Nine months after the passage of Proposition 21, 30 percent of all teen offenders in California were being charged as adults. In some counties the percentage was much higher—in San Diego County, for example, three out of every four young people were charged as adults by the end of that first year. This wasn’t because more juveniles were committing crimes. Juvenile arrest rates began to fall in 1994, and they have continued to fall ever since. Today the FBI’s juvenile violent-crime index, which measures arrests for murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault, is lower than it was in 1980, and
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