Liam Day speaks to a new Department of Education study, which found a startling gap in the harshness of punishment based on race and sex.
As reported by The New York Times, new data released by the federal Department of Education last week highlights a dynamic I don’t think will come as much of a surprise to many people: black students, particularly black boys, are more likely to be disciplined in school than other students. Three and half times more likely to be exact.
Despite comprising only 18% of the students in the 72,000 schools sampled, black students were 35% of those who had been suspended at least once, 46% of those who had been suspended more than once, and 39% of all students who had been expelled. In all, one in five black boys had received at least one out-of-school suspension.
I’m not going to offer an hypothesis as to why this is happening. There are probably many reasons having to do with everything from the chaotic nature of the schools black children are more likely to attend to simple prejudice, both conscious and not.
What I would like to do is draw a line – a line from the school data to court data, where disparities demonstrate, I believe, inequities. As in the discipline systems of our public schools, black children are overrepresented in the juvenile justice system and before you argue that it could simply be that black children commit more crimes, consider the following statistics:
1) Between 1986 and 1991, the number of white youth arrested for a drug-related offense decreased 34% at the same time that the number of youth of color arrested for a drug-related offense increased 78%.
2) In 1995, only 15% of arrests of white youth led to detention, as compared to 27% of arrests of black youth, this despite the fact that white youth represented 52% of all juvenile arrests and black only 45%.
3) In a 2002 report, the Racial Disparity Initiative of the Council on Crime and Justice found that, though African-American males were more likely to use drugs, the discrepancy paled in comparison to the difference in the arrest rates between African-American and white males. African-American males used drugs at a rate only 51% higher than white males, but were arrested for drug-related offenses at a rate 400% higher.
4) Finally, in a report just last week, The Sentencing Project determined that the race of the offender and victim might play a role in whether a juvenile suspect is sentenced to juvenile life without parole. I quote directly from the report’s executive summary: “The proportion of African Americans serving JLWOP sentences for the killing of a white person (43.4%) is nearly twice the rate at which African American juveniles are arrested for taking a white person’s life (23.2%). Conversely, white juvenile offenders with black victims are only about half as likely (3.6%) to receive a JLWOP sentence as their proportion of arrests for killing blacks (6.4%).”
Overall, roughly 10% of young black men are in prison. It appears that we have, either consciously or unconsciously, created a system of adjudication that is more likely to funnel black men to jail than white men. Drawing connections in the data, perhaps the funneling begins in school and not in court.
Photo courtesy of Diego3336