Latino and Hispanic Youth in the Juvenile Justice System

safety without destroying lives and wasting resources. Crime and justice issues are the
new civil rights issues of the 21 st century.”
Lost Opportunities, co-authored by NCLR, the Center for Youth Policy Research
(CYPR), and Michigan State University’s Office of University Outreach & Engagement,
is the first comprehensive examination of Hispanics in every facet of the criminal justice
system – from arrest to sentencing, including juvenile justice. The analysis is based on
data from government sources, including the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the U.S.
Census Bureau.
Lost Opportunities offers policy recommendations – including community-based
strategies for alternatives to incarceration – for addressing criminal justice issues that
affect Latinos and which provide models for states to replicate.
“This study conclusively documents the criminal justice system’s discriminatory
practices against the nation’s largest and fastest-growing minority population,” said
Nancy Walker, president and senior research fellow of CYPR and MSU adjunct
professor, and an author of the report. “This indictment of the system comes from the
government’s own statistics. Our nation cannot afford to ignore the compelling case that
these numbers make for reforming our system. It would be costly, both in human and
monetary terms, for us to proceed with today’s norm.”
In Lost Opportunities, the authors found that the inequities that Hispanics experience in
the criminal justice system stem from a variety of factors:
policy initiatives, such as “mandatory minimum” sentencing, the “war on drugs,”
and the “war on crime,” that have caused incarceration rates for low-level drug
offenses and immigration violations to skyrocket;
systemic discriminatory practices in law enforcement and court proceedings –
such as over-criminalizing certain behaviors and employing personnel who are,
often, neither bilingual nor culturally competent – that lead to higher arrest and
incarceration rates for Hispanics;
and even damaging media portrayals that create negative public perceptions and
prejudices of Hispanics in general.
Other key findings about the disparate treatment that Hispanics receive include:
Hispanics experience discrimination during arrest, prosecution and
sentencing, and are more likely to be incarcerated than whites charged
with the same offenses. Problems at the arrest stage include racial profiling and
targeting poorer, “high crime” neighborhoods, which impacts people of color.
Hispanics are disproportionately represented by publicly appointed legal counsel,
who are overworked and underpaid. Of those defendants found guilty in large
state courts from 1994 to 1998, 71 percent represented by public counsel were
sentenced to incarceration, as compared to 54 percent of defendants with private
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