Analysis Based on factual reporting, although it incorporates the expertise of the author/producer and may offer interpretations and conclusions.
The Not-So-Rebellious Youth Revolution Coming to Your County

Regularly on school days, Placer High School students flood out of their open campus’s unlocked gates to invade downtown Auburn, California, for lunch. The town’s students, 37% of whom are of color, contrast with Auburn’s adult population, which is 85% white.
A recipe for racialized, anti-youth panic? Apparently not. The sushi, vegetarian, Mongolian, and smoothie shops nearest the school calmly offer the long lines of chattering students specials tailored to teenage budgets.
The “teenager” was invented as a corporate marketing target by 1940s teen business entrepreneur Eugene Gilbert. However, from the 1970s forward, the label was repurposed by political “moral entrepreneurs” to describe a fearsome minority—reckless, hormonal, impulsive, crime-prone risk-takers fueling numerous social panics.
That “teenager” of legend no longer exists, if it ever did. Defying alarmist headlines, younger Millennial and Generation Z teenagers rarely commit crimes, have babies, engage in violence, drop out of school, or flounder in college. America’s calcified grown-up institutions—the media, interest groups, political leaders, etc.—remain distinctly uncomfortable with the “new teen” and unable to adapt to dynamic new realities. Placer’s youth revolution remains a secret, just as in communities across the country.
The Youth Revolution Is Everywhere
Placer County, a breathtakingly beautiful county of 417,000 people rising just over 100 miles in elevation from Sacramento’s sprawling eastern suburbs across the High Sierra to the Nevada state line, is one of California’s few remaining Republican-voting bastions, with thundering trucks sporting gun racks and conspiracy stickers.
Placer might seem an unlikely place for a youth revolution—especially one accompanying a massive increase in its youthful population of color and remarkable changes among its young women. Life is dramatically different for local teens today compared to just a generation ago. Go back two generations? Their grandparents grew up on a different planet.
Placer’s adolescent population age 10 to 17 has exploded from 16,200 in 1970, to 43,700 in 2023. Its teenage population of color (Hispanic, Black, Asian, Native, or other nonwhite) has skyrocketed tenfold to more than 12,000 today.
National predictions in the mid-90s filled California headlines with dire warnings that the growing teenage population, particularly Black and Brown teens, threatened a “new wave of mayhem” led by “superpredators” and massive social disruption. What actually happened? Virtually every cherished, disparaging myth adults hold about adolescents is being demolished.
The rate of criminal arrests of Placer youth has fallen by a mind-boggling 95% since 1995, and by 97% since 1975. In 1975, arrests handcuffed nearly one in 10 Placer youth; today, the figure is one in 300. In 1995, in a much smaller teen population, more than 200 Placer youth were incarcerated in state and local detention facilities. In 2022, there were just 13.


Placer County’s crime plunge has been so precipitous that teenage youths are no longer a crime problem, with arrest rates falling below those of residents in their 50s. The reduction in crime rates, which mainly affects boys, isn’t the only change. The revolution among teenage girls is even more startling.
In 1960, the grandparent generation, girls between the ages of 15 and 19 gave birth to 260 babies in Placer. In 2021, there were just 62 babies among a female teen population six times larger. That’s a birth-rate drop of 96% over two generations, and nearly 90% in just one generation.

Since they’re not raising babies, committing crimes, and getting locked up, what are Placer’s teenagers doing with their time? Going to school, for one thing. Since 1990, the high school dropout rate among Placer youth ages 18 to 24 has fallen by 60% while college enrollment has risen by 28%.
In 1960, six in 10 Placer women had babies in the five years from ages 15 to 19, while just one in seven women aged 18 to 24 were in college or had college degrees. In 2021, the change is staggering: just two in 100 teens became mothers from ages 15 to 19, while nearly six in 10 women age 18 to 24 were in college, and 2,100 held degrees.
Today, persons under age 20 account for just 7% of Placer’s violent crime arrests, 5% of its drug (including fentanyl) overdose and binge-drinking deaths, 4% of its total criminal arrests, 2% of its deaths by suicide, and 1% of its gun deaths.
Placer County’s youth revolution is happening everywhere. Whether urban or rural, blue or red in politics, regardless of region, similar evolutions are occurring in communities nationwide as young people become more racially diverse and technologically connected.
Antiquated psychological-development and brain-pseudoscience doctrines flatly assert that what today’s adolescents are doing cannot be happening. The Sentencing Project’s recent claim (“Brain immaturity fuels delinquency. Scientists have confirmed that the brain does not fully mature until age 25, and this lack of brain maturity makes lawbreaking and other risky behaviors more common during adolescence.”) sounds downright silly amid 2022’s realities. The popular stereotypes of teenagers, founded in faulty brain-scanning technology later research found unreliable, were not really “science,” but recrudescence of century-old bigotries.
Why Did This Happen?
Placer’s youth improvements did not occur because of youth-targeted crackdowns or remediations, most of which have been found ineffective, or worse, harmful. California’s decriminalization of marijuana in 2011 and temporary COVID-19 restrictions in 2020 might explain around one-tenth of the drop in youth arrests.
The explosion in online cultures since the early 1990s may have had beneficial effects. Amid the panic over social media, the Pew Research Center’s detailed 2022 study found large majorities of teens saying that “social media gives them some level of connection, … reassures them that they have people to support them during tough times, and … makes them feel more accepted.” That might reduce troubles.
“The virtual universe has offered wonderful opportunities for young people to broaden their horizons and grow in many ways,” Sierra Foothills Unitarian Minister Alex da Silva Souto observes. “My main concern is that the significant reduction of in-person human interaction might negatively impact the positive trends.”
The most plausible correlates of reduced teenage problems are the dramatic, largely undiscussed 80% to 95% reductions in poverty rates and attendant hazards like children’s levels of neurotoxic lead over the last 30 years. Poverty rates are strongly correlated with arrest, gun violence, and birth rates, while lead toxicity is connected to poorer educational outcomes and higher levels of antisocial behaviors. In 1993, 27.9% of children and youth lived in poverty, according to ChildTrends researchers, using the comprehensive Supplemental Poverty Measure. In 2021, that number was reduced to just 5.2%. Blood lead levels, lagged 15 years to allow for growth from childhood testing to adolescence, show a similar plunge, economist Rick Nevin of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports.

Are America’s biggest crime fighters and social reformers the Environmental Protection Agency and the Earned Income Tax Credit, the government transfer most responsible for reducing poverty? Today’s teenagers make a strong case, if we can drop old prejudices and see it.
Placer County’s youth revolution, and that nationally, is a stunning affirmation of progressive faith that racial and lifestyle diversity can accompany—and perhaps is even essential to—a safer, healthier, better-educated society. “Biodiverse environments are stronger than homogeneous ones,” da Silva Souto says, “so I believe that increasing racial, ethnic, gender, and lifestyle diversity have improved the conditions for teenagers to access the information, opportunities, and connections that they would not otherwise.” The most likely drivers of improved youthful behavior, greater public aid for poorer populations, stronger environmental protection regulations, and more interconnected youth, also stunningly affirm progressive ideals in the face of right-wing demands for more policing, guns, sexuality controls, environmental deregulation, and social safety-net cuts. Why, then, are authorities and media so afraid of the disappearance of the reckless “problem teenager” that they refuse even to talk about it?
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Mike Males
is a senior researcher for the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, the principal investigator for YouthFacts, and the author of five books on American youth.
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