Derailed: Racial Differences in the Impact of Juvenile Drug Arrest on Educational Outcomes

• In Event: Roundtable: Substance and Alcohol Abuse Research

Abstract

Racial biases in law enforcement over the last three decades have been linked directly and indirectly to the racialized policies of the War on Drugs, which have given way to controversial aggressive policing tactics focused mainly on minority youth. This study examines the educational consequences of this drug enforcement on the lives of youth by looking at racial differences in the impact of a juvenile drug arrest on high school dropout and college enrollment. The author argues that racial profiling in drug enforcement creates a racialized selection bias among drug arrestees, which leads to racially disparate consequences for drug arrests, but not other types of arrest. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent and Adult Health and logistic regression, the author finds that juvenile drug arrests are more consequential for Black and some Latino youth, and do not significantly affect the educational trajectories of White youth.

Author

• Mariam Ashtiani, California State University, Fullerton