Some juvenile crime and criminal victimization rates have dropped in recent years due to community-based policing strategies that attack "quality of life" disorders and sentencing policies that keep career criminals behind bars, says the second report of the Council on Crime in America. In New York City, for example, crime rates have fallen even as the population of at-risk youth has grown.

However, the council warns that long-term crime reduction strategies must include prevention . Adult intervention in the lives of young teenagers makes those children substantially less likely to become criminals. The report cites volunteer programs that help keep at-risk children out of the criminal justice system:

• Youngsters paired with a volunteer adult mentor in Big Brothers/Big Sisters were found to be half as likely to use drugs or skip school, and one-third less likely to engage in violent behavior.

• Non-felony juvenile offenders diverted from Family Court to alternative punishments monitored by volunteers in Philadelphia's Youth Aid Panel (YAP) are much less likely to re-offend -- the overall recidivism rate since 1987 is about 20 percent.

But the number of at-risk children is growing, says the council, and a teenage crime wave is forecast as they become teenagers:

• Up to 57 percent of children in America do not have full-time parental supervision, according to James Alan Fox of Northeastern University.

• The number of reported instances of child maltreatment more than quadrupled between 1976 and 1993, rising to nearly 3 million cases, according to Douglas S. Besharov of the American Enterprise Institute.

• Homicide is the leading cause of death for children under the age of four, according to a 1995 report of the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect.

• A 1994 National Institute of Justice study that found maltreatment increased the probability of arrest as a juvenile by more than 50 percent, as an adult by nearly 40 percent, and for a violent crime by nearly 40 percent.

There are currently heavy concentrations of serious juvenile violence in the urban minority neighborhoods of nearly a dozen states, says the council, but community- and faith-based prevention programs are needed in cities across the U.S.

Source: "Preventing Crime, Saving Children: Monitoring, Mentoring & Ministering," Second Report of the Council on Crime in America, February 1997, Manhattan Institute, 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017, (212) 599-7000.