Director of Leadership Conference on Civil Rights to Speak at OSI-Baltimore on New Report on Racial Disparities in the Criminal Justice System

Wednesday, February 21, 4 p.m. to 6 p.m.
Open Society Institute-Baltimore
201 North Charles Street
Suite 1300
Baltimore, Maryland

BALTIMORE—Wade Henderson, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, will discuss the organization's report on racial disparities in the American criminal justice system at a forum sponsored by the Open Society Institute-Baltimore on Wednesday, February 21.

Attending the forum and participating in a discussion will be Baltimore-area policymakers, researchers, and others interested in the issue of race and the criminal justice system. The event is part of a broad series of forums sponsored by OSI-Baltimore that are designed to encourage community leaders with diverse perspectives to craft solutions to challenges facing the Baltimore region.

The Leadership Conference report contends that while U.S. criminal laws are "facially neutral," they are enforced "in a manner that is massively and pervasively biased" and "threaten to render irrelevant fifty years of hard-fought civil rights progress." It also offers recommendations for remedying the disparate treatment of black and Hispanic Americans in profiling, prosecutorial discretion, sentencing, the courts, and juvenile justice. For information about the Leadership Conference and a copy of the report, funded by the Research and Policy Reform Center, an affiliate of the Soros Foundations Network, visit: http://www.civilrights.org/.