Black juveniles awaiting trial in Baltimore are routinely locked up with the most dangerous of adults while white youths accused of similar offenses are more often sent to juvenile facilities, according to a national study.
More than nine of every 10 juveniles charged as adults in Baltimore are black, according to the study released today, and many of them are held for months in the city's aged jail, which has been assailed by critics as among the most inhumane in the country.
Not only does the placement determine how harshly juveniles will be treated while confined, it determines whether they get even rudimentary attention for such problems as drug and alcohol abuse while jailed and after their release.
The study was written by the independent group Pretrial Services Resource Center and was commissioned by the Youth Law Center, an advocacy group headquartered in San Francisco.
It looked at 18 jurisdictions across the country, finding that the get-tough approach to juveniles has resulted in more teens - even those not accused of violent offenses - being locked up in adult facilities. And most of the juveniles are black.
"We really have to take a hard look at a system that sweeps up kids charged with relatively minor offenses, puts them into adult facilities and has a racial disparity to it," said Mark Soler, president of the Youth Law Center. "If you send a kid into the adult system, you may as well say you've given up on him."
Nowhere are the racial disparities more stark than in Baltimore, the Pretrial Services report showed. Those findings are consistent with several previous national studies that looked at the city's criminal justice system. Baltimore has essentially two juvenile justice systems, the studies suggest, one for black youth and one for white.
"The first lesson these young African-American men are getting is that the system is unfair, and it's never going to treat them fairly because of the color of their skin," said Jonathan M. Smith, executive director of Public Justice Center, who studies juvenile issues in Maryland. "We return them back to the community with no faith in the system and in many ways they're far worse off than when they entered the system."
Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, who oversees criminal justice issues in the state, said yesterday through a spokesman that she is aware of many of the problems noted in the report. Several committees - some dating to 1998 and some created in April - are working to alleviate them, the spokesman said.
