A Clinton School student conducted a research project in Iowa to better understand experiences of minority children who became involved in child welfare and juvenile justice.
Clinton School student Nuno Almeida spent the last seven months working with Brad Richardson, coordinator of the Disproportionate Minority Contact Resource Center at the University of Iowa where he conducted interviews and investigated the stories of young people of color who experienced the state child welfare and juvenile justice system during childhood.
Almeida traveled to four states to interview minority children and found situations of disproportionality beyond the point when minority children were referred to the system. Conclusions from the research confirmed that the way institutional workers are organized to act on cases contributed to poor outcomes or experiences among minorities.
Results from this study were introduced to a Human Rights subcommittee in Des Moines, and according to the project supervisor, they are expected to lead to a new round of public discussions on disproportionality and crossover.
In 2002, Congress passed the Delinquency Prevention Act and mandated the creation of special investigation units to help states reduce overrepresentation of minority youths in the juvenile justice system.
National awareness about racial disparities has dramatically increased in the past decade. To understand what is happening Richardson and Almeida proposed to look at the problem from the unique and relatively unknown perspective of young minorities, who recently transitioned out of state care.
They compared stories of individuals in different states and uncovered several other stories describing cases of mishandled youths, at any number of places along the course of child custody services and juvenile systems.
“Most studies to date did not really focus on the children’s position and their unique perspective about overrepresentation, and the child welfare system’s response to minorities”, Richardson said. “This project may start the next series of public discussions around disproportionality, with DMC (Iowa) leading efforts to raise awareness of the larger issues that these young minorities face”.
Almeida has worked with vulnerable populations twice before this last year, including a similar field service project about youth perceptions in foster care. Almeida’s partnership with DMC represents his last field service requirement before graduation in the summer of 2013.
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