LAW: Young and Deadly.

ON Super Tuesday, 62 percent of California voters approved Prop osition 21. This law authorizes prosecutors to bring felony charges against juveniles aged 14 or older, without having to get a judge's approval; makes vandalism resulting in $400 in damages prosecutable as a felony; permits courts to sentence even petty juvenile felons to adult prisons; and exposes youths convicted of murder to terms of life without parole.

Proposition 21 is direct democracy at its worst, and another recent initiative indicates why. In 1994, Californians passed a "three-strikes- and-you're-out" measure mandating that certain categories of adult repeat felons get 25-years-to-life. Other states applied similar laws in a modulated way, but in California the law became a perverse prosecutorial crutch. By 1997, it was being applied like buckshot in hundreds of cases, including many in which less Draconian penalties would have sufficed. Thus, only in California has the "three strikes" law produced anything like the dire fiscal consequences and jail-crowding crises predicted by many experts. I fear that Proposition 21 will result in similar prosecutorial overreaching.

Which is especially sad, because I believe that laws mandating adult incarceration for youth criminals are inherently unwise and pernicious. However predatory his crime, and however physically imposing a 14-year- old juvenile offender may be, there is neither a public-safety nor a correctional rationale for imprisoning him alongside hardened and sophisticated adult felons.

Locking up juvenile offenders with older felons under Spartan conditions will only produce better street gladiators. Yes, restrain violent youth criminals; but do so in suitably secure juveniles-only facilities, and, even then, be vigilant about the need to separate the minnows from the sharks and killer whales. Just because the juvenile-justice pendulum has swung too far in the direction of leniency, don't enact laws that tempt overburdened prosecutors to put the system on autopilot, set to the destination of adult prison.

To be fair, Proposition 21's opponents-mainstream criminologists, advocates for children, and their friends in government and the media- have only themselves to blame. For too long, they have denied the unpleasant post-1960 facts about juvenile crime. Unless they begin to make more credible arguments, and frankly admit that some of today's young criminals are predators who need to be confined (albeit humanely and not with adults), California's misguided crackdown on juveniles could sweep into other states.

Opponents should start by acknowledging that the juvenile-crime problem is grave. In 1967, President Johnson's crime commission noted with alarm that "enormous numbers of young people appear to be involved" in "juvenile delinquency and youth crime." In 1960, the juvenile-arrest rate was 20.1 per 1,000 youths aged 10-17. By 1970, it was 32.3, on the way to 46.4 in 1980, 51.5 in 1990, and 60.7 in 1995, or three times the rate that so alarmed the commission. Over the same period, violent-crime arrest rates for youth quadrupled.

Juveniles perpetrated 137,000 more violent crimes in 1994 than they did in 1985, and were responsible for 26 percent of the growth in violent crime during that period, including 48 percent of the increase in rapes and 35 percent of the increase in murders. In 1995, we had a record 1.7 million "delinquency" cases. In 1996, 2,172 juveniles were arrested for murder, up from 1,860 in 1980, but down from the 1993 peak of 3,790. Since 1996, juvenile violent-crime rates have been falling fast, but serious youth crime remains above its 1960 level.

Why, fumed the initiative's detractors, should we toughen the penalties for juvenile crime when it is declining? One answer is that tougher penalties might yield even lower rates. Important studies suggesting this do, in fact, exist. In 1997, University of Chicago econo mist Steven D. Levitt published a major statistical analysis in which he estimated that, had juvenile and adult incarceration risen at the same rates between 1978 and 1993, about a third of the violent and property crime committed by juveniles in those years would have been averted.

But, as I have long argued, the claim that today's super-impulsive youth criminals-including street-gang members-can be deterred by the stigma of arrest or the threat of confinement is highly doubtful. Where these typically fatherless, jobless, and semiliterate youths and young adults are concerned, one-on-one, adult-to-child prevention and intervention efforts-especially through grass-roots faith-based ministries-would do infinitely more to bolster public safety and save young lives than any conceivable enforcement strategy.

The California initiative's opponents also lambasted the "get tough" juvenile laws of other states-laws that (they claimed) had already landed large numbers of youths behind bars with adults. But if there aren't many juvenile offenders who commit acts that make them eligible for prosecution as adults, why worry? Are there really that many kids languishing in adult prisons?

The statistics tell a complicated story. The percentage of inmates under 18 entering state prison with sentences longer than one year was the same in 1997 as it had been in 1985: about 2 percent. But the total number of persons under 18 sentenced to adult state prisons in 1997, about 7,400, was more than twice the number sentenced in 1985; and the number of juveniles entering state prisons in 1997 for serious violent offenses was 4,510-higher than the total number for 1985.

But we mustn't lose sight of the fact that the vast majority of all formally adjudicated juvenile offenders-leaving out, that is, the estimated 60 percent of serious youth criminals who were never caught, and the hundreds of thousands of petty young offenders who were given citations or other nonjudicial treatment-received sentences of low- or no-supervision probation. That is why we now have over half a million juvenile-probation cases annually. Only in this ironic sense can it truly be said that the system has been treating juveniles "as adults": Over half of the nation's 3.3 million adults on probation are felony offenders, most of whom are supervised little, if at all, and receive no real rehabilitative services.

The initiative's opponents also argued, foolishly, that post-1960 America had an epidemic of youth violence, but without having an epidemic of violent youth. Many, perhaps most, mainstream criminologists have contended that guns are the important factor: Until 1994, they say, guns were finding their way into young hands, producing more youth violence; after 1994, the juvenile gun supply suddenly slowed, and so did youth crime.

I myself am a longtime supporter of gun-control policies, including the Brady law. But I have yet to see a shred of evidence that the juvenile gun supply expanded and contracted as the no-bad-boys-only-bad-guns theory requires. In 1989, I warned about the criminogenic impact of crack cocaine, and the unprecedented youth violence that would result from drug wars among well-armed street gangs out to establish markets or defend turf. But, so far as I can tell, even the guns-plus-crack explanation does not begin to explain the complicated post-1985 data on rates of youth violence.

Whatever its causes, the problem threatens to get worse. By the year 2006, America will be home to the largest cohort of teenagers since 1980. Times are good, but several factors that research has consistently linked with crime and delinquency have abated little, if at all. For example, boys raised in mother-only homes are about twice as likely as otherwise comparable boys to commit crimes that lead to imprisonment. About 28 percent of all males, and 70 percent of black males, who will turn 16 in 2006 were born to unwed mothers.

To pathologies like these, measures like Proposition 21 are not the answer. The only sure-fire way to improve the life prospects of poor children from dysfunctional homes and dangerous neighborhoods is to put as many caring, responsible adults into their lives as possible-teachers, coaches, clergy, and others. We should all do what we can to monitor, mentor, or minister to first-time juvenile offenders, volunteer to assist youths on probation, and visit and help kids who are in criminal confinement in and around our own communities. That is what's needed for 2006, and what civic morality requires. Whether the citizens of California or other states will accept this challenge is an open question.