Racial disparities in youth incarceration are the widest they’ve been in decades

Officer bias, over-patrolling and ethnic disparities in stop and search

Black and Asian people in the United Kingdom are more likely to be stopped and searched by police than White people. Following a panel of 36,000 searches by 1,100 police officers at a major English police force, we provide officer-specific measures of over-searching relative to two baselines: the ethnic composition of crime suspects officers interact with and the ethnic composition of the areas they patrol. We show that the vast majority of offi…

Racial disparities in youth incarceration are the widest they’ve been in decades

When Jazmyn Taitingfong was a juvenile public defender, she saw firsthand how certain kids were criminalized for just being kids. She remembers one child who was accused of damaging property while playing in a park. When the police arrived, she says, they handcuffed all the children there.“Obviously it’s anecdotal from my experience, but those were always young Black children,” says Taitingfong, now a staff attorney at the ACLU of New Mexico. “T…

Racial disparities in youth incarceration are the widest they've been in decades

The number of American children and teenagers in juvenile detention has sharply declined over the last few decades, but as overall numbers decrease, data shows Black and Native American youth are far more likely to be incarcerated than white children.(Image credit: Stephen Smith)

BLK ALERTS - Racial disparities in youth incarceration are the widest they’ve been in decades

The number of American children and teenagers in juvenile detention has sharply declined over the last few decades, but as overall numbers decrease, data shows Black and Native American youth are far more likely to be incarcerated than white children. (Image credit: Stephen Smith)