In 1968, when he was locked up in the Birmingham jail, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote, "Injustice anywhere threatens justice everywhere." As the 20th Century comes to an end, I am disturbed to find that not only is equal justice still a challenge for America's juvenile and criminal justice systems, but that for much of the country, it is an increasing challenge.

What I'd like to do today is talk about some data and studies that have been conducted which I believe shed some light on this dilemma. But I'd also like to talk about some of the real-life cases that I hope can put the numbers into the context of flesh and blood people.

In the early hours of the morning of May 8, 1992, a friend and colleague of mine, Robert Wilkins and his aunt, uncle, and cousin - all African Americans -- were driving on an Interstate highway in Maryland. They had been at Robert's grandfather's funeral in Chicago, and were in the process of traveling through the night to get home to Virginia.

Just before six o'clock in the morning, a Maryland state trooper pulled Robert and his family over, claiming that they were speeding in the Cadillac that they had rented for the long trip. The police officer did not merely write up a traffic citation, though. He told the family that he was going to search the car for drugs.

Robert, a young, bright and soft-spoken graduate of Harvard Law, is a public defender in the District of Columbia. He explained to the policeman that he had no right to search the car because there was no reason to believe that he and his family were in possession of drugs.

Robert rattled off Supreme Court precedent, but the trooper made Robert and his relatives stand in the early morning drizzle as the officer sent for a drug-sniffing dog. The German shepherd smelled nothing suspicious, while they waited by the car in fury, embarrassed at what the curious motorists driving by must have been thinking. The frustrated police officer gave Robert's cousin a $105 speeding ticket and allowed the family to continue on their way.

Robert then took the state to court, asserting that he and his family filled a written drug courier profile because they are African American. As part of the discovery material handed over by the state, there was indeed a memo to state troopers encouraging them to search rented cars from Virginia driven by youth African American men. This upsetting evidence won Robert an out-of-court settlement. A condition of the settlement required that Maryland state troopers record the race and other details of the motorists whose vehicles they search.

The data from Maryland are disturbing. Roughly 17% of those driving on a 45-mile stretch of I-95 in Maryland are African American, while 77% are white. An astounding 93% of the motorists exceed the speed limit, with the percentages remaining about the same as the makeup of the drivers (75% of those speeding were white and 18% were black.) A study in New Jersey revealed similar results, finding that 98% of motorists drive above the speed limit, and 15% of the drivers who speed are African American.

So, pretty much everybody speeds, and a white driver is just as likely to speed as a black driver.

Despite the similarities in driving patterns, African Americans are exponentially more likely than whites to be searched by Maryland's troopers. From 1995 through 1997, 70% of the drivers whose vehicles were searched by Maryland state troopers were African American. That means that an African American driver is more than 13 times more likely to be searched than a white driver. One hundred percent of the searches conducted by one trooper were of African American drivers.

Although African American clearly do not have drugs in their car thirteen times as often as whites, their rate must be at least a little higher to justify that great an enhanced level of police scrutiny. Right? A Temple University study found that Maryland state police find contraband 28% of the time they search cars operated by African American drivers, and 29% of the time they search white drivers.

Put another way, searching more blacks isn't justified before the fact by speeding, or after the fact by finding illegal drugs more frequently amongst blacks than amongst whites. According to Temple researcher John Lamberth, Ph.D., "in layman's terms the probability that black Interstate-95 drivers are subjected to search at so high a rate by chance is less than one in one quintillion." To calculate that figure, simply write a one, and add 18 zeroes.

I started off with Robert's story for a number of reasons. First, because Robert is a person, not a statistic, and when I get on a roll, I can often churn out a numbing pile of data. To paraphrase Stalin, the loss a million Russian soldiers is a statistic, the loss of one Russian soldier is a tragedy. Robert is a good, decent man, and that day on highway, he went through something that is a common experience for young black men, and almost unheard of for young white men.

On that day, Robert did not deserve for that to happen to him.

It is also not a difficult jump to make between driving while black and the glaring disparities observed in America's juvenile justice system. Insofar as what happened to Robert is or was part of a government-sanctioned profile, it has obviously happened and is happening to other blacks innocently driving on America's highways. While many in number, they are not numbers, they are real people too.

