Our Children, Their Children – Confronting Racial and Ethnic Differences in American Juvenile Justice (JOHN D AND CATHERINE T. MACARTHUR FOUNDATION SERIES ON MENTAL HEALTH AND DEVELOPMENT) - Hardcover

Hawkins, Darnell F

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226319881 ISBN 13: 9780226319889

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2005

Synopsis

In "Our Children, Their Children", a prominent team of researchers argues that a second-rate and increasingly punitive juvenile justice system is allowed to persist because most people believe it is designed for children in other ethnic and socioeconomic groups. While public opinion, laws, and social policies that convey distinctions between "our children" and "their children" may seem to conflict with the American ideal of blind justice, they are hardly at odds with patterns of group differentiation and inequality that have characterized much of American history. "Our Children, Their Children" provides a state-of-the-science examination of racial and ethnic disparities in the American juvenile justice system. Here, contributors document the precise magnitude of these disparities, seek to determine their causes, and propose potential solutions. In addition to race and ethnicity, contributors also look at the effects on juvenile justice of suburban sprawl, the impact of family and neighborhood, bias in postarrest decisions, and mental health issues. Assessing the implications of these differences for public policy initiatives and legal reforms, this volume is the first critical summary of what is known and unknown in this important area of social research.

About this title

About the Author

Darnell F. Hawkins is professor emeritus of African American studies, sociology, and criminal justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the editor or author of several volumes, including, most recently, Violent Crimes: Assessing Race and Differences. Kimberly Kempf-Leonard is professor of sociology, crime and justice studies, and political economy at the University of Texas at Dallas. She is the editor of the Encyclopedia of Social Measurement.

From the Back Cover

In Our Children, Their Children, a prominent team of researchers argues that a second-rate and increasingly punitive juvenile justice system is allowed to persist because most people believe it is designed for children in other ethnic and socioeconomic groups. While public opinion, laws, and social policies that convey distinctions between &;our children&; and &;their children&; may seem to conflict with the American ideal of blind justice, they are hardly at odds with patterns of group differentiation and inequality that have characterized much of American history.

Our Children, Their Children provides a state-of-the-science examination of racial and ethnic disparities in the offending and processing of youths within the American juvenile justice system. Here, contributors document the precise magnitude of these disparities, seek to determine their causes, and propose potential solutions. This collection assesses the implications of these differences for evaluating the impact of public policy initiatives and legal reforms that have been implemented or proposed over the last several decades. In addition to race and ethnicity, contributors also look at the effects on juvenile justice of suburban sprawl, the impact of family and neighborhood, bias in postarrest decisions, and mental health issues. Offering the first critical summary of what is known and unknown in this important area of social research, Our Children, Their Children will prove an invaluable resource for any policy maker, social worker, educator, attorney, counselor, or other type of worker affiliated with the juvenile justice system.  

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Our Children, Their Children

Confronting Racial and Ethnic Differences in American Juvenile Justice

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2005 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-31988-9

Contents

Foreword Barry A. Krisberg....................................................................................................................................................................................vii1 Introduction Darnell F. Hawkins and Kimberly Kempf-Leonard.................................................................................................................................................1Part 1 Racial and Ethnic Differences in Juvenile Crime and Punishment: Past and Present2 The Role of Race and Ethnicity in Juvenile Justice Processing Donna M. Bishop..............................................................................................................................233 Racial and Ethnic Differences in Juvenile Offending Janet L. Lauritsen.....................................................................................................................................834 Degrees of Discretion: The First Juvenile Court and the Problem of Difference in the Early Twentieth Century David S. Tanenhaus............................................................................1055 Race and the Jurisprudence of Juvenile Justice: A Tale in Two Parts, 1950-2000 Barry C. Feld...............................................................................................................122Part 2 Understanding Race Differences in Offending and the Administration of Justice6 Suburban Sprawl, Race, and Juvenile Justice Paul A. Jargowsky, Scott A. Desmond, and Robert D. Crutchfield.................................................................................................1677 Race and Crime: The Contribution of Individual, Familial, and Neighborhood-Level Risk Factors to Life-Course-Persistent Offending Alex R. Piquero, Terrie E. Moffitt, and Brian Lawton.....................2028 Explaining Assessments of Future Risk: Race and Attributions of Juvenile Offenders in Presentencing Reports Sara Steen, Christine E. W. Bond, George S. Bridges, and Charis E. Kubrin......................2459 "Justice by Geography": Racial Disparity and Juvenile Courts Timothy M. Bray, Lisa L. Sample, and Kimberly Kempf-Leonard...................................................................................27010 Race, Ethnicity, and Juvenile Justice: Is There Bias in Postarrest Decision Making? Paul E. Tracy........................................................................................................300Part 3 Toward Remedial Social Policy11 Disproportionate Minority Confinement/Contact (DMC): The Federal Initiative Carl E. Pope and Michael J. Leiber............................................................................................35112 Mental Health Issues among Minority Offenders in the Juvenile Justice System Elizabeth Cauffman and Thomas Grisso.........................................................................................39013 Minimizing Harm from Minority Disproportion in American Juvenile Justice Franklin E. Zimring..............................................................................................................41314 Conclusion Kimberly Kempf-Leonard and Darnell F. Hawkins..................................................................................................................................................428Contributors...................................................................................................................................................................................................449Subject Index..................................................................................................................................................................................................451

