EDMONTON (CUP)—“Youth crime rises steadily for 25 years.” Surprised? Probably not.
When University of Alberta sociology professor Timothy Hartnagel opened his Edmonton Journal to this headline on Jan. 6, he wasn’t surprised either. In fact, it further proved his point that the media grossly misrepresent youth crime rates, which have actually been falling for the last 10 years or so.
Hartnagel recently completed a report for policy think-tank the Parkland Institute entitled “Youth Crime and Justice in Alberta: Rhetoric and Reality.”
“The point of choosing the subtitle of ‘Rhetoric and Reality’ is to communicate the point to people that there is quite a disparity between a lot of the talk around issues of youth crime and justice and what exactly the situation is,” he said.
“The media tends to disproportionately focus on the rarer, more extreme kinds of crimes. They play on people’s fears by looking at the atypical and the exceptional. And all of this gives the public a very distorted image of reality.”
While he sees this decline as a positive development, he also believes the government could do more to prevent youth crimes.
“We know what the most effective kinds of prevention programs are from the evaluations that have been done on a number of studies,” he said. “I would say that what we need to do is implement those kinds of programs on more than an experimental basis. The government needs to provide longer-term, stable funding.”
Such programs, many of which have been successful on a trial basis, would include identifying high-risk children and treating them from early childhood.
Hartnagel’s paper lists various risk factors recognizable from a very young age, including impulsiveness, low intelligence, poor parenting, anti-social tendencies and difficult socio-economic circumstances.
“If we could only focus on these factors from an early age, we could make an effort to change these children’s futures,” said Hartnagel. “This would have a big impact, as it is these high-risk children who are committing a disproportionate number of violent youth crimes.”
However, Hartnagel attributes this decline in youth crime more to an aging population and a healthy economy than to government efforts.
“The media tends to ignore other kinds of youth crime that have also been declining, like property crime,” said Hartnagel. “They also tend to ignore things like the fact that it’s the more serious offences that are likely to be proceeded against and charged, and therefore we rarely hear about the less severe crimes that occur. The facts are very different than the media’s representations, and it’s important for the public not to forget this.”
