A Times Editorial

'And Justice for Some'

© St. Petersburg Times, published April 28, 2000

Americans have reason to be skeptical of reports declaring that racism infests our criminal justice system. As many commentators have pointed out, if racial minorities commit proportionately more crimes than whites, we are likely to see a justice system reflecting that fact. But a new study funded in part by the Department of Justice suggests that the harsher, more punitive treatment of African-American youth in all aspects of the juvenile justice system goes well beyond what can be justified. If so, prejudice and stereotyping are unfairly cutting short redemption opportunities for young black males.

The report, titled "And Justice for Some," prepared by the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, a criminal justice think tank, documents startling disparities in the criminal justice system's treatment of white and minority youth.

Among juveniles who have not previously been sent to a juvenile detention facility, blacks are at least six times more likely than whites to be sentenced to prison. For those charged with a violent crime who have not previously been to juvenile prison, African-American youths are nine times more likely than whites to be sentenced to prison. And when the crime is a drug offense, of those who have not been to prison before, black juveniles are 48 times more likely to be sent there.

Even after controlling for type of offense, the comprehensive study found that black youth are dealt with more severely at every stage of the process: from their likelihood of being detained by police to being formally charged by prosecutors to being sent to prison by a judge. The negative impact of this cumulative effect gets exacerbated at every succeeding step in the criminal justice system.

For minority communities this means the young men who will grow up to be fathers and husbands will start out their adulthood with a handicap that many white men charged with similar crimes won't face.

Policymakers who have fundamentally altered our juvenile justice system from a rehabilitative program to a punitive one are partly to blame here, as the report shows how these changes have fallen most harshly on young black males. But the greatest lessons of the report are reserved for the criminal justice professionals. While it's unlikely that overt racism is the root cause of this disparate treatment, police, prosecutors and judges may be responding to such irrelevant things as a young person's baggy pants, manner of speech and neighborhood and family circumstances. Those kind of unconscious value judgments can quickly create a discriminatory impact.

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