Chicago Bureau: “For those who follow corrections, it comes as little surprise that the United States leads the world in the rates of incarcerated – and it leads with state spending on corrections totaling approximately $52 billion, the bulk of it earmarked for prisons, according to a 2011 Pew Research report.
Of even smaller surprise is that the system is lopsided against minorities – but what can shock is just how skewed the system is. Consider: According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, one in three black men are likely to be imprisoned in his life, while for whites it’s one in 17.
But with reports in recent years out of San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and even Chicago about how racially skewed the justice system is, and how that imbalance often begins in the school, the knowledge of the issue is starting – starting – to gain traction.
The Juvenile Justice Information Exchange, a website based outside Atlanta and a partner of The Chicago Bureau, held an online discussion recently on youth of color and the juvenile justice system, moderated by JJIE’s Katy McCarthy and featuring James Bell of the W. Haywood Burns Institute and Katayoon Majd of the Public Welfare Foundation. The former works to reduce racial and ethnic disparities for teenagers of color in the American justice system, whereas the latter funds policy reform efforts in the United States.
Although the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 2002 broadened the scope of the ‘disproportionate minority confinement’ (DMC) initiative to that of ‘disproportionate minority contact’ (DMC), Bell finds even that term, so widely used in discourse today, somewhat archaic.
“DMC started in the 80’s,” he said. “As we move into 2014, [we move] to the stage where young people of color are the majority in states like Hawaii, New Mexico, California and Texas. To continue to call people of color a ‘minority’ in places where most of the young people are is backwards thinking.””
Read the rest here.
