Two 16-year-old boys get arrested for a nonviolent offense. One is Black, one is white. The Black youth lives in a poor community on Chicago’s West Side. He is no stranger to the police.
Two 16-year-old boys get arrested for a nonviolent offense. One is Black, one is white. The Black youth lives in a poor community on Chicago’s West Side. He is no stranger to the police. He has been rounded up and taken to jail during sweeps, which counts as a strike against him even if he’s done nothing wrong. Fighting and drug use are manifestations of his anger over his troubled home life. He even spent a night in juvenile lockup for fighting at school.
The white youth lives in a northwest suburb. He has made frequent trips to the principal’s office for fighting, coming to school under the influence of drugs and alcohol, and displaying erratic behavior. He and a group of friends were picked up by police last summer for “joy riding” but were released to their parents’ custody. Since then, he’s been seeing a therapist to deal with anger issues and depression.
The white youth is far more likely than the Black youth to be asleep in his own bed at the end of the day, to get court supervision or to be ordered to continue therapy. But you can bet the Black youth won’t be that lucky. In Illinois, Black youth make up about 20 percent of the population but account for more than 50 percent of youth offenders in the state’s juvenile detention centers. Cook County’s numbers are even higher, with African-American youth making up a whopping 85 percent of those serving in juvenile detention centers.
In Illinois, the difference between a white and a Black youth offender who commit similar crimes could be anywhere from three months in juvenile detention to several years if the prosecutor decides to charge him or her as an adult.
We’re aware that African-Americans make up the majority of the adult prison population. But there has been little public awareness about the sentencing disparities between Black and white youth in the juvenile justice system.
That’s why the Chicago Urban League, through a grant from the James D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, is raising public awareness about the alarming rate at which African-American youth flow in and out of the system. People who work with youth offenders call these disparities disproportionate minority contact. I call it discrimination.
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