How Universal Is Disproportionate Minority Contact? An Examination of Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Juvenile Justice Processing Across Four States

Abstract

The extent to which disproportionate minority contact (DMC) in the juvenile justice system varies across states remains largely unknown. Using a multijurisdictional sample of 146 counties across four states, the present study utilizes multilevel modeling with cross-level interactions to explore whether there is variation in the influence of race and ethnicity among states across four major juvenile justice processing decisions—preadjudication detention, petition of delinquency, adjudication of delinquency, and judicial disposition. The results highlight the existence of some variation in DMC across the four states, with the variation most pronounced at detention and least pronounced at disposition. The possibility of state variation in DMC underscores the need for state-specific analysis of DMC, what contributes to it, and what can be done to reduce it.