Justice Is Not Color Blind, Studies Find

“Where you going?” the cops asked the teenager lugging his schoolbooks along Vermont Avenue one afternoon last week. “What are you doing?”

They pointed to his UC Berkeley cap and clothes, all blue--a color often favored by local gang members. And they said:

“You look suspicious.”

They let him go with a warning, but later that day Wylie Jason Tidwell III, 17, became livid while telling the story to friends.

“Suspicious? Me? Why, because I’m black?” asked the tall Washington Prep High School senior, soon to be a San Francisco State University freshman.

His friends, college-bound black and Latino youths who also live in South-Central Los Angeles, listened and nodded. Said one: “The experience is all the same here. We’ve all been through that and worse.”

New studies show that these teenagers are not alone.

Pulling together the most comprehensive data yet on race and crime in America, two recent reports show that, at every stage of the nation’s system of crime and punishment--from arrest through plea bargaining to sentencing--black and brown Americans get tougher treatment than whites.

And the studies show that criminal justice trends in California closely mirror national conditions.

Such patterns, the studies say, have led to worsening racial disparities in criminal justice. And they have contributed to deep-rooted hopelessness in many communities of color.

The studies also highlight new, disheartening trends, ones Tidwell and his friends found unsurprising:

* Among first-time offenders charged with the same crime, young minority group members are six times as likely to be locked up as are young whites.

* Whites and blacks use drugs at the same rate, yet nearly two-thirds of those convicted of drug offenses are black.

* Between 1985 and 1995, the rate of Latino incarceration nationwide more than tripled. Latinos are the fastest-growing group of imprisoned Americans.

* Young African Americans in California are imprisoned in state facilities at the third-highest rate in the nation. Though just 7% of Californians are black, 38% of the youths sent to adult prisons in 1996 were black.

“Crime has come to be defined as an issue of people of color, and the long-term consequences are going to be grave,” said Dan Macallair, vice president of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, a 15-year-old national group aimed at reducing society’s use of prisons to solve social problems.

He said African Americans, who have the highest incarceration rates in the nation, already have “been devastated” by society’s zeal to imprison people. Increasingly, he added, similar effects appear to be emerging in the Latino community.

The new reports were compiled by two umbrella public policy groups: the Washington, D.C.-based Leadership Council on Civil Rights, a 50-year-old group that represents 185 human rights organizations, and Building Blocks for Youth, a liberal group of child and legal advocacy organizations focused on helping minority juvenile offenders.

Anti-Crime Fervor Is Seen as a Factor

Experts say the data--from government and private databases, academic studies, think tanks and other sources--are the most conclusive yet on American race, crime and imprisonment.

Because statistics on Latinos, Asians and Native Americans often are scarce, the reports focus largely on disparities between blacks and whites.

They also underscore that, in recent years, the race-crime gap has worsened, even as crime rates have gone down.

The reason: a strong anti-crime sentiment across the nation that has inspired a wave of new tough-on-crime laws, Macallair said.

“This is a politically charged issue,” he said.

California’s Proposition 21 is one recent example.

The Gang Violence and Youth Crime Prevention Act, approved in March by more than six in 10 voters, makes it easier to try young people as adults and to sentence them to adult prisons.

“The consequences of Proposition 21 are staggering,” reads the Leadership Council on Civil Rights report, released May 4. “Given the demonstrable racial disparity in juvenile justice, there is little question that the impact of Proposition 21 will fall largely on minority youth.”

Rochelle Hernandez, a sophomore at Crenshaw High School, organized her classmates to protest the law when it was on the ballot. “The crimes that cause the most problems in society are white-collar crimes, but [the proposition] targeted street crimes--it targeted black and brown kids,” she said.

In recent years more than 40 states, including California, have changed their laws to make it easier to try youths as adults, according to Building Blocks for Youth. In 1998, more than 200,000 young people were prosecuted as adults, the group said.

And, in California, black youths are 2.5 times as likely to be tried as adults as whites are, according to the Center on Juvenile Justice, which collaborated on the Building Blocks report.

Similarly, the national war on drugs, begun in the 1980s by former President Ronald Reagan, aimed to curb use by jailing nonviolent drug offenders. As a result, between 1980 and 1995, the number of state prisoners convicted of drug crimes increased by more than 1,000%, the Leadership Council reports. In the same period, drug offenders in state prisons rose from one in 16 to one in four.

Data in both studies consistently showed that most people incarcerated for drug offenses are members of minorities. Blacks make up about 13% of the U.S. population but are about 74% of those sentenced to prison for drug offenses, according to the Leadership Council.

Behind these data are such examples as the sentencing disparity between use of crack cocaine and powder cocaine.

Government health statistics show that Americans, regardless of race, use drugs at about the same rate, but most crack cocaine users are white. Yet in 1993 more than 95% of those convicted of federal crack offenses were black or Latino, according to the Leadership Council.

And federal laws call for a 10-year sentence for someone caught selling 500 grams of crack. But a dealer would have to sell 10 times that amount--5,000 grams--to get that same sentence for selling powder cocaine.

Despite the accumulated evidence of such racial disparities, why does the problem persist?

The studies’ authors avoid simple explanations.

“We were cautious, and I think appropriately so,” said Marc Schindler, a staff attorney with the Youth Law Center, which collaborated on the Building Blocks study, released last month. “Racism to a certain extent does play a role, but it’s probably not the No. 1 factor.”

Schindler cited other factors, such as flaws in the criminal justice system and a skewed perception conveyed by the media that crime is a minority problem.

Activists who work on issues of race and crime agree.

Poverty often is one of the biggest hurdles to justice, said Javier Stauring, the Catholic chaplain at Central Juvenile Hall in East Los Angeles.

For example, he said, a poor youth from a single-parent home often is unable to bring a family member with him when he goes before a judge for sentencing. “He’s probably going to Y.A.,” he said, referring to the California Youth Authority.

“But if a kid comes with both parents and dad’s in a three-piece suit and has insurance that can cover [drug] rehabilitation, the judge has a lot of options,” he said. “That plays a big role.”

Though prosecutors, judges and other actors in the criminal justice process are rarely overtly racist, Schindler said, many harbor unconscious racial biases.

The reports stress that, at every stage of the criminal justice process, such unconscious biases erode the chances that minorities will get a fair shake.

For explanation, some point to racial patterns in criminal justice authorities. Eighty-five percent of state prosecutors in California are white, according to Macallair.

Such demographics, he said, can lead to “wide perception gaps.”

Still, one recent study analyzing racial bias among probation officers found few differences between white and black officers. The bias was, according to the author, rooted in the structure of the probation system itself.

The study, by a University of Washington sociologist, found a subtle, consistent bias by probation officers in their written reports on young black and white offenders.

The officers routinely described blacks as bad kids with character flaws. But they depicted white offenders as victims of negative environmental factors, such as exposure to family conflict or delinquent friends.

“The data couldn’t have been more striking,” said George S. Bridges, who co-wrote the study. “These were kids with the same background, the same offense, the same age. The only difference was race.”

Perceiving Young Blacks as Bad

Judges use probation officers’ reports to help determine how to treat--or punish--youth offenders, he said. Such determinations often rest heavily on whether a judge believes a youth can be rehabilitated.

When decision-makers in the criminal justice system routinely perceive young blacks as bad kids who can’t be rehabilitated, the effects are “profound,” Bridges said.

“This will lead to longer rates of incarceration for minority children . . . that will ultimately have a severe impact on the child’s livelihood,” he said.

Jody David Armour, a law professor at USC, calls such treatment of minorities “a sympathy deficit.”

He pointed to last year’s youth violence at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., as proof that “there can be a lot of sympathy for youth in trouble.”

“We can find it in our hearts to identify with the Columbine kids,” Armour said. “We looked for circumstantial evidence: the jock culture, the video games. But when we talk about drive-by shootings in the inner city, we talk about [the youths being] monsters.”

Despite the complex explanations behind the race-crime gap, the Leadership Council study said skin color is the most reliable predictor of who police will target and whether prosecutors will offer plea bargains, try young people as adults or seek the death penalty.

And this, experts stress, contributes to a growing sense of hopelessness in many minority communities.

Alberto Retana of South Central Youth Empowered Through Action helped teens in South-Central Los Angeles rally against Proposition 21. When the law passed, he saw firsthand the despair in their faces.

“The teens saw it as a definite attack on their community,” Retana said. “When the law was put on the books, it just deepened the sadness and sense of hopelessness among them. It’s a disempowering experience.”

Said Stauring, the juvenile hall chaplain: “African American and Latino youth have been dehumanized. It’s scary when kids know that society has given up on them.”