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The Disproportionate Minority Confinement, and later Contact (DMC), mandate was developed by Congress to reduce minority overrepresention in the U.S. juvenile justice system. Presently, this federal provision compels states to decrease the disproportionate number of minorities handled at all of their juvenile processing stages. The DMC mandate has recently captured political attention due to its compulsory status and system-wide focus, but its impacts on the treatment of minority youth are less clear. This study uses original juvenile processing data from Pennsylvania to evaluate whether the DMC mandate has diminished the size of processed minority youth populations. Empirical assessments demonstrate the DMC mandate has successfully generated substantial declines in minority processing throughout the state’s juvenile justice system. The results highlight the potential of a national reform to remedy racial inequalities in juvenile justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The War on Drugs popularized a set of policies and practices that dramatically increased the number of drug arrests, particularly for low-level drug offenses. The War’s tactics have affected Americans of every race; however, minorities have been most dramatically affected. There are several explanations for the observed racial disparity in drug arrests, but relatively little research directly tests these explanations. In this study, we test three common explanations of racial disparities in drug arrest rates. We find that racial disparities in drug arrests cannot be explained by differences in drug offending, nondrug offending, or residing in the kinds of neighborhoods likely to have heavy police emphasis on drug offending. Our findings are most consistent with explanations focusing on racial bias in drug sanctions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article utilizes a longitudinal approach to assess the visibility of women as police officers in primetime crime shows from 1950 to 2008 and compares these numbers for television to actual data on women who work as police officers in the United States. We find that as expected, annual labor force data and crime show data both indicate increases in the number of minorities and women working in the criminal justice system over time. Given the robust literature on the general underrepresentation of women on television, however, we did not expect to uncover that both White and minority women are overrepresented as police officers on television every year compared to the occupational reality. Implications of the findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Objectives. This article investigates the extent to which contextual and individual factors influence the length of prison sentences in California. Methods. The analysis applies a hierarchical linear model to individual and county-level data. Results. Some characteristics of the racial, organizational, and public safety environments are found to influence the length of prison terms. Conclusions. The findings support the organizational maintenance perspective and the idea of minority incarceration as a response to a perceived crime threat. Political environment is not found to have a significant effect on sentence lengths, and the findings do not support the racial threat hypothesis. The effects of contextual factors are more modest than those of individual attributes, including legally relevant variables, such as offense severity, prior record, parole status, and three strikes eligibility. African-American and younger offenders receive longer sentences, but this effect is not found for Latinos. Substantive, methodological, and policy implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article evaluates the impact of race and ethnicity on minority overrepresentation of the U.S. juvenile offenders throughout the stages of the U.S. court system and also presents the courts' way of addressing this issue. It informs that minority youth are overrepresented as criminals because they perpetrate more serious crime when compared to White youth. It discusses racial selection bias to elucidate racial disparities in the justice system and life without parole (LWOP) sentences.

