SuperScapeGoats: Dispeling the Myth the Superpredators were gang members

[DFab420]

http://fair.org/extra-online-articles/Superscapegoating/

Rallied by the media, legislators have sounded the alarm that we must prepare ourselves for the attack of the “superpredator.” In May, a bill originally titled the “Violent Youth Predator Act” passed the US House of Representatives; it allows 14-year-olds to be tried as adults and offers $1.5 billion in law enforcement block grants to states that toughen their laws in compliance with federal standards. The Senate version would weaken national protections against jailing juveniles with adults, require states to try juveniles as adults in order to be eligible for federal funding, and allow the federal government to execute people as young as 16.

http://www.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/27206_1.pdf

A professor of politics and public affairs on the political science faculty at
Princeton University, John DiIulio, created and popularized the superpredator
concept. He coined the term superpredator (1995b) to call public
attention to what he characterized as a “new breed” of offenders, “kids that
have absolutely no respect for human life and no sense of the future. . . .
These are stone-cold predators!” (p. 23). Elsewhere, DiIulio and co-authors
have described these young people as “fatherless, Godless, and jobless” and
as “radically impulsive, brutally remorseless youngsters, including ever
more teenage boys, who murder, assault, rob, burglarize, deal deadly drugs,
join gun-toting gangs, and create serious [linked] disorders” (Bennett,
DiIulio, & Walters, 1996, p. 27).

[EdwardBernays]

1. Some more in depth background and detail

http://www.democraticunderground.com/12511339737

[Journeyman]

2. Huh. Twenty-three years before DiIulio coined his phrase, the woman who raised me was murdered. . .

by a 14 year old gunman who dragged her from her car in a busy southern California intersection, pistol whipped her, then put two slugs through her left eye. He and his 16 year old accomplice got a some change and whatever cigarettes she had in her purse.

Other than the term, I don't see that this Princeton jackawipe added much to the conversation. We had far more descriptive terms for the pair who interrupted our lives.

[delrem]

3. So you agree with Hillary Clinton's remarks about "super predators"?

Try to believe me that I have sympathy for the victims of such brutal crimes.
How could anyone not have sympathy?
How could anyone not judge that the perpetrators of such crimes are unworthy?
If I were on the jury and it were proven to me, I'd say "guilty" and I'd never forget it.

However, the classification of a whole generation of youth as guilty by association under the umbrella term "super predators" is spreading the blame and putting a rhetorical spin on it that is ...
in this case not just a rhetorical spin but a super spin given by a POTUS and his wife.
OK, I'll say it, in context it was extraordinarily racist.
It was a racism that was out of whack. Degenerative.
I really don't like those who, in my generation and coming to power, pushed this shit.