Chapter One

Introduction

Darnell F. Hawkins and Kimberly Kempf-Leonard

Born in homes of comfort and surrounded by the protecting influences of the church and good society, we are slow to appreciate the immense difference between our favored fate and that of the child whose first breath is drawn in an atmosphere of moral impunity and in the midst of privation. (Letchworth 1886, 138-139)

What better education for a disorderly life can be found than that which the gang provides; inculcation of demoralizing personal habits, schooling in the technique of crime, the imparting of attitudes of irresponsibility, independence, and indifference to law, and the setting up of the philosophy of taking a chance and of fatalism.... Unsupervised gangs of older boys and young men continue this process of demoralization in the direction of more serious criminality. The end product is the slugger, the gunman, and the all-round gangster. (Thrasher 1927, 272-274)

The documents, as we see, corroborate our assumption that in studying the delinquency of children there is no need to ask what are the factors of demoralization, for there is no morality to start with. Except in the case of Ficki (a child whose delinquency career was profiled by the authors), all the cases show clearly that there is no constructive influence whatever in the families of the delinquent boys. In some cases (Falarski and Czalewski) the marriage-group is positively disorganized; .... But lack of positive constructive influences may very well coexist with apparently normal, i.e., not abnormal family conditions. (Thomas and Znaniecki [1927] 1958, 1793)

Cornerville's problem is not lack of organization but failure of its own social organization to mesh with the structure of the society around it. This accounts for the development of the local political and racket organizations and also for the loyalty people bear toward their race and toward Italy. (Whyte [1943] 1981, 273)

The question has been asked many times: What is it, in modern city life, that produces delinquency? Why do relatively large numbers of boys from the inner urban areas appear in court with such striking regularity, year after year, regardless of changing population structure or the ups and downs of the business cycle? (Shaw and McKay [1942] 1969, 140)

In 1992, 3 in 10 juveniles living in central cities were black, and 2 in 10 were Hispanic. In 1992, 22% of all juveniles in the U.S. lived in poverty. Minority juveniles were more likely to live in poverty than were nonminority juveniles. In 1992 the poverty rates for black juveniles (47%) and juveniles of Hispanic origin (40%) were far greater than the rate for white juveniles. (Snyder and Sickmund 1995, 6-7)

Overrepresentation of blacks, Hispanics, and American Indians in the juvenile justice system requires immediate attention. The existence of disproportionate racial representation in the juvenile justice system raises concerns about differential exposure to risks and the fairness and equal treatment of youth by the police, courts, and other players in the juvenile justice system. (McCord, Widom, and Crowell 2001, 258)

The aim of this collection of original papers is a state-of-the-science examination of the extent and causes and correlates of racial and ethnic differences in the processing of youths within the juvenile justice system. We have undertaken this effort during a period when the juvenile court and its assorted institutional appendages have come under increased scrutiny and criticism from both within and without. Much recent public discourse regarding how we care for and discipline our children appears quite reminiscent of debates occurring in the decades leading to the establishment of nation's first juvenile courts and correctional facilities (the 1880s through early 1900s). Public attitudes towards youths, juvenile law, and the administration of justice in the United States have always reflected a myriad of interacting and often competing social forces. Public perceptions of race, ethnic, social class, and place-of-birth differences and their relevance for criminal involvement have always figured prominently in that ideological, political and socioeconomic array of forces.

