Racial disparities in the juvenile justice system have tended to mirror those in the adult criminal justice system, and federal data that was released in March suggests that the disparity is widening in the juvenile justice system.
According to NPR, although the effects of the school-to-prison pipeline have been previously studied, data from 2023 indicates that Black children are six times as likely as white children to be incarcerated while indigenous children are four times as likely, underscoring the rate of incarceration of those populations in the criminal justice system.
Josh Rovner, the director of Youth Justice at the Sentencing Project, told the outlet that this is the worst disparity on record.
“This is the largest Black-white disparity on record. This is the largest Native-white disparity on record. We see that youth of color are just not given the leniency or the common-sense responses that white youth are given,” Rovner told NPR. “The off ramps that exist throughout the system are much more available to white youths who are similarly situated than to Black youth.”
Another factor in the disparity is, ironically, a reduction in incarceration overall. This, according to Perry Moriearty, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota Law School who specializes in juvenile justice, often results in increased inequality in incarceration.
“When we reduce incarceration overall, writ large, disparities often go up. What you would often hear is ‘We’ve now finally got the kids who need to be there. I disagree in a really fundamental way with that premise. The kids who remain are often the kids with more complex needs. They are not the kids who are inherently more dangerous or who are less redeemable. They are kids we could reach in other ways. And the reality is, we’ve chosen not to,” Moriearty told the outlet.
Nate Balis, the director of the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Juvenile Justice Strategy Group, indicated that the school-to-prison pipeline comes to bear on the current disparity because of the way that Black youth in particular are released from custody or detention.
“Youth are being released more slowly from detention, and Black youth are being released much more slowly from detention once they’ve been detained,” Bialis told NPR. “The longer young people stay in detention, the less likely they are to, for example, enroll in school, far less likely to ever graduate, more likely to be rearrested than young people who are not detained. They’re more likely to be involved in the adult system when they get older.”
He continued, laying the blame at the feet of the adults who control the system itself and not the children who become its victims.
“Changing youth incarceration, youth detention, changing how we respond to young people, changing how long they stay, those are decisions made by adults, not made by kids. If we want to understand why youth are being held in detention centers longer, that’s not because of the youth behavior. That’s because of adult behavior.”
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