Research Bulletin

              Assessing disproportionate minority contact
with the Illinois juvenile justice system
By Phillip Stevenson, ICJIA Senior Research Analyst
Vol. 4, No. 6 December 2005
Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority
Research Bulletin
The problem of minority
overrepresentation is
especially acute for
African-American youth
in Illinois.
Rod R. Blagojevich, Governor
Sheldon Sorosky, Chairman
Lori G. Levin, Executive Director
Research Bulletins are published periodically by the Illinois
Criminal Justice Information Authority. They focus on
research conducted by or for the Authority on a topic of
interest to Illinois criminal justice professionals and
policymakers.
This project was supported by Grant # 03-DB-BX-0037,
awarded to the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority
by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, Office of Justice
Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. Points of view in this
document do not necessarily represent the official position
or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
For more information about this or other publications from
the Authority, please contact the Authority’s Criminal
Justice Information Clearinghouse at 312-793-8550, or visit
our website at www.icjia.state.il.us
Printed by authority of the State of Illinois, December 2005.
Minority youth are very
much in the majority
when it comes to being
arrested and incarcerated, accord-ing
to an assessment of minority
overrepresentation in Illinois’
juvenile justice system.
Findings of a study conducted by
the Authority indicated that in
many Illinois counties where there
is a measurable percentage of minority youth, those
youth are overrepresented in the
juvenile justice system. The prob-lem
of minority overrepresentation
is especially acute for African-
American youth in Illinois.
Introduction
The Juvenile Justice and Delin-quency
Prevention Act of 1974
provides for the allocation of
federal funds to address juvenile
delinquency and improve juvenile justice systems at
both state and local levels. To receive these funds,
states are required to submit three-year juvenile justice
and delinquency prevention plans to the Office of
Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP).
The Illinois Juvenile Justice Commission, the state
advisory group, is charged with developing, approving,
and submitting the juvenile justice plan for the state.
Addressing disproportionate minority confinement
became a key component of the state plan as man-dated
by OJJDP in 1992. Other components included
sight and sound separation of juveniles from adults in
secure facilities; de-institutionalization of status
offenders; and elimination of the practice of confining
or detaining juveniles in adult jails and lockups.
In 2002, the disproportionate minority confinement
core component was modified to address dispropor-tionate
minority contact. This broadened the focus of
the effort, from studying youth in detention centers