From InsideOut.ChicagoPublicRadio.org
April 18, 2010
There are many more black and brown young people in our jails and prisons than you’d predict, if you just look at their percentages in the population at large.
The numbers are simply out of whack.
And that’s got a fancy name. It’s called D-M-C: disproportionate minority contact.
Juvenile justice experts say it’s not rocket science to fix the problem.
No, they say, it’s a LOT HARDER than rocket science.
As part of our juvenile justice series Inside and Out, Linda Paul reports.
< OUTDOOR AMBI, cars idling >
MAN’S VOICE : I sometimes used to look up when I walked out of the building when I worked here.. and occasionally I would see some forlorn looking kid, uh, looking out the window – waving -- and I would often think – what’s goin’ through that kids’ mind?
Randell Strickland is pointing to the upper floors of the juvenile detention center .. Cook County’s jail for kids where they’re held until it’s time for trial.
STRICKLAND: He’s standing in the window and the only contact he’s able to muster is a wave at a perfect stranger. That’s not just sad. That in itself is criminal.
Strickland used to be a Cook County probation officer and now he’s the Illinois
point person at the MacArthur Foundation for disproportionate minority contact.
What Strickland knows, is that over a third of the juveniles are here for non-violent offenses. He also knows what he’d find if he could take a gigantic hack saw, cut off the roof and look down. In fact, if he’d done that on April 11 – about a week ago – he’d have found 336 kids inside. 278 of them, or 83%, were black. Latinos made up 13 percent, and the 14 white kids represented barely four percent of the population.
Now that’s a lot of numbers, but we’re throwing them at you because they’re so stark. What this all boils down to is that last year admissions to the detention center of Hispanic youth were 5 times that of white youth. For African-American youth, 30 times higher. 30 times.
But that’s just the juvenile jail. What about the youth prisons, where kids are actually incarcerated? Well, if you look at just the youth who were sent there from Cook County – there were 420 last year- the ratio is practically identical. 81% black, 5% white.
STRICKLAND: The sad fact is that there are a whole lot of policies and practices that our institutions can engage in, can change that would improve the lives and the outcomes and chances of these kids so that this does not stand as the sort of towering symbol of the state of poor black and Latino youth.
< HALL AMBI...DOOR SLAM...Hey Barb, how you doin? >
We enter the building and make our way to a conference room where I ask Strickland a question that seems insensitive… even politically incorrect.
Is the reason black youth and Latino youth are overrepresented in the juvenile justice system because THEY are the ones who commit more crimes?
STRICKLAND: I think a lot of people have that impression, but from what we know of the statistics and the research, that’s not the case.
Strickland tosses out some examples. The University of Michigan, Penn State and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for instance, have all done studies, he says, showing that white youth use drugs more than youth of color and use drugs earlier than youth of color.
STRICKLAND: So, if white youth are using more drugs and using drugs earlier than youth of color, how is it that so few white youth are being arrested and prosecuted for drug offenses and so many youth of color, are ?
That simple question, it turns out, doesn’t have a simple answer. When researchers look into it, they immediately run up against all the intractable societal problems we’ve heard about for years - poverty, poorly performing schools, single parent households.
So how do you begin to tease out those variables to figure out if there are specific practices within the justice system that contribute to disproportionality ?
STRICKLAND: There are federal dollars that are tied to the requirement for municipalities to examine and understand and then make plans to address their over-representation problems.
The U.S Department of Justice asks states to gather demographic data at key decision points along the juvenile justice continuum: For instance - which youth get arrested in the first place? Who does the state’s attorney decide to charge and who not to charge? And ultimately, of course, which kids do and which kids do not, get locked up?
STRICKLAND: We know that youth of color are arrested more than white youth. We know that.
Illinois, by the way, isn’t doing so great when it comes to data collection. Counties and agencies across Illinois tend to report in their own idiosyncratic ways. There’s no unified system. And there’s also no over-all enforcement Many times, if you don’t turn in the data- no big deal.
Which may be unfortunate, because Strickland says this data can help find the subtleties. The many points in the system when someone in power gets to make a DISCRETIONARY decision:
STRICKLAND: Probation officers, state’s attorneys, judges, are much more likely, especially if it means the county won’t have to pay for it, are much more likely to allow youth to be referred outside of the system if they can be assured that their problems will be effectively addressed. And that benefit accrues disproportionately to white youth, and not youth of color.
< AMBI.. voice: I think we hafto sit down no phones, no nothing.. PHONE RINGS >
It’s after hours, on a Friday afternoon. Micki Moran and a colleague are mapping out future plans for the office. She’s an attorney who frequently works with suburban kids who get in trouble with the law. Many, though not all, of her clients come from families with means and a lot of the kids she deals with, by the time they get to her, are already under the care of a psychologist or psychiatrist.
MORAN: So the first thing I do is I talk to the psychiatrist or I tell the parents I need a letter from the psychiatrist and I need it tomorrow. I want you to put together a timeline of all the interventions you’ve done. I look at their school records. I want to see whether they have any special education needs.
Moran quickly learns everything she can about the young person. Say she finds out her client has bipolar illness, anxiety disorder or severe depression -
MORAN: That’s important for the court to know. It mitigates and also changes the court’s view that we don’t just have a drug dealer kid here, who’s dealing drugs just to make a little pocket change, but a kid who is seriously ill.
And Moran has a lot of kids, she says, who are seriously ill..
That is gonna make a huge impact on the way the state’s attorney sees the kid, the way the judge sees the kid and the interventions we’re gonna target for the child.. It’s not gonna be just, ok, community service. I may say to the judge, my kid is so depressed judge if you give him 150 hours of community service, there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that that kids’ gonna be able to successfully complete that community service.
So Moran goes into the courtroom with a plan. A plan that may give her a client a leg up in successfully navigating the juvenile justice system Maybe for parents to place their child in private drug treatment and do weekly drug tests at home. Maybe to place their kid in a private thereapeutic day school.
MORAN: Or the parents have located a wilderness program, he’s going to go there for an assessment evaluation. He’s going to be gone for 12 weeks at their expense your honor, $30,000. This family is willing to do whatever it takes to help their child. And both parents are in court. If they’re divorced I tell them to suck it up, cooperate, look on the same page even if you aren’t. I tell the kid how to dress. Ditch the piercings, cover the tattoos, suit and tie. “I don’t have one” -- go out and get one.
Moran wants to show the judge that the parents are proactive.
MORAN: And that the court’s intervention is actually going to be NOT necessary. That the parents are going to do everything the court actually would require them to do, but we’re going to basically offer ourselves up. We’re going to say, “You don’t have to worry about this, we’re on it, it’s already handled.
More often than not, the court agrees to the plan. And her clients, she believes, often white, often wealthy, end up with services and therapy better targeted to their needs. But it bothers her that all kids don’t get these benefits.
MORAN: It’s just reality. Outcomes are resource based. I mean, if you don’t have money, or you can’t get treatment for your kid, you’re gonna have a very different outcome, than if you can.
Moran says she feels demoralized by this, but she tries to take it one kid at a time. She’s asked sometimes to give presentations to parents about what to do if their kid has a run-in with the law. She once, somewhat bitterly, told a friend:
MORAN: Unfortunately I think I should begin and end my talk with this line—If your kid -- if you don’t have resources -- your kid is screwed..
Tomorrow, we meet a young white man, who at 17, was caught selling marijuana in the suburbs. We ask if his narrative might match that of a low-income African-American youth caught doing the same thing.
Posted By: Siebra Muhammad
Monday, April 19th 2010 at 12:54PM
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