Since 1998, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) has required all states that receive formula grant funding through the Juvenile Justice Delinquency Prevention Act to determine the rate of minority youth in confinement. In 2002, OJJDP enhanced this requirement to include other key decision points (e.g., arrest, referral, diversion, detention, petition, adjudication, probation, confinement, and bind over) in the juvenile justice process.This expanded view allows for a more comprehensive assessment of how minority youth are treated by various juvenile justice system actors (e.g., law enforcement, corrections, and the courts). The Act’s goal is to ensure that all youth, regardless of race or ethnicity, are afforded an equal and fair treatment by the juvenile justice system.
In Maine, the Juvenile Justice Advisory Group (JJAG) partners with the Muskie School of Public Service at the University of Southern Maine to carry out disproportionate minority contact (DMC) research. For the past seven years, the Muskie School has been establishing relative rate indices for all nine decision points to gauge whether DMC occurs in Maine, and if so at what decision point and where
