RACE

America’s attention was captured by the Senate debate over gun control. But lost amid that debate was an equally important debate about race and America’s juvenile-justice system. As a result, when the bill passed, it eliminated a seven-year-old provision that required states to examine whether they were discriminating against minorities in their juvenile-justice systems, an act of premeditated ignorance excessive even for the U.S. Senate.

Perhaps more surprising was the tenor of the debate. The bill’s coauthor, Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), shocked many Senate colleagues and the civil-rights community by insisting the justice system was completely “color blind.” Hatch said, “I haven’t heard one shred of information that proves there is discrimination here. When you prove that, I will be right there, side by side with you.” More divisively, he asked “Should they not be convicted when they sell drugs to our kids? Everybody knows that it happens.”

In research funded by the provision Hatch wanted to eliminate, all but a few states have reported disproportionate minority confinement in their juvenile-justice systems. In an analysis by researchers Carl E. Pope and William W. Feyerheim, two-thirds of the studies found that even when minority and white youth commit similar offenses and have similar records, minority youth get a worse deal in the justice process. They’re more likely to be detained, locked up on sentencing or sent to adult prisons, even with other factors equal.

About two-thirds of America’s youth are white, but about two-thirds of the youth in public detention facilities are minorities. Although blacks make up 12% of America’s population and 13% of its drug users, black teenage males are locked up for drugs at 30 times the rate of white teenage males.

As shocking as national numbers are, state-by-state data are even more alarming. In both Connecticut and Texas, 100% of the juveniles held in adult jails in 1996 were minorities. In Pennsylvania, minorities constitute 30% of juvenile arrests but 87% of juveniles in secure corrections. In Wisconsin, minorities are 19% of juveniles arrested and 75% of juveniles locked up in adult prisons.

In California, the National Council on Crime and Delinquency examined incarceration decisions for hundreds of thousands of youths. They found minorities were locked up at higher rates than whites, even when they committed similar offenses and had similar records. For example, of youth arrested for violent offenses, 47% of whites were detained, compared to 61% of Latinos and 64% of African Americans.

Hatch was steadfast in response to data like these. “They can’t prove it [disparity], other than to show statistics.”

This setback, which could still be redressed by the House when it debates the bill, comes at a particularly inopportune time, because recent research offers real insight into the causes and solutions for the overrepresentation of minorities in the juvenile-justice system. For example, Delbert Elliott, former president of the American Society of Criminology, has conducted groundbreaking analyses of differential offense rates between white and African American teenagers using self-reporting data. According to Elliott, black teenagers report committing violent crimes about 50% more frequently than white teenagers, a lower disparity than what shows up in arrest or prison data. For example, black youth are about four times as likely to be arrested and seven times as likely to be locked up for violent crimes as white teenagers.

After their teenage years, however, white and black teenagers follow a different course. White teenagers “mature out” of criminal behavior and begin to show sharply declining involvement in violence. African American teenagers show a resurgence of violence in young adulthood.

But when the subjects of the study have either a job or a stable relationship, both blacks and whites experience the same sharp decline in violent behavior.

As America continues its “conversation on race,” such information can be helpful in forming public policy, but only if Congress allows it to be collected. America already has a model system for addressing juvenile delinquency at its disposal--the system that kicks into gear when a white middle-class youth gets arrested. That child gets special attention--parents, relatives, coaches and neighbors vouch for him and pledge enhanced monitoring. Special schools are arranged, restitution is set up, even volunteer service to the community is worked out. What the Senate now needs to do is help promote a system that mirrors what any of us, white or black, would do for our own kids if they were in trouble.

Several years ago a high-school student named Derrick came through a program run by my organization. His story illustrates this point.

Derrick’s mother had died the year before he got into trouble, after which he soon picked up his first arrest for possession of marijuana. Still, he was in school, worked nightly at his stepfather’s shoe-repair store and was enrolled in ROTC.

One day after school, he stole a sweat jacket from a black male freshman. During pretrial negotiations, Derrick’s lawyer referred the case to my organization, indicating he was unable to get the district attorney to offer anything less than state prison. The lawyer offered by way of explanation that his client had a “big black kid problem,” insofar as he was about 6’ 3” tall, a bit heavy and exuded a tough attitude to those who didn’t know him.

My agency offered the mother of the victim--a dispatcher at the police department--the opportunity to meet with Derrick before sentencing. She yelled at him, and he looked at his shoes and mumbled what appeared to be sincere apologies. We told her about his living situation and how he hadn’t been in any trouble until after his mother died. Derrick offered to pay restitution for the jacket out of his earnings, and we arranged for him to perform community service--training recovering drug addicts to repair shoes. The judge sentenced Derrick to this plan, with the mother’s blessings.

Though this is a happy ending, it seemed from the beginning that the system saw a different, easily readable, script for Derrick--eventually including a trip to prison. As a result, the system did not recoil from locking him up as it would have for a similarly situated white, ROTC, working, high-school senior whose mother had died the year before. The burden was on us to humanize Derrick--he walked into court as a statistic.

Indeed, that prison-bound script is not so far from accurate. A Justice Department study released last year found that one in four black male children born in the United States last year will go to prison. It was only through luck that Derrick found us. Many more Derricks don’t.

Despite the fact that African American parents love their kids as much as white parents do, their treatment in the juvenile-justice system is generally not what Derrick got, and not what my kids--who are white--would get. Too often they are defended, prosecuted and judged by apathetic attorneys, ministered to by disinterested probation officers and imprisoned in dangerous warehouses. It is indeed true that the opposite of love is not hate, but apathy.

As a result, while white youth are obtaining the jobs and establishing the relationships that will alter their life paths from violence to success--as Elliott’s data and common sense tell us it will--African American youth are learning the hard lessons taught in America’s prisons.

Speaking on the floor of the Senate in response to Hatch, Sen. Paul D. Wellstone (D-Minn.) said, “I cannot believe that I have heard on the floor of the Senate an argument that race is not the critical consideration . . . . When we get to the question of which kids are arrested and which kids are not, you don’t think that has anything to do with race today in America? . . . When we get to the question of sentencing, you don’t think that has anything to do with race? You are sleepwalking through history.”

When he was locked up in a Birmingham, Ala., jail, Martin Luther King Jr. put it more succinctly: “Injustice anywhere threatens justice everywhere.” For my part, I know that if the system would not give up on my children, it should do no less for the sons and daughters of African American parents.