Racial disparity among juvenile defenders remains
A decade after joining a national effort to reform the juvenile justice system, Franklin County has seen the number of youths arrested and detained for delinquency offenses plummet.
Delinquency filings in county Juvenile Court fell from 6,247 in 2010 to 2,457 in 2020, a 61% drop. The number of youths admitted to the county’s juvenile detention center fell from 2,196 in 2010 to 602 in 2020, a 73% decline.
While celebrating those numbers, court officials remain frustrated by the lack of improvement in one critical area: Black youths continue to be charged and detained at a far higher rate than their white peers.
In 2020, Black teens in Franklin County were twoand-a-half times more likely to be charged with a delinquency offense than white teens — in a county where less than 25% of the population is Black.
Racial disparity “is one of those last hurdles for everybody” working in the juvenile justice system, said Franklin County Juvenile/ Domestic Relations Court Judge Kim A. Browne.
Reducing the disproportionate number of Black youths in the system “is the one thing that has eluded us as a nation and has plagued the county,” said Browne, the court’s administrative judge.
In Franklin County, the detention numbers are particularly stark. Black juveniles represented 84% of the youths admitted to the county detention center in 2020.
That number has grown worse since 2010, when Blacks accounted for 71% of the juveniles detained.
On average, the daily population in the county detention center in 2020 included 47 Blacks and four whites.
And the median length of stay in detention — where youths are held before their cases are resolved — was 12 days for Black juveniles and three days for white juveniles. It’s the biggest such gap in the past decade.
Browne considers that the most troubling of the disparity statistics.
“That’s a stunner,” she said. “That’s a problem.”
Franklin County’s numbers closely mirror those for juvenile courts across the nation.
“Racial disparities are the first thing that stands out about what our juvenile justice system looks like around the country,” said Nate Balis, who directs the juvenile justice strategy group for the nonprofit Annie E. Casey Foundation.
Those disparities are a major reason that the foundation created the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative, a national juvenile-justice reform program that Franklin County joined in 2010.
The program’s membership now extends to more than 300 jurisdictions, all seeking “to address the glaring overrepresentation of youth of color in the justice system” and develop community-based alternatives to confinement.
Enormous progress has been made on the latter goal.
“Since 1999, the nation’s juvenile detention population has fallen by 50%, which is pretty remarkable,” Balis said. “And it has fallen by 70% for those who are put in out-of-home placement.”
Out-of-home placement refers to all juveniles who are found to be delinquent or unruly and are sent by the court to a state youth prison, residential treatment center or the custody of children services.
In Franklin County, those placements have dropped dramatically for Black youths, but even more for whites.
The 65 Black juveniles who were given an out-ofhome placement in 2020 represented a 70% drop from 2014. But the 13 white youths placed out-of-home last year represented an 89% drop during the same period.
Since 2014, Franklin County has been among a dozen jurisdictions taking part in the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s “deep-end initiative.” The program focuses on the overrepresentation of young people of color in court-ordered institutions, otherwise known as the “deep end” of the system.
Based on raw numbers, Balis said, Franklin County’s Juvenile Court is to be commended for the drop in out-of-home placements for Black teens. The number of such placements stood at 215 in 2014.
“I believe Franklin County is operating with an understanding that to have a better juvenile justice system for all youth, it requires a much better juvenile justice system for Black youth,” Balis said.
The “deep-end” program’s focus on race is welcomed by experts such as Josh Rovner, senior advocacy associate for The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit group that advocates for sentencing reform and an end to mass incarceration.
The reason that the percentage of Black youths in the juvenile justice system has remained so “stubbornly high,” Rovner said, “is because we haven’t seen solutions that are racially targeted.”
The disparities are complicated and deep-seated, said Rovner, who recently authored The Sentencing Project report, “Racial Disparities in Juvenile Incarceration Persist.”
“Given what we know about racial and ethnic disparities outside of the juvenile justice system — things like housing disparities, health care disparities, access to mental health care, access to primary heath care — it’s not surprising that if you’re not addressing those underlying causes, the disparities in juvenile justice are not going to go away,” he said.
The good news, according to those who research young people in the justice system, is that juvenile crime across all racial groups continues a downward trend that began at least two decades ago.
Although homicides and shootings have surged in Columbus and many other cities since the pandemic began in 2020, both adult and juvenile crime have been on a steady decline since its high water mark in the early 1990s.
The public perception that juvenile crime is out of control doesn’t align with a nationwide decline of delinquency court cases, which fell from 1.7 million in 1999 to about 745,000 in 2018, according to Balis of the Annie E. Casey Foundation.
“It’s pretty clear, juvenile crime has dropped to perhaps the lowest levels we’ve seen,” he said.
Rovner of The Sentencing Project said the drop in juvenile crime aligns with other positive findings about young people today.
“Teen pregnancy is down, smoking is down, drug use is down, teen graduation rates are up,” he said. “The fact is, we’re looking at a healthier, more responsible generation than generations that came before. It’s not at all surprising that youth arrest rates have gone down with all of these other indicators moving in the right direction.”