Shuttering schools during the pandemic inflicted unintended consequences on most children: learning loss, mental health struggles, and missed milestones, among a host of others.
But for some children, prolonged school closures destroyed what little stood between them and a life of chaos and abuse. And for a few, that meant turning to illegal activity.
Juvenile crime is not necessarily on the rise nationwide. In fact, over the past several decades, the rate at which minors have broken the law has fallen significantly, according to the Sentencing Project.
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But in some cities, most of which kept schools closed longer than the national average, juvenile crime has increased dramatically.
“Especially in lower-income groups, you had the parents, despite the lockdowns of what we call the ‘pajama class’ now, the parents in those lower-income households continued to work, so it’s not like they had anyone to watch their kids in the middle of the day,” said Naomi Schaefer Riley, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, noting a term used to describe people whose white collar jobs allowed them to work exclusively from home during the pandemic, adding, “School serves that basic function … giving teenagers something to do during the day.”
“The social services that you usually get through school, which include everything from school lunch programs to therapy and just activities where kids are interacting in a pro-social as opposed to anti-social way, is, I think, very important,” she added in an interview with the Washington Examiner.
A number of factors have contributed to the increase in youth violence in select cities. Overall crime is rising in those cities, too, and more liberal criminal justice policies can lead to young offenders ending up back on the streets more quickly than in other places, allowing the same minors to be arrested multiple times.
But some city officials have pointed to school closures as a driving force behind a rise in youth violence.
In the nation’s capital, police have reported arresting juvenile defendants at an alarming rate. Police said earlier this year that in 2021, more than half of arrests related to the 456 carjackings that took place in Washington, D.C., involved minors.
The district’s mayor, Muriel Bowser (D), tied the crime problem directly to school closures in January — when the city’s police chief said 14 of the 18 carjacking arrests made in Washington in the first four weeks of this year were of juveniles.
“That’s why we’ve been so adamant about getting kids in school, in-person so that they can be around adults,” Bowser said at the time. “Maybe that kid has some mental or behavioral health issue that needs to be addressed. We can better figure that out if they’re in school.”
Police chiefs in Connecticut warned state officials in December 2020 that their officers were encountering more and more teenage offenders as school closures dragged on.
“We have an issue where a lot of our young folks are not in school,” New Haven Police Chief Otoniel Reyes said, according to the Associated Press. “These are young folks that need that structure … that school provides them. Many of them are making bad decisions. … Every week, we’re dealing with robberies and stolen vehicles. We’re dealing with juveniles that are committing robberies. And it’s very concerning.”
In Chicago, juvenile crime has increased so significantly that the City Council passed an ordinance in May expanding a curfew that orders the city’s children aged 17 and younger to be home by 10 p.m. each day.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D) said in February that shuttered schools were to blame.
“A lot of parents went to work during the day thinking their teenagers were logged on to remote learning, only to find something else,” Lightfoot said. “I’ll be frank and say in Chicago, there was a correlation that we believe in remote learning and the rise in carjacking.”
The Chicago Teachers Union, which long backed keeping schools closed, pushed back aggressively on Lightfoot’s comment, accusing her of perpetuating racism.
School closures also choked off some of the normal pathways students take through the social services system.
Repeated or serious infractions in the classroom can generate a referral from a school resource officer that could lead to a school-based incident of misconduct becoming a crime.
But with school doors shuttered for various lengths of time across the country, fewer children found themselves facing legal entanglements based on misconduct, such as fighting or making threats, that took place in the classroom.
In North Carolina, for example, school-based complaints to the state’s juvenile justice system dropped significantly in 2020 and 2021, falling from 45 in 2019 to just seven in 2021.
Referrals to the juvenile justice system that occurred outside of school jumped at the same time, however, from 54 in 2019 to 92 in 2021.
Students who may have benefited from the intervention of counselors or other social services officials through school had significantly fewer resources for help when learning was fully remote.
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Nationwide, children experienced an unprecedented mental health crisis as a result of school closures; adolescent suicides and suicide attempts reached startlingly high levels after the lockdowns began, for example.
In Maine, one county’s district attorney said reversing the rise in juvenile crime would require a more serious approach to children’s mental health services.
“This is a nationwide, significant increase in youth involved violent offenses,” Knox County District Attorney Natasha Irving said this month. “My counterparts in other states are dealing with an enormous increase in gun violence, most of which are commissioned with a legally purchased firearm. I cannot emphasize how grave the need is for a significant, statewide investment in a public mental health system for children.”
