Reforming Juvenile Justice A Developmental Approach (2013) / Chapter Skim
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8 Reducing Racial/Ethnic Disparities
8 Reducing Racial/Ethnic Disparities
Pages 211-240
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From page 211... ...
. A number of assessments over the ensuing decade continued to document this overrepresentation of minority youth, especially African Americans, in the juvenile justice system (Engen, Steen, and Bridges, 2002; Bishop, 2005; Lauritsen, 2005; Bishop and Leiber, 2012)
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core requirement was broadened from "confinement" to "contact," and states were required to implement strategies aimed at reducing disproportionality (Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 2009a)
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. Instead of presenting another detailed review, this chapter briefly summarizes the problem, reviews the two main frameworks that have been used to understand and explain the problem (differential offending and differential selection)
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.3 MINORITY YOUTH INVOLVEMENT IN THE JUVENILE JUSTICE SYSTEM Researchers typically draw on three possible sources of data to gauge the extent of minority4 youth involvement in crime and delinquency: official 2 The term "disproportionate minority contact" is used to describe the disproportionate number of minority youth at various stages of processing in the juvenile justice system (Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 2009a, 2009b)
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In addition, the degree of black overrepresentation is at its lowest in the category of drug abuse violations, in which blacks make up roughly 26 percent of youth arrests. These data consistently show that there are important differences by race in rates of arrest -- especially across offense type, with black youth arrested for violent index crimes at much higher rates than whites (Bishop, 2005; Bales and Piquero, 2012)
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1,343 (1.2) 109,507 Drug abuse violations 97,232 (72.4)
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For example, RRI data suggest that H ispanic youth experience greater contact with the juvenile justice system than do white youth and that the extent of these differences (disparities) is not as great as those experienced in general by black youth (Feyerherm, 2011, p.
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TABLE 8-2 The Processing of Juveniles by Race, 2008 218 American Indian or Asian or White Black Alaskan Native Pacific Islander Total Population Ages 10-17 25,251,300 (77.4)
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96) reports that black youth are disproportionately involved in such offenses as measured via official records, whereas self-report data indicate that white youth report higher levels of drug abuse violations.
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used data from the three delinquency studies in Pittsburgh, P ennsylvania; Rochester, New York; and Seattle, Washington, to examine DMC and the factors that might affect it at the police contact and court referral levels. First, in all three cities, African American youth had the highest rate of contact/referral, and it was significantly greater than for white youth.
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Third, although black youth are most likely to be disadvantaged, this is not uniformly the case and similar patterns tend to emerge for Hispanic youth as well. Their review covered studies conducted in 2002-2010 on the official processing of minority youth at nine different decision points in the juvenile justice system (arrest, court referral, delinquency findings, detention, diversion, petition/charge filings, probation, secure confinement, and transfer to adult court)
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Both American Indian and Asian American youth have a higher rate of disproportionate contact at the case referral stage and the detention stage than whites. Asian youth have higher rates of processing than black youth in the referral, petition, and adjudication stages as well higher rates of transfer to adult court.
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Some scholars emphasize differential offending as the root source of disproportionate minority involvement in the juvenile justice system and of the system's differential response. This approach points, in effect, to real, underlying differences between white and minority youth in the actual extent of engaging in (or the severity of)
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. A similar study has not been done on minority youth in the United States, but, given the high rates of heavy alcohol consumption among African Americans and Native Americans (Galvan and Caetano, 2003)
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. Thus, the differential selection hypothesis would anticipate that minority youth emerge in official records at a disproportionate rate because of differential police, court, and correctional decisions.
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are largely race based. Thus, because the passage of the crack cocaine sentencing laws were made, in part, as a response to the violence that was permeating many inner cities in the mid- to late 1980s, and because the police had to selectively target certain communities and drug markets, an obvious by-product was that minority youth would be exceedingly more likely to fall under formal social control.
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.14 Race, police contact, and minority youth's behavior are also intertwined in complicated ways. When contacts with police occur early, the likelihood that a black youth will have future contacts with police is increased.
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.15 In the earlier cited review, Cohen and colleagues (2011) concluded that some race effects exist in the processing of some minority youth, in some locations, at some time periods, and for certain offenses; that minority youth are more likely to receive harsh treatment for certain but not all offenses; and that racial disparities can be documented for certain stages but not others.
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Some evidence suggests that urban courts tend to be more formal and bureaucratic and have greater access to detention facilities than rural courts and that these characteristics are associated with harsher sentences. Because they disproportionately reside in urban counties, black youth are at increased risk of being processed, detained, and punished than white youth in rural localities who have committed similar offenses.
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Code of the Street Anderson's (1999) code-of-the-street thesis, which contends that minority youth -- especially black youth -- form and espouse an attitude that is organized around informal rules governing street behavior and response to personal affronts.
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child population. African American youth in the child welfare system are up to two times more likely than white adolescents to experience at least one arrest (Ryan and Testa, 2005)
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. Negative stereotypes and media imagery of minority youth may play a role in the differential treatment they receive from police and other actors in the juvenile justice system.
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examined such community attributes as underclass poverty, racial inequality, wealth, court referral rates, mobility, urbanism, youth density, and criminal justice resources on court processes. Sampson and Wilson (1995)
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To be sure, there has been much attention devoted to racial/ethnic disparities over the past decades, yet the empirical research has primarily focused on assessing the effect of differential offending and differential enforcement (and to a lesser extent differential processing) in an isolated manner.
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Funded by the Annie E Casey Foundation, the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative was designed to reduce reliance on secure detention by promoting changes to policies, practices, and programs.
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reports that the DMC Action Network in Peoria, Illinois, found that many arrests of black youth were for aggravated battery and that once alternative conflict strategies were started, arrests for black youth dropped significantly. Working with the Child Welfare and School Systems As noted, the child welfare and school systems are contributors to the overrepresentation of minority youth in the juvenile justice system.
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Publicly available data representing 85 percent of the nation's students are being used to determine disparate discipline rates for suspensions and expulsions as well as arrests and referral to law enforcement.16 A recent rollout of the expanded Department of Education civil rights database and the Texas study showing the high degree of discretion being exercised by school administrators in suspension and expulsion decisions (Fabelo et al., 2011) have resulted in widespread media coverage and a collaborative project between the Justice and Education departments to address the "school to prison pipeline." Among the goals of the initiative are to promote collaborative research and data endeavors, including evaluations of alternative disciplinary policies and interventions and to encourage positive discipline options and awareness of evidencebased and promising policies and practices among each state's judicial and education leadership (U.S.
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. Based on experiences in reducing disparities in the child welfare system and for crossover youth who enter the juvenile justice system, five general strategies have been identified (Chapin Hall Center for Children, 2009)
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Many other factors affect disproportionality of minority youth in the juvenile justice system, including the troubling entrenched patterns of poverty, segregation, gaps in educational achievement, and residential instability. DMC exists in the broader context of a "racialized society" in which many public policies, institutional practices, and cultural representations operate to produce and maintain racial inequities.
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Similarly, policies and practices involving youth who have ties to the mental health and child welfare systems need to be carefully assessed to ensure that the reasons for their handling are legitimate and their subsequent processing by the juvenile justice system is appropriate and nondiscriminatory. Third, any reform strategy should focus on eliminating formal and informal agency policies and practices that are shown to disproportionately disadvantage minority youth.
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