Discuss Disproportionate Minority Contact

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Disproportionate minority contact (DMC) is addressed by Piquero (2008), who explains that the traditional research approach to DMC has been a comparative research endeavor to come up with an index figure. For example, if the youth population in a given jurisdiction was about 3 percent minority and 12 percent of juveniles in custody were minority, the index would be 4.0 . States with an index greater than 1.0 were required to implement a plan to reduce this proportionality: "Asking how much minority overrepresentation in the juvenile justice system is due to differences in processing and how much to differences in offending no longer seems a helpful way to frame the discussion" (61). He says both processes contribute to the problem.

Piquero suggests that what started out as an issue of disproportionate minority confinement has broadened into DMC, affecting all points in the juvenile justice system. He recommends that researchers should move to other concerns, such as understanding the mechanisms that contribute both to differential involvement in crime and to differential treatment by decision makers and study the effect of various interventions to reduce disparities in both arenas and at different points in the process.