A prominent political scientist prophesied a coming wave of young superpredators.

Evidence

The political scientist John J. Dilulio even coined the term superpredator to call attention to this new breed of criminal, as dramatized by the young men in the Central Park case. These were “kids that have no respect for human life and no sense of the future,” Dilulio said. They were “fatherless, Godless, and jobless.” For him, these were “stone-cold predators.” He even predicted that by 2000 “there would be a million more people between the ages of 14 and 17 than there are now….Six percent of them will become high rate, repeat offenders—thirty thousand more young muggers, killers, and thieves than we have now. Get ready.” — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 212

Categorization

• XREF: The superpredator panic is a textbook moral panic, matching the reader’s knowledge from Cohen’s moral panic framework.
• QUESTION: Dilulio later became a prominent critic of mass incarceration himself in the early 2000s; worth checking when and why he flipped.