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Juvenile Crime Coverage

Runaway Juvenile Crime?: The Context of Juvenile Arrests in America

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Introduction and Analysis

On a Saturday night back in 1984, Kathy Robbins, a 15-year-old girl from Glenn County, California, was arrested for being in her town after curfew. She was taken in hand-cuffs to a 54-year-old cell in Glenn County’s adult jail. Four days after she was arrested, at a juvenile court hearing, a judge refused to release her to a juvenile detention facility. On that day, still isolated and alone in an adult jail cell, Kathy Robbins twisted a bed sheet around her neck, and hanged herself from the rail of the top bunk bed.

Robbins was one of six teenagers who took their lives in California jails between 1979 and 1984. The controversy surrounding her suicide culminated in the passage of a California law in 1987 which forbade the detention of teenagers in the same jails as adults. Juvenile advocates at the time regarded the California legislation as “the most progressive law in the U.S. on this issue.”3 With the help of this California law and the 1973

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Super-Predators or Victims of Societal Neglect? Framing Effects in Juvenile Crime Coverage

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An impressive array of scholarly research demonstrates that language has a profound influence on human thought (see Carroll 1956; Seidel 1975; Sanford, 1987; Rosch 1973; Lakoff 1987). In the realm of political communication, the use of particular forms of presentation or modes of discourse (also known as "frames") -- strongly influences perceptions of public issues, events, and leaders (Iyengar 1991; Neuman, Just, and Crigler 1992; Gamson 1992; Anderson 1996). For example, the public is more likely to endorse increases in government welfare spending when the beneficiaries are said to be "poor people" rather than "people on welfare" or "black people" (Bobo and Kluegel 1993; Gilens, 1996; 1999; Gilliam, 1999; Smith 1987). Of course, the most common forum for the presentation of public issues is broadcast news. The overwhelming majority of broadcast news reports are "episodic" or event-oriented, focusing on concrete acts or live events rather than general contextual material. Television...

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