Assessing the Differences In the Treatment of Minority Confinement in Kansas

Abstract

Minority race youths and other youths admit in self reports to similar overall rates of legal offenses, but there is little doubt that minority youths are more likely to be confined. Similarly, females are more likely than males to be processed in the juvenile justice system and to be confined for status offenses even though male juveniles' self-reported offending rate is 2.3 times that for female juveniles. In response to such discrepancies, the 1989 re-authorization of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act required that each state analyze the disproportionate confinement of minority, especially racial minority, youths. Disproportionate here means merely statistical over-representation compared with census records of youths race/ethnicity/sex for each area. This study was undertaken to comply with that act.

Our results show that youths of one or more racial/ethnic minorities were indeed disproportionately confined in Kansas as a whole, all four Metropolitan Statistical Areas, at least 24 of the 31 judicial districts, and at least 23 of the 105 counties. We discovered that disproportionateness by race begins with the pattern of calls to the police: more calls come from parts of town where minority race populations are relatively large. However, most of the disproportionateness of minority race males and of all females for status offenses is introduced into the juvenile justice system at the police contact step, followed in importance by the decision to detain, the decision to commit to SRS, and the decision to extend initial detention. Further, females are less likely than males to have their cases dismissed.

In the logistic regression analysis to determine the effects of race and sex in the mix of legal and non-legal variables which produce disproportionate minority confinement, we found that race is significantly involved, net of other variables, for African-Americans in the initial detention and diversion decisions but not in the dismissal or detention disposition decisions. For Asian­Americans, race was important only in the initial detention decision. For Hispanics, ethnicity is important only in getting a confinement disposition. Race was not crucial at any step for Native Americans. Sex was significant in initial detention and diversion decisions but not in dismissal or confinement decisions. Overall, family and school variables are the most powerful associations with decisions leading to secure detention.