*This post is part of our two-week symposium on racial inequalities in the criminal justice system.
In the past decade, there has been a lot of good news in the field of juvenile justice reform – not least the series of four landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions that, beginning with Roper v. Simmons in 2005, recognized the developmental differences that separate children and teens from adults, including their lessened culpability and enormous capacity for change. At the same time, most states have significantly cut the number of youth they incarcerate. Between 2001 and 2011, the number of youth confined in the U.S. declined by 41 percent.
What’s more, new data from Texas shows that incarcerating fewer youth and serving more of them in the community makes communities safer. Since 2007, the state has closed nine youth prisons, even as the juvenile arrest rate fell to a 30-year low. In a report released at the end of January, the Council of State Government’s (CSG) Justice Center analyzed 1.3 million individual case records spanning eight years and assembled from three state agencies. CSG found that youth who were incarcerated were 21% more likely to recidivate than youth handled locally.
But it’s not time to break out the champagne yet: In spite of a decade of reform, racial disparities are worse than ever. A new national study looking at racial and ethnic disparities between 1980 and 2000 found that Black and Hispanic boys were far more likely to be sent to a secure facility than white boys for similar behavior. In the U.S. in 2011 (the most recent year for which data is available), Black youth were incarcerated five times as often as White youth; Latino youth twice as often; Native American youth three times as often. If we think of the juvenile justice system as a maze with pathways in and out, it’s clear that youth of color have far more pathways into the maze than White youth do, and they’re lucky to find a pathway out.
Even in states where significant juvenile justice reforms have been undertaken, the ratio of youth of color receiving dispositions in juvenile court has gotten worse, not better. In Texas – where the CSG report provides powerful evidence that youth justice reform has produced promising results – one sees disproportionate numbers of youth of color at every decision point in the system, and with Black youth in particular, who appear at almost twice the rate one would expect compared to their numbers in the general population.