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>> 169 8 Minority Overrepresentation On Causes and Partial Cures Franklin E. Zimring The overrepresentation of disadvantaged racial and ethnic minorities in the courtrooms and detention cells of American juvenile justice is both an undeniable fact and a serious problem. Throughout the world, the poor and disadvantaged get caught up in the machinery of social control in numbers far greater than their share of the population. In the United States, the long shadow of racism adds another important dimension to concern about young persons already at serious disadvantage. Punishment and stigma make a bad situation worse. What to do? The issues we confront in trying to fix the damages of disproportion in juvenile justice are a mix of the obvious and the obscure. There can be no doubt that the handicaps imposed on youth by arrest, detention, adjudication, and incarceration fall disproportionately on males from disadvantaged minority groups in the United States. It is equally obvious that the hardships imposed on formally sanctioned youth are substantial by themselves and even worse when they aggravate the other byproducts of social disadvantage. But this chapter is about the not-so-obvious choices that we confront when attempting to reduce the harms that disproportionate minority concentration produces. There are a variety of different approaches that can be taken to reforming juvenile justice to protect minority youth, and not all of them are of equal effectiveness. My ambition in these pages is to identify some of the key policy choices that must be made in reducing injustices found in American juvenile courts. A clear definition of goals and priorities is absolutely essential to intelligent policy planning. My argument is that reducing the hazards of juvenile court processing may be a better approach to 170 > 171 But why should a question about the generality of the pattern that produces minority disadvantage be a starting point for seeking remedial measures? The reason is that the data reveal whether the special organizational and substantive provisions of juvenile justice should be regarded as the proximate causes of the problem, so that shifting the special provisions or procedures of juvenile courts could be expected to provide a remedy. If so, the specific approaches of the juvenile court should be a high priority for reform. If, however, the extent of minority overrepresentation in juvenile justice is about the same as that found in criminal justice, it is less plausible that this pattern is the product of any special characteristics of the juvenile system. One example of the usefulness of this type of analysis concerns the relative concentration of young girls in incarcerated populations in juvenile justice. Figure 8.1 turns back the clock to compare juvenile and adult incarcerations by gender for 1974, as a familiar example of looking for special patterns in juvenile justice. The 1974 vintage for this data is to summarize patterns at the time when federal legislation first mandated deinstitutionalizing status offenders. Figure 8.1. Percentage of Female Incarcerated Persons in 1974 Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics (Prisoners); US Department of Justice, Children in Custody (Juveniles). Prisons JuvenileFacilities 3% 23% 172 > 173 of the youth population (about 15%). Thus, overrepresentation is both obvious and substantial. But the concentration of African Americans incarcerated in adult criminal justice populations is about the same at 38 percent. If we could add in other minority populations the size of the total minority shares would increase, but the contrast between systems would remain close to that portrayed in Figure 8.2. The importance of finding this general pattern is not to minimize the problem of juvenile minority overrepresentation, but to alert policy analysts that the pattern extends beyond juvenile justice and is therefore less likely to have been generated by the peculiar rules and procedures that the juvenile system uses. So it appears that minority boys are at a disadvantage in the juvenile system, but no more so than minority persons are in the rest of the criminal process. What disadvantages minority kids in delinquency cases is part of a broader pattern that probably should be addressed by multiple system approaches. B. Equalize Disadvantage or Minimize Harm? My friend and teacher Hans Zeisel once published a note showing that a peculiar kind of disproportion was evident in the death sentences accumulating in the state of Florida. Zeisel found that 95 percent of the death sentences in that state were imposed on defendants who were charged with killing white victims (Zeisel 1981). Zeisel showed that some Florida prosecutors believed that the solution to...

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