Race and Risk II

At the beginning of the month I introduced Donald Baumann on this topic of continuing interest, and have been in contact with him since then. Here is Donn's response to my post, setting out his view of the current state of the data.

"Over-representation comes from several sources and we have evidence for some of them. According to the latest National Incidence Study (NIS 4), African American families are more likely to maltreat their children under certain conditions. However, if you look closely at the Texas CPS data on substantiated maltreatment, controlling for poverty, single parenthood, young parents, number of children and other factors, a picture of racial bias emerges.

What we find is that even at lower levels of risk of future maltreatment (which includes prior reporting), workers are more likely to substantiate African Americans than Anglos. What this means is that both bias and maltreatment may play a part in all of this but no one knows what that part is. In our view, poverty is the key because it is viewed differently for African Americans than it is for Anglos and, as a result, the threshold for substantiation is lower for African Americans than Anglos. At present, however, no one knows what features of poverty are related to substantiated maltreatment and what are related to bias.

One major source of over-representation that we know about is the higher reporting rates for African Americans, relative to Anglos. This higher rate appears to move through what we refer to as the CPS Decision-Making Continuum from intake to service provision and placement of children into care. Thus, some of the higher rates of disproportionality results from reporting and that contribution to disproportionality continues to move through the system.

So why is there so much disproportionality at reporting? Some have argued that people who are low income are often under greater scrutiny through their contacts with social service programs, increased law enforcement in low-income neighborhoods, etc., so this likely increases reporting about these families - thus, we can't say with certainty whether "repeated contacts" are truly indicative of greater rates of maltreatment among African Americans or of unidentified maltreatment among other racial groups.

Others have argued from data such as infant mortality rates that the reporting rates appear similar to the fatality rates and, because the latter is not as subject to bias as reporting rates, the reporting rates are real.

Finally, we don't know much about the potential for reporting bias. It may be that, much like the substantiation decision, the decision to report contains some disparate features that are related to actual maltreatment and some that are related to bias.

Another source of over-representation is decision-making bias that contributes to the higher rates of placements into care for African American children relative to Anglos and the lower rates of reunification for African American children relative to Anglo children. Regarding the latter two sources (flow in and out of the system) we controlled for the same factors as above for substantiation and; in the case of reunification, drug abuse and inadequate housing are additional factors that are controlled for.

Our findings are similar to those with regard to substantiation. What this means is that both underlying risk of maltreatment and racial bias play a part in how cases flow in and out of the CPS system of care and disproportionality is the result."

Race and Risk

Yesterday the Statesman reported on the continuing saga of "The seven [capital murder] cases identified by [then Attorney General] Cornyn [that] were all tainted by testimony by psychologist Walter Quijano, who regularly told juries that defendants were more likely to commit future criminal acts because they were black or Hispanic."  I remember well when this saga was much younger, I was with TDCJ, and I hosted a group of Argentinian students in a discussion of the American death penalty and Victor Saldano, on death row in Texas from Argentina and one of the seven cases. I showed them his page on the death row website and they said something to effect of "why do you even list his race? You Americans are totally hung up on race." That really stayed with me. 

And yes, we are indeed, but not without good cause at this point in our history, as Quijano's fairly recent testimony suggests.  I am among those who are hung up on racial disproportionality in criminal justice and all of the systems we design to intervene in people's lives from one angle or another. I find it ironic that we have realized it is illegitimate to use race as a proxy for risk in imposing the death penalty, but there is a raging debate in child welfare about whether race is legitimately correlated with higher risk so that we should actually expect disproportionality, or whether racisim in the system itself has a role that we need to be addressing.  My friend Donald Bauman, now retired from DFPS, recently provided me with the following abstract of some cutting-edge research he has conducted:

Findings indicate an important interaction between race, income, and risk of maltreatment. First, we found that poverty is associated with higher risk assessment scores.  We also found that African American families involved in both substantiated and unsubstantiated cases were assessed by caseworkers as having lower risk than White families.  Finally, when controlling for poverty, race is not a significant predictor of substantiated maltreatment.  However, when controlling for risk, poverty was not a significant predictor of substantiation, while race did emerge as a significant predictor.  This suggests that although income may influence risk assessment, it is not a factor that influences the threshold for the substantiation decision.  Rather, the findings suggest that there are racial differences in the risk threshold used by caseworkers in making the substantiation decision.  Specifically, the risk threshold for substantiation is higher for Whites than it is for African Americans.  One possible explanation for this (as also suggested by Rivaux et al., 2008 regarding the decision to place children in care) is the fundamental attribution error (Ross, 1977), a concept from social psychology that refers to the tendency to undervalue situational explanations for the observed behaviors of others and to overvalue personal explanations, such as traits and attitudes.  In the context of the substantiation decision, this would suggest that poverty (a situational factor) is underestimated in favor of race (a personal factor).  Thus, although poverty may be an important factor to address when assessing risk, caseworkers may be assessing the risk associated with poverty differentially for poor African American families than for poor White families.

