Serious youth crime has fallen off drastically since the 1990s, leaving juvenile halls emptied. So why is California still spending so much?

“I don’t pay attention to statistics one way or the other, good or bad,” he said. Instead, he focuses on the kids he fears could become him, even now. “I tell them, ‘Bro, you don’t want to be David at 15.’”

Monroe, 36, paroled in 2016 and now counseling at-risk teens in San Francisco, says the numbers mean little to him.

“Nobody knows why this occurred,” said Mike Males, a senior research fellow with the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice in San Francisco, which advocates for alternatives to incarceration. It happened “almost regardless of what local, state or national policies were adopted.”

As with the earlier rise in crime, the reasons for the sharp drop aren’t well understood and research has yet to pinpoint the causes. California is not alone in experiencing the decline in youth crime, as rates have fallen across the country.

“The steep decline of juvenile crime is very good news and represents a profound shift for California,” state Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, said after being told of The Chronicle’s findings. “It also has huge implications both for the state and for counties, raising serious questions about whether we are using public safety funds effectively when juvenile halls around the state are operating at below capacity.”

In the years ahead, potential benefits to families, schools and health care systems could expand as youths diverted from a life of crime grow into law-abiding parents, a virtuous cycle that even a few years ago would have seemed inconceivable.

In human terms, a Chronicle analysis shows, the downward trend in violent crime has resulted in 4,700 fewer juveniles slain in California during the past 2½ decades; 150,000 fewer arrests for rapes, assaults and other violent crimes that didn’t happen; and hundreds of thousands of youths not booked into juvenile hall.

The shift in youth crime, if it holds, could drastically alter the justice system in a state that spends $15 billion a year to operate its jails and prisons. The drop in juvenile arrests has far outpaced all other age groups, and has fueled an overall reduction in crime across California.

“Our jails are not full,” he said, “but people think maybe someday they will be.”

San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón, whose office has stopped seeking jail time for many low-level juvenile crimes, said it can be hard to convince the public and politicians that things are better. Being tough on crime gets people elected, he said. There is little political advantage or financial incentive to acknowledge the system doesn’t need a massive and punitive juvenile justice system anymore.

Unlike the surge of violence a generation ago, the plunge in juvenile crime has received relatively little attention and has spurred few demands for action.

Over the past decade, the state’s numerous expanded juvenile halls have become near-empty monuments to a costly miscalculation — a mistake compounded each year as the number of young offenders plummeted. Some California counties are spending $1,400 a day to incarcerate each juvenile, or $500,000 annually, up from $400 a day or $150,000 annually just eight years ago.

The Chronicle also found that California has responded slowly at best to the decline in youth crime. Many counties have yet to cut back significantly on the resources directed at juvenile halls and camps, though they are no longer needed at the level they once were.

A Chronicle review of federal and state statistics over the past three decades revealed startling declines in the number of crimes committed by people 18 and under even as the population grew. In California, homicides of juveniles dropped 83 percent — from 382 in 1995 to 63 in 2017, the latest state data show. Youth arrests for violent felonies in the state dropped 68 percent — from 22,601 in 1994 to 7,291 in 2017.

But those fears, often focused on young people of color, turned out to be unfounded. The predicted wave of youth violence didn’t just stop growing — it collapsed.

The idea of Monroe and teenagers like him — so-called “super-predators” who supposedly killed and robbed without remorse — terrified many. The belief that generations of children to come would be swept up in violence prompted a severe toughening of penalties for young criminals and a decades-long building boom of juvenile halls.

The midday shooting on a Stockton street in 1997, while heinous, was hardly uncommon when it happened. In the mid-1990s, a juvenile was slain, on average, almost every day in California. Arrests of youths for violent felonies averaged about 60 a day statewide. Juvenile halls became so overcrowded, authorities were forced to release hundreds of young offenders early each month.

David Monroe pulled a gun from his pocket, said “f— it,” and fired five shots at a boy he had never seen before. At age 15, he became a killer.

Violent crime by youths in California plummeted over the past two decades and arrests of juveniles for violent felonies fell 68 percent. Juvenile halls that were expanded across the state stand mostly empty, while the costs per youth have skyrocketed. This Chronicle investigation examines this unexpected and largely unrecognized shift and its implications for criminal justice and society.

Juvenile crime spike

Monroe remembers the smallest details about the day he killed Eliasar Garcia. He was with a group of teens, the youngest 13, when he confronted the 16-year-old on a south Stockton street in December 1997 and asked if he had a problem with their gang.

“He said yes, and that was it,” said Monroe.

As he pulled the trigger, Monroe said, he flashed on an image of his alcoholic father beating his mother. He was propelled to that moment, he said, by the “pain, hurt, resentments that you have in your life, that you’ve never dealt with that you don’t even realize are there.”

He was a product of his environment, Monroe said. “I learned if somebody hits you, you hit them back.” He was in many ways the juvenile delinquent society feared in the 1990s — the product of a violent, dysfunctional family and a gang-infested community, where being a criminal was not just normal, but expected.