The driving while black data also makes it more reasonable to conclude that minority youth are subject to heightened scrutiny by law enforcement than white youth, even given the same or similar rates of offending. These findings add a very important element to our understanding of overrepresentation of minorities in the justice system because blacks were neither speeding nor in possession of drugs at higher rates than whites, yet they were scrutinized 13 times more frequently. Much of the self reporting data I'm going to talk about later similarly show that minority youth are involved in criminal behavior at very similar rates as white youth, yet they are filling our jails, prisons, and juvenile lock ups at much higher rates.

I'd like to talk a little about what some of the data has shown with respect to race and America's justice system, and I'll start close to home so that no one accuses me of just coming to Connecticut and giving you grief, I'll confess DC's sins first. In preparation for this presentation, I took a look at some of the demographics of the youth served by a delinquency program I run. The program, located in Washington, DC, obtains release for kids housed in DC's decrepit and dangerous juvenile detention facility and works to rehabilitate them in their home communities.

Since 1994, when the program started, we've obtained release for almost 1000 kids. About 25 of them were Latino, none white, and the rest were African American. On the day I wrote this, every youth in our program, and every youth in the District's juvenile jail, is African American.

This is not a phenomenon unique to the nation's capital. In nearby Maryland, the prison population has nearly doubled since 1988, and 87% of that increase has come in the form of African American inmates. In a study my organization will be releasing later this month, 90% of the rather substantial increases in prison commitments in both New Jersey and New York during the 1990s were accounted for by minorities. In 1985, Connecticut had about 6,000 people in prison, by 1998, that number mushroomed to nearly 18,000, and 11,400 person increase. Minorities account for 78% of that increase in Connecticut's prison population 1990. This is in contrast not only to the fact that crime has been declining throughout the country during this period of time, but that crime has declined most sharply amongst African Americans and Latinos.

The state of Illinois has a law that mandates that kids be tried as adults if they are convicted of selling drugs within 1000 feet of a school or public housing project. Of the 259 youth tried under that law last year, one was white.

According to a report released by the Building Blocks for youth Initiative, African American youth are 16% of America's youth population, 26% of youth arrests, 44% of youth detained after arrest, 46% of youth committed to public facilities, and a whopping 58% of youth admitted to adult prisons in America. Despite the improvements noted in the excellent report by Hartstone and Richetelli, in Connecticut, minority youth make up 25% of the state's youth population, 51% of juvenile court referrals, 71% of youth committed to Long Lane, and 68% of transferred youth. Minority youth make up about 1/3 of America's youth population, and 2/3 of those in public custody in America. Minority youth make up one quarter of Connecticut's youth population and more than two thirds of youth committed to your training school and waived to adult court here. According to the state-by-state analysis of minority youth in custody done by Building Blocks and reported in our "And Justice for Some" report, overrepresentation index values are 50% higher than the national average for both detained and committed youth. (Note to self detained, public committed, private committed US= 1.8, 2.0, 1.6; Conn. = 3.0, 3.2; 2.3).

Some are tempted to conclude that, since minority youth make up most of the arrests, they occupy most of the prison cells. Conservative criminologist James Q. Wilson has suggested that these data merely reflect "an unhappy fact" about crime in America. Indeed, there is growing rhetoric coming out of the conservative Manhattan Institute denying the existence of disproportionate minority confinement and calling for its removal from the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act.

That call was heard loud and clear by former Senate Judiciary Chair Orin Hatch, who authored an amendment to a juvenile justice bill in the last Congress to remove the Disproportionate Minority Confinement core mandate from the JJDPA. Senator Hatch surprised both his Senate colleagues and the civil rights community by stating flatly that he believed the justice system to be completely "colorblind." While his opposition to redressing disproportionate minority confinement had previously focused on its constitutionality, in his floor statement, Hatch claimed, "I haven't heard one shred of information that proves there is discrimination here. When you prove that, I will be right there, side-by-side with you." More divisively, he asked "Should they not be convicted when they sell drugs to our kids? Everybody knows that it happens." Hatch's amendment narrowly passed the Senate but died in committee due to the controversy over the gun control provisions of that bill.

