Racial Disparity and the Juvenile Justice Process: A Multi-Stage Analysis for the State of West Virginia, Final Report

• NCJ Number: 208521
• Author(s): Stephen M. Haas Ph.D.; Seth A. Summers M.S.
• Date Published: June 2004
• Length: 214 pages
• Grant Number(s): SJI-03-N-005
• Sponsoring Agency: State Justice Institute
• Corporate Author: Marshall University
• Sale Source: Marshall University
• Publication Format: Document
• Publication Type: Report (Study/Research)
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This study examined the extent to which racial disparity exists at multiple stages of the juvenile justice process in West Virginia.

Abstract

Over the past few decades, the issue of minority overrepresentation in the American juvenile justice system has received copious research attention. The current paper reports on two studies examining the prevalence of racial disparity at multiple stages of the West Virginia juvenile justice system. The first study drew on official juvenile records maintained in the Juvenile Probation Database (JPDB) to examine the extent to which race influences outcomes at various stages of the juvenile justice process. The second study drew on survey responses from key juvenile court officials in West Virginia to assess their perceptions of racial disparity in the juvenile justice decisionmaking process. Results of multivariate statistical analyses that controlled for legal and extra-legal characteristics of youth revealed that, in the first study, minority youth were overrepresented by 2 to 3 percent in relation to their proportion in the general population. These minority youth were significantly more likely than their White counterparts to receive harsher disposition at informal disposition, predispositional detention, and formal disposition and were more than twice as likely to be detained prior to adjudication. Results of the second study indicated that approximately one-quarter of respondents perceived the presence of racial disparity in the West Virginia juvenile justice system. More than 10 percent of prosecutors and over 10 percent of judges reported that minority youth were referred to court more often than White youth for the same offense at least “sometimes.” Overall, the findings pointed to significant differences between the treatment of White and non-White youths upon referral to juvenile intake, thus illustrating the presence of racial disparity in the West Virginia juvenile justice system. Future research should focus on the factors that influence decisionmaking at the adjudication stage.