The term racial and ethnic disparities refers to situations where a particular group is over-represented at various stages of the juvenile justice system than is represented in the general population. Depending on the population characteristics of juvenile system jurisdictions, racial and ethnic disparities may be found involving African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics, and other ethnicities, as well as minority religions. Minority youth tend to be over-represented at multiple stages of the juvenile justice process, and the degree of inequity tends to increase as a minority youth penetrates further into the system.

Although racial and ethnic inequities are well documented in all parts of the juvenile justice system, determining the causes is more difficult. The Alliance for Racial Equity in Child Welfare concluded in its 2010 publication, Policy Actions to Reduce Racial Disproportionality and Disparities in Child Welfare:

In 1993, when modifications to the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act added reporting requirements regarding disproportionate minority confinement, juvenile justice courts questioned whether a problem existed. Studies conducted by juvenile justice courts would often result in findings that minority youth who were brought to the juvenile justice system by local law enforcement and detained had more serious offense histories and presenting offenses than their non-minority peers. These results reinforced the belief that there were justifiable reasons that minority youth were disproportionately detained and that the problem was beyond the control of juvenile justice courts. Other studies, however, indicated that:

• Racial and ethnic disparities were not a function of offending patterns among minority youth. Iowa, Maryland, and Pennsylvania found that after controlling for offense, history, characteristics of the offense, social history, gender, race, and age, formal intake outcomes (case filing, detention) were more common for African American male youth than for whites.
• Two-thirds of existing studies found that ethnic status influenced decision-making within the juvenile justice system.

As a result of these and other studies, many juvenile justice courts looked harder at the data to determine if there were causal factors that were under the juvenile justice court’s control. The Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative (JDAI), funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, promoted local system strategies to reduce minority overrepresentation. This important initiative has helped juvenile justice courts examine policies, procedures, practices, and programs, as well as to identify and address many elements of racial and ethnic disparities over which the court does have control. Examples include:

• Multiple points of subjective rather than objective decision-making produced inequities;
• Cultural insensitivity throughout the system, resulting in a lack of positive engagement of families and youth in helping to solve the problem, with lack of understanding producing unnecessary resistance and hostility;
• Unnecessary delays in the juvenile justice court process contributing to longer lengths of stay in detention, so that the number of days of disproportionate confinement was exacerbated even further;
• A lack of services, or barriers to accessing services, combined with a probability that if services had been available, minority youth might not have engaged in law-breaking behavior; and
• Barriers to services for minority youth once they entered the juvenile justice system. Several studies found:
  • Implicit bias on the part of juvenile justice court practitioners including judges, intake workers, prosecutors, etc. when working with youth of color.
  • Differential processing (differing dispositions and placements in the courts and correctional systems) for minority youth by the juvenile justice system
  • Administrative policies, such as zero-tolerance in schools that unintentionally propel minorities into the juvenile justice system
  • Juveniles of color are generally under-served by the mental health system. This causes many children of color not to receive services or to have been poorly served by the mental health system prior to their entry into the juvenile justice system.
  • African American adolescents with mental health problems, particularly males, are more likely to be referred to juvenile justice court rather than the treatment system.
  • Historically, Mexican Americans and other immigrant groups have shown low rates of use of mental health services, in part due to language difficulties and lack of neighborhood-based services, increasing the likelihood that treatable, yet untreated mental illness caused behavior that resulted in contact with the juvenile justice court.

Although it remains true that societal issues may subject minority youth to risk factors for delinquency, ongoing work in many juvenile justice court jurisdictions shows that the practices of individual justice agencies can exacerbate or alleviate the disparity at each decision point. Examples of practices that juvenile justice courts can adopt to alleviate these disparities include:

• Collecting, analyzing, and monitoring data from all decision points to ensure that minority youth are not being disparately treated;
• Collecting, analyzing, and monitoring data from all decision points to ensure that all youth are treated fairly. Decision points include arrest, referral, diversion, detention, petition, delinquent, probation, confinement and transfer to adult court;
• Ensuring that race and ethnicity data are routinely and accurately collected from youth and families in juvenile justice courts. The minimum race/ethnicity categories for data reported to the federal government include American Indian/Alaskan Native, Asian, Black, Hispanic/Latino, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, and White. Local jurisdictions may provide additional detail as need.
• Contacting your state or local DMC coordinator, if your state participates in the JJDPA act, to inquire about DMC data they report to the federal government that might reflect local county detail.
• Creating multidisciplinary task forces that include minority representatives to monitor racial and ethnic disparities, and involving minority representatives in developing and implementing community-based alternatives to formal court processing;
• Collaborating to ensure that all juvenile justice practitioners, including judges, police officers, prosecutors, counsel for youth, intake officers, probation officers, detention care workers, and correctional workers are culturally competent;
• Ensuring that minority practitioners are represented in direct service delivery and in critical decision-making ranks of the juvenile justice process;
• Providing increased access to culturally knowledgeable and community-based early intervention services and diverting youth in the juvenile justice system to these treatment systems whenever possible;
• Focusing on the strengths and protective factors available to culturally diverse youth, their families, and extended families, and providing for techniques such as family conferencing that maximize engagement of ethnic families and build on their strengths;
• Using validated, objective, and culturally unbiased screening and assessment instruments at all decision points;
• Contracting with parents representing a community’s cultural and ethnic groups to serve as advocates and liaisons – as “parent partners” – to families going through the system; and
• Examining personal biases and prejudices to understand and moderate their impact on judicial decision-making.