November 24, 2021

By Bill Berkowitz

This is a story about the ginned-up "superpredator" scare of the 1990s that put tens of thousands of black youth in prison, weaponized the mainstream media, and gave rise to the prison industrial complex. It is also the story of Reginald Dwayne Betts, who was imprisoned at the age of 16, thrown in solitary confinement for months, then survived and built a remarkable life.

The prequel to the Superpredator Scare began in the early 1990s with talk from both sides of the aisle in Congress about “predators” running wild in our streets. This laid the groundwork for a November 1995 cover story in Bill Kristol’s now-defunct conservative magazine, The Weekly Standard, called “The Coming of the Super-Predators.” In it, author John Dilulio Jr., a political scientist, coined the term "superpredator" as he called attention to "stone-cold predators" that he described as "kids that have absolutely no respect for human life and no sense of the future." DiIulio wrote that, by the year 2000, an additional 30,000 young “murderers, rapists, and muggers” roam America’s streets, sowing mayhem. “They place zero value on the lives of their victims, whom they reflexively dehumanize as just so much worthless ‘white trash,’" he wrote.

James A. Fox, a professor of criminology at Northeastern University, joined DiIulio in warning of a juvenile "crime wave storm" and an impending "bloodbath" of teen violence. The Chicago Tribune devoted its entire op-ed page to reprinting the Weekly Standard article, thereby further spreading the term “superpredator.” In addition, all three major national news magazines ran big “superpredator” stories in 1996, reaching millions of readers.

Whether DiIulio and Fox fully understood the magnitude of the fear-mongering that they unleashed, or the  the public outcry they created, or how many non-criminal black youths would be demonized is an “unknown known.” What is known, as the Marshall Project’s Carroll Bogert and LynNell Hancock, professor emeritus at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, reported last year: “By the end of the 1990s, virtually every state had toughened its laws on juveniles: sending them more readily into adult prisons; gutting and sidelining family courts; and imposing mandatory sentences, including life sentences without parole.” (https://www.themarshallproject.org/2020/11/20/superpredator-the-media-myth-that-demonized-a-generation-of-black-youth).

Last year in the Los Angeles Times, Kim Taylor-Thompson, a professor of law at NYU School of Law and chair of the board of the Equal Justice Initiative, wrote that  “(l)inking Black children to animal traits made them seem less human. … [it] put Black children outside the boundaries of childhood and allowed this country to remain unbothered by the fact that judges were sending children to die in prison under sentences of life without parole.”

In that same article, Taylor-Thompson, said that while the superpredator predictions “was fiction,” and “never materialized,” we are still living with the results of the superpredator jeremiads.

The New York Times, for example, pointed out that Dilulio’s assertions “were based on a notion that there would be hordes upon hordes of depraved teenagers resorting to unspeakable brutality, not tethered by conscience ... Chaos was upon us, DiIulio proclaimed back then in scholarly articles and television interviews. The demographics, he said, were inexorable. Politicians from both major parties, though more so on the right, picked up the cry. Many news organizations pounced on these sensational predictions and ran with them like a punt returner finding daylight."

Kim Taylor-Thompson asked: “What made this superpredator story so easy to swallow — and so stubbornly intractable? The answer is simple and damning. The superpredator myth glommed onto a deeper lie rooted in American soil and in the American psyche. A lie that insists that Black children do not deserve the care we reflexively offer white children. All that was needed was the barest of information, and our worst beliefs filled out the contours of the story.”

Reality didn't match the dire superpredator predictions: "Instead of exploding, violence by children sharply declines. Murders committed by those ages 10 to 17 fell by roughly two-thirds from 1994 to 2011, according to statistics kept by the Justice Department's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.” Mugged by reality, DiIulio has offered a mea culpa. “Demography,” he said, “is not fate.” The trouble with his superpredator forecast, he told The New York Times Retro Report, is that “once it was out there, there was no reeling it in."

With the superpredator hot take under his belt, Dilulio's career took off; he was seen as an expert on criminal justice issues; he was often quoted by criminal justice hardliners in both political parties; glowing pieces were written about him that appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer and The New Yorker magazine. He became a regular at think tank conferences and on the media. He influenced the passing of onerous new laws, including some state laws that allowed 13- and 14 year-olds to be tried as adults. Thousands of juveniles were sent to prison, some for life.

Dilulio went on to became the first director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives under President George W. Bush. He currently serves as the Frederic Fox Leadership Professor of Politics, Religion, and Civil Society and Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

This was his reward for creating the wave of fear and loathing of black youth that washed over the land. More prisons were built. A generation of black, poor, and minority youth was incarcerated, and the prison industrial complex burst into being.

The Survival of a young black man 

Reginald Dwayne Betts was one of the teenagers caught up in the wave of imprisonment caused by the superpredator myth. He was born months before Ronald Reagan won the White House, and grew up during the Reagan/George H.W. Bush/Bill Clinton administrations, when crack cocaine saturated inner-city streets, fear reigned supreme, the criminalization of young black people became the order of the day, and "lock 'em up and throw away the key" was the criminal legal system's mantra.

After a long, and sometimes tortuous journey that included eight and a half years in prison, Betts survived and is now a teacher, lawyer, and celebrated a poet, who has published several books of poetry. He is  currently editing the Poetry page in the Sunday edition of The New York Times Magazine.

 Dwayne Betts survived prison and solitary confinement. He wrote a memoir, A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison, and several books of poetry, including the Bastards of the Reagan Era. And more recently Felon, which explores his post-incarceration experience. Betts was a 2010 Soros Justice Fellow, 2011 Radcliffe Fellow, and 2012 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow, and in 2012, President Obama appointed him to the coordinating council of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

In 2014, Betts wrote an essay titled "I Was 16 and in Solitary Before I Ever Even Went to Trial”: On February 21, 1997, when he was sixteen years old, he was “being held in pre-trial detention on carjacking and robbery charges. After spending three months in juvenile facilities, I had grown strangely familiar with being in a cell. But nothing prepares you for solitary confinement.”

Sentenced to eight years in prison, Betts wrote that “the better part of my youth was spent confined. And during those eight years, I spent a year and a half doing various short stints in solitary confinement. I watched grown men crack under the pressure of a solitary cell. I watched men beg for relief, strapped to a bed by their arms and legs.”

“It has been a generation since the superpredator myth entered public discourse, and we are still living with its pernicious effects,” noted Kim Tatylor-Thompson.  “The justice system needs to stop referring children into the adult criminal justice system so that Black children get the benefit of the doubt instinctively given to white children.

In 2001, John Dilulio admitted he had been mistaken, saying '’I'm sorry for any unintended consequences.” He overstated the threat, and that helped lead to the mass incarceration of black youth. Carroll Bogert and LynNell Hancock, noted that “(in) 2012, [Dilulio] even signed on to a brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court supporting a successful effort to limit life sentences without parole for juveniles.” Several media entities have also acknowledged that they were wrong to use the term “superpredators.”

Dwayne Betts is one of the survivors. His survival and growth resulted from an unusual confluence of things: his steadfast determination and resilience; his interest in books and ideas; his loving and supportive family; and his great fortune in finding mentors in prison. Unfortunately, Betts' reality is more the exception than the rule. With so few positive programs available in prison, too many of Dwayne Betts' contemporaries will have little to show for their time when they are released.

[With extensive editorial assistance by Robin Heid]

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