Young people's encounters with the criminal justice system generally begin with the police. Officers' decisions about how to handle these encounters are affected by their on-the-spot assessments of young people's proclivity for delinquency, prospects for rehabilitation, and overall moral character. And because most police-citizen interactions…

For many years, notes Alex Piquero, youth of color have been overrepresented at every stage of the U.S. juvenile justice system. As with racial disparities in a wide variety of social indicators, the causes of these disparities are not immediately apparent. Some analysts attribute the disparities to "differential involvement"--that is, to…