OJJDP Issues Update on Disproportionate Minority Contact

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Last week, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) released an updated fact sheet addressing disproportionate minority contact (DMC) in the nation’s juvenile justice system. The OJJDP requires states participating in its Part B Formula Grants program to collect information about the effectiveness of programs and initiatives intended to address the overrepresentation of minority young people in state juvenile justice systems. Using a five-phase DMC reduction model, the OJJDP advises states to calculate disproportionality, assess “mechanisms” contributing to DMC and develop intervention, evaluation and monitoring programs to deter delinquency and initiate systematic improvements. According to 2011 data, 41 states now have DMC subcommittees under State Advisory Groups, while 37 have either part-time or state-level personnel designated as DMC coordinators. Twenty-nine states have collected DMC data at nine contact points within their juvenile justice systems, while an additional 13 have collected DMC data from at least six contact points. Thirty-four states, the updated data indicates, have invested in “targeted local DMC reduction sites.”

Regarding intervention practices, 34 states have implemented systems improvement and delinquency prevention strategies, while 30 have either funded or received funding and/or technical assistance to implement DMC reduction programs patterned after nationally recognized models.

Atlanta Forum Set on Alternatives to Alternative Schools

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A year-long research and reporting project on equity in education in Georgia schools will frame an upcoming public discussion for professionals and families in Atlanta. “Research has found children of color, poor children and children with learning disabilities tend to be disciplined more harshly in public schools,” said Chandra Thomas Whitfield, host of the forum. That’s one of her findings at the end of a year of her work as a Soros Justice Fellow. The panelists -- most of whom she has interviewed in her years of work as a journalist -- will discuss this harsher punishment of certain children, then what happens when students are put into so-called alternative schools. She defines those as schools where children have been put out of a traditional setting for a discipline or academic problem.

Girls Poorly Served by Juvenile Justice System, Say Authors

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A pair of new scholarly articles say nominally neutral rules in the juvenile justice system can actually fail girls, especially, emphasizes one author, young women of color. Discrimination is sort of hidden, said Professor Francine Sherman, director of the Juvenile Rights Advocacy Project at Boston College Law School and author of the paper “Justice for Girls: Are We Making Progress?”

“If there were laws on the books that said we’re going to do one thing for girls and another thing for boys, that would be challengeable” in court, she said.  Instead, the discrimination is in practice, where “we do one thing for girls and one thing for boys.”

For example, in some states minors are still subject to criminal prostitution charges, a charge that disproportionately falls on females, and can make them less likely to run away from their exploiters. Both Sherman and a colleague point out that girls are more likely than boys to be locked up for the status violation of running away. “Most of the girls are running away from abuse,” said Jyoti Nanda, author of “Blind Discretion: Girls of Color and Delinquency in the Juvenile Justice System” and core faculty member in both the David J. Epstein Public Interest Law Program and the Critical Race Studies Program at the University of California Los Angeles School of Law.

The Complex Picture of America’s New Immigrants

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With President Barack Obama’s mid-June executive order that protected certain children of illegal immigrants from deportation, and the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that invalidated most of Arizona’s anti-immigrant law, immigration has finally been yanked onto the front burner. And with that spotlight has come some misleading shorthand: that immigrant means Latinos and illegal, and that legal immigrants, including immigrant youth, if mobilized to become citizens will vote Democratic. But immigration in the United States today is far more comprehensive than stereotypes and myths can convey, and we owe it to ourselves to understand the nuance of their politics and influence on our country, especially in an election year. There are about 40 million immigrants in the United States today, and according to the U.S. Census Bureau, that is more than at any time in U.S. history. Almost two-thirds of them have arrived during the past 20 years. Immigrants, defined as people born outside the United States and residing here legally or illegally, now comprise about one-eighth or 12.5 percent of the U.S. population.

Afterschool Cutbacks Particularly Severe for African-American, Latino Communities

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The Afterschool Alliance recently released a new study evaluating the financial security of afterschool programs, finding that more than 60 percent of respondents reported a downturn in funding over the last three years. Uncertain Times 2012: Afterschool Programs Still Struggling in Today’s Economy  also finds that almost two out of every five programs reported having budgets that were “in worse shape” now than in 2008. Researchers say that funding issues are particularly severe for afterschool programs that predominantly serve Latino and African-American children, where almost 90 percent of children enrolled in such services also qualify for reduced-price lunch programs.

According to researchers, 68 percent of afterschool programs predominantly serving African-American children and 65 percent of programs serving predominantly Latino children reported reduced funding since 2009. Researchers report that roughly 70 percent of African-American majority programs state that their current budgets cannot sufficiently meet student and community needs, while 62 percent of Latino majority programs state that their budgets cannot fulfill the needs of children enrolled in such services. Additionally, 92 percent of predominantly Latino afterschool programs reported that children in the local community required afterschool care, but could not access it.

Sex Workers, Including the Young, Protest Taking of Condoms

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WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Given that the government, in some cases, gives out condoms to prevent disease and infection, a recent Human Rights Watch report might strike some as a surprise. The report,  released last month, said that on the streets of major American cities, word has spread that police are seizing condoms from sex workers and using the condoms as evidence for prostitution charges. The report says police in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and New York City have been violating the health rights of sex workers by searching and arresting sex workers for carrying condoms.

Anti-prostitution loitering laws make this practice legal in some large cities, including Chicago. And attorneys and advocates are questioning why the government handed out condoms to prevent HIV infection and then seized them, exposing marginalized individuals to even higher risks for infection. Consider this from Andrea Ritchie, a police misconduct attorney and organizer in New York City, who said she was asked by a 22-year-old transgender women: “‘I’m damned if I do, and I’m damned if I don’t … Why do they take our condoms? Do they want us to die?’”

Though some sex workers told researchers they continued to carry condoms with them, many sex workers have reported that they carry as few as one or two condoms for fear of harassment by police. Carol F., identified as a Los Angeles sex worker and interviewee in the report, said, “There were times when I didn’t have a condom when I needed one, and I used a plastic bag.”

The report emphasizes that vague anti-loitering laws allow for police to racially profile individuals who “look” like sex workers.