NCJ Number
196396
Date Published
June 2002
Length
37 pages
Annotation
This report discusses the number of minority youth involved with court systems in Iowa.
Abstract
Disproportionate Minority Confinement (DMC) concerns whether minority youth are disproportionately greater in number in the court system and confined in secure settings than their representation in the overall juvenile population. In Iowa, while minority youth have historically represented less than a tenth of the juvenile population, they have represented from one-quarter to one-third of the youth in Iowa’s juvenile detection centers and at the State Training School. They represent up to one-half of the number of youth that receive a prison sentence after being transferred to the adult court system. A previous study of DMC in the State of Iowa has shown that legal variables, such as type of offense committed and prior record, are the strongest factors that influence the disproportionate number of minorities involved in the system. One of Iowa’s tools for addressing this issue has been the DMC Matrix. This is a tool that helps determine the rate of disproportionate minority representation at various areas of the justice system by comparing the percentage the minority is in the overall population to the percentage the minority is in the specific area. While some parts of the DMC matrix have been simple to complete (arrests and incarceration), other parts (prosecutions and dispositions) have been extremely difficult to complete. The Justice Data Warehouse (JDW), created in 1997, is a central repository of key criminal and juvenile justice information from the Iowa Court Information System (ICIS). The mission of JDW is to provide the judicial, legislative, and executive branches of State government with improved statistical and decision support information pertaining to justice system activities. This project allows the opportunity to collect information for DMC efforts that were previously difficult to collect. More complete data is now available that helps the State focus its efforts towards the regions of the State that require more assistance and helps target the focus on the parts of the juvenile justice system that need attention. The amount of data and the consistency of the data that was being uploaded to the warehouse have been improved. The number of people able to access the JDW has increased. 2 graphs, 2 tables, 6 footnotes, 3 appendixes