“I’ve shot people and stabbed people and beat people up,” he said. “We were the kids that they were talking about.”

Those kids were part of a juvenile crime spike dating to the late 1980s, when arrests for murders, rapes, robberies, attempted murders and other violent crimes began a steady rise across California and the nation.

Some experts have linked the increase to the growing drug trade and the availability of cheap “Saturday night special” pistols that later were banned in many cities. Children were being recruited to sell crack cocaine, then armed with guns and assigned gang affiliations, said Patti Lee, who oversees juvenile cases in the San Francisco public defender’s office.

“We had a lot of kids getting killed,” she said.

As violence escalated across California, the number of juvenile homicide victims more than doubled — from 162 in 1987 to 382 in 1995. Experts predicted that violence among youths would only get worse, even as many indicators showed improvements in youth crime by the mid-1990s.

San Francisco Chief Juvenile Probation Officer Allen Nance began working with youth offenders in the late 1980s and witnessed the crime wave.

“In my heart of hearts I never believed that any child could be born to be a super-predator,” Nance said. “But I clearly saw the behavior that led so many people to that belief — very scary behavior, very dangerous behavior. Twelve- and 13-year-olds who are committing homicide and not demonstrating one iota of remorse.

“I saw those kids,” Nance said. “I worked with those kids.”

Unprecedented building boom

Fear of out-of-control teenagers pushed local agencies in the 1990s to adopt tough-on-crime policies, and lawmakers latched onto the issue, promising to end the scourge of violence in California. In 1995, the state dropped the minimum age for adult prosecution from 16 to 14.

In 2000, even as far fewer juveniles were being arrested, California voters passed Proposition 21, a pivotal law that increased penalties for certain crimes and enacted harsh sentences for current and former gang members convicted of even minor offenses. It also made it easier for prosecutors to charge adolescents as adults, giving them new power over a juvenile system once run primarily by judges and probation officers.

During the same period, the state launched a building boom to ease its overcrowded juvenile halls and house the anticipated flow of ever more dangerous delinquents that many feared were still to come.

At least 41 of the state’s 58 counties expanded or built new juvenile halls between 1996 and 2007, using hundreds of millions of dollars in state and federal funds that were available only on the condition they increase capacity. In total, space for more than 2,500 additional youths was added to the counties’ maximum-security facilities, according to the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice.

“We were locking up youth at an alarming rate,” Mark Varela, chief probation officer in Ventura County, said of the decision to rebuild and significantly expand the county’s juvenile hall. “We just figured this was going to be a building that was going to fulfill our needs for quite a number of years in the future.”

Instead, the lockups emptied.

As new detention centers went up, youth crime continued to drop. Every part of the state — from isolated counties in the Sierra and Cascades, to rural parts of the Central Valley, to urban areas like Los Angeles and San Francisco — experienced the decline in arrests.

The reduction was staggering when compared with the steady but modest decline in overall arrest rates. Between 1980 and 2016, the arrest rate dropped 84 percent for juveniles, though it fell only 9 percent for adults in their 50s, according to a recent Public Policy Institute of California report. For felony crimes, the arrest rate among juveniles fell 86 percent over the same period, while it actually increased for age groups 30 and older.

We’re all kind of scratching our heads over what we’re going to do with all the extra space.

The decline in violent crimes targeting youths was even more dramatic, with juveniles representing 3.5 percent of all homicide victims in the state in 2017, compared with 11 percent in 1995.

Arrests of youths of all races and ethnicities fell, but disparities between whites and blacks widened. In 2017, the arrest rate for young African Americans was nearly five times higher than for whites, according to state data, a gap that has steadily grown since the mid-1990s.

Due to the declining crime and a growing emphasis on alternatives to incarceration, The Chronicle found, in 39 of the 43 California counties that have juvenile halls, the facilities were less than half full in 2018. Some were nearly vacant.

Nevada County had an average of five juveniles locked up each day last year in a facility built to hold 60. Alameda County had 66 kids in a building designed for 358. County-run camps and ranches, which house youths after they’ve been sentenced, also were mostly empty.

With bigger facilities and fewer wards, the costs of juvenile detention spiked. The Chronicle requested and reviewed juvenile hall and camp populations and spending data from 14 diverse counties, and found that the annual cost of detaining youths increased in each one since 2011, ranging from 29 percent to 214 percent.

“It’s really the opposite of what we thought it would be,” Varela said. “We’re all kind of scratching our heads over what we’re going to do with all the extra space.”

Even with nearly 20 years of sustained declines in youth crime and thousands of empty beds in juvenile halls, there is still a lingering sense that it’s all too good to be true.

“We’re still holding our breath,” Nance said.

An unexpected drop

The youth crime decline would be easier to believe, experts said, if they understood why it happened.

Why has youth crime plummeted? What's led to the dramatic drop in violent youth crime? Experts point to several factors, but no definitive answer has been found for the historic lows seen across the country regardless of varying demographics or policies. Read

Systemically, there is no clear explanation for why the crime rate dropped, and continued to decline through the 2008 recession and to the present day. Though there’s no consensus, many are eager to offer theories and take credit.

