A serendipitous article appears today amid the CNN media empire. Within the article you find the ideology, the motive, which led Miami-Dade School Police to hide the criminal behavior of Trayvon Martin.
The Author is a Temple University (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) Professor, Laurence Steinberg
(CNN – Excerpt) […] Intervening to help young black males develop better social-cognitive skills is important, but if the President’s initiative is to be successful, transformations are needed in our social institutions as well.
One of the most significant contributors to the difficulties that many black teenagers have is that those who have been convicted of crimes typically penetrate more deeply into the justice system than offenders from other ethnic groups.
Black teenagers are not just more likely to be arrested, they also are more likely to be locked up, even when convicted of the same crimes as others. Racial disparities are especially pronounced when it comes to punishment for relatively minor offenses, such as drug possession.
For example, black juveniles are nearly twice as likely as their white peers to be locked up for a drug offense. As a result of mandatory sentencing laws, courts don’t have much discretion when it comes to sentencing people convicted of serious violent crimes, which makes sentencing less racially biased in these instances.
Incarcerating a young black man seriously impedes his chances of making a successful life. Spending time in jail or prison disrupts schooling, which makes it hard to get a decent job. The unemployment that often follows release from incarceration has rippling effects, contributing to high rates of single parenthood (unemployed men are less likely to marry) and family instability in the black community (divorce rates are higher in families with unemployed fathers), increasing the likelihood that one generation’s difficulties will be passed on to the next. (continue reading)
Counter point: Not incarcerating a young black man who engages in extreme unlawful conduct also leads to victims:
