Shifting Perceptions of Race and Incarceration as Adolescents Age: Addressing Disproportionate Minority Contact by Understanding How Social Environment Informs Racial Attitudes

Abstract

African American youth disproportionately experience incarceration in the United States and a number of programs have been created to address disproportionate minority contact (DMC) with the juvenile justice system. Thus, we aim to understand the ways in which race and incarceration are conceptualized differently by younger and older youth. Within these age categories we explore how perceptions of incarceration and crime inform racial attitudes among African American adolescents. We also investigate how a program grounded in an operating framework that extols an achievement ideology and designed to decrease DMC among African American adolescent males shapes participants’ attitudes about race and incarceration and their perceived future trajectories Our findings suggest the older participants were less likely to embrace achievement ideology and more likely to be aware of the structural barriers related to race. Thus, a more culturally responsive, critically engaged intervention may be more appropriate for African American youth.