Disparities in Youth Arrest Across Racial and Ethnic Subgroups

• Published date: 01 January 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/15412040231186337
• Author: Peter S. Lehmann,Ryan C. Meldrum
• Date: 01 January 2024
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice

2024, Vol. 22(1) 22–45

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/15412040231186337

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Disparities in Youth Arrest

Across Racial and Ethnic

Subgroups

Peter S. Lehmann

1

and Ryan C. Meldrum

2

Abstract

An extensive body of research suggests that youth of color are more likely to experience an arrest

than their White counterparts. Theoretically, these f‌indings have been understood, at least in part,

as the result of the differential deployment of law enforcement to areas with higher Black and

Hispanic concentrations as well as stereotyped attributions of dangerousness and threat implicitly

assigned to these suspects by police before and during encounters. However, previous studies

typically have employed conventional racial/ethnic categorizations, which might obscure potential

nuances in arrest disparities across subgroups. Using data on a statewide representative sample of

adolescents from the 2018 Florida Youth Substance Abuse Survey (N= 54,611), these analyses

reveal that the likelihood of a self-reported arrest is greatest among Haitian, West Indian/

Caribbean, Dominican, and non-Hispanic Black youth. Further, Mexican and Puerto Rican ad-

olescents have a higher risk of experiencing an arrest than members of other Hispanic subgroups.

Keywords

arrest, race/ethnicity, implicit bias, group threat, FYSAS

Formal contact with the police can represent a crucially important turning point in the lives of

youth, and a vast body of scholarship has documented a wide range of short- and long-term

negative outcomes stemming from being arrested. For instance, research has demonstrated that

adolescents who experience an arrest, even if no charges are f‌iled, frequently have diminished

educational opportunities (Sweeten, 2006;Widdowson et al., 2016) and occupational success

(Bushway, 1998;Kirk & Sampson, 2013;Uggen et al., 2014), especially in the digital age where

criminal records are particularly accessible and “sticky”(Lageson, 2016). Arrest also has been

shown to have a labeling effect, increasing the risk of subsequent offending regardless of whether

youth are adjudicated or convicted (e.g., Bernburg & Krohn, 2003;Liberman et al., 2014;Wiley

et al., 2013). More generally, the stigma associated with a negative police encounter can be

1

Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, TX, USA

2

School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, USA

Corresponding Author:

Peter S. Lehmann, Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, Sam Houston State University, P.O. Box 2296,

Huntsville, TX 77341, USA.

Email: psl003@shsu.edu

detrimental for youths’self-identity, mental health, and emotional well-being (Jackson et al.,

2019;Moore et al., 2016;Sugie & Turney, 2017), ultimately structuring their daily interactions

with people and institutions (Brayne, 2014;Stuart, 2016).

The likelihood of experiencing justice system contact is not equal across racial and ethnic

groups, and several decades of research have revealed that Black and Hispanic youth are more

likely than Whites to be arrested (for reviews, see Kochel et al., 2011;Lytle, 2014;Mitchell &

Caudy, 2015;Smith et al., 2017). Theoretical accounts of these disparities often draw upon the

conf‌lict perspective, which posits that mechanisms of social control are mobilized to protect and

reinforce existing power relations by suppressing segments of the population presumed to threaten

the status quo (Black, 1976;Chambliss & Seidman, 1971;Turk, 1969). Using this framework,

scholars have proposed that inequalities in arrest may stem from the differential deployment of

police resources to areas with larger populations of color (Beckett et al., 2006;Engel et al., 2012;

Gaston, 2019) as well as the use of more aggressive tactics in those contexts (Terrill & Reisig,

2003). Further, the decision-making of individual off‌icers also may be inf‌luenced by social

conditioning and implicit bias, as unconscious beliefs, attitudes, and stereotypes might link

suspects’minority status with attributions of dangerousness, hostility, and violence (Russell-

Brown, 2009;Smith & Alpert, 2007).

Although this body of research has provided important insights, two key limitations exist. First,

disparities in arrest frequently have been assessed using administrative data collected on traff‌ic

stops and other police encounters, with researchers examining the extent to which the suspects’

race/ethnicity affects arrest decisions after accounting for situational factors, offense type, suspect

criminal record, victim preferences and attributes, and various characteristics of off‌icers and police

departments (e.g., Ridgeway, 2006;Schafer et al., 2006;Stolzenberg et al., 2021;Tillyer & Engel,

2013). However, such data include no information about criminal activity that is not observed or

recorded by law enforcement. Indeed, while a police-suspect encounter of some kind must occur

prior to an arrest, these interactions are themselves tied to processes that make contact with

individuals of color more likely (Thacher, 2011;Warren et al., 2006). In contrast, self-report

survey data are not dependent on these potential sources of bias, though relatively few studies on

race/ethnicity and arrest have used this approach (Barnes et al., 2015;Brame et al., 2014;Mitchell

& Caudy, 2017;Tapia, 2010,2011).

A second limitation concerns the measurement of individuals’racial/ethnic identities. Many

scholars contend that traditional, monolithic conceptions of race and ethnicity do not accurately

capture the increasingly f‌luid and pluralistic demographic landscape of the U.S., especially in light

of recent immigration from Latin America and the Caribbean (Bonilla-Silva, 2018;Khanna, 2012;

Lee & Bean, 2007). Specif‌ically, broad classif‌ications of people as “Black”or “Hispanic”fail to

account for nuances in ancestry, heritage, and national origin, ultimately producing simplistic

constructions of racial/ethnic identity that overlook notable intra-group diversity (Jim ´

enez et al.,

2015;Morning, 2011;Telles, 2018). While the salience of physical appearance and colorism has

been emphasized in recent scholarship on a wide range of institutional social control outcomes

(e.g., Chen et al., 2021;King & Johnson, 2016;Viglione et al., 2011), including police contact

(Branigan et al., 2017;Finkeldey & Demuth, 2021;Monk, 2019;White, 2015), no prior study has

explored possible disparities in the likelihood of arrest according to youths’racial and ethnic

subgroup identities.

To address this gap in the literature, the current study uses survey data collected on a statewide

representative sample of middle and high school students in Florida (N= 54,611) to investigate the

existence and extent of heterogeneity in the likelihood of a self-reported arrest across 13 racial/

ethnic subgroups. Before presenting our f‌indings, we f‌irst review the extant theory and research

surrounding racial/ethnic arrest disparities, highlighting the ways in which the present analyses

advance this line of inquiry. Next, we discuss theoretical considerations surrounding possible

Lehmann and Meldrum 23