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Minority Youths and Juvenile Justice

Disproportionate Minority Contact After Nearly 20 Years of Reform Efforts

University of Texas at Dallas

This article describes the current status of minority youths in juvenile justice systems. With nearly 20 years of federal support, there has been considerable research attention to identifying, explaining, and reducing the disproportionate minority contact with juvenile justice systems. Although progress is evident, the achievements of the Disproportionate Minority Contact (DMC) initiative have made it clear that the questions are more complicated than initially appeared. The answers do not appear in simple comparisons of youths by race but require "similarly situated" youths who differ only by minority status. Assuring that youths are similarly situated requires knowing their status on many complex and interrelated factors that exist across multiple levels of individuals, families, communities, and juvenile justice systems. The ways in which DMC can be reduced also require addressing parity in opportunities and expectations, both in the community and throughout juvenile justice systems.

Key Words: minority overrepresentation • disproportionate minority contact • race • ethnicity

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