TO BE EQUAL 		                                    COLUMN 17

Wanted:  Unbiased Justice for Juvenile Offenders
 
By Hugh B. Price 
President 
National Urban League


Civil rights leaders like Jesse Jackson, political officeholders, and
many others throughout Black America have said for years that Jim Crow
Is alive and well in America's criminal justice system.

They've criticized the harsher sentences imposed on African Americans
arrested for possession of crack cocaine, compared with those imposed
on whites arrested for possession of powdered cocaine.

They've questioned the disproportionate number of African Americans on
the death rows of the nation's prisons.

Now, a new study sponsored by the Department of Justice and six
national foundations adds startling new information to the growing
evidence that racism is endemic in the juvenile justice system as
well.

The report, "And Justice for Some," shows that African- and
Hispanic-American youth are treated more severely than white teens
charged with comparable crimes at every step of the juvenile justice
system.

The former are more likely than their white counterparts to be
arrested, held in jail, sent to juvenile or adult court, convicted,
and given longer prison terms

Indeed, the report presents evidence of bias so blatant that it's
mind-boggling.  For example, among teens who've not been sent to
prison before, blacks are more than six times as likely as whites to
be sentenced by juvenile court judges to prison.

For those young people charged with a violent crime who've never been
in juvenile prison, black teens are nine times more likely than whites
to be sentenced to juvenile prison.

For those charged with drug offenses, black youths are forty-eight
times more likely than whites to be sentenced to juvenile prison.

White youths charged with violent offenses are incarcerated on average
for 193 days after trial.  By contrast, black youth are incarcerated
an average of 254 days; Hispanic youth, an average of 305 days.

Nationally, the report states, blacks under the age of 18 make up 15
percent of their age group, but 26 percent of those young people
arrested, 31 percent of those sent to juvenile court, 44 percent of
those detained in juvenile jails and 32 percent of those found guilty
of being a delinquent.

Similarly, young blacks account for 46 percent of all juveniles tried
in adult criminal courts, 40 percent of those sent to juvenile
prisons, and 58 percent of all juveniles confined in adult prisons.

These and other alarming statistics underscore that the nation is
faced with an extraordinarily serious social and civil rights issue:
We have a juvenile justice system that dispenses juvenile injustice

"When you look at this data, it is undeniable that race is a factor,"
said Mark Soler, president of the Youth Law Center, a research and
advocacy group in Washington.  The Center led the coalition of civil
rights and youth advocacy organizations (including the National Urban
League) which organized the research project,

Soler added that the biased, harsher treatment of teens of color who
get in trouble with the law has a continuing devastating impact on
their prospects for a decent life, making it harder and harder for
those ensnared in its web to "go straight"-to go straight"-to
"complete their education, get jobs and be good husbands and fathers."

In addition to the Justice department, support for the research effort
came from the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the
Rockefeller Foundation, the Walter Johnson Foundation, the Annie
E. Casey Foundation, and the Center on Crime, Communities and Culture
of George Soro's Open Society Institute.

The national study closely tracks the findings of another study, "The
Color of Justice," released in February by the nonprofit Justice
Policy Institute that examined the juvenile justice system in
California.

Dan Macallair, the institute's co-director and the study's co-author,
told the New York Times, "California has a double standard: throw kids
of color behind bars, but rehabilitate white kids who commit
comparable crimes."

This double standard at both the state and national level has
continued, and perhaps grown even sharper as juvenile crime has
declined in recent years as precipitously as adult crime.

Obviously, all Americans can be grateful for such declines, and for
the efforts law enforcement agencies and community and other
organizations have made to establish and maintain the peace and help
teens be law-abiding.

And we're not naïve.  We realize that many young people who run afoul
of the law probably have committed some offense.  Some of them would
never be mistaken for angels.

But none of that explains or excuses these blatant disparities in the
way the criminal justice system handles, on the one hand, black,
Hispanic and Asian American youngsters, and, on the other, white
youngsters who commit the same offenses.

Attorney General Janet Reno deserves kudos for helping to expose the
rampant racism in juvenile sentencing.

The question we all have to answer now is how we act quickly to get
the "juvenile injustice system" to clean up its act.

17 TBE 4/24/2000 TO BE EQUAL 120 Wall Street, NY, NY 10005