Statement of Hilary O. Shelton,
Washington Bureau Director, NAACP

Good morning. My name is Hilary O. Shelton, and I am the Director of the NAACP Washington Bureau, the federal legislative and national public policy division of our nations oldest and largest grassroots based civil rights organization.

I stand here today with the Youth Law Center and the Building Blocks for Youth initiative, as well as other friends in the civil and children's rights communities, to discuss the troubling findings of the report that has just been issued.

Let me begin by saying, however, that the NAACP applauds the fine work and tremendous detail that went into this important report, and that we look forward to continuing to work with the Youth Law Center and our other partners to address the serious issues raised by the new report, "…And Justice For Some."

As the report being released today shows, ethnic and racial minority children in America are not being treated equally by our juvenile justice system. In almost every state in this country, African American and Hispanic American children are being locked up at a disproportionate rate and given harsher sentences than their Caucasian peers, though they commit crimes at roughly the same rate and proportion.

Given this disparity, which today's report clearly substantiates, it is difficult for any American of conscience to say with conviction that our current legal system is operating with the creed "equal justice under the law."

Furthermore, it is almost impossible for Americans of color not to have their faith in the United States Justice system challenged almost daily when we know from experience that we are treated differently because of the color of our skin. And as this report demonstrates, this unequal treatment starts at a very early age.

The NAACP joins with the Youth Law Center and others to decry this injustice and to try to find out when and why young Americans of color are treated with such disparity.

The question of at what point in the process ethnic minority children are targeted is perhaps easier to answer. As today's report points out, "…minority overrepresentation is often a product of actions that occur at earlier points in the juvenile justice system." Furthermore, the report clearly shows that "minority youth are more likely than white youth to become involved in the system with their overrepresentation increasing at each stage of the process." From arrest through detention, formal processing, incarceration in juvenile facilities, waiver to adult court and incarceration in adult prisons, African American youth are clearly and disturbingly treated unequally and unfairly.

At every stage in the process, children of color are treated more harshly than their Caucasian counterparts. In the beginning, when a decision is made to arrest a child or let him or her go with a warning, African American youth, which represent 13% of the overall youth population, make up 26% of those arrested.

At the other extreme of the process, three out of four of the more than 7,000 children under the age of 18 placed in adult prisons in 1997 were racial and ethnic minorities.

The question of why are America's ethnic minority children being treated so poorly, so unequally, is unfortunately more difficult, and I am not convinced that there is one simple answer.

Obviously, racial profiling, targeting patrols in certain low-income neighborhoods, and racial bias within the justice system contributes significantly to the stark disparities confirmed in this report. The NAACP is committed to working with the Youth Law Center, the National Council of La Raza, the Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium, the National congress of American Indians, the Children's Defense Fund, and other civil rights and children's rights organizations to try to put an end to all of the practices that result in juvenile crime, and in the disparities in how the children are treated when they become involved in our juvenile justice system.

Yet we need help. We need a strong Disproportionate Minority Confinement initiative to help us better measure and understand the depth and the roots of the problem. We need a commitment from the U.S. Congress and from the Administration that adequate resources will be provided to fight these inequalities and to ensure that "justice and equality" are integral parts of our judicial system.

We need to address these grave concerns now, in a coordinated effort that recognizes the seriousness of the problem and that it is our collective future being threatened.

And finally we must put ourselves in the shoes of our children, the ones who have been placed in an adult jail, and whose future has effectively been abandoned by our system.

We need to do better. We must do better.