In other words, race matters in that initial decision to intervene in the child abuse and neglect system.  In the other camp - though we need to find a way to bring these two views harmoniously together - is the work of Elizabeth Bartholet of Harvard, summarized this June by Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago.

This debate is a huge challenge faced by those of us who work to reduce disproportionality by facing the issue of race and racism head-on.

We believe that the evidence presented at this conference signals that it is time for reconsideration of certain past assumptions and conclusions. It indicates that generally there is a significant black/white maltreatment gap, one that roughly parallels the gap in official maltreatment reports. This evidence contradicts the belief that black children are included at high rates in the child welfare system because of racial bias. This is not to say that the evidence presented removes the possibility of bias. Bias may well exist in pockets of the system, operating in ways that lead black children to be either over- or underserved, and it is present more generally within the larger society. But we find no evidence that initiatives that emphasize reducing the high representation of black children will provide a path to more equitable services.

Disproportionality in Texas Systems

To start off the blogging in 2011, this chart speaks for itself, but a little more explanation. . . Racial disproportionality, specifically the impact of being African-American, pervades the child welfare, school discipline, juvenile justice, and criminal justice systems. For every bad outcome, from having a child removed from the home to being on death row, African Americans are represented significantly more than they are represented in our state population, and the exact reverse is true for Whites. 
Data Sources:

• State Population: Estimate of the Population by Age, Sex, and Race/Ethnicity for July 1, 2009 for State of Texas, Texas State Data Center, http://txsdc.utsa.edu/tpepp/2009ASREstimates/alldata.pdf.
• FY 2009 CPS Data: Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, Data Book 2009, http://www.dfps.state.tx.us/About/Data_Books_and_Annual_Reports/2009/default.asp.
• Students Expelled 2008–2009, Mandatory and Discretionary Expulsions 2007–2008: Texas’ School-to-Prison Pipeline: School Expulsion The Path from Lockout to Dropout, Texas Appleseed, 2010, http://www.texasappleseed.net/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_download&gid=380&Itemid.
• Juvenile Justice Data: The State of Juvenile Probation Activity in Texas—Calendar Year 2008, http://www.tjpc.state.tx.us/publications/reports/RPTSTAT2008.pdf, published July 2010.
• Prison/State Jail Population: TDCJ On Hand as of August 31, 2009: Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Fiscal Year 2009 Statistical Report, http://www.tdcj.state.tx.us/publications/executive/Statistical_Report_FY09.pdf.
• Felony Revocations: FY 2010 Statewide Felony Revocations to Texas Department of Criminal Justice, data received from Texas Department of Criminal Justice, December 27, 2010.
• Drug Arrests: Arrest Data by Race, 2009 Crime in Texas, http://www.txdps.state.tx.us/administration/crime_records/pages/crimestatistics.htm
• Death Row Offenders: Gender and Racial Statistics of Death Row Offenders, http://www.tdcj.state.tx.us/stat/racial.htm, last updated November 22, 2010.

Equal Justice Under the Law

This plaque hangs outside the courtroom and clerk's office of the Supreme Court of Texas. As I have written about previously, some remarkable work on racial disproportionality in the child welfare part of our justice system is underway in the Texas health and human services world. Since I last wrote, the Health and Human Services Commission has elevated work that was going on specifically in the child welfare area, to embrace the entire enterprise, with the creation of the Center for the Elimination of Disproportionality and Disparities. One of my goals is to bring that work, which has a growing contingent of child welfare judges on board, into the criminal justice conversation. On January 13 the Judicial Advisory Council to TDCJ-Community Justice Assistance Division will hear a presentation by Joyce James, who is the director of the new Center and the driving force behind this courageous work in Texas.