Possible reasons include a decline of lead poisoning in children, which reduced the toxic effects on young brains, and pivotal shifts in the street drug trade, including diminishing demand for crack cocaine and strict laws that sent dealers who might recruit young people away for decades.

In San Francisco, said Gascón, prosecutors moved away from incarcerating children for low-level offenses like truancy or petty theft as research showed that even one stint in juvenile hall led to a higher likelihood of recidivism.

“We recognized that actually institutionalizing people, especially young people for low-level offenses, actually has the reverse impact,” Gascón said. “It doesn’t deter them.”

The transition from a lock-’em-up mentality toward home- or community-based alternatives in San Francisco and other counties came as California rolled back some of Prop. 21 and made other reforms. In 2016, prosecutors lost the ability to unilaterally send juveniles to adult court, and last year were barred from treating any defendant under 16 as an adult.

The San Francisco public defender’s office, Lee said, has pushed for juvenile defendants to be diverted to programs and for social worker support to keep young offenders in school, in community programs and out of a jail cell — which increases their chances of success.

“I like to think we contributed to the reduction in the numbers,” Lee said. “We’re trying to keep those records clean so we can create a path to rehabilitation.”

Others point to the efforts of nonprofit organizations that launched in the 1990s and early 2000s to address youth crime, including United Playaz, where Monroe works.

In this video, United Playaz program coordinators David Monroe, Krystal Morales and Will Ramirez reflect on their upbringings and the choices they made as teens, which eventually led to their working in youth violence prevention.

Manjula Vargese / The Chronicle

In Oakland, Anne Marks believes the efforts of Youth Alive, founded in 1991, have helped quell violence by sending counselors into hospitals after teens are injured in shootings to try to prevent retaliation and to mentor at-risk youths.

“There are fewer people shot and fewer trips to the hospital,” said Marks, the organization’s executive director. “Youth Alive has saved lives.”

Such local policies or programs, however, don’t explain the near-universal drop. The numbers fell in every California county, in most states and even on a global scale, said Males of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. Arrests for low-level offenses like petty theft and truancy have decreased, as have arrests for serious and potentially life-altering crimes like kidnap and rape.

“I would be very suspicious of people who claim to know why,” Males said, adding that elected officials like to credit local policies for the decline. “Then the county next door did the opposite and that worked, too.”

Looking forward

The falling crime rate, particularly among youths, raises larger questions about societal priorities and long-term impacts that are tantalizing but difficult to predict.

“We could get to a point where we achieve our mission of ending violence in Oakland,” said Marks of Youth Alive, who has seen the number of juveniles slain in the city fall to a low of one in 2017 from a high of 18 in 2006. “You could picture how it could happen.”

With fewer teens and young adults getting into trouble and more resources available, the group has expanded its violence prevention efforts to include those under 35.

Criminologist Jay Albanese sees the possibility for big dividends from the reduction in violence.

“The question is, what would the future look like?” asked Albanese, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. “If it is a long-term trend, the future is looking more like Canada and Europe in the way they spend money.”

Instead of spending billions in taxpayer dollars on the “criminal justice apparatus,” Albanese said, public officials could spend the money on housing, health care, employment training and education. There is a reason education is a fraction of the cost in countries that prioritize public spending in that way, he said.

But Albanese and several other experts and policymakers said history offers a lesson in caution.

“Too often we find ways to fill the prisons,” he said, referring to the crack epidemic or the current crackdown on undocumented immigrants. “I’m worried about whether that vacuum gets filled with another crime problem, real or imagined.”

State Sen. Holly Mitchell, D-Los Angeles, cited the war on drugs, which resulted in mass incarceration, as the type of policy that could stymie a societal transformation based on record-low crime.

If juvenile crime rates had remained at mid-'90s levels in California, there would have been 4,700 more juveniles slain since then; 150,000 more arrested for rape and other violent crimes; and hundreds of thousands more booked into juvenile hall.

“I am optimistic as long as the economy continues to be healthy and as long as we don’t fall back into historic patterns based on fear and bias ... where we see people of color and poor people as threats and lock them up,” Mitchell said. “History has a history of repeating itself.”

If Monroe has any say, no one will ever repeat his history.

He walked out of San Quentin just over two years ago and took a job as a program coordinator for the nonprofit youth organization United Playaz, mentoring and supporting city kids in an after-school and summer program.

Inside a South of Market youth center, photos of young men killed in San Francisco are tacked to the walls as reminders of the impact of violent city streets. Many of the photos are starting to fade from age.

On a recent afternoon, Monroe was vacuuming as middle school students poured into the center. The girls and boys came up for hugs as he asked about school or their new hairstyles before corralling them to start homework. As the room quieted, he huddled with a student to help him simplify algebraic equations.

Monroe never had this kind of support and interaction when he was growing up. If he had, he said, he doesn’t think he would have pulled the trigger that December day 22 years ago. He wouldn’t be a murderer.

“I would be different for sure, completely,” he said, pausing as he looked around the room. “I could have been something different.”