LOCK 'EM UP!

Minority Youths Are More Likely To Face Trial As Adults

A White kid sells a bag of cocaine at his suburban high school.

A Latino kid does the same in his inner-city neighborhood. Both get caught.

Both are first-time offenders.

The white kid walks into juvenile court with his parents, his priest, a
good lawyer-and medical coverage.

The Latino kid walks into court with his mom, no legal resources and no
insurance.

The judge lets the white kid go with his family; he's placed in a private
treatment program.

The minority kid has no such option.

He's detained.

There, in a nutshell, is what happens more and more often in the
juvenile-court system.

Minority youths arrested on violent felony charges in California are more
than twice as likely as their white counterparts to be transferred out of
the juvenile-justice system and tried as adults, according to a study
released last week by the Justice Policy Institute, a research center in
San Francisco. Once they are in adult courts, young black offenders are 18
times more likely to be jailed - and Hispanics seven times more likely -
than are young white offenders. "Discrimination against kids of color
accumulates at every stage of the justice system and skyrockets when
juveniles are tried as adults," says Dan Macallair, a co-author of the new
study. "California has a double standard: throw kids of color behind bars,
but rehabilitate white kids who commit comparable crimes."

Even as juvenile crime has declined from its peak in the early 1990s,
headline-grabbing violence by minors has intensified a get-tough attitude.
Over the past six years, 43 states have passed laws that make it easier to
try juveniles as adults.

In Texas and Connecticut in 1996, the latest year for which figures are
available, all the juveniles in jails were minorities. Vincent Schiraldi,
the Justice Policy Institute's director, concedes that "some kids need to
be tried as adults.

But most can be rehabilitated."

Instead, adult prisons tend to brutalize juveniles.

They are eight times more likely to commit suicide and five times more
likely to be sexually abused than offenders held in juvenile detention.
"Once they get out, they tend to commit more crimes and more violent
crimes," says Jenni Gainsborough, a spokeswoman for the Sentencing Project,
a reform group in Washington. The system, in essence, is training career
criminals.

And it's doing its worst work among minorities.