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Juvenile Justice Reforms Keep Mostly White Kids out of Jail

South Dakota had the second-highest juvenile incarceration rate in the country while having a juvenile violent crime arrest rate only one third of the national average. So we’ve tried some reforms to better identify kids who can get by on supervised release instead of behind bars.

As a result, Minnehaha County officials are indeed locking up fewer kids… fewer white kids:

graphic from Mark Walker, "After Juvenile Justice Reform, White Kids Getting Benefit of Doubt Most Often," that Sioux Falls paper, 2017.08.04.
Graphic from Mark Walker, “After Juvenile Justice Reform, White Kids Getting Benefit of Doubt Most Often,” that Sioux Falls paper, 2017.08.04.

According to Walker, in a 14-county region with a 90% white population, white kids made up 49% of the inmates at Minnehaha County’s Juvenile Detention Center in 2012. Thanks to our reforms, the white JDC population was down to 35% in 2016. But as you can see in Walker’s chart, while the number of white juvenile inmates has dropped by half, the number of American Indian juvenile inmates has bounced back to 2012 levels after some decline.

If we want to reduce incarceration equitably, it looks like we have to intervene well before we get to juvenile corrections. We need to invest in education, job opportunities, and anti-racism efforts to give every kid the same chance of having zero interaction with JDC.