It is a scene that is becoming increasingly familiar. An African-American youth, usually a male 13 or 14 years old, sits in a courtroom with a blank expression on his face, unable to fully grasp the complexity of a criminal justice system that is about to treat him as an adult.

The most recent case involves Lionel Tate, 14, who was sentenced to life in prison without parole in Florida for the death of a 6-year-old playmate. Jurors found Tate guilty of first-degree murder after dismissing his lawyers’ claim that the boy, who was 12-years-old at the time, was merely imitating the antics of professional wrestlers he had watched on television.

You wouldn’t know it by the haunting images of handcuffed youth in the media, but juvenile crime is on the decline, reaching its lowest level in a generation.

In December, the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention reported that juvenile crime has been falling for the past six years. The rate of homicide arrests in the 10-17 age group has dropped 68 percent, reaching its lowest level since 1966. Juvenile crime rates for the most serious violent crimes - murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault - is down by 36 percent, according to FBI statistics.

The Justice Department reported:

- The juvenile arrest rate for weapon crimes dropped 39 percent from 1993, the lowest level since 1988;

- Rape by juveniles was down 31 percent from 1991 to 1999, the lowest level since 1980;

- Robbery by teens was down 53 percent from 1994, the lowest level since 1989;

- Burglary was down 60 percent from 1980;

- Larceny-theft fell 23 percent from 1997;

- Auto theft among teens was down 52 percent from 1990.

In addition to the overall drop in juvenile crime, James Alan Fox, a noted criminal justice professor at Northeastern University in Boston, has produced additional research that shows a huge drop in the number of Black teens arrested for murder. According to Fox, murders committed by African-American youth age 14-17 fell from 244.1 per 100,000 youth in 1993 to 67.3 in 1999.

Two areas in which juvenile arrests had climbed during the 1990s - drug abuse violations and loitering - have also begun to drop.

No one factor accounts for the decline in teen crime. Experts have cited reasons ranging from a booming economy to tougher laws for juvenile offenders and a surge in after-school programs, the time period in which most teens commit crimes.

What makes the decreases even more impressive is that they came during a period that the youth population was experiencing a slight increase.

These numbers do not mean that juvenile crime is no longer a serious problem. To the contrary, African-American males 14 to 17 years old are six times as likely to commit a violent crime as their White counterparts. Black males in this age group are also six times as likely to be a homicide victim.

More stunning than the drop in juvenile crime is the dramatic difference in how White and African-American teens are treated by the juvenile justice system.

According to a report issued by the Washington, D.C.-based Youth Law Center, titled “And Justice for Some,” Black youth who had no previous involvement with the juvenile justice system were six times more likely to be sentenced by juvenile court to the equivalent of juvenile prison. Among youth charged with violent crimes for the first time, Black teens were nine times more likely than Whites to be sentenced to prison.

Black teens arrested on drug charges were 48 times more likely than Whites to be sentenced to juvenile prison. Even when White and Black youth were charged with the same violent crime, Whites served an average of 193 days after trial, Blacks served 254 days and Hispanics 305 days.

“The people in the system are looking at African-American kids and are thinking, ‘Drugs,’ and are thinking, ‘We’ve got to punish them,’” Mark Soler, president of the Youth Law Center in Washington, D.C. said in an interview with National Public Radio. “And when they look at White kids charged with the same offenses, they are not making the same kind of assumptions about who these kids are. And that shows all the way from arrest all the way through sentencing.”

Lionel Tate, the teen in Florida, was sentenced to life under Florida’s mandatory sentencing provisions. He is the youngest person serving a life sentence in the United States. Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has pledged to review Tate’s case when it is formally presented to him.

As long as states continue to pass get-tough laws aimed at juveniles, as long as prosecutors are granted the power to usurp a judge’s prerogative and decide for themselves whether teens should be tried in adult courts, as long as politicians shamelessly exploit the juvenile crime issue and as long as the public is ignorant about whether juvenile crime is up and down, we can expect to see more kids ending up like Lionel Tate, another Black face staring at us blankly.