Abstract
Youth of color, particularly black youth, are overrepresented at every stage of processing in the juvenile justice system. This paper presents an analysis of racial differentials at an early stage—pretrial detention among youth charged with violent and serious offenses. It contributes to work in this area by exploring police decision making, which has been understudied in comparison with decision making by court actors. Contrary to prior studies suggesting that race differences in police treatment are found primarily in the handling of youth suspected of minor offenses, we find that black youth are three times as likely as white youth to be detained, controlling for other demographic and legal factors, including offense type and severity. This paper also contributes to efforts to understand how racial disproportionality occurs, by including an analysis of how geography affects detention decisions differentially by race. Using data from an urban county in Michigan, we find that geography and race interact, such that white youth from the suburbs are much less likely to be detained than white youth from the city and black youth from the city or suburbs.
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Notes
Offenses in this provision include first degree murder; second degree murder; assault with intent to commit murder; assault with intent to maim; first degree criminal sexual conduct; armed robbery; carjacking; kidnapping; arson (burning of a dwelling house); assault with intent to commit great bodily harm; assault with intent to rob; first degree home invasion; bank, safe, or vault robbery; escape or attempted escape from a medium or high-security juvenile facility; manufacture, sale, delivery, or possession of 650 grams or more of a schedule 1 or 2 narcotic or cocaine; or any attempt, solicitation, or conspiracy to commit any of the crimes previously listed.
In addition to substantive reasons for coding geography as residence in urban or suburban portions of the county, we code this way because we are unable to use a finer unit of analysis (e.g., neighborhood or city of residence) due to the small number of cases in each unit. An examination of cases by city of residence indicates that detention practices within the suburban jurisdictions are similar (in that all have similar rates of detention overall).
Although all youth charged with murder and some other offense were included in the murder category and thus excluded from these analyses..
These characteristics were chosen because they represent the average or most common for each variable.
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Shook, J.J., Goodkind, S.A. Racial Disproportionality in Juvenile Justice: The Interaction of Race and Geography in Pretrial Detention for Violent and Serious Offenses. Race Soc Probl 1, 257–266 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12552-009-9021-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12552-009-9021-3