Much of the impetus for the most recent critical examination of juvenile justice can be traced to a decade of rapidly escalating rates of violent crime among juveniles between the early 1980s and the early 1990s (see Tonry and Moore 1998; Zimring 1998; McCord, Widom, and Crowell 2001). Though rates of juvenile violence have decreased in the decade since then, for many areas of the nation rates of youthful assault, battery, rape, and homicide remain at levels above those of decades earlier. The rise in youthful aggression was most pronounced in the nation's urban core and particularly among African Americans and some Latinos. On the other hand, the widely publicized school shootings in rural, small town, and suburban America during the 1990s, even as large city rates had begun to decline, served to dramatically increase the level and emotional intensity of public discourse regarding the causes of and solutions for youthful violence. In addition to serving as a stimulus for the "get tough" rhetoric that has accompanied criticisms of the juvenile justice system and its perceived failures, the spike in youthful violence was also the impetus for the unprecedented move in the 1980s by the federal Centers for Disease Control to declare interpersonal violence a "public health" problem (e.g., see Rosenberg and Fenley 1991; Fingerhut, Ingram, and Feldman 1992a, 1992b). That declaration has led to the establishment since then of an assortment of violence prevention initiatives, many of which are aimed primarily at racial and ethnic minority youths and their communities (e.g., see U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2001).

As the series of quotations with which we began our introduction clearly illustrate, public and scholarly discussions of race, ethnic and social class inequities, and the pivotal role they may play in the etiology of antisocial conduct among juveniles and in shaping societal responses to such conduct have a very long history in the United States. Despite this legacy, our book is the first devoted in its entirety to a discussion of racial and ethnic differences within the context of the modern juvenile justice system. Much more attention has been paid to such differences among adults, but even in that arena, comprehensive discussions of race and ethnicity are often sorely lacking. A special issue of the journal Crime and Delinquency entitled "Minority Youth Incarceration and Crime" (Krisberg 1987) represents an earlier effort to review the growing literature on this topic; and in their book, Minorities in Juvenile Justice, Kempf Leonard, Pope, and Feyerherm (1995) summarize important findings from seven important state-level studies of differential processing. Apart from these efforts, there are no comprehensive treatments of the subject. We do acknowledge the existence of governmental reports that have emerged from the federal Disproportionate Minority Confinement (DMC) initiative, which is discussed in several contributions to the present volume. As compared to the present volume, those studies and reports provide less discussion of racial and ethnic differences in the social conditions that contribute to differential rates of offending among youth; instead they focus primarily on the administration of justice.

This relative paucity of literature prompted contributors to the recent National Research Council report Juvenile Crime, Juvenile Justice to note the "scant research attention that has been paid to understanding the factors contributing to racial disparities in the juvenile justice system" (McCord, Widom, and Crowell. 2001, 258). Consistent with that observation, the report contains an informative and insightful chapter on race and ethnic disparity in juvenile crime and justice. Given the historical and contemporary salience of race and ethnicity in American society, our book aims at beginning to fill a rather unexpected and glaring void in the juvenile justice literature. We commence our discussion by probing the broader sociopolitical and historical contexts within which contemporary discourse on racial and ethnic difference is inevitably embedded. In an era characterized by rapid-fire media sound bites and a present-oriented culture, such attentiveness to the lessons of the past are increasingly uncommon, even within the world of academia. For those reasons, our discussion of the historical and ideological underpinnings of the problem of racial and ethnic disparity may, at first, seem somewhat misplaced. However, we believe that although a close reading of history always leaves unresolved questions as to what are the "facts" and what is the "truth," the past always informs the present. This is so even when the major lesson to be learned is that the lack of consensus we currently experience has its origins in the now seemingly distant past.

Our Children, Their Children: A Global and Historical Perspective

Much anthropological and historical evidence suggests that all societies, past and present, have viewed their children as heirs to their biological and cultural legacies. To this extent, a premium has been placed on the care and protection of infants and children, even though technological, cultural, and economic conditions inevitably affect the extent to which this goal can be actualized. For example, historians suggest that parental affection and efforts to socialize children in Western societies coincided with declines in infant mortality, first in the 1400s, then again in the early 1600s (Aries 1962; Berger and Luckmann 1967; Kett 1977). The sharp declines in rates of infant mortality were probably both a product of and a stimulus for a renewed societal commitment to give children the resources and attention needed to guarantee their physical and socioemotional growth and development. Included in this commitment to nurturance is the recognition that youth need to be both monitored and disciplined in order to assure their successful socialization into adulthood. Although the precise meanings of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood differ across societies and over time, the well-being of those perceived as our children is now seen as not only a matter of assuring biological and cultural survival, but also as a moral imperative.

