itute fellow who co-wrote the book with William Bennett and John
Walters, calls it a "multi variate phenomenon, " meaning that child abuse,
the high number of available high-tech guns, alcoholism and many other
factors feed the problem. University of Pennsylvania professor Mavin
Wolfgang says, "6 percent to 7 percent of the boys in an age group will be
chronic offenders, meaning they are arrested five or more times before the
age of 18." If that holds true, because there will be 500,000 more boys
ages 14 to 17 in the year 2000 than there were in 1995, there will be at
least 30,000 more youth criminals on the streets. Between 1990 and 2010,
there will be 4.5 million more boys, yielding 270,000 young criminals.
"The big destruction happens early," Heritage Foundation fellow
Pat Fagan says. "By the age of 4 or 5, the kid is really warped.
Psychologists can predict by the age of 6 who'll be the super-predators."
According to Fagan: Child abuse and alcohol ruin these children. But the
groundwork was laid three decades ago with the widespread adoption of
birth control, which made the sexual revolution possible. It altered
people's dedication to their children and altered a fundamental
orientation of society. Sexual morality got unanchored in the 1960s,
followed by the legalization of abortion.
"Abortion is a very definite rejection of the child. So is out-of-
wedlock births, as well as divorce," he says. "The [predators] everyone' s
afraid of were abused kids. There's sexual abuse and alcohol, and just the
general decline in the cultural knowledge of what love is. " In 1950, for
every 100 children born, he says, 12 had divorced parents or were born out
of wedlock. In 1992, that number had quadrupled to 60 children for every
100 born. Throw abortion into the mix, and the number shoots up to 92 per
John Dilulio asserts that "each generation of crime-prone boys has
bee...