DRUG LAW UNFAIR TO BLACK YOUTHS

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 nation's 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 may 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 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, according to Ziedenberg.

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.