Kristin Henning
86 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 1604
In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson established the Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice to study the causes of crime and delinquency and identify strategies for prevention. After eighteen months of investigation, the Commission published a report, The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society, in February 1967. Citing youth crime as one of the most significant concerns, the Commission devoted considerable attention to research and recommendations for reducing juvenile delinquency.
In light of recent bipartisan efforts to launch a new National Criminal Justice Commission in 2017, this Article takes a close look at the successes and shortcomings of the 1967 Report. The Article contends that although the first Commission’s insights on the source of youth crime and recommendations for
reform were progressive for the time and rightly guided by a rehabilitative ideal, the Report failed in one key respect: it did not explicitly identify racial justice as one of its core objectives. Although the Commission articulated a commitment to reducing “unfairness” in the system, it failed to meaningfully explore the scope and cause of racial disparities in the administration of juvenile and criminal justice and, even worse, frequently referred to the causes of crime in language that conveyed negative racial overtones. The Article not only urges any new Commission to be more transparent about the existence and causes of racial disparity but also draws upon the hindsight of fifty years of data on racial disparities in the juvenile justice system and twenty-five years of research on normative adolescent development and the cognitive science of implicit racial bias, to identify new ideas for reform. Ultimately, the Article offers a series of recommendations to stimulate a new round of juvenile and criminal justice reform.
