169 - Change to JIS Race and Ethnicity Categories

The Center for Court Research has been working with the Minority and Justice Commission, the Superior Court Judges Association, the Juvenile Court Administrators, the Board for Judicial Administration, and both the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Annie E. Casey Foundation to assess and report on disproportionate minority contact in Washington. Disproportionate minority contact (DMC) refers to the overrepresentation of persons of color in the justice system, and its reduction for juveniles is a mandate in the 2002 reauthorization of the Federal Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act.

Being able to obtain and analyze high quality data (data with few missing, unknown, or inaccurate entries) is the only way to accurately identify the scope of the problem. As our first effort at identifying DMC in Washington’s juvenile courts, a summary review of the existing JIS data was prepared describing juveniles referred to juvenile courts statewide. This review found large percentages of unknown data. It appears that the decentralized nature of the Washington court system permits a lack of uniformity in the process through which race and ethnicity are collected at different courts. Therefore, there is a great deal of variation across the juvenile courts in the completeness and validity of race and ethnicity data. Without valid and complete data, accurate analyses cannot be carried out and effective interventions cannot be implemented.

One large improvement would result from implementation of the Federal approach to classifying race and ethnicity, a move that would bring Washington into comparability with most of the nation. Federal policy1 outlines five race categories and two ethnicity categories:

RACE	ETHNICITY
(1) American Indian/Alaska Native, (2) Asian, (3) Black/African American, (4) Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, and (5) White/Caucasian.	(1) Hispanic and     (2) Non-Hispanic.

Identified Problems:

We have been focusing on the development of reports for courts to inform them about their race/ethnicity data and provide information about best practices in data collection.

1. PROBLEM: Upon a closer review of the JIS data, it was discovered that our coding system does not match the federal policy in separating Asian and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander into two categories - JIS currently combines them into one (code A).

3. PROBLEM: Ethnicity is a read-only field for users in superior or CLJ courts. Only the juvenile court users are able to update the ethnicity field. Even if courts were to adopt the proposed

RACE	ETHNICITY
·         American Indian/Alaska Native (I) ·         Asian (A) ·         Black/African American (B) ·         White/Caucasian (W) ·         Unknown (U) ·         NEW! Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander (P) ·         POSSIBLE! Select All That Apply (Option A) or Multiple (M) (Option B) ·         NEW! Refused (R)	·         Hispanic (H) ·         Non-Hispanic (N) ·         Unknown (U) ·         NEW! Refused (R)

Solutions:

Once these changes are approved and implemented, staff from Research will work with Court Education to develop a webinar-style tutorial that can be recorded and shared with front-line staff. In addition, Research staff are working with Information Access to develop a set of exception reports in BOXI to address incorrect race and ethnicity combinations, as well as a best practice "answer" in RightNow.

a. Proposed Solution: We propose that ethnicity be a required field in JIS. The existing JIS business process for coding H in the race field as Unknown Race, Hispanic Ethnicity is consistent with national best practices. However, for other racial groups, there should be an ethnicity designation of Hispanic or Non-Hispanic, therefore ethnicity must be required.

2. PROBLEM: The JIS codebook lists Hispanic as an option under the race category. Although there is a JIS business process for recoding Hispanic as an ethnicity from the race category, reviews demonstrate large percentages of unknown ethnicity data which cause problems in interpretation of results, making it impossible to be sure that the court data accurately represents the extent of the overrepresentation.

a. Proposed Solution: We propose that the JIS coding system should be changed to separate the groups currently combined as noted above to bring the JIS system into compliance with Federal standards. This change would, of necessity, occur from the date of change-implementation forward, with no expectation of conversion of legacy data. Courts would have the option to review and correct their own data.