Lord knows why I decided to visit this place, but don't worry, it won't be for long.   Anyway, here goes...

You may remember that part of my work in reading intervention is in the juvenile corrections world, so I've spent a significant amount of there.  A large project I ran took place in a privatized facility, so I have many stories to support the assertions that our system is broken and that privatization of correctional facilities is the worst thing that ever happened to our justice system.

But one story sticks out in my head.  When we were first starting work in this particular facility, I had a conversation with an administrator, who explained what kind of kids were sent there.  It was a medium security facility for boys 12-18 years old with average sentences of 6-9 month (range was 3 months to 2.5 years, but very few had sentences longer than 1 year).  He said this to me (I'm paraphrasing from memory):  The kids here are mostly here because they're poor and because they don't have anyone capable of adequately advocating for them.  They haven't done anything any worse than something my kid or your kid might do--all kids do stupid things.  But, when my kid or your kid does the same thing and gets caught, first the police are likely to drive them home and turn them over to us because they come from a "good" family (and by "good" I mean middle-class and white).  If they aren't that lucky, and they do have to go to court for their offense, my kid and your kid are going to have the best legal defense possible, even if it means we have to mortgage our house to get it.  These kids' parents don't own their houses, so they have to depend on the luck of the draw from public defender's office.  My kid and your kid would never end up here, and not because they're any better than these kids.

So, a poor, black kid, instead of getting taken home or getting a good defense for whatever minor crime they've committed, spends 6-9 months or more in a correctional facility.  Unfortunately, no real "correction" or "rehabilitation" is happening there.  Instead, these kids get introduced--often for the first time--to a culture of crime and gangs and drugs and prison.  In Florida, something around 70% of the kids who are incarcerated in these facilities end up in adult prison by the time they are 28.  For the kids who, for the same offenses, get alternative sentences (e.g., community service, counseling) the rate is under 20%.  It's a cycle that's started early and repeated often.

Mind you, a huge percentage of kids in these facilities are dealing with untreated reading disabilities (more than 70%) and mental health problems (about half).  These are both problems that are known to make a child more likely to get in legal trouble.  However, kids who come from more affluent homes are much more likely to have such problems appropriately addressed, so they won't lead to the behaviors that get kids in trouble.  There is a lot of evidence that high poverty schools tend to have less experienced and lower quality teachers.  So these schools, which tend to have mostly black and Latino kids, have a lot more kids who are academically behind.  Also, there's research in more diverse schools to show bias among teachers, who are more likely to refer white kids who struggle in reading for early intervention.  Black kids with identical reading problems tend to get referred much later, which means the interventions are far less likely to be effective and the difficulties are for more likely to persist throughout school and beyond.  For Latino kids, teachers tend to attribute reading problems to language differences, which also delays intervention, even when the child's primary language is English.  Kids who still have reading problems in middle school and high school are far more likely to drop out, get involved with drugs, and get in trouble with the law.  Adults with reading problems are for more likely to be unemployed or limited to low-paying jobs.  When these adults have kids, those kids are far more likely to end up in a correctional facility than your kid or my kid.

So, yes, those things hit blacks more than whites.