The punishment for drug and alcohol addiction and gang-organized
crimes has been mainly warehousing or institutionalization and has led to
violence, injury, and death for the majority of at-risk youth. Most of them
have never escaped the failure syndrome which has guided their lives
from the beginning. The failure syndrome is one in which the student
almost always fails at everything. If, on occasion, the student does
succeed, the ability to hold on to that success is short-lived because it is
much easier for at-risk youth to return to failure.

The term high-risk youth can be viewed as an all-encompassing concept
what had been used in the 1980s by only a few social agencies and
governmental organizations in America, such as Act Together (a
Washington-based organization). Since there are so many negative
statements or reactions by young people to society, it is best to analyze
the overall concept by first naming and describing the list of categories
into which they fit; and second, by giving specific examples of the young
people whose background and present situations place them in those
categories. The latter will be done as the story of the American youth
studied over the last seventeen years unfolds.

Youngsters who feel inferior, deprived, shamed, and frustrated express
those feelings through vandalism and stealing. Youth from dysfunctional
families often have low academic skills, vague or totally missing career
goals, a poor or complete lack of work history, abuse drugs and/or
alcohol, and have been involved with the juvenile justice system.

Our society still emphasizes punishment before rehabilitation for
crimes which occur because children lack socialization. Children who
have had drug or alcohol problems as early as the age of six or seven
become involved in substance abuse-related crimes before the teenage
years and continue to have conduct disorders well after adolescence. For
example, youth under age eighteen were arrested for 87,222 violent
offenses in 1980, and in 1981 there were 479,000 youths being held in
8,333 adult jails and lockups.

More recently, in 1990, the following statistics were recorded: 4,173
teens were killed by guns, the highest firearm death rate ever recorded in
the United States; in 1990, there was a rate of 105.3 for every 100,000
black male teenagers killed, a rate eleven times higher than a 9.7 rate in
1985; in Allegheny County in Western Pennsylvania, during 1989/1990, a
56 percent increase in homicide or intentional injury to black males
occurred in 1989, a rate of 5.8 per 100,000 people were killed in
Allegheny County of which 8.5 per 100,000 were men and 26.4 were
black males ( Fuoco 1993, A1, A2).

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