But a fair analysis of race and America's justice system is much more complicated than Wilson's unhappy resignation would have one believe. While some research has not found racial disparities, particularly at the sentencing and imprisonment stages, there is an unfortunately large and impressive body of research that reveals substantial overrepresentation that cannot be accounted for by the so-called "unhappy fact" that minorities commit more crime.

In a meta-analysis of studies on race and the juvenile justice system, researchers Carl Pope and Richard Feyerherm found that about 2/3 of the studies of disproportionate minority confinement showed "race effects" at one stage or another of the juvenile justice process, while 1/3 found no such effects.

By contrast, an often-cited analysis conducted in 1983 by Steve Klein, Joan Peterselia and Susan Turner of the Rand Corporation found little evidence to support a conclusion of racially different treatment of cases at sentencing. Likewise, Carnegie-Mellon professor Alfred Blumstein found that 76% of the differences in incarceration rates between whites and blacks could be explained by differences in arrest rates. This, by the way, was used to argue that little discrimination existed, although I'm not so sure I'd feel that way if I were someone who suffered from the 24% unexplained and potentially discriminatory effects.

Both the Rand study and Professor Blumstein's study start from the premise that arrest rates and arrest charges are generally reflective of crime, a presumption about which I have grave concerns.

Research presented by Hartstone and Richatelli being released at this forum showed that self-reported offense rates amongst whites, blacks and Latinos are much more similar than one would expect given the stark overrepresentation of minorities found in our nation's locked juvenile facilities and prisons. The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth that surveys 9,000 youth found that whites, blacks and Hispanics report carrying weapons, marijuana use, and petty theft at almost identical rates. The 1998 Youth and Social Issues Program study of 2,000 high school seniors across the country found that similar numbers of white and black youth report getting into a fight, entering a building without permission and again, theft.

Interestingly, both the most recent National Institute of Drug Abuse Survey of high school seniors and National Household Survey on Drug Abuse found substantially higher involvement in serious drug behavior for whites than for blacks. The NIDA survey found that white youth self-reported using heroin and cocaine at 7 times the rate of black youth and crack cocaine at 8 times the rate of white youth. In the National Household Survey, white youth age 12 - 17 reported selling drugs a third more frequently than black youth. If white youth are indeed using more frequently than black youth, the higher sales numbers makes sense, since drug users report most commonly buying drugs from people of the same race.

This is an important finding when it comes to looking at rates of disparity in the juvenile justice vs. actual behavior as opposed to arrest rates. According to the "And Justice for Some" report by Building Blocks I mentioned earlier, overrepresentation in the treatment of youth charged with drug offenses tend to worse than for youth charged with property and violent offenses. For example, nationally, the average length of stay for Latino youth admitted to a public facility for a drug offense is double the length of stay for white youth (306 days vs. 144 days). Similarly, African American youth admitted for a drug offense were held 63% longer than white youth (235 days vs. 144). Hispanic youth with no prior commitments charged with drug offenses are 13 times as likely to committed to locked custody as white youth. African American youth with no prior commitment record are an astonishing 48 times as likely as similarly situated white youth to be committed to locked custody. These rates of overrepresentation are all much more pronounced than they are in other offense categories.

Meanwhile, African American youth are underrepresented in treatment programs. While 33% of youths arrested for drug offenses are African American, and 63% of youth waived to adult court for drug offenses are African American, only 17% of drug treatment admissions for youth are African Americans.

Delbert Elliott former President of the American Society of Criminology, has conducted groundbreaking analyses of differential violent offense rates between white and minority youth using the self reporting data from the National Youth Survey, which I believe are helpful in looking at the issue of disproportionate minority confinement. Elliot found that, black youth self-report committing violent crimes at about one and one half times the rate of white youth, a much lower disparity than shows up in arrest or prison data. For example, in these same age cohorts, black youth are about four times as likely to be arrested and seven times as likely to be locked up for violent crimes as are white teenagers.

After their teenage years, however, white and black teenagers follow a different course. White teenagers "mature out" of criminal behavior, and begin to show sharply declining involvement in violence. African American teenagers show a resurgence of violence in young adulthood.

"Maturing out" is an unfortunate term in many respects because it can connote the inexorable forces of aging, which the research obviously does not bear out. If age were the key ingredient in declines in crime, blacks and whites, who age equally as they move into young adulthood, would show more similar declines in criminality.

