From the Department of the Obvious

From the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation comes this about a paper published in the Journal Pediatrics:

Delinquent Youth Far More Likely to Die and Die Violently Than Youth in the General Population
New study of deaths of delinquent youth, the most comprehensive in 60 years, finds minorities most at risk and girls increasingly endangered.

Plagued by a high rate of homicides, youth in the juvenile justice system, a group largely composed of poor racial and ethnic minorities, are four times more likely to die�and if they are girls, eight times more likely�than youth in the general population, according to a new study that considers violent death a major public health threat for America�s troubled young people. The study appears in the June edition of the journal Pediatrics.

"We need to get away from the stereotype that delinquent youth are just bad kids. They are a group of young people who are especially vulnerable to early and violent deaths," said Linda A. Teplin, Ph.D., Owen L. Coon Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, an expert on criminal justice populations, and the study�s principal author. "All the young people in our study had at least one encounter with the juvenile justice system," she added. "And that means there were opportunities to intervene."

A bit more on this study:

Teplin and her colleagues followed 1,829 youth (1172 males and 657 females), some for more than eight years, who between the ages of 10 and 18 years old came through Chicago�s Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center. More than half of the sample were African American, almost a third were Hispanic and about 16 percent were non-Hispanic white.

As of March 2004, 65 had died, almost all in a violent manner. Homicides, murders that usually involved guns, accounted for 90 percent of the deaths, while encounters with law enforcement (technically known as death by "legal intervention") claimed another 5 percent. Other causes of death included suicides and car accidents.

Overall, the mortality rate among delinquent youth was four times higher than youth in the general population, even after controlling for demographic differences. Moreover, it was three times higher than the rate recorded in a 1940 study that previously had been viewed as the reference point for mortality rates in delinquent youth.

Duuhhh! And of course, like a true liberal, they are looking to fund a program to 'intervene' rather than deal with the problem at its source - a sense of entitlement fostered by the welfare society, the poor conditions of the schools and the difficulty of not being able to call a spade a spade. Bill Cosby is able to get away with his criticisms because he is famous. Someone less well known would be shouted down as being politically incorrect and not sensitive enough...