Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/racial-injustice/)
A project aiming to grant more Black and brown youth entry to community-based programs that are an alternative to juvenile incarceration will be implemented in five upstate New York counties, the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services has announced.
The new law is retroactive. It allows persons to have prior marijuana-related convictions for which, under the new rules, they would not be arrested, to be expunged from their record. Expungement of prior records was critical to ensuring fairer justice for communities disproportionately policed, arrested and affected by drug policies, said New York State Assembly Majority Leader Crystal Peoples-Stokes (D-Buffalo). “Black communities, brown communities, have always been the target of these laws,” Peoples-Stokes said. “If we’re going to take the market above ground, we have to remove those convictions.”
It doesn’t take a lot of research to see that racial disparity in incarceration of both adults and juveniles is alive and well in the United States, but it is not so easy to say why. When I entered the Georgia prison system in 1985, blacks made up about 70 percent of the inmate population. That same year, blacks were 30 percent of the population of my home state. I grew up in a town in south Georgia with a large black population, and I had friends in school who were black. But I had no real consciousness of the inequality that existed in the justice system.