Pubdate: Fri, 27 Apr 2001
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Section: Editorial; Pg A23
Copyright: 2001 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: William Raspberry

THE BIG ILLINOIS CRACK-UP

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. There is a 100-to-1 disparity 
between the amounts of crack (preferred by black abusers) and powder 
cocaine (preferred by whites) needed to prosecute someone as a major drug 
dealer. 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 possession or 
sale of drugs 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 to 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 rate seven times higher.

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.
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MAP posted-by: Beth