Racial disparities persist in US juvenile drug offense cases

Research on race/ethnicity and juvenile court processing in the United States has found that youth of color often have outcomes that are more disadvantaged than those of their White counterparts, and that community context may condition this relationship.

In a new study, a researcher examined the association between race/ethnicity in White, Black, Hispanic youth and the type of drug offense (possession versus distribution) they were charged with in terms of adjudication and disposition outcomes to find differing outcomes by race and ethnicity.

The study, by a researcher at the University of Central Florida, is published in Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice.

“The findings reveal ongoing racial and ethnic disparities in the U.S. juvenile justice system and offer insights into the conditions under which youth of color charged with different drug offenses are processed in juvenile court,” according to Jennifer H. Peck, associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Central Florida, who authored the study.

Over the last 20 years, the number of delinquency cases in juvenile courts in the United States has declined for all racial and ethnic groups, but Black youth continue to be overrepresented in the juvenile justice system. Peck explored the long-term impact of the War on Drugs, launched in 1986, on juvenile court proceedings to determine whether the political or cultural influence of this initiative and its symbolic threat remain embedded in juvenile court processing more than 30 years later.

Specifically, Peck investigated how Black and Hispanic youth charged with drug possession or distribution have been treated in juvenile court proceedings. She also examined the potential conditioning effects of underclass poverty and racial/ethnic inequality on racial/ethnic and drug offense relationships.

The study examined more than 25,000 petitioned referrals for drug offenses from all counties in a northeastern U.S. state from January 2005 through December 2010. Case-level data (i.e., demographic, legal, and extra-legal information) were provided by the state’s central repository of juvenile court information for each youth referred to court.

Black youth charged with a drug distribution offense were more likely to receive residential placement than similarly charged White youth, the study found. Underclass poverty and racial/ethnic inequality moderated these associations, but the significance and direction of the results differed depending on the stage examined.

Among the policy implications of these findings are the need to focus on strategies to reduce the overall presence of youth in the juvenile justice system and decrease the overrepresentation of youth of color through community-, organizational-, and individual-level strategies.

“My study extends seminal research on racial/ethnic disparities to examine how youth of color charged with drug offenses fare in our juvenile justice system,” says Peck. “In finding that race and ethnicity individually and in combination with drug offending and characteristics of disadvantaged communities predict social control, the findings provide greater contextualization and insight into the circumstances surrounding juvenile justice processing of youth in this country.”

Peck noted several limitations to her study, including that her data did not include some individual-level variables pertaining to the characteristics of juveniles and cases, which could introduce bias in the findings. In addition, detention status was not included as an independent or dependent variable, Hispanic youth were treated as a homogeneous ethnic group, and the study lacked information on the attitudes and perceptions of court actors (e.g., juvenile court personnel).