What Elliot's analysis does show is that, when the subjects under study possess either a job or a stable relationship, both blacks and whites experience the same precipitous decline in violent behavior. Researchers Sampson and Laub similarly found that two factors, if they occurred between ages 17 and 25, were most likely to turn an adolescent male away from violent crime -- finding a stable job that he cared about, and marrying a woman to whom he is attached. Michael Males, in his excellent book The Scapegoat Generation found that differences in youthful white and black crime rates disappeared when controlling for poverty.

As America continues its "conversation on race", such information can be very helpful in forming public policy. America already has a model system for addressing juvenile delinquency at its disposal. It is the system that kicks into gear when a white middle class child gets arrested. That child gets special attention -- parents, uncles, coaches, and neighbors come out of the woodwork to vouch for them and pledge enhanced monitoring. Special schools are arranged, restitution is set up, even volunteer work to the community is worked out. Growing up in Brooklyn, I knew early on that, if a kid in my Polish and Irish community got into trouble, the whole neighborhood would rally around to keep him out of the Spofford Detention Facility in the Bronx.

In 1989, my organization was referred the case of a black youth who was a senior in a local high school charged with a strong armed robbery. Derrick's mother had died the year before, and he was sort of stuck with a stepfather with whom he never had a great relationship. In the year since his mother's death, he had had one other arrest for possession of marijuana. Still, he was in school, worked nightly at his step-dad's shoe repair store, and was enrolled in ROTC.

One day after school, he and a couple of other seniors stole a sweat jacket off of a black male freshman in their same school. No knife, no gun, they didn't rough the kid up, just a classic, decidedly unpleasant for the victim, strong armed robbery. During pretrial negotiations, Derrick's court-appointed lawyer, with whom I shared an office at the time, told me about the case and about how he was unable to get the DA to offer anything less than state prison. The lawyer offered by way of explanation that his client had a "big black kid" problem, insofar as he was about 6' 3" tall, a little heavy and exuded a tough attitude to those who didn't know him.

My agency was able to convince the mother of the victim to meet with Derrick prior to sentencing at a local police station where she was the dispatcher. She yelled at him, and he looked at his shoes and mumbled what appeared to me (and more importantly, to her) to be sincere apologies. We told her a little about his living situation and about how he hadn't been in any trouble till after his mother died. Derrick offered to pay restitution for the sweat jacket out of his shoe repair earnings, and my organization had arranged for him to perform community service, training recovering drug addicts how to repair shoes.

The mother was moved by Derrick's circumstances and was convinced to write to the judge and ask for leniency. The judge ordered Derrick to serve three months in jail, do community service and make restitution, which he had already saved up by the time of sentencing.

In his book about race and the juvenile justice system, Search and Destroy, Jerome Miller describes the first-hand experiences he had with race and the juvenile justice system when he headed up the Department of Youth Services in Massachusetts, which I feel put Derrick's case into a broader context. Dr. Miller wrote:

I learned very early on that when we got a black youth, virtually everything -- from arrest summaries, to family history, to rap sheets, to psychiatric exams -- was skewed. If a middle-class white youth was sent to us as "dangerous," he was more likely actually to be so than the black teenager given the same label. The white teenager was more likely to have been afforded competent legal counsel and appropriate psychiatric and psychological testing, tried in a variety of privately funded options, and dealt with more sensitively and individually at every stage of the juvenile justice processing. For him to be labeled "dangerous" he had to have done something very serious indeed.

A 1999 study by Bridges and Steen from the University of Washington bore out Miller's concern when it found that, in a blind analysis of probation reports descriptions and recommendations, minority youth were consistently described in harsher terms and received more punitive dispositional recommendations, holding prior record and current offenses constant.

I was mostly glad about the way Derrick's case turned out, although I wished that he had not been exposed to jail at his impressionable age. But more importantly, even though it turned out OK for Derrick, we shouldn't have had to do what we did for Derrick, who committed schoolyard misbehavior that would have resulted in a trip to detention in a white, middle class school. Like Jerry Miller, I felt from the beginning that the system saw an easily readable script for Derrick, which was eventually going to include a trip to jail or prison. As a result, the system did not recoil from locking Derrick up like it would have for a similarly situated white high-school student. The burden was on us to humanize Derrick -- he walked into court as a stereotype.

