Juvenile Offenders: Race, Class, and Gender

Overrepresentation of Minority Youths

Minority youths are disproportionately represented at every stage of secure juvenile corrections. In 2001, minority youths accounted for approximately 60% of the residential placements of juveniles despite making up only roughly one-third of youths in the community. Of these young people, African American youths were the most overrepresented.

In 1999, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention published a detailed report about the racial composition of its juvenile institutions that cited numbers from 1997. This report provides the most recent figures currently available and is the basis for much of the following analysis. According to this report, in 1997 African American youths comprised 15% of the general adolescent population but made up 45% of detained youths, 40% of youths in secure confinement, and 60% of the youths under age 18 admitted to adult prisons. Although their admission to adult prisons was equal to their representation in the population (15%), Hispanic youths were slightly overrepresented among detained or committed juveniles (18%). The failure to disaggregate ethnicity from race in data systems, however, results in many Hispanic youths being classified as white and the underreporting of Hispanic representation in the juvenile correctional population. Although African American youths also were overrepresented in probation placements, white youths were more likely to receive community-based treatment.

Details may not add to totals due to rounding.

There is substantial evidence that the overrepresentation of minority youths in secure juvenile corrections is often the result of differential treatment rather than higher rates of criminal misbehavior. Research, for example, shows that nonwhite youths are more likely to be detained in secure custody prior to their hearing than white youths regardless of the delinquency offense. African American youths are six times more likely and Latino youths are three times more likely to be incarcerated than white youths even if both groups have no prior record and are charged with the same offense. Regional research also has indicated that racial and ethnic minority youths have a higher probability of [Page 521]receiving the harsher dispositions in juvenile corrections than white youths even when they are alike in terms of legal and extralegal factors. The greatest disparity in secure commitments is among African American and white youths for drug offenses for which African American youths were 5.3 times more likely to be committed to state prisons in 1997.

...