Racial Disproportionality in Juvenile Justice: The Interaction of Race and Geography in Pretrial Detention for Violent and Serious Offenses

Youth of color, particularly black youth, are overrepresented at every stage of processing in the juvenile justice system. This paper presents an analysis of racial differentials at an early stage—pretrial detention among youth charged with violent and serious offenses. It contributes to work in this area by exploring police decision making, which has been understudied in comparison with decision making by court actors. Contrary to prior studies suggesting that race differences in police treatment are found primarily in the handling of youth suspected of minor offenses, we find that black youth are three times as likely as white youth to be detained, controlling for other demographic and legal factors, including offense type and severity. This paper also contributes to efforts to understand how racial disproportionality occurs, by including an analysis of how geography affects detention decisions differentially by race. Using data from an urban county in Michigan, we find that geography and race interact, such that white youth from the suburbs are much less likely to be detained than white youth from the city and black youth from the city or suburbs.