In addition to my work with the Center, I was the chair of San Francisco's Juvenile Probation Commission, a member of Governor George Deukmejian's Blue Ribbon Commission on Inmate Population Management, an advisor to California's Commission on the Status of African American Men, and recently a member of the Corrections Subcommittee of Mayor Anthony Williams' transition team. I have also personally been a foster parent to a severely emotionally disturbed delinquent teenager. So I come before you today with experience both with direct services and research and policy work. I'd like to start with some data about race and America's juvenile justice system, talk a little about our program, and then discuss a few implications of the data and my experiences. There is a large and growing body of research which paints a dismal picture of disproportionate confinement in America.
Black youths are seven times as likely to be held in a public detention facility as white youths.
Blacks make up 12 percent of America's population and 13 percent of America's monthly drug users, but teenage black males are confined for drug offenses at 30 times the rate of their white counterparts. Some are tempted to conclude from all of this that, since blacks commit most of the crime, they occupy most of the prison cells. But a fair analysis of race and America's juvenile justice system is much more complicated than that. Delbert Elliott, Ph.D., former President of the American Society of Criminology, has conducted groundbreaking analyses of differential offense rates between white and African American teenagers using self-reporting data from the National Youth Survey, which have profound policy implications. According to Dr. Elliott, black teenagers self-report committing violent crimes at about one and one half times the rate of white teenagers, a much lower disparity than what shows up in arrest or prison data.