Race and Ethnicity as a Compound Risk Factor in Police Interrogation of Youth

This chapter focuses on juveniles, particularly juveniles of color, in police interrogation contexts. A scientific and professional perspective is provided on the factors affecting children in this setting. The chapter draws from the adult and juvenile literature on interrogation, as well as research on racial factors, to suggest that there are unique vulnerabilities that minority and stigmatized youth bring to the interrogation context. These vulnerabilities may increase their susceptibility to interrogative pressures and false confessions. The chapter also provides recommendations for ways to protect this vulnerable group and calls for interrogation scholars to add race and ethnicity to their research inquiries. This will provide a clearer empirical understanding of the mechanisms by which race and ethnicity affect interview and interrogation behavior and outcomes.

Racial Minority Youths’ Perceptions of the Justice System

Both explicit and implicit racial biases shape police and civilian perceptions of and responses to adolescent offending. In turn, Black youths’ contemporary and historical personal and vicarious experiences with racism and policing shape their perceptions of and responses to the police. Although youth of all races generally exhibit the same developmental trajectories of cognitive and psychosocial capacities, minority youth are treated more harshly than their peers. This chapter highlights the attitudes, expectations, and experiences that youth and law enforcement bring to a shared encounter and examines how they play out in the interaction itself. The chapter also discusses the implications for justice policies and practices and for training. Reform should focus on school-based police presence and enhanced police training that involves youth. Research should foreground multiple methodologies using an intersectionality lens. Only when racial minority youth experience fair treatment and outcomes within the legal system will their attitudes toward it improve.

Child Immigration

Race has played a prominent and persistent role in shaping U.S. immigration laws, and immigration laws in turn play a critical role in shaping the racial composition of the nation. Immigration status also serves as a proxy in efforts to target people for negative treatment based on race or poverty. The contrived development of immigration law has broad effect, but it also has particular bearing on children. As addressed in this chapter, immigration law and immigration enforcement affect the mental health of children in immigrant families, causing and contributing to trauma. Immigration law creates barriers to economic security, on the basis of both real and perceived immigration status, such that children in immigrant families suffer disproportionately. Efforts at reform will be daunting, as embedded legacies of race will not easily give way, but reform informed by research on the profound negative effects that immigration law has on children will provide a starting point for meaningful change.

Adults’ Perceptions of Law-Involved Minority Children and Youth

This chapter reviews the role of race and ethnicity in shaping legal actors’ (e.g., police officers, attorneys, judges, jurors, parole officers) perceptions and judgments of youth victims and offenders. The intention of this review is to provide researchers with a comprehensive synthesis of the literature and to help front-line workers understand how race influences their interactions with racial minority youth. The chapter begins by considering racism in the criminal justice system generally and the research showing how race shapes perceptions of adult offenders and victims. The main focus is a review of research illustrating parallel findings in cases involving youthful offenders and victims. The chapter ends with recommendations for future research, as well as practical applications to improve law and public policy and to assist legal actors during their interactions with racial minority youth.

Transracial Adoption

Historically, transracial adoption has been controversial in the United States. Even with legislation supporting the adoption of children who are not the same race or ethnicity as their parents, debate has continued about the well-being and racial socialization of transracially adopted children. Transracial adoptions comprise close to half of adoptions in the United States and most frequently involve White parents raising children of color. This chapter reviews what is known from the social sciences about family dynamics and child outcomes among transracial adoptive families in the United States. It also highlights pivotal court cases in custody battles related to transracial adoption, including recent controversy surrounding the Indian Child Welfare Act (1978). An intersectionality framework is used to represent diversity among transracial adoptive families, including those with sexual minority parents and formed through different pathways (i.e., international, private domestic, public child welfare). Finally, the chapter discusses evidence-based recommendations informing relevant laws and policies.

Corporal Punishment Harms All Children

Corporal punishment remains a controversial practice among American parents despite over 1,400 studies demonstrating the harms to children’s long-term physical and psychological health. Although the public strongly believes there are large disparities in racial attitudes about hitting children, national surveys show that the majority of parents across racial and ethnic lines (with the exception of Asians) defend hitting. Moreover, the utilization of the culture defense in public forums is erroneous and harmful. Consequently, expert witnesses who invoke the culture defense are admitting views of a vocal minority into courtrooms while lacking evidentiary value that satisfies Daubert standards. This chapter provides a template for how to dismantle assertions that whupping children is an intrinsic cultural tradition among African Americans. It also shares historical and scientific facts to help professionals counter defenses that attempt to minimize the harms of children or excuse their maltreatment.

Children, Race, and Psychology

This book, The Legacy of Racism for Children, focuses on an extremely important but understudied topic in the psychological literature: the legacy of racial discrimination for children of color. The authors develop this theme by introducing many related and timely issues, such as sex trafficking, physical punishment, child maltreatment, education, transracial adoption, juvenile court, criminal court, and immigration. Here, we consider each chapter in the book and summarize its main points, discuss future directions, and provide some relevant research findings. Our chapter highlights the importance of the home and the education system as contexts for intervention. This chapter concludes with a poignant example to discuss the assumption of free will as applied to adolescents or adults who have experienced racial discrimination and other traumas in childhood.

Racial Disproportionality in the School-to-Prison Pipeline

For Black children, experiences with school discipline are often not an opportunity to learn, they are a pathway into the criminal justice system. At every step along the way, this pathway is faster and even more consequential for Black students than for their White peers. Implicit and explicit biases result in Black children’s behavior being managed more harshly, perceived as more dangerous, and more often deemed sufficient to justify expulsion in comparison to their White peers. There are formal and informal pathways for removal, starting in preschool, and the consequences for Black children in particular are stark. Policies often allow racial disproportionality in the school-to-prison pipeline to be ignored, or even facilitated. This chapter reviews the factors driving disproportionality in the pipeline and the current policy landscape. It also identifies ways in which schools, districts, and preservice teacher preparation programs can disrupt and dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline.

The Impact of Parental Criminal Justice Involvement on Children of Color

Over the past five decades, arrest, incarceration, and correctional supervisory rates have risen dramatically. One collateral consequence of the upward trend concerns the millions of children who are deeply impacted by the effects of parental criminal justice involvement and the associated risks, yet remain relatively hidden from society and underserved by support systems. Of great concern is the extent to which children of color, who are significantly overrepresented, experience increased vulnerability to adversity and poor outcomes. The need and opportunity exist to examine contributors to racial disproportionality and disparity among this population and to identify policies and practices that counteract contributing factors. This chapter discusses the scope of the problem, the impact that parental criminal justice involvement and the associated risks have on youth, and policies and practices that contribute to overrepresentation of children of color. Policy and practice recommendations that advocate for culturally informed responses and child-centered approaches are provided.

Juvenile Dependency Court

The juvenile dependency court is designed to ensure children’s safety and best interests, primarily by providing services to families and reunifying children and parents, when possible. However, the dependency system’s informal and discretionary policies may perpetuate racial disproportionality and contribute to disparity. Historically, the system perpetuated bias by exerting control over poor and minority, particularly Black, families. Remnants of this past are still seen today in the disproportionate number of low-income and minority families involved in the system. Key to understanding this disparity and identifying interventions is greater knowledge about dependency professionals’ decision-making and better understanding of parents’ experiences, which are crucial to courts’ decisions. This chapter describes important differences in minority parents’ understanding of dependency cases, which may impact their perceptions of justice, engagement, and case outcomes. Implications of these differences and recommendations for improving juvenile dependency practice and policy for all parents, especially low-income and minority parents, are also discussed.