Racial Disparities in the Acquisition of Juvenile Arrest Records

• In Event: New Findings on Race and Policing from the National Justice Database

Abstract

Using administrative data for California, we first estimate the effect of a prior booked arrest on the likelihood that a future interaction with law enforcement results in a formal booking exploiting the discontinuous increase in the bookings probability at age 18. This analysis reveals evidence of a large causal effect of a prior booked arrest on the likelihood that a future arrest is booked rather than cited on the order of 11 percentage points. We then document very large racial and ethnic disparities in the propensity of law enforcement to formally book, and thus officially record juvenile arrests. A fair share of the black-white disparity can be attributed to difference in arrest offense severity and arrest history, though this is not true for Hispanic-white disparities. In addition, a very large share of the raw differences can be explained by differences in practice between law enforcement agencies that tend to arrest minority youth and law enforcement agencies that tend to arrest white youth. Racial disparities in the propensity to book arrests tend to be largest for offender age ranges, offenses, and in departments where the greatest discretion is exercised.

Authors

• Steven Raphael, University of California, Berkeley

• Sandra V. Rozo, University of Southern California