Cultural Diversity

Juvenile crime in the United States is wave; the sheer number of juvenile offenders ensures a blooming correction business far into this century, said to say with those numbers come the racial and ethnic disparities. Understanding why there are disparities is important to help researcher understand the underlying causes for the huge amount of juvenile crime happening in the United States. Much advancement has been done within the justice system to help reduce the number of ethnically forced arrests; however, there not nearly the impulsive to reduce the root cause for the crime level and the disparities that exist. The following paper address's the advancement, disparities and takes a look at possible root causes as well as potential fixes

Statistics in Juvenile Justice:

Understanding the evidence currently existing on a national level is the key when discussing the probable disparities with juvenile offenders' race and ethnicity. The most recently publicly available statistics are 2007 for juvenile offenders it is vital to be aware of that in many cases juvenile arrests are not reported to the Uniform Crime Report of the Federal Bureau of Investigations because of different state and federal boundaries on juvenile information. In 2007 law enforcement agencies in the United States made an anticipated 2.18 million arrests of persons under the age 18. (Puzzanchera, 2009) Of the approximately 14 million arrests made for all crimes and ages in 2007 statistics show that juvenile arrests equaled approximately 15% of all arrests made. Juvenile arrests equaled over 18% of all adult arrests which means for every eighteen adults detained one juvenile was also detained. Obviously, these are arrest figures and do not properly reveal concluded cases and incarcerations. According to Puzzanchera in 2007 black adolescence accounted for just 17% of the youth population ages 10 through 17, black juveniles were implicated in 51% of juvenile vicious crime index arrests and 32% of juvenile property crime index arrests. Therefore, the crime types seem to be the real variables here and not the so-called disparity of arrest numbers. In fact by looking at the essential numbers, it is obvious that there is no real disparity in arrests on a broad-spectrum scale, as the current numbers per the 2000 census reflects approximately 18% of the residents meaning that the 17% percent arrest rate is lower than the residents' numbers in general. On the other hand, close to 60% of African Americans live in urban region, and because a huge proportion of the crime occurs in urban areas due to the bigger number of people it is a absolute certainty that a greater number of African Americans may, in fact, be detained or in prison for specific offense types versus other racial or cultural groupings. An appealing point of fact however, is the decrease in the past 15 years of violent crimes committed among African American juveniles.

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