DRUG LAW DISPARITIES MUST BE ADDRESSED

In the late 1980s - around the time Congress was enacting
harsher sentences for "crack" than for powder cocaine offenses - the
state of Illinois was passing legislation automatically transferring
certain juvenile drug offenders to adult court. The chief result of
the congressional action is well known. The nationís prisons are
bursting with black inmates. Crack, the form of cocaine preferred by
black abusers, carries a penalty 100 times harsher than for the powder
preferred by whites.

Hardly anyone believes the law to be fair.

Here, from a report done for a consortium called Building Blocks for
Youth, is the result of the Illinois law: Ninety-nine percent of the
automatic transfers to adult court in Cook County during 1999 and 2000
were either black or Hispanic. Of 393 juveniles automatically excluded
from juvenile court, just three were white.

And here's the kicker. The lawmakers, far from intending this racially
outrageous result, were most likely acting to make black communities
safer from the scourge of drugs.

The crack/powder legislation was enacted at a time when black
activists were worried about an epidemic of cheap, powerfully
addictive and very dangerous crack cocaine destroying black
neighborhoods. Nobody objected - at the time - to the disparate
penalties because we all believed that crack was a special scourge
whose dangers included everything from deadly gang warfare to
crack-addicted newborns.

The Illinois law, proceeding no doubt from a similar rationale,
mandates transfer to adult court for 15- and 16-year-olds charged with
drug offenses within 1,000 feet of a school or public housing project.

See? A racist law would have upped the ante for drug crimes committed
in white or affluent neighborhoods.

This one targeted drug crimes in the most vulnerable, largely black
neighborhoods. A dozen years later, we understand how incredibly
unfair the legislation is in its implementation. It isn't merely that
white drug merchants are less likely than their black counterparts to
operate near schools or public housing. There might also be some
disparity in enforcement as well.

Jason Ziedenberg, a senior policy analyst with the Justice Policy
Institute and principal author of the Building Blocks report, notes
some odd and unexplained facts. For instance, in 1985, before the
automatic-transfer legislation took effect, 88 white youths - and 31
blacks - were arrested for the manufacture and delivery of controlled
substances in Illinois. By 1999, he says, the number of white youths
arrested had dropped to 64, while the number of black youths arrested
shot up to 469.

"Did the white kids suddenly get good?" he wonders. "Did black kids
suddenly get a lot worse?"

Ziedenberg then points to a 1999 National Household Survey on Drug
Abuse that shows white youths aged 12-17 at least a third more likely
than their African American counterparts to have sold drugs. A 1998-99
survey of high school seniors for the National Institute of Drug Abuse
shows white students using cocaine at seven to eight times the rate
for blacks, and heroin at a seven times higher rate.

It doesn't sound as though white kids suddenly got
good.

But blacks, who make up just over 15 percent of Illinois' juvenile
population, account for 59 percent of the youths arrested for drug
crimes, 85.5 percent of those automatically transferred to adult
court, 88 percent of the ones imprisoned for drug crimes statewide,
and 91 percent of the juveniles tried as adults who are admitted to
state prison from Cook County.

The report is the latest in a series published by Building Blocks for
Youth, a Washington-based coalition of groups doing work on
disparities in the juvenile justice system.

Ziedenberg, whose Justice Policy Institute is a member of the
coalition, says the new report is neither prescriptive nor accusatory
but intends merely to describe what is going on. In fact, it is very
hard to know what combination of factors - closer police attention,
greater concentrations of young people, more out-of-doors drug
trafficking, racial profiling, differential use of police discretion -
accounts for higher arrest rates among black youths cited by the report.

But we know exactly what accounts for the overwhelming disparity in
automatic transfers to adult court. It is the law that specifically
targets schools and housing projects.

However innocent - even constructive - the original intent of that
law, Illinois legislators now know its hugely unfair consequences.
They must know, too, how such manifest unfairness erodes and
undermines respect for the law in general.

It's time for Illinois to revisit automatic transfers.