Life-without-parole for youths hits minorities hardest

[flashl]

Illinois law that allows youth offenders to be sentenced to life without parole most often affects black and Hispanic minors, a new study suggests.

The Illinois Coalition for the Fair Sentencing of Children found the state has 103 youth offenders serving life in prison without the possibility of parole. Of them, 72 are black and 10 are Hispanic.

In a report released Wednesday, the coalition is urging officials to require the possibility of parole when minors receive life sentences and to make it retroactive, so that it would apply to youths already behind bars.

"Each of these people deserve an opportunity to be heard again before they die ... and have a board review their sentence to determine, in fact, if they do deserve to be serving a life sentence," said Simmie Baer, an assistant professor at Northwestern Law School who interviewed some of the inmates for the report.

Chicago Sun TImes

This is about the 495,340,345,495,495th report with the same findings.

[PDJane]

1. Jail time is wasted time for both the watcher

and the watched. Moreover, I put jailing a minor for life in the same category as the death penalty and the use of evidence obtained by torture; it is a thing that civilized peoples do not do. Period.

[mysteryman2]

2. Hi

I am a criminal profiler. Stop looking at race and examine behavior. That is what I am trained to do. Racial profiling is junk science and thats what your doing. Your breaking it down by race.

Racial profiling doesn't work it didn't catch the dc sniper. They were looking for a white dude. A good criminal profiler examines behavior not race. What they are doing is the study of sentence laws to determine reoffend patterns. They examine what works this is called evidence based practices. You will hear more about this in the debates. It goes beond good ideas and examines studies to determine what works. It's called evidence based practices.

For instance did you know that there are studies that show DARE does not work. Do research Google it. It sounds good on paper but evidence based studies show it is very weak.

Anyway google that word evidence based practices. Thats what they are doing not examining race.