Addressing Disproportionality in Child Welfare and Juvenile Justice, Part 1

Moving Toward a Better Response to Disproportionality

For over two decades, there has been a great deal of concern about disproportionate representation of minority children in the juvenile justice and child welfare systems. Research has confirmed that this disproportionality extends in many jurisdictions across the two systems and across race and ethnicity.
 
Despite the broad interest in addressing disproportionality within these two systems, we have not seen a lot of effort by these two systems to learn from each other’s efforts and to work across service systems to confront it. These two systems are, however, particularly appropriate places to start this type of cross-system effort. After all, studies inform us that children and youth in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems are often the “same kids,” just seen at a different point in time. This research informs us that children and youth who are maltreated are more likely to end up in the juvenile justice system than those who have not been abused or neglected. So how can we get the systems to work together on this critically important issue?

 
In partnership with the Chapin Hall Center for Children, Georgetown University’s Center for Juvenile Justice Reform (CJJR) began examining the work that had been undertaken in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems to address disproportionality, looking to discover where there might be commonalities in the efforts of these two systems. The idea was to find areas in which cross-system efforts could be employed to reduce disproportionality in both systems, in addition to identifying effective practices from each system’s work that could be adopted by the other system.
 
 
Five Common and Key Elements for Addressing Disproportionality

While the decision points in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems are different, there are enough common areas of focus to make the adoption of a cross-system approach effective.
 
For example, “Racial and Ethnic Disparity and Disproportionality in Child Welfare and Juvenile Justice: A Compendium,” a paper by the Chapin Hall Center for Children and the Center for Juvenile Justice Reform, identified five key elements for addressing disproportionality across these two systems (also see slide 7 of the attached presentation):

1. Increasing Transparency
   
   • Management information systems must be able to collect race and ethnicity data and they must be able to share this information across agencies and publicly.

2. Re-engineering Structures and Procedures
   
   • Processes and procedures should be reviewed on a routine basis to determine whether they contribute to disparities, and when they do, they should be redesigned.

3. Changing Organizational Culture
   
   • Influence the attitudes and values of agency staff in order to shape organizational culture in a way that may reduce disparate treatment and disproportionality.

4. Mobilizing Political Leadership
   
   • Build awareness and consensus among the key decision makers in order to advance needed changes in policy and practice through their ownership of and leadership on the issue.

5. Partnering in Developing Family and Community Resources
   
   • Work at the community level to build better support systems for families.

 
I’ll say more about each of these elements in tomorrow’s post.
 
In the mean time, I encourage you to review the PowerPoint presentation I mentioned above by Dennette Derezotes of the Center for the Study of Social Policy and Clinton Lacey of the W. Haywood Burns Institute, which was used in a webinar the three of us conducted. The presentation gives a sense of the potential of this work by looking at concrete examples from Santa Cruz, CA, and Ramsey County, MN.
 
 
About the Author

Shay Bilchik is the founder and Director of the Center for Juvenile Justice Reform at Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute. The Center’s purpose is to focus the nation’s public agency leaders, across systems of care and levels of government, on the key components of a strong juvenile justice reform agenda.
 
Prior to joining the Institute, Mr. Bilchik was the President and CEO of the Child Welfare League of America for seven years. Before that, he headed up the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) in the U.S. Department of Justice, where he advocated for and supported a balanced and multi-systems approach to attacking juvenile crime and addressing child victimization.