The Disproportionate Overrepresentation of Minority Youth in ...

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that she gets help and she doesn’t get hurt. So, there is really a push from
the parents. My only explanation for that would be that the parents come
in requesting them to be placed out of the home because they can no
longer control them and that goes back to that double standard that we
talked about before. I would say about 60-70 percent of the girls who are
placed out of the home, the families come in and say that they want them
of the home.
Decision makers were also asked three additional questions in the interview. The
first question was, “Why does Black Hawk county refer so many more youth onto
petition than the other three counties included in the analyses” The second question was
concerned with their overall feelings of the study in particular, phase one of the research.
Suggestions for changing the problem of the overrepresentation of minority youth in
secure facilities was the third question. The responses to the first two questions are
presented in this section. The impressions from the answers to the third question are
provided in the next section of the chapter.
Large Number of Youth Referred to Court
Most of the responses focused on the emphasis of early intervention and holding
youth accountable for the actions.
I think we are a pretty aggressive county in terms of reacting. I think there
is a feel that you attempt to provide initial services informally and then if
they come back into the system that is considered that they have ongoing
problems and part of the way to deal with an ongoing problem is to initiate
the court involvement. We are just more aggressive in our programming
and more aggressive as far as services and intervention.