NCJ Number
225207
Date Published
March 2008
Length
34 pages
Annotation
This document is the Disproportionate Minority Contract (DMC) Section of Iowa's 2008 JJDP Act Plan Update.
Abstract
Findings show that both offending characteristics and racial bias appeared to be contributing factors to African-American overrepresentation in secure detention and in the juvenile justice system in Black Hawk County, IA. Data revealed that the primary reasons for detention admissions of Whites were court violations, followed by property crimes, and then person offenses. For African-Americans, it was court violations, crimes against persons, and property offenses. While drug admissions represented a small percentage of total admissions, the largest racial gap was for drug offenses for African-Americans. African-American youth were subjected to more multiple court violation detentions than were White youth. This relationship was reversed when the detention was a 48-hour hold, where Whites were more likely to receive multiple 48-hour hold detentions than were African-Americans. Legal variables, such as offense seriousness, and extralegal factors such as age, or coming from a single parent household, most often had the strongest effects on detention decisionmaking. Race, individually and in combination with other variables such as gender, was found to have an impact on detention and system decisionmaking even after considering differences in crime severity, prior record, etc. Race effects were also discovered at petition, adjudication, and judicial disposition. Sometimes, the effects resulted in more severe or more lenient outcomes. With the exception of decisionmaking at intake, race was not found to operate through detention to produce a negative cumulative impact. Also found was that being female affected what happened at intake and petition, and in combination with race, influenced adjudication and judicial disposition decisionmaking. These findings are consistent with previous research. The sample included 449 randomly-selected juvenile court referrals plus 478 nonrandom youth who were held in detention. 19 figures