal Japan. The country developed a new moral system as well. We think of a custom like the lifetime employment that is practiced by large Japanese firms as an ancient cultural tradition, but in fact it dates back only to the late nineteenth century, and was fully implemented among large companies only after the Second World War. Before then there was a high degree of labor mobility; skilled craftsmen in particular were in short supply and constantly on the move from one company to another. Large Japanese companies like Mitsui and Mitsubishi found that they could not attract the skilled labor they needed, and so, with the help of the government, they embarked on a successful campaign to elevate the virtue of loyalty above others.

COULD the pattern experienced in the second half of the nineteenth century in Britain and America, or in Japan, repeat itself in the next generation or two? There is growing evidence that the Great Disruption has run its course, and that the process of re-norming has already begun. Growth in the rates of increase in crime, divorce, illegitimacy, and distrust has slowed substantially, and in the 1990s has even reversed in many of the countries that experienced an explosion of disorder over the past two generations. This is particularly true in the United States, where levels of crime are down a good 15 percent from their peaks in the early 1990s. Divorce rates peaked in the early 1980s, and births to single mothers appear to have stopped increasing. Welfare rolls have diminished almost as dramatically as crime rates, in response both to the 1996 welfare-reform measures and to the opportunities provided by a nearly full-employment economy in the 1990s. Levels of trust in both institutions and individuals have also recovered significantly since the early 1990s.

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How far might this re-norming of society go? We are much more likely to see dramatic changes in levels of crime and trust than in norms regarding sex, reproduction, and family life. Indeed, the process of re-norming in the first two spheres is already well under way. With regard to sex and reproduction, however, the technological and economic conditions of our age make it extremely doubtful that anything like a return to Victorian values will take place. Strict rules about sex make sense in a society in which unregulated sex has a high probability of leading to pregnancy and having a child out of wedlock is likely to lead to destitution, if not early death, for both mother and child. The first of these conditions disappeared with birth control; the second was greatly mitigated, though not eliminated, by a combination of female incomes and welfare subsidies. Although the United States has cut back sharply on welfare, no one is about to propose making birth control illegal or reversing the movement of women into the workplace. Nor will the individual pursuit of rational self-interest solve the problems posed by declining fertility: it is precisely the rational interest of parents in their children's long-term life chances that induces them to have fewer children. The importance of kinship as a source of social connectedness will probably continue to decline, and the stability of nuclear families is likely never to fully recover. Those societies, such as Japan and Korea, that have until now bucked this trend are more likely to shift toward Western practices than the reverse.

Some religious conservatives hope, and liberals fear, that the problem of moral decline will be resolved by a large-scale return to religious orthodoxy-a Western version of the Ayatollah Khomeini returning to Iran on a jetliner. For a variety of reasons this seems unlikely. Modern societies are so culturally diverse that it is not clear whose version of orthodoxy would prevail. Any true orthodoxy is likely to be seen as a threat to large and important groups in the society, and hence would neither get very far nor serve as a basis for a widening radius of trust. Rather than integrating society, a conservative religious revival might in fact accelerate the movement toward fragmentation and moral miniaturization: the various varieties of Protestant fundamentalism would argue among themselves over doctrine; orthodox Jews would become more orthodox; Muslims and Hindus might start to organize themselves as political-religious communities, and the like.

A return to religiosity is far more likely to take a more benign form, one that in some respects has already started to appear in many parts of the United States. Instead of community arising as a by-product of rigid belief, people will come to religion because of their desire for community. In other words, people will return to religion not necessarily because they accept the truth of revelation but precisely because the absence of community and the transience of social ties in the secular world make them hungry for ritual and cultural tradition. They will help the poor or their neighbors not necessarily because doctrine tells them they must but rather because they want to serve their communities and find that faith-based organizations are the most effective means of doing so. They will repeat ancient prayers and re-enact age-old rituals not because they believe that they were handed down by God but rather because they want their children to have the proper values, and because they want to enjoy the comfort and the sense of shared experience that ritual brings. In this sense they will not be taking religion seriously on its own terms but will use religion as a language with which to express their moral beliefs. Religion becomes a source of ritual in a society that has been stripped bare of ceremony, and thus is a reasonable extension of the natural desire for social relatedness with which all human beings are born. It is something that modern, rational, skeptical people can take seriously in much the way that they celebrate national independence, dress up in traditional ethnic garb, or read the classics of their own cultural tradition. Understood in these terms, religion loses its hierarchical character and becomes a manifestation of spontaneous order.

Religion is one of the two main sources of an enlarged radius of trust. The other is politics. In the West, Christianity first established the principle of the universality of human dignity, a principle that was brought down from the heavens and turned into a secular doctrine of universal human equality by the Enlightenment. Today we ask politics to bear nearly the entire weight of this enterprise, and it has done a remarkably good job. Those nations built on universal liberal principles have been surprisingly resilient over the past 200 years, despite frequent setbacks and shortcomings. A political order based on Serb ethnic identity or Twelver Shi'ism will never grow beyond the boundaries of some corner of the Balkans or the Middle East, and could certainly never become the governing principle of large, diverse, dynamic, and complex modern societies like those that make up, for example, the Group of Seven.

There seem to be two parallel processes at work. In the political and economic sphere history appears to be progressive and directional, and at the end of the twentieth century has culminated in liberal democracy as the only viable choice for technologically advanced societies. In the social and moral sphere, however, history appears to be cyclical, with social order ebbing and flowing over the course of generations. There is nothing to guarantee upturns in the cycle; our only reason for hope is the very powerful innate human capacity for reconstituting social order. On the success of this process of reconstruction depends the upward direction of the arrow of History.

Volume:	283
Issue:	5
Start Page:	55-80