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News :: Miscellaneous |
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DISPARITY BY DESIGN: Illinois Offers a Lesson in Targeting Minority Youth |
Current rating: 0 |
by Commandante Lucas
(No verified email address) |
01 May 2001
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This story focuses on Chicago, but our local persecuter, John "Don't Get Between Him and a TV Camera" Piland, is also known to take advantage of this racially biased law. |
In a recent article for the Weekly Standard, John Walters -- President Bush\'s nominee for drug czar -- declared that it is not \"true that the prison population is disproportionately made up of young black men. Crime, after all, is not evenly distributed throughout society. It is common knowledge that the suburbs are safer than the inner city, though we are not supposed to mention it.\"
Young black men, Walters implies, are simply more prone to committing crime than whites. He fails to take into account that laws may be written and enforced in a manner yielding racially disparate results.
New data from the Building Blocks for Youth coalition presents the perfect case study for illustrating how American justice is unfair to youth of color. If one were to deliberately design a law to target only minorities, one could hardly do better than what they\'ve accomplished in Illinois.
In 1989, the Illinois legislature mandated that young people be tried as adults if they sell drugs within 1000 feet of a school or public housing project. Schools and public housing projects are more concentrated in Chicago than in the surrounding suburbs, making it far more likely that urban youth will be prosecuted under the law (click here for a map of the metropolitan Chicago area, with schools and housing projects flagged). In fact, over the last five years, 99.2 percent of the youth prosecuted under that law were minorities. Though previous research has shown that minority youth bear the brunt of the nation\'s juvenile drug laws, the Illinois law qualifies as among the most racially inequitable drug laws in the country.
To be sure, the fact that minority youth get a raw deal at the hands of the juvenile justice system is nothing new. Although African American youth make 15 percent of their age group in the U.S. population, they account for 26 percent of juvenile arrests, 32 percent of delinquency referrals to juvenile court, 41 percent of juveniles detained in delinquency cases, 46 percent of juveniles in corrections institutions, and 52 percent of juveniles transferred to adult criminal court.
The disparities are worse when it comes to drug offenses. Despite the fact that government surveys show that white youth use crack cocaine and heroin at seven times the rate of black youth and that white youth sell drugs one-third more frequently than black youth, research consistently shows that racial disparities are at their worst in the juvenile justice system when it comes to sentencing for non-violent drug cases. For example, among youth convicted of non-violent drug offenses who have never been locked up before, the incarceration rate for African Americans is 48 times the rate of whites. Once they are locked up for drug offenses, minority youth stay locked up far longer as well. On average, African American youth stay behind bars 90 days longer than white youth for drug offenses.
On top of this mound of unfairness comes the Illinois law. Almost all of the youth automatically transferred under this law (92 percent) come from the Chicago area, where one can scarcely turn around without being within 1000 feet of a school or public housing project. Of 259 youth tried as adults for drug crimes in Cook County (Chicago), last year, 258 were minorities and one was white. In an arena in which sentencing disparities abound, the level of inequity in the Land of Lincoln is second to none.
There are a host of harmful effects that result from adult court prosecution. Youth imprisoned with adults are five times as likely to be raped or sexually assaulted and eight times as likely to commit suicide as youth in juvenile facilities. Prosecuting children as adults also diminishes the likelihood of rehabilitation; youth prosecuted as adults get rearrested more frequently and for more serious offenses than youth with similar prior records who were prosecuted in juvenile court. Although juvenile court is far from perfect, it is in a much better position to provide the individualized mix of treatment and punishment required to turn young lives around.
Ironically, a century ago, the first juvenile court in the world was founded in Chicago. It was a model forged in the philosophy that the goal of state intervention was to rehabilitate young offenders. Chicago\'s experiment with juvenile court was embraced and emulated throughout the nation and the world.
It is an experiment Illinois has now abandoned. The state\'s automatic transfer laws are robbing minority youth of the second chance they could be afforded in the juvenile court system. Like so many states with glaring inequities plaguing their juvenile justice systems, Illinois should immediately abolish this law, and design a system that is both fair and effective.
Vincent Schiraldi and Jason Ziedenberg are with the Justice Policy Institute, a policy development and research organization that promotes effective and sensible approaches to America\'s justice system.
http://www.cjcj.org/
Originally published at: http://www.tompaine.com/opinion/2001/04/30/2.html |
See also:
http://www.buildingblocksforyouth.org/
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Link to Map of Chicago Area Schools |
by Commandante Lucas
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
01 May 2001
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Here's the link mentioned in the body of the above article. |
See also:
http://www.buildingblocksforyouth.org/illinois/illinois.html
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