HARI SREENIVASAN, PBS NEWSHOUR WEEKEND ANCHOR:

Good evening and thanks for joining us. We begin with a scathing federal report on the St. Louis County juvenile justice system. The U.S. Department of Justice says the county discriminates against black children, treating them more harshly than white children because of their race.

According to the Justice Department's civil rights division, black children in St. Louis County are 1.5 times more likely than white children to end up in family court in the first place.

Black children are 2.5 times more likely than whites to be detained before their trial, and, if convicted, they are more than 2.5 times as likely to be held in custody after trial.

The report also found inadequate representation for children from low-income families no matter what race in St. Louis County, where one juvenile public defender handled 394 cases last year.

The investigation began in 2013, nine months before the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, which is in St. Louis County. In March, the Justice Department issued a similar critical report about disparate racial treatment by the Ferguson Police Department.

Yamiche Alcindor is reporting on this story for USA Today, she joins me now from St. Louis.

This was a fairly comprehensive dive that the DOJ took. I mean, they looked at more than 30,000 cases over a three-year period to come up with these conclusions.