Have Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Juvenile Justice Declined Over Time? An Empirical Assessment of the DMC Mandate

• Date: 01 April 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/1541204020962163
• Published date: 01 April 2021
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Have Racial and Ethnic

Disparities in Juvenile

Justice Declined Over Time?

An Empirical Assessment

of the DMC Mandate

Steven N. Zane

1

Abstract

The present study examines whether racial and ethnic disparities in juvenile justice declined sig-

nificantly in a state that has made substantial reform efforts in compliance with the Disproportionate

Minority Contact (DMC) mandate. Using a sample of all referrals in Connecticut with final dis-

position in 2000 (N ¼18,458) or 2010 (N ¼12,265), the study employed multilevel modeling with

cross-level interactions to assess whether disparities changed over time for five outcomes: deten-

tion, petition, adjudication, commitment, and waiver to criminal court. Findings indicated that Black-

White disparities in detention decreased over time, while Black-White disparities increased for

petition, adjudication, and waiver. Findings also indicated that Hispanic-White disparities increased

for adjudication (while not changing for other outcomes). The limited success of the DMC mandate

may be explained by implementation failure or theory failure. Adjudicating between these alternative

explanations is needed to guide future reform efforts. Several implications for research and policy

are discussed, including whether reform efforts should focus on overall harm reduction rather than

proportional representation.

Keywords

disproportionate minority contact, DMC mandate, racial and ethnic disparities, juvenile justice,

program evaluation

In the juvenile justice system, persistent racial and ethnic disparities at various points of contact

are referred to as disproportionate minority contact (DMC). The federal “DMC mandate,”

introduced in 1988 as an amendment to the 1974 Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention

Act (JJDPA), is the largest national response to the issue of DMC to date, attempting to

incentivize states to reduce racial and ethnic disparities in juvenile justice processing at the

local level. The 1992 reauthorization of the DMC mandate included five ongoing phases of

1

College of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA

Corresponding Author:

Steven N. Zane, College of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32304, USA.

Email: szane@fsu.edu

Youth Violence and JuvenileJustice

2021, Vol. 19(2) 163-185

ªThe Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/1541204020962163

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compliance: identification, assessment of causes, interventions, evaluation, and monitoring. It

also included a financial incentive: states risked losing 25 percent of their formula grant

funding if they did not show a “good faith effort” to comply with the mandate (Leiber,

2002). The DMC mandate was again reauthorized in 2002, expanding the scope of the mandate

to all decision points along the juvenile justice continuum (reflected in changing the term

“confinement” to “contact”). Most recently, the JJDPA was reauthorized as the Juvenile Justice

Reform Act of 2018 (JJRA), which includes, among other things, replacing the language on

“disproportionate minority contact” with “racial and ethnic disparities.”

1

In a review of “best practices” of DMC-reduction efforts, Cabaniss and colleagues (2007) enum-

erated the following major strategies adopted by various states in response to the DMC mandate:

decision-point mapping and data review; cultural competency training; adding more community-

based prevention and intervention programs (most notably detention alternatives); removing

decision-making subjectivity through standardized screenings and protocols; reducing barriers to

family involvement; and cultivating state leadership to legislate system-level change. Importantly,

however, states have not responded to the DMC mandate in uniform fashion. As of 2011, only 18

states had full-time DMC coordinators, 18 states completed an assessment study between 2005 and

2011, and only four states had conducted a form al evaluation of DMC reduction intervention s

(Hanes, 2012).

Three decades on, a critical question is whether the DMC mandate has in fact resulted in lower

racial and ethnic disparities in juvenile justice outcomes. Few studies have attempted to assess

whether racial and ethnic disparities have decreased significantly in jurisdictions that have under-

gone substantial reforms in compliance with the DMC mandate (see Donnelly, 2017, 2019; Leiber

et al., 2011). Notably, this dearth of research is not limited to juvenile justice. In a recent review,

King and Light (2019) observe that surprisingly little research has examined trends in racial and

ethnic disparities in criminal justice outcomes over time (but see Enders et al., 2019). The present

study is motivated by this gap in the literature, and seeks to assess whether racial and ethnic

disparities have declined significantly across major juvenile justice decision points. To do so, the

present research compares the effects of race and ethnicity on juvenile justice outcomes over time in

a state that has, in compliance with the DMC mandate, undergone substantial reforms aimed at

making its juvenile justice system less punitive and more equitable.

Changes in DMC Over Time

As a starting point, we can observe descriptive trends in DMC over time. For example, Leiber and

Fix (2019) recently assessed national trends in the relative rate index (RRI) from 2005 through 2015.

The RRI is the measure of racial disparity used (until recently) by the Office of Juvenile Justice and

Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), a rati o of the proportion of minority youth (relative to thei r

population) at a given stage of processing to the proportion of White youth (relative to their

population) at the same stage of processing. At referral, the Black-White RRI increased from 2.7

in 2005 to 2.9 in 2018, while the Hispanic-White RRI declined from 1.1 to .9. At detention, the

Black-White RRI increased from 1.3 in 2005 to 1.4 in 2018, while the Hispanic-White RRI moved

from 1.4 to 1.5. At waiver, the Black-White RRI increased from 1.1 in 2005 to 1.6 in 2018, while the

Hispanic-White RRI increased slightly from .9 to 1.0. And at secure placement, the Black-White

RRI increased from 1.3 to 1.4, while the Hispanic-White RRI remained steady at 1.4 (see Leiber &

Fix, 2019; OJJDP, 2020).

2

Strikingly, then, there has been no clear pattern of DMC reduction at the

national level, despite “a wide range of initiatives [that] have been developed and implemented, as

well as [an] enormous amount of dollars ...spent via the Federal Title II Formula Grants and other

funding by private foundations, states and localities” (Leiber & Fix, 2019, p. 586).

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164 Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice 19(2)