This Essay tests the theory that “deliberative and focused” juvenile strategies exerted an independent impact on
juvenile homicide arrest (and presumably offense) rates. We take advantage of a natural control group-eighteen-
to-twenty-four-year-old offenders with very similar homicide time trends to juveniles in the late 1980s and early
1990s. [FN10] This natural control group should theoretically have been unaffected by the legislative measures targeted
at juveniles throughout the period. If these juvenile penalty enhancements truly deterred juvenile offenders, we
would expect that juvenile homicide offender rates would decline more rapidly or by a greater magnitude compared
to their young adult counterparts. As the following data demonstrates, there is no such distinctive statistical fingerprint
in the national statistics on homicide arrests. This finding calls into question the primary legal tactic used for
fighting juvenile crime over the last two decades. We have divided this Essay into parts. In Part III, we detail the history
of juvenile penalty enhancements over the last two decades. Part IV explains the natural experiment methodology
used to test the effectiveness of increased juvenile sanctions on juvenile crime. And in Part V, we statistically
examine the results of our natural experiment and offer some conclusions.