Micro, Mezzo, and Macro Implications of Minority Overrepresentation in Juvenile Justice: A Social Work Perspective

Purpose: American constitutional and criminal law suggest that justice be based on legal factors and not extralegal factors. In 2002, although African Americans constituted 16 percent of the national juvenile population, they comprised 28% of the arrests and 33% of the cases resulting in out-of-home placements (Snyder & Sickmund, 2006). Minority overrepresentation research often focuses on the delinquency and rarely a mix of micro, mezzo, and macro factors.

To date, no empirical mixed-method study has examined the legal and extralegal factors of minority overrepresentation in juvenile justice from a social work perspective (Hsia, Bridges, & McHale, 2004). This study does, asking: 1) Is there a disparity in Virginia's juvenile justice processing (diversion) and sanctions (incarceration) for African American males versus Caucasian males? 2) If a disparity exists, what role does race play? 3) Do interviews with stakeholders triangulate the quantitative findings? 4) What do the qualitative findings add?

Method: The project is a cross-sectional, mixed-method study. Quantitative data are from a random, disproportionately stratified sample of 2,233 juvenile cases collected by Virginia's Joint Legislative and Audit Review Commission (JLARC) for which frequency distributions were employed and two logistic regression models developed.

Qualitative data are from 36 semi-structured, interviews using a purposive sample of juvenile judges, Commonwealth's attorneys, defense attorneys, police officers, youth and their parents. These data were unitized (Lincoln & Guba, 1985) and clustered (Miles & Huberman, 1994).

Results: Disparities in diversion and incarceration were found as Caucasian males are more likely to be diverted and African American males are more likely to be incarcerated.

Logistic regression analyses indicate that only crime severity predicts whether youth will be diverted. Whereas, the second logit suggests that four independent variables predict incarceration: crime severity (1.03 times more likely to be incarcerated); prior record (1.42 times more likely to be incarcerated); grade repeated (1.60 times more likely to be incarcerated); and race (African American youth are 1.62 times more likely to be incarcerated). The extralegal factor of race is the strongest predictor of incarceration.

Interviewees concurred with the quantitative findings making three additional points: 1) the majority of stakeholders feel a disparity exists in juvenile justice processing as race often influences youths' interaction with school, community, and police, and can affect a youth's involvement with and treatment by the courts; 2) professional respondents cited family structure as a contributor to court involvement though it was not a significant predictor in either logistic regression and youth and their parents did not cite it as affecting processing or sanctions; 3) there was much discussion regarding education after stakeholders were informed of the quantitative findings – they suggested “the majority of court-involved youth cannot read or write sufficiently to succeed in today's society.”

Implications: The quantitative and qualitative data from this study provide new micro, mezzo, and macro lenses by which to examine minority overrepresentation from a social work perspective. Moreover, specific policy and practice implications for African Americans as well as Latinos are presented.