Super Predators Hypothesis

The phrase “super-predator” was first adopted by the media to characterize the rise in violent juvenile crime during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The phrase was and later adopted by conservative policy advocates to address the issue of these increased rates violent juvenile crime throughout the United States. The “juvenile super-predator” was first formally described by John J. Dilulio Jr. in 1995 and expanded in the co-authored Body Count: Moral Poverty and How to Win America’s War Against Crime and Drugs (1996) the following year . The “super-predator” hypothesis predicted minority male youths entering their teens in the late 1990s who would cause drastic increases in violent crime rates. These youths were expected to generate a crime …show more content…
In addition, Dilulio and colleagues never clearly defined nor proposed an operationalization to test for the development or effects of “super-predator” characteristics or causal effects of “moral poverty (Bennett, Dilulio & Walters, 1996). They instead cited vague concepts of “broken homes”, “badlands neighborhoods”, joblessness and a lack of religion (Ibid., Pizarro et al., 2007). The primary theoretical issues are the vague macro and micro level concepts of influence, creating a “black box” for the causes of super-predators’ characteristics. The hypothesis was popularized by the media and politicians in the mid-1990s, which contributed to shifts in public opinions about the criminality and perceived violence of minority juveniles. Several academics also gave public support of the hypothesis like James Fox, whose research was the empirical base of the hypothesis (see also Fox, 1996; Pizarro et al., …show more content…
He and others acknowledged that policy implications were predominately focused on black and minority youths, and disproportionately impacted them (Pickett et al., 2012). The hypothesis was abandoned after it’s apparent failure, and public attention shifted to the “war on terror” policy following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The result has left current legislators and policymakers to mitigate policy decisions of the 1980s and 1990s which continue to affect this demographic (Bernard & Kurlychek, 2010; Surette, 2011). The debunking of the “super-predator” has allowed for rational policy responses to youth crime with a focus on the economic and social causes of crime (Krisberg et al,

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