25 Influential criminologists predicted ...“Super-predator” language was commonly used
in conjunction with dire predictions that a vast increase in violent juvenile crime was
occurring or about to occur. See Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention,
U.S. Department of Justice, “Juvenile Justice: A Century of Change” ( 1999 ), 4 – 5 , available
at http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles 1 /ojjdp/ 178993 .pdf, accessed April 30 , 2014. See, for example,
Sacha Coupet, “What to Do with the Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing: The Role of Rhetoric and
Reality About Youth Offenders in the Constructive Dismantling of the Juvenile Justice
System,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 148 ( 2000 ): 1303 , 1307 ; Laura A. Bazelon,
“Exploding the Superpredator Myth: Why Infancy Is the Preadolescent’s Best Defense in
Juvenile Court,” New York University Law Review 75 ( 2000 ): 159. Much of the frightening
imagery was racially coded; see, for example, John J. DiIulio, “My Black Crime Problem,
and Ours,” City Journal (Spring 1996 ), available at http://www.city-journal.org/html/
6 _ 2 _my_black.html, accessed April 30 , 2014 (“ 270 , 000 more young predators on the
streets than in 1990 , coming at us in waves over the next two decades ... as many as half
of these juvenile super-predators could be young black males”); William J. Bennett, John
J. DiIulio Jr., and John P. Walters, Body Count: Moral Poverty—And How to Win America’s
War Against Crime and Drugs (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996 ), 27 – 28.
26 Sometimes expressly focusing on black ... John J. DiIulio Jr., “The Coming of the
Super-Predators,” Weekly Standard (November 27 , 1995 ), 23.
27 Panic over the impending crime ... Bennett, DiIulio, and Walters, Body Count, 27. See
also Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, “Juvenile Justice.”
28 The juvenile population in America increased ... See, for example, Elizabeth Becker,
“As Ex-Theorist on Young ‘Superpredators,’ Bush Aide Has Regrets,” New York Times
(February 9 , 2001 ), A 19.
29 In 2001 , the surgeon general ... U.S. Surgeon General, Youth Violence: A Report of the
Surgeon General ( 2001 ), ch. 1 , available at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK 44297 /
#A 12312 , accessed April 30 , 2014 ; see also U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile
Justice and Delinquency Prevention, “Challenging the Myths” ( 2001 ), 5 , available at
http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles 1 /ojjdp/ 178995 .pdf, accessed April 30 , 2014 (“[A]nalysis of
juvenile homicide arrests also leads to the conclusion that juvenile superpredators are
more myth than reality”).
30 We decided to publish a report ...“Cruel and Unusual.”