Voices Matter: The Impact of Serious Legal Problems on 16- to 30-year-olds in the Black Community

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Observations

After conducting the focus groups and analyzing the data, the research team identified a number of general trends in the frequency and impact of certain experiences. These provide an additional context to the results.

Age

The age of the target population may have affected some of their responses. Participants in the younger end of the age range may not necessarily have held a job or signed a housing or employment contract. Others did not volunteer a legal issue at first but then commented in response to another participant’s story. They may not have initially recognized the legal aspect of the issue. This may also have affected the way that they identified the frequency of the serious legal problem or how they categorized it.

The relatively young age of some participants may also have affected the kinds of impacts they identified. For example, many participants talked about leaving jobs because of discriminatory treatment, discrimination in hiring processes, or extended periods of housing instability, but few of them identified a financial impact to these legal problems. Whether this is because they compartmentalized the legal issue from the financial impact of unplanned unemployment, or because they have not yet felt the financial impact is unclear.

Age is also evident in the strategies participants used in the face of serious legal problems. Older participants were more likely to take specific or direct action in response to experiences of discrimination, such as addressing issues directly with teachers, professors, and employers and quitting their employment. Younger participants were more likely to tolerate the mistreatment, accepting harassment, labelling, or bullying at school or use avoidance strategies such as not shopping at certain stores.

Older participants understood the options for complaint and for resolution and were willing to fight individual issues like a traffic ticket. However, they were largely unwilling to make a formal complaint about police.

Gender

The data also showed differential results based on gender. All of the parents in the study identified as women and described issues of safety and risk around the security of their children. However, the expectation of managing family matters for their parents or helping siblings deal with family breakdown were experienced by both men and women.

Women described incidents of sexual harassment and discrimination by customers while working in retail environments, aligning with sexualized experiences of women across racial distinctions. 10

Racial profiling and police carding, an issue often associated with Black men, was identified by men and women equally with no gendered difference in the frequency, level of aggression, personal risk, impact on physical safety or steps taken to avoid police interactions that the participants reported.

Lasting, pervasive impacts

The childhood experience of serious legal problems, including their peripheral involvement in their parents’ legal issues, had a significant impact on participants. The way that they understood and responded to legal issues was informed by their observation of their parents’ legal issues, and the ensuing instability in their childhood from discrimination, immigration, and housing uncertainty and family breakdown. Participants were already apprehensive of employers, landlords, government services, people in power, and avenues for assistance when their own first legal problem arose.

While family matters generally resulted in acceptable outcomes, none of the individuals who had experienced criminal legal problems felt that their cases had been handled well by police or the legal system, despite being active participants in the cases.

The experiences that the focus group participants shared varied in substantive area, severity, and complexity. Despite this variation, all of the participants understood their legal issues through a combined lens of race and social opportunity. They described their experiences of systems and institutions, as well as their options for responding, as issues of racism in their lives. Race was not only a factor in overt instances of discrimination or racist treatment, but also a factor in their experiences of civil and criminal legal issues. They saw race, social privilege, and economic opportunity as fundamental to how they navigated legal issues and why they faced legal problems.

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