OP-ED: You can’t Talk About Justice Without Talking About Race by Judge George Timberlake
To read ths article on the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange website, click here.
Attempts at reducing disproportionate minority contact (DMC) and disparate treatment of racial and ethnic youth in the justice systems of our country have not made much progress. Advocates, foundations, courts and stakeholders have exercised words and approaches, but the numbers don’t lie.
According to the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange’s recent analysis of federal data from 1990 and 2010, minority youth were greatly over-represented at every point of the system. The comparison of that 20-year span shows little to no improvement of DMC in arrests, adjudications, detentions and transfers to adult court.