African-American Youth in The Juvenile Justice System

CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
Overrepresentation of blacks, Hispanics, and American Indians in the juvenile justice
system requires immediate attention. The existence of disproportional racial
representation in the juvenile justice system raises concerns about differential exposure
to risks and the fairness and equal treatment of youth by the police, courts, and other
players in the juvenile justice system. Given the importance of the problem of race,
crime, and juvenile justice in the United States, the scant research attention that has
been paid to understanding the factors contributing to racial disparities in the juvenile
justice system is shocking.
Recommendation: The panel recommends that a comprehensive, systematic, and
long-term agenda for acquiring empirical knowledge to understand and meaningfully
reduce problems of unwarranted racial disparity in the juvenile justice system is a critical
priority and that new funding should be set aside for this effort.
Research should focus on the entirety of the juvenile justice system by examining
multiple decision-making points and processing stages. This report demonstrates
how small biases in one part of the system may have an unforeseen and
dramatic outcome at later points in the juvenile justice system process. The links
across each of the decision-making points, as well as the decisions themselves,
should be scrutinized.
Research is needed to examine the role of organizational policy and practice in
the production of juvenile arrest, adjudication, and confinement rates and the
organizational policy/practice and the decisions of individual officials. Research
should especially target police-juvenile encounters, prosecutorial practices, and
correctional processes. Challenges to the research community should be issued
to develop creative ways to overcome methodological limitations of much existing
research.
Research on bias should take into account the fact that problems may appear on
a local level that do not show up when state-aggregated data provide the only
source for information. We need information about private as well as public
facilities. Research should also take into account sample selection biases as the
screening process operates to filter youth in different directions within the
system.
Research is needed to examine how juvenile justice system decisions are
influenced by the characteristics of the communities in which different youth live.
Research should move beyond traditional emphasis on black-white differences to
include other minorities and should recognize the diversity within racial and
ethnic groups.
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