African-American Youth in The Juvenile Justice System

of their sentences (Carroll and Mondrick, 1976). Time served also would contribute to
racial disproportionality.
Blacks are not the only minority at risk for unequal treatment by the justice system.
Alvarez and Bachman (1996) examined racial disparity comparing American Indians to
whites in Arizona. After accounting for previous felony convictions and several other
factors, American Indians were found to receive longer sentences than whites for the
relatively common crimes of robbery and burglary and relatively shorter sentences for
the less common crime of homicide (Alvarez and Bachman, 1996). Commenting on the
study, Stone (1999) suggested that both types of discrepancies may indicate bias. The
longer sentences could be evidence of harsher treatment of American Indian offenders
for crimes against strangers, but lesser punishments for homicides, which largely
involve acquaintances. Stone further suggested that there may be both under- and
overenforcement in some communities and that these two kinds of bias may cancel
each other out in studies that do not take interactions into account.
Despite the lack of an extensive literature on this topic, the review by Bridges and
colleagues (1987) suggests that the bias in the juvenile justice system may be subtle,
indirect, and difficult to detect. This makes it difficult, in turn, for policy makers to justify
changes in policies to remedy the disparate treatment of youth in the juvenile justice
system. Liska and Tausig (1979) reexamined 17 juvenile justice studies that considered
the relationship between social class, race, and legal decision making. They found race
differences that produced a cumulative effect that changed a racially heterogeneous
prearrest population into a nonwhite, homogeneous institutionalized population. Initial
race differences were compounded at successive stages of the juvenile justice system.
Accumulated racial differences were also found by Feyerherm (1981) in his examination
of status offenders.
Risk is a limiting concept to the extent that it fails to make explicit the degree to which
enduring features of racial stratification and discrimination interact with and compound
problems related to individual decision making, family dysfunction, school failure,
community context, crime, and contact with the juvenile justice system. Hawkins et al.
(1998) highlighted the important connections between race and risk when they wrote:
“the social and developmental life courses of African Americans and whites in the
United States are products of not only their specific individual experiences but also their
membership in historically distinct and unequal social and economic groupings” (p. 40).
To reduce racial disparities, many jurisdications have undertaken the imposition of
sentencing guidelines. In a study to determine effects of using sentencing guidelines,
Ulmer and Kramer (1996) studied three counties in Pennsylvania. They discovered that
race, sex, and age continued to have an impact on sentencing differences, even
though legal factors, such as severity of crime or number of prior offenses, accounted
for much of the impact.
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