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