The US has one of the most inequitably funded school systems and the largest prison population in the industrialized world. These two factors help to construct what is known as the school to prison pipeline. The past 30 years has included punitive policies within schools and the criminal justice system that have resulted in a disproportionate number of Latino and African-American youth being suspended from school, dropping out, and/or incarcerated. In this article, the lived experiences of incarcerated youth framed by institutional policies within prisons and schools are discussed. In total, fifteen interviews with incarcerated youth who spontaneously discussed drug trafficking were analyzed using criminological theory. A key theme for many youth was how a lack of educational opportunity and success shifted their focus to attaining economic opportunities through drug trafficking. Policy implications are discussed relating to school and corrections funding along with the costs to society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research suggests that the use of monetary sanctions as a supplementary penalty in state and federal criminal courts is expanding, and that their imposition creates substantial and deleterious legal debt. Little is known, however, about the factors that influence the discretionary imposition of these penalties. This study offers a comprehensive account of the role socio-cultural factors, especially race and ethnicity, have in this institutional sanctioning process. We rely on multilevel statistical analysis of the imposition of monetary sanctions in Washington State courts to test our theory. The theoretical framework emphasizes the need to treat race and ethnicity as complex cultural categories, the meaning and institutional effects of which may vary across time and space. Findings indicate that racialized crime scripts, such as the association of Latinos with drugs, affect defendants whose wrong-doing is stereotype congruent. Moreover, all individuals accused of committing racially and ethnically stigmatized offenses in racialized contexts may experience the courtesy stigma that flows from racialization. We find that race and ethnicity are not just individual attributes but cultural categories that shape the distribution of stigma and the institutional consequences that flow from it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study examined legal and extralegal factors, specifically race, and their effects on processing and sanctions for 2,233 African American and Caucasian males in Virginia’s juvenile justice system. Qualitative findings from in-depth interviews with juvenile judges, Commonwealth’s attorneys, defense attorneys, police officers, juveniles and their families triangulate the quantitative findings. Crime severity was the only factor which affected the likelihood of diversion; whereas race, grade repeated, prior record, and crime severity increased the likelihood of incarceration through two logistic regression models. Stakeholders added discussion regarding family structure and education. As social work practice intersects with juvenile justice through multiple avenues, the implications of these findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On Tuesday, April 5, 1994, in downtown Toronto, a 23-year-old woman named Georgina Leimonis was shot and killed in a café known as "Just Desserts." The fear surrounding the incident was bound up from the beginning with concerns about a peculiar category of person-the "Jamaican criminal"--because the suspect sought by police in connection with the killing, and later convicted and imprisoned for it, had immigrated to Canada from Jamaica during his early childhood. This article discusses the construction of the Jamaican criminal in the English language press through the lens of Michael Foucault's concept of critical ontology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International research has suggested that rapist criminal histories can be predicted from certain offence behaviours. Ninety-six solved stranger rape cases were examined to determine if there was consistency in a New Zealand sample. Rapist behaviours during the offence were compared with criminal convictions prior to the rape. The primary statistical technique used was likelihood ratio stepwise binary logistic regression. Predictive utility of the results was limited, due to significant correlation coefficients between the criminal history variables. Nevertheless, the current study reflected the general findings of similar descriptive international research. These outcomes were: the majority of stranger rapists had prior criminal convictions, and the majority of those convictions were for property offences not sexual offending. Furthermore, ethnic minorities were over-represented among the offenders, and the majority of stranger rapists started committing their first known rapes in their mid- to late 20s. Finally, methodological difficulties were encountered during this study. This highlights the need to refine existing statistical approaches to predictive offender-based research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most contemporary sociological theories of crime predict that blacks will be overrepresented among arrestees in common law personal crimes. These theories differ, however, in the extent to which this overrepresentation is attributed to disproportionate involvement in criminal offenses vs. criminal justice system selection biases. Studies that have relied upon official data have generally supported the differential involvement hypothesis, whereas studies relying on self-report techniques generally have supported the differential selection hypothesis. National victimization survey data on victims' reports of racial characteristics of offenders are introduced as a third measurement technique in order to shed additional light on this controversy. These data for rape, robbery, and assault, are generally consistent with official data on arrestees and support the differential involvement hypothesis. Some evidence of differential selection for criminal justice processing is found; however, most of the racial disproportionality in arrest data is shown by victimization survey data to be attributable to the substantially greater involvement of blacks in the common law personal crimes of rape, robbery, and assault. These results suggest that traditional admonitions against using arrest data as an index of involvement in these crimes may be overly cautious. In fact, the results imply that more caution should attend the use of self-report data in this vein and that more attention should be given to sampling and instrument concerns in self-report techniques. As currently used, the method may not be adequate for assessing the correlates of serious illegal conduct. The results also suggest that research emphasis be placed on those theories, such as the subcultural and differential opportunity perspectives, which attempt to explain differential racial involvement in these common law personal crimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the over-representation of African Americans and other minority groups in criminal justice process. The author identifies various areas of judicial disparity against U.S. minority groups, such as policing, pre-trial practices and sentencing. For instance, since 2004, 89% of Maryland prisoners who have received mandatory minimum sentence are African Americans. The author claims that states with large percentage of minority tend to spend more on incarceration and less on social welfare, thus creating a series of disadvantages for minority communities.