The Health & Medicine recently-formed LGBT Task Force is a national leader in identifying causes and remedies to the growing numbers of LGBT youth in the court system. This article in The Public Intellectual explores the problem and identifies our program as holding national promise.
LGBT kids in the prison pipeline
Why we punish LGBT kids — especially when they’re not white– and how we might stop.
By Angela Irvine
Angela was the Principal Investigator on the Annie E. Casey Foundation national survey of 2,200 LGBTQ youth in the juvenile justice system. This article draws on that research, which also appeared in the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law. Angela is the Associate Director at the National Council on Crime and Delinquency.
When we talk about disparities in detention and sentencing, we’re usually thinking about race as the cause: youth of color do make up 65 percent of the juvenile detention population. But our child welfare, education, and criminal justice systems unwittingly conspire to create different outcomes for LGBT people too.
LGBT kids and adults face harsher punishment than straight people for the same crimes. Young people who aren’t hetero are more often expelled from school, arrested, and convicted of a juvenile offense compared to their straight counterparts. At least 15 percent of the population in juvenile detention is LGBT. Dice the numbers according to gender and the statistics get worse: 27 percent of girls booked into detention sites across the country disclosed lesbian or bisexual sexual orientations or otherwise failed to conform to expectations of how girls should behave. Like kids of color, LGBT youth are punished more often than their straight peers. Download article
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