For those living in modern, industrial societies the question of just who is included among the ranks of our children is hardly a rhetorical one. The rise of what social scientists label the nation-state, in both its modern and premodern forms, can be viewed as a global social experiment in which people were encouraged to adopt broader (than in the past) conceptions of group identity and belonging. People were encouraged to move beyond traditional notions of family, kin group, caste, and tribe to embrace more expansive notions of who is to be considered "my/our people," or in the case of the young, "my/our children." Some sociological theories have long held that the process of modernization itself is ideologically incompatible with the retention of individual and group divisions based solely on ascribed traits such as race, ethnicity, or family background.

It is clear that this global experiment has achieved its share of both successes and failures vis--vis that body of sociological theory. Notwithstanding the obvious success over the centuries in producing a sense of nationhood among diverse and often competing human groups in all parts of the globe, failings have also been quite evident. One of the defining features of social life in early modern societies, especially in the West, was the use of "race" and other dimensions of we-versus-they group identity to fuel a series of bloody, internecine wars and, later, acts of genocidal aggression within and across state boundaries. Clearly they served as "justification" for the atrocities committed before and during World War II in Europe. In other parts of the world, perceptions of what social scientists now label "ethnic" differences or religious schisms fueled similar we-versus-they conflicts, as they continue to do today.

Ruth Benedict ([1940] 1959) describes how these we-versus-they and us-versus-them conceptions also were used to justify the slave trade and the worst aspects of European colonialism and expansionism abroad. Even a cursory glance at world events reveals that many schisms linked to the perceived salience of race and ethnic difference persist in purportedly modern societies even at the turn of the twenty-first century. Today, as in the past, they serve to challenge and divide people's conceptions of what is considered the "common good" and "public interest," as well as views of who are considered to be "our people."

A primary theme underlying many of the contributions to this book is that long-standing patterns of socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic inequality in the United States today pose severe challenges to conceptions of how best to nurture, protect, and discipline the nation's children and youths. Contributors to this volume note that there are many well-documented precedents in the history of the United States, as a society, and of the history of juvenile crime and justice, in particular, which continue to shape modern law and policy. Many of the challenges now facing the nation in the juvenile justice arena derive from the very nature of social life in all modern, urban, demographically and culturally heterogeneous societies. Others have their roots in the unique historical circumstances that have shaped the development of American society. Public opinion, laws, and social policies that convey distinctions between "our children" and "their children" may seem at odds with the very meaning of modernity, but are not at all at odds with well-entrenched patterns of group differentiation and inequality that have characterized much of American history.

Apart from the intergroup divisiveness that often characterizes contemporary societies, it is also clear that other aspects of life in modern industrial, urban societies pose risks for children and adolescents. Arguably, when compared to the past, many of the cultural, economic, and demographic changes associated with the rise of modern, urban societies have produced potentially greater obstacles to the successful personal and social development of youths of all ethnic, racial, and class backgrounds. There are potentially more threats to their safety and socioemotional well-being than were found in agrarian or preindustrial societies of the past or those that exist today. This is true despite the obvious benefits in terms of nutrition, health care, and overall economic well-being that have accompanied greater urbanization and modernization. Paul Goodman in Growing Up Absurd (1960) has eloquently chronicled the unique set of stressors and alienation faced by children as they grow up in urban, industrial society. The social and cultural dislocations and readjustments associated with the mass movement of populations from rural or small town settings to urban contexts have also been documented by other social scientists and historians. Many contributions to this volume, particularly those in the last two sections of the book, chronicle some of these stresses and strains and their impact on levels of racial and ethnic disparity within the juvenile justice system.

Having attempted to provide a broader, global context for the reading of the ensuing chapters, let us now consider the specific historical developments surrounding racial and ethnic disparities in American society and within the juvenile justice system at its inception.

The More Things Change ...

Both before and after the inception of the nation's first juvenile court at the end of nineteenth century, and with it the gradual establishment of the assorted institutional appendages that are now labeled the "juvenile justice system," American society experienced periods of intense public debate regarding the causes of misconduct and crime among youths and what can be done to suppress such behavior. In his pioneering investigation of the origins of the nation's juvenile justice system, Platt (1969) noted that the "child savers" movement that led to the emergence of that system had its beginnings in deeply entrenched images of adult criminality and of delinquency among youths as a precursor to such crime. As it is today, the juvenile justice system was seen as a means of preventing youths from becoming adult criminals. Images of the risks facing youth, and their negative impacts on healthy youth development, were evident in much scholarly, public, and jurisprudential discourse found in Europe and the United States between 1870 and 1900.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226319881
• ISBN 13: 9780226319889
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 440