Minority Youths and Juvenile Justice

• Author: Kimberly Kempf-Leonard
• Published date: 01 January 2007
• Date: 01 January 2007
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1541204006295159
• Subject Matter: Articles

71

Minority Youths and

Juvenile Justice

Disproportionate Minority Contact After

Nearly 20 Years of Reform Efforts

Kimberly Kempf-Leonard

University of Texas at Dallas

This article describes the current status of minority youths in juvenile justice systems. With

nearly 20 years of federal support, there has been considerable research attention to identify-

ing, explaining, and reducing the disproportionate minority contact with juvenile justice sys-

tems. Although progress is evident, the achievements of the Disproportionate Minority

Contact (DMC) initiative have made it clear that the questions are more complicated than ini-

tially appeared. The answers do not appear in simple comparisons of youths by race but

require “similarly situated” youths who differ only by minority status. Assuring that youths are

similarly situated requires knowing their status on many complex and interrelated factors that

exist across multiple levels of individuals, families, communities, and juvenile justice systems.

The ways in which DMC can be reduced also require addressing parity in opportunities and

expectations, both in the community and throughout juvenile justice systems.

Keywords: minority overrepresentation; disproportionate minority contact; race; ethnicity

Early in the 20th century, sentencing statistics from across the country were compiled,

and the results showed that people from minority groups were incarcerated and given

lengthy prison sentences at a rate much higher than expected based on their presence in the

general population. One expert explained this disproportionate representation of minorities

in contact with criminal justice (now referred to as DMC) as follows:

The statistics presented hide a number of possible variables, such as differences among these

race and nativity groups in such factors as recidivism, aggravating circumstances, etc., which

might produce differences in the length of sentences attributable to no prejudice on the part of

the judge. Although these factors may play a role, they are probably not responsible for the

great and relatively constant variations observed. These we must largely attribute to the human

equation in judicial administration and as evidence that equality before the law is a social fic-

tion. (Sellin, 1935, p. 217)

It is likely that Thorsten Sellin’s audience accepted his interpretation of judicial bias. He

was, after all, a leading authority on crime and criminal justice at a time on the heels of the

Progressive Movement, when scholarly views on social problems and their solutions were

highly valued. Although Sellin was also writing at a time when nearly all states had recently

Youth Violence and

Juvenile Justice

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January 2007 71-87

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72 Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice

implemented independent juvenile courts and custodial facilities, the issue of minority dis-

parity in juvenile justice would not become a prominent concern for many decades.

Now, early in the 21st century, DMC with juvenile justice systems is a national policy

issue. In the mid-1980s, researchers with the National Council on Crime and Delinquency

(NCCD) brought the issue to the attention of federal legislators by presenting findings from

the Children in Custody surveys of the country’s juvenile facilities, which identified con-

fined youths overwhelmingly as children of color (Krisberg, Fishman, Eisikovits, Guttman,

& Joe, 1987; Krisberg, Schwartz, Lisky, & Austin, 1986). Congress acknowledged the dis-

parity problem and responded. Since then, much of the research and policy attention given

to DMC has been the result of federal funding connected to three amendments of the

Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974 (JJDP Act) regarding how states

can access federal funding for juvenile justice initiatives. In 1989, the first amendment ear-

marked a portion of the formula funding program targeted to reduce overrepresentation of

minority youths confined in secure detention and other residential treatment facilities.

Second, in 1992, attention to disproportionate minority confinement became an additional

core requirement for state participation in the JJDP Act. Finally, in 2002, the definition of

DMC was expanded beyond secure confinement to include contact with the system.

With these three amendments, Congress provided both the “carrot” in the form of finan-

cial incentives and the “stick” in terms of requirements for eligibility for states to assess the

extent of minority overrepresentation in juvenile justice systems. Because most states par-

ticipate and receive federal funding via the JJDP Act, these amendments have inspired con-

siderable research and development of programs and policies aimed at understanding and

reducing overrepresentation of minority youths in juvenile justice systems.

When the NCCD researchers and Congress first envisioned DMC reform, the problem of

racial inequity in confinement and the way to correct it seemed fairly straightforward. State

officials were encouraged to identify the disparities, locate the sources—which would prob-

ably involve the discretion of officials—and then implement policies to restructure the

process in a way that would eliminate discretion and bias. Experience with racial disparity of

adults in criminal courts had been addressed throughout the 1980s by limitations on discre-

tion through institutionalized sentencing guidelines and mandates, so it seemed logical in the

1990s that the next step toward equity in juvenile justice was to extend standardized, uniform

case-processing policies to juvenile court officials. However, in nearly 20 years of concerted

DMC reform initiatives, scholars have learned that identifying, explaining, and remedying

disparity problems is much more complicated than it initially appeared. This article describes

the current status of the DMC reform initiative, including issues in identifying disparity and

understanding why minority overrepresentation continues to be observed.

Identifying the Level of DMC

Identification of DMC is fundamentally a comparative research endeavor. The aim is to

compare the proportions of minority youths in juvenile justice systems to their proportions

within the general population. Krisberg and his NCCD colleagues combined information

from detention centers and reform schools across the country to show the high levels at which

youths of color were located in custody (Krisberg et al., 1986; Krisberg et al., 1987). Many