Indeed, that prison-bound script, that typecast, is not so far from accurate. A Justice Department study released last year found that the likelihood of a black male child born in America in the mid-1990s going to prison at some time during his life is an astonishing one in four. This is not the "one-in-four young black men under the control of the criminal justice system" statistic that the Sentencing Project put out that many of you are familiar with, which includes the much larger number of young black men in jail, on probation, and on parole. This finding is that one in four black male children born in America will go to prison, if the incarceration rate stays the same. And it has already risen, by the way, and as I mentioned earlier, 4 out of 5 of those new inmates were minorities.

It was only dumb luck that Derrick found us. Many more Derricks don't.

Despite the fact that African American and Latino parents love their kids as much as white parents do, their treatment at the hands of the juvenile justice system is generally not what Derrick got, and not what my kids would get. Too often they are defended by apathetic attorneys, ministered to by disinterested bureaucrats, and imprisoned in dangerous warehouses. It is indeed true that the opposite of love is not hate, but apathy.

As a result, while white youth are obtaining the jobs and establishing the relationships that research and common sense tell us will alter their life paths from violence to success, African American youth are learning the hard lessons taught in America's prisons and jails.

Unfortunately, instead of helping to create a system, which will redress these inequities, much of the country is moving toward a harsher and more punitive response to youth crime and indeed, all forms of youthful misbehavior. Since 1992, 47 states, including Connecticut, have toughened their juvenile codes, generally by making it easier or even mandatory to try youth as adults at younger and younger ages, by abolishing confidentiality protections or by otherwise "adultifying" the juvenile justice system. In 1998, 200,000 young people were tried as adults in America, and about 17,000 youth are locked up in adult institutions on any given day, in addition to the 90,000 or so in locked juvenile custody. About 3 million youth were either suspended or expelled from schools in America in 1997, about twice the rate at which youth were expelled when I was in high school.

These more punitive approaches are flourishing despite sharply declining rates of youth violence, youth crime, and youth misbehavior in general, a fact that is one of the best kept secrets in America. From 1993 to 1999, there was a 68% decline in juvenile homicides and similar double digit declines in other rates of youth crime. The youth homicide rate is at its lowest since 1966, when I was seven, and homicides by youth under age 13 are at their lowest since the FBI began keeping that statistic in 1964. The National Crime Victimization survey - a poll that asks 20,000 Americans every year about their crime victimization - is considered one of the best measures of youth crime and has been conducted since 1973. The most recent survey available was 1998, and it showed youth crime at its lowest rate ever in the 25-year history of the survey. Still, 62% of respondents to a Building Blocks for youth poll in 1999 believed that youth crime was on the increase.

This information gap is found across the board when it comes to crime and youth behavior. Youth arrests make up about one out of every six arrests in America yet 60% of respondents to a 1997 California polled believed that youth commit a majority of the crime nowadays. There has been a 70% decline in homicides in schools in America since 1992 and last year, there was a one in two million chance of being killed in one of America's schools. Yet 71% of respondents to a Wall Street Journal Poll thought such a shooting was likely in their school. While whites are 6 times as likely to be killed by other whites and 3 times as likely to be victimized by other whites, twice as many whites who responded to a Money Magazine poll believe they were more likely to be victimized by a minority than by another white.

I graduated from high school in 1977. Overall, the last several graduating classes of America's high school students were less likely to take drugs, less likely to drink beer, less likely to commit homicide and other crimes, less likely to have out of wedlock births, more likely to believe in God and practice their religion, and more likely to go to college than my graduating class was. Yet my crop of baby-boomers thinks worse and worse of them and treats them more harshly than we were ever treated, particularly if they have black and brown faces. This treatment will ultimately turn out a more alienated, dangerous and brutalized cadre of young people in the 21st Century.

It will also take us further away from Dr. King's dream of a future where white and black children will walk hand-in-hand as equals. The notion that a higher value is placed on the lives of young whites than young blacks is a wink and a nod not lost on the African American and Latino communities, however. For my part, I know that, if care and concern is what the system would mete out to my children, who are white, it should do no less for the sons and daughters of minority parents.

Vincent Schiraldi is Director of the Justice Policy Institute in Washington, DC.