Working As A Juvenile Supervision Officer For The Fort...

Working as a Juvenile Supervision Officer for the Fort Bend County Juvenile Probation Department, I come in contact with a lot of juvenile offenders. What I have notice during my tenure is that the majority of the juveniles I see are minorities, African- American, Hispanic and Asian young men and women. According to The Sentencing Project, â€Å"In 2010, African Americans comprised 17 percent of all juveniles, but 31 percent of all arrests.† Do juveniles of color commit crimes and come in contact with authorities more often than white juveniles? Understanding why people of color experience a higher rate of contact with law enforcement is an issue that plagues communities and crosses over from juvenile to adult, I will focus on juvenile. The people that children come in contact with on a daily basis play a very important role in their lives. It develops relationship, trust and bonds, this includes police officers. When a juveniles of color come in contact with a law enforcement officer early in life they are more likely to develop negative feelings towards them because the interactions are usually negative. As pointed out in Wade C. Jacobsen’s Minority Youth and Police Contact, â€Å"One example of police contact is New York City’s Stop-and-Frisk program. It has been practiced by the New York Police Department for decades†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦but the practice has nonetheless been met with heated debate and complaints of racial profiling. Indeed, a recent report by the New York Civil Liberties Union