More than 20,000 protesters and worldwide media descended on tiny Jena, La., on Sept. 20 to demand justice for Mychal Bell, a black teenager who an all-white jury tossed into adult jail after a schoolyard fight.

The angry masses have left Jena by now, and most news media have turned the channel. But Bell remains behind bars—where he joins thousands of black youth who have been victims of overaggressive prosecution and are rotting in adult lockups.

The Jena case began when a group of white high school kids hung nooses from a tree in order to deter black students from sitting there. The superintendent dismissed their terrorism as a “prank” and a series of race fights ensued—including one in which a white student allegedly pointed an unloaded gun at a black student. One Monday morning last December, a white student taunted a black classmate who had been beaten up over the weekend, and six black kids retaliated by beating up the white kid.

Prosecutor Reed Walters absurdly charged the black students, now known as the “Jena 6,” with various felonies, including attempted murder. Walters had already refused, however, to file anything more than misdemeanor charges in at least two prior attacks on black kids, including the gun incident, according to press reports.

Five of the boys have been released on bond and await trail. But Bell, who was 16 at the time of the fight, was tried as an adult, convicted on felony charges and sentenced to 22 years.

In that, he is not unique. Amnesty International has estimated that 200,000 American kids are prosecuted as adults every year. Studies have repeatedly shown them to be overwhelmingly black—in one late 1990s Justice Department study, 77 percent of kids sent to adult prisons were minorities.

The trend started when conservative activists conjured the myth of young “superpredators” for lawmakers and reporters in the 1990s. Between 1992 and 1995, 40 states and the District of Columbia responded by making it easier to try kids as adults, despite a clear and ongoing drop in youth crime. By 1997, the number of kids in adult court had doubled from 10 years prior.

Once in adult lockup, those kids are nearly eight times more likely to commit suicide, five times more likely to be raped and, not surprisingly, significantly more likely to become repeat offenders of progressively more serious crimes, according to The Sentencing Project.

In Jena, an appeals court overturned Bell’s adult conviction on Sept. 14. Walters is appealing and vows to press similar cases against all six kids.

Jena’s brazen injustice has fed the growth of a powerful, previously untapped political tool: black blogs and Web-organizers, like the Bay Area’s Colorofchange.org, that drove national outrage into last week’s massive demonstration.

But this political cyber-awakening must undue more than one extreme case of injustice. All Americans must demand an end to our obscene national effort to make hardened criminals out of black children.

A version of this op-ed was syndicated to daily newspapers around the country via the Progressive Media Project.