Racial and Ethnic Disparities
The Court of Appeals of Washington remanded a transfer case to the superior court and offered the following language in support. “Our Supreme Court has made clear that trial courts must be vigilant in addressing the threat of explicit or implicit racial bias that affects a defendant’s right to a fair trial. We hold that…
Florida routinely pushes Black children out of schools and into a legal system with well-documented harms. In recent years, the state has made significant investments in school law enforcement and self-proclaimed “tough love” youth legal system policies, purportedly in the name of public safety. However, these investments have yielded a system that disparately disciplines, arrests,…
The Sentencing Project released an updated snapshot of youth arrest and incarceration rates, revealing that youth arrest rates have declined 80% from 1996 and youth incarceration declined 75% between 2000 and 2022. Despite these shrinking rates, the juvenile legal system is still marked by significant racial and ethnic disparities. Black youth are 4.7 times more…
The evidence provided in this brief supports bold reforms for youth and emerging adults sentenced to extreme punishments.
The answer, then, is not to simply reform the system of punishment, but to stop surveilling and punishing kids and instead invest in the things that set kids up for success, like education, family support, and access to healthcare. We need to start seeing children as children, not as criminals, and giving them the tools…
A decade after national protests catapulted the Black Lives Matter movement following the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and four years after a national racial reckoning triggered by Minneapolis police officers killing George Floyd, lawmakers are wavering on their commitment to making the criminal legal system more just and effective. Many are…
School districts historically approached conflict-resolution from the perspective that suspending disruptive students was necessary to protect their classmates, even if this caused harm to perceived offenders. Restorative practices (RP) – focused on reparation and shared ownership of disciplinary justice – are designed to address undesirable behavior without imparting harm. This study looks at Chicago Public…
This one-page infographic from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention illustrates statistics on waiver from juvenile to criminal courts.
This research article explores the history of girls prosecuted as adults in courts across the United States. It explores the effects of childhood trauma and victimization on brain and physical development and the connection to involvement in the criminal legal system as children. The article describes the results of a survey of young women who…
From the introduction: “The report begins by examining the racial impact of the Persistent Offender Accountability Act (POAA) through data. The racially disparate application of the Three Strikes Law has been documented since shortly after the law’s passage and has held constant for more than two decades. This report presents the most recent data related…
This report examines racial disparities, policing landscapes, and budgets in twelve jurisdictions across the country, comparing the city and county spending priorities with those of community organizations and their members. While many community members, supported by research and established best practices, assert that increased spending on police do not make them safer, cities and counties…
This report presents the evolution of the second look movement, which started with ensuring compliance with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions in Graham v. Florida (2010) and Miller v. Alabama (2012) on the constitutionality of juvenile life without parole (“JLWOP”) sentences.12 This reform has more recently expanded to other types of sentences and populations, such…
This article calls for the categorical exclusion of young children from juvenile court jurisdiction as a pathway toward the abolition of the juvenile legal system in its current form. This article highlights the landscape of age-based jurisdictional boundaries across the country: 24 states have no minimum age of arrest and prosecution, while 18 states have…
A concentration of a few states has unevenly complied with Miller and the possibility of resentencing provided by Montgomery. Some states have refused to comply at all. This uneven implementation of the Miller decision has a particularly profound impact on racial disparities among those serving JLWOP. An analysis of those deemed worth protecting from JLWOP…
From the introduction: “Although racial discrimination in the Deep South is not the outright focus of this Note—many other scholars have tackled this subject—it remains an underlying ugly truth that is woven into the conversation throughout. Rather than illuminate an already expansive area of jurisprudence, the Author has sought to address racial disparities in sentencing…
