Recent Studies of Interest from OJJDP

This month's edition of YFJ Net News features two recent studies of interest to the LRE community from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention of the U.S. Department of Justice.

RISK AND PROTECTIVE FACTORS OF CHILDREN DELINQUENCY

This 16-page bulletin from the OJJDP Study Group on Very Young Offenders and features what is known about preventing pre-adolescent children from engaging in delinquent behavior. The Bulletin focuses on four types of risk and protective factors: individual, family, peer, and school and community and is derived from the chapters devoted to these critical areas for prevention and intervention in the Study Group's final report, "Child Delinquents: Development, Intervention, and Service Needs."

The LRE community is very familiar with delinquency research in a juvenile context, and there are some understandable parallels for younger students. For example, "associating with deviant peers" and "peer rejection" are significant risk factors for younger students as well as adolescents. For younger students the failure to bond to school and low academic aspirations also are risk factors. Even more significant is the specific risk factor for delinquency of poor academic performance. The importance of early intervention to prevent delinquency among young children has an equal and perhaps even greater importance to that of adolescent interventions.

This report may have particular relevance to State LRE Centers and trainers working with elementary school age populations, and for State LRE Centers demonstrating the importance of elementary academic skill programs to prospective supporters.

"Risk and Protective Factors of Child Delinquency" (NCJ 193409) is available online.

RACE AS A FACTOR IN JUVENILE ARRESTS

Disproportionate Minority Contact (DMC), formerly referred to as disproportionate minority confinement, is a central priority of OJJDP. As OJJDP notes and LRE educators can well attest, "[the] belief that fair treatment - regardless of race - is integral to the very concept of justice in the United States."

This 8-page bulletin by Carole E. Pope and Howard N. Snyder focuses on what OJJDP describes as "a somewhat neglected area of research, i.e., the role that race plays in police decisionmaking," by using statistics from the FBI's National Incident-Based Reporting System to compare arrest probabilities of white and nonwhite juveniles for violent crimes. Data was drawn from NIBRS master files from 1997 and 1998 that was submitted by law enforcement agencies in 17 states.

Pope and Snyder identify two general trends in analyzing the racial disparity in the justice system: those who focus on the operation of juvenile justice systems while the other focuses on the behavior of individual juveniles who commit crime. They note that research on race and juvenile justice has focused on four major decision points in the juvenile justice system - intake, detention, adjudication, and disposition. "Few research studies have focused on police encounters with juveniles [as] these encounters are rather difficult to measure. However, studies that have examined such encounters have generally found that police decisionmaking does contribute to minority overrepresentation in the juvenile justice system. This is simply an observation that, within their scope of responsibility, police decide when to arrest and when not to arrest, and to the extent that this decisionmaking process results in the arrest of African American youth at a higher rate than white youth, it contributes to overrepresentation. Without more information, though, it is impossible to say whether that overrepresentation is the result of police bias or differential behavior." They characterize their report as a contribution "toward filling that gap."

Pope and Snyder summarize their findings by noting that their NIBS for the 17 states examined "offer no evidence to support the hypothesis that police are more likely to arrest nonwhite juvenile offenders than white juvenile offenders, once other incident attributes are taken into consideration. This holds true when the data are analyzed in the aggregate (i.e., for all states and crimes combined), at the state level, and within each crime category. In fact, there is some evidence to support the conclusion that once a violent crime is reported to or witnessed by police, the likelihood of arrest is greater for white juvenile offenders than for nonwhite juvenile offenders. The data do indicate, however, an indirect bias effect in the arrest of nonwhite juveniles in that they are more likely to be arrested when the victim is white than when the victim is nonwhite."

Pope and Snyder caution against making generalizations beyond the data, noting that "overall patterns might differ if other states were included in the sample," and that "different patterns might be found if analyses focused on individual communities within the sample."

"Race as a Factor in Juvenile Arrests" (NCJ 189180) is available online. This link also can be found on the Youth for Justice DMC web site.

YFJ Net News is a service of Youth for Justice, the national coordinated law-related education program supported by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention of the United States Department of Justice. Comments or recommendations in YFJ Net News do not necessarily represent the views or policies of the United States Department of Justice.

Please forward comments, corrections, or suggestions about YFJ Net News to Nisan Chavkin at Constitutional Rights Foundation Chicago.