Race and Disproportionality

Reading the NYT Week in Review article on Race, perhaps I should be reticent about engaging in this topic.  But, it is important, and it isn't all just hand-wringing.

The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, in partnership with Casey Family Programs, has done some remarkable, ground-breaking work on the issue of disproportionality in the child welfare (child abuse and neglect) system.  Check out the DFPS website  on this topic, where I got this:

Data from 2007 shows African-American children in Texas were almost twice as likely as Anglo or Hispanic children to be reported as victims of child abuse or neglect. Even after adjusting for this higher number of reports the number of substantiated reports of abuse and neglect involving African-American children was also disproportionately high. So was the number of African American children removed from their families. Even when other factors are taken into account African American children spend significantly more time in foster care or other substitute care, are less likely to be reunified with their families, and wait longer for adoption than Anglo or Hispanic children.

I heard more about national work in this area at the recent conference of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, under the program banner "Courts Catalyzing Change: Achieving Equity and Fairness in Foster Care Initiative (CCC)", funded by Casey Family Programs and supported by the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), brings together judicial officers and other systems’ experts to set a national agenda for court-based training, research, and reform initiatives to reduce the disproportionate representation of children of color in dependency court systems.

As is commonly understood, the criminal justice system has parallel issues, perhaps in even starker statistical terms.  The last time I checked, African-Americans were about 11.5% of Texans, and about 48% of the prison population.  I hope to develop this angle further.

COSCA White Papers

As I pointed out in 2010, my national group, the Conference of State Court Administrators (COSCA) issues a policy paper each year, known to many as the "COSCA White Paper." Working on racial disproportionality in child welfare and other systems has sensitized us to the freighted significance of such terminology. We now refer to it as a Policy Paper, for that is what we hope the Policy & Liaison committee will produce, a statement of provocative and helpful policy guidance for the leaders of the states' court systems. As the current chair of that committee, I hope to release the newest paper, "Courts Are Not Revenue Centers," in the very near future.  In the meantime I thought it would be helpful to share a compilation of the last decade-plus worth of very good papers:

Position Paper on Problem-Solving Courts (1999)

Self-Represented Litigation (2000)

Access to Court Records (2000)

State Courts' Responsibility to Address Issues of Racial and Ethnic Fairness (2001)

Effective Judicial Governance and Accountability (2001)

Court Leadership in Justice Information Sharing (2002)

Effective Management of Family Law Cases (2002)

State Judicial Branch Budgets in Times of Fiscal Crisis (2003)

Safety and Accountability: State Courts and Domestic Violence (2004)

The Emergence of E-Everything (2005)

Emergency Preparedness in the State Courts (2006)

White Paper on Court Interpretation: Fundamental to Access to Justice (2007)

Promoting a Culture of Accountability and Transparency: Court System Performance Measures (2008)

Digital Recording: Changing Times for Making the Record" (2009)

The Demographic Imperative: Guardianships and Conservatorships (2010)

Integrated Justice

No, this does not refer to racial integration or addressing disproportionality in the justice system (perhaps a future topic here). I am referencing the need for a new local-state, judicial-executive, public-private partnership supporting justice system data exchanges to increase efficiency, improve key decisions, and promote positive outcomes in criminal, juvenile, and family justice.

The National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) and its predecessor effort (“GJXDM”) define a method for developing information exchanges across disparate justice entity databases, using Information Exchange Package Documentation (IEPDs) to define exchanges of information that need to occur as cases and people pass through a justice process. The Texas Path to NIEM began with TIJIS and criminal justice agencies, and has led to adoption of a rule by JCIT and the Judicial Council, 1 TAC §177.2, directing conformance to NIEM and the IEPD construct. It also led to the development of IEPDs for 28 criminal justice business processes, focused on the hand-off of a sentenced prisoner from county to prison, and production of the “pen packet” information that accompanies the prisoner under article 42.09, Section 8, Code of Criminal Procedure.
The NIEM model is expanding to include the Texas version of national efforts to share data between courts and child welfare agencies (DFPS in Texas), and courts and child support agencies (OAG in Texas).

Alongside and intertwined with the emergence of standards for sharing information are the evolution of e-filing , and the movement toward second and third generation case management systems for courts and counties. The JCIT will discuss these related topics at its first meeting under new Chair, Justice Rebecca Simmons, on Wednesday Sept. 30, 1:00, at the Texas Law Center.