Looking for Reasons for Racial Imbalance in the Juvenile Justice System

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.