With minority children increasingly and disproportionately winding up behind bars in some areas, communities are stepping up efforts to reduce the number of minority juveniles who are confined.

In suburban Cook County, Illinois, an advisory board meets monthly to discuss the issue of disproportionate minority confinement (DMC).  Together, these advisory board members, who range from judges to police chiefs to parents, hope to find some solutions to reduce DMC.

The south suburbs of Cook County comprise one of four pilot sites in Illinois where the Disproportionate Minority Confinement (DMC) Project has been underway since 2002.  Those sites have contracted with the California-based Burns Institute (BI), a non-profit that promotes fairness and equity in the juvenile justice system, which supports them in their mission to chip away at DMC.

"[We're] working with the local [project] coordinators to [help them] think through the best way to move system people and community folks in [a] forward direction," said Michael Finley, Site Manager for BI.

The institute's approach to reducing DMC is data-driven and requires that communities are first mapped, which means that a blueprint of the community is created, including details like where businesses are located, their hours of operation and where youth typically congregate.  Then, according to the BI model, that data is analyzed and advisory boards, made up of key community stakeholders, make recommendations about what changes can be made to the juvenile justice system to cut down on the disproportionate number of minority juveniles who are confined.

"We're hoping that this procedure asks questions that haven't been asked before and helps systems improve the way they do business and improve their services for kids," said Finley.  "Our job is to push the folks who are already together sitting at the table to dig deeper into what this data and what these numbers really say."

Getting people together at that table, or creating strong advisory boards, is what makes a project like this possible, said Dee Gully, DMC Coordinator for the state of Illinois. 

According to Gully, when collecting information about juvenile offenders from various agencies, like the Chicago Police Department for example, it is good to have a representative from that organization on the advisory board to help access that data.

"They'll get you through some of the hurdles and the obstacles," Gully said.

South Suburban DMC Coordinator Angela Greene agrees.  She is extremely grateful to the 75 people working on her advisory board who she says are truly dedicated to that task at hand.  That dedication is helping to make a difference in her part of the county.

A Closer Look at Cook County's South Suburbs

"We have a great group of people working with us," said Greene about her advisory board, which consists of prosecutors, defenders, educators, politician, parents, law enforcement personnel, religious leaders, probation officers and community treatment providers.  "Keeping everyone at the table and talking and getting everyone to hang in there [is important]."

Greene and her advisory board focus on three suburban areas of Cook County - Chicago Heights, Riverdale and Robbins.  There, the community mapping process, which involved raw data collection about the community and focus groups with community members, has been completed.

"The community mapping is physically on the streets looking at what is in the community," said Greene.  "The mapping piece is really a unique part of the process because it allows us to gather information on the community by community people."

In the South Suburbs, youth from the community were charged with collecting information about their neighborhoods, such as the locations of vacant lots and what types of services exist in which areas.  According to Greene, determining what kinds of services exist for these juveniles is important, especially since many families migrated there from Chicago, where both parents and children had access to a greater variety resources. 

"We are so needy here because, you know, unfortunately when people move their families from the city, the services didn't move with them," Greene said.

According to Greene, the data obtained during the community mapping process is currently being analyzed.

Beyond the mapping component, data will be collected in these three suburbs about the disposition of court cases involving youth from these communities.  With a year left of the three-year DMC project, Greene is confident that all of the people working together on this project can collectively make a difference.

"This information is in the process of being compiled now and then we will deal with the recommendations and implement the recommendations for policies and practices and work to change [the system]," Greene said.

A Wider Focus

While in Cook County's South Suburbs, the DMC Project is directed at reducing the number of minority juveniles who are in confinement, there is also a new push nationally to expand that focus to include all minority juveniles who come into contact with the juvenile justice system.

The focuses of DMC projects across the board are being tweaked because of an amendment passed recently to the federal Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act, which modified the DMC requirement to include all minority juvenile offenders who come into contact with the system.  The Act specifies nine key decision points for consideration: juvenile arrests, referrals to juvenile court, cases diverted, cases involved in secure detention, cases where charges were filed, cases resulting in delinquent findings, cases resulting in probation placement, cases resulting in confinement in a secure juvenile detention facility, and cases transferred to adult court.  This could translate into less minority juveniles even becoming involved with the juvenile justice system.

According to Gully, that change in focus is so new and involves so much additional data collection that the four project sites in Illinois have only just begun to gather information regarding all of those decision points. 

But Greene believes that broadening the project's focus in the South Suburbs shouldn't be too difficult.

"I don't think that it's going to really be a challenge for us due to the fact that a lot of the information that they're now requiring at the federal level, I was already collecting," Greene said.  "[But] that's something very new [and] we're just now into the first month of this.  We still have to understand what mandates that are being made."

With new regulations and a focused mission, the eventual goal for the DMC Project in Cook County's South Suburbs and the other Illinois sites has broadened.

"The real hope for the project is to reduce the amount of kids that not only [are] in confinement, but are even coming into the juvenile justice system," Gully said.  "We really want to start seeing how we can make recommendations for changes to policies and procedures in those communities that we think could reduce minority kids getting involved in the system."
 
Resources:

Finley (415) 321-4100

Gully (217) 522-2663

Greene (708) 596-4018

BI http://www.burnsinstitute.org/

OJJDP http://ojjdp.ncjrs.org/dmc/about/core.html