Understanding Ethnic Disparities and Social Disadvantage in the Juvenile Justice System

In the US, youth of color are disproportionately represented at every stage of the juvenile justice system. Some argue that disproportionate minority contact (DMC) is the result of minority youth committing more frequent or serious crimes. Others argue that DMC is produced by risk factors for incarceration that are also correlated with ethnicity. Furthermore, very little attention has been paid to the varied patterns of incarceration experienced by youth across adolescence, and whether these, too, reflect DMC. This paper examines the extent of DMC across different types of incarceration experiences (low, moderate, or chronic) in a longitudinal community sample, and whether observed disproportionalities are accounted for by prior offending and drug use, and/or by risk and protective factors.

Data were drawn from an ethnically diverse, gender-balanced longitudinal study of 808 youth oversampled from high risk urban neighborhoods followed prospectively into adulthood. Within this sample 39% ever had a police contact and 13.4% had an official incarceration record during adolescence. Utilizing path analysis, we examined risk and protective factors in the individual, family school, peer, and community domains in elementary school, as well as demographics, to predict adolescent offending and drug use measured prior to first incarceration, which then predicted subsequent patterns of incarceration.

Results indicate that among those who ever had a police contact, significant patterns of DMC were observed such that minority youths were much more likely to be in the chronic incarceration group than Caucasian youth. DMC was reduced slightly but remained significant after controlling for prior property, violent and drug offending, and after controlling for individual, family, school, peer, and community factors. In addition to ethnicity, family poverty and male gender also predicted incarceration patterns over and above self-reported offending and environment.

Results extend understanding of DMC, showing that environmental risks do increase adolescent offending which, in turn, predicts more extensive incarceration experiences.  However, above and beyond these risks and offending, young men of color from impoverished backgrounds experience more extensive patterns of incarceration. Thus, two of the more common explanations given for DMC—different levels of offending behavior and the presence of higher environmental risk among minority youth—were shown not to fully explain the observed DMC.  These findings suggest that disproportionate incarceration experiences, over and above risk and offending, may serve to exacerbate social disadvantage in these youths’ transition to adulthood, a hypothesis to be examined in subsequent research.