Racial Equity Dashboards in Juvenile Justice

In youth justice, what gets measured gets fixed—but only if it’s visible. For years, disparities in arrest, detention, and probation outcomes were buried in spreadsheets or annual reports few people read. Now, a new generation of racial equity dashboards is changing that. States are using real-time visualization to track whether reforms are reaching all youth equally, not just overall averages.

Key Findings

Arkansas’s Youth At-Risk Index Plus (YARI+) combines juvenile, education, and health data to calculate risk-adjusted outcomes by race and county. Its public dashboard, launched in 2024, allows users to compare diversion rates and detention use across demographics. The data are sobering: Black youth still face roughly double the detention rate of white youth in several Delta counties, even after statewide reforms. But for the first time, those numbers are public and routinely updated.

Missouri’s Division of Youth Services released its first “Equity Scorecard” in 2025, displaying representation gaps in referrals, commitments, and staff demographics. Tennessee’s Administrative Office of the Courts is developing a similar portal, linking race-disaggregated data to time-to-disposition and reentry outcomes. These dashboards aren’t just visual—they’re accountability mechanisms embedded into policy.

State Comparisons

Arkansas and Missouri are leaders in transparency. Texas publishes partial data through its Legislative Budget Board, but detailed race metrics are often behind internal firewalls. Mississippi’s Youth Court Improvement Program began collecting race data uniformly only in 2023. Louisiana’s OJJ and Oklahoma’s OJA both plan to release public dashboards by 2026 as part of their federal transparency commitments.

The regional picture is clear: racial disparities persist, but access to data has moved from reactive to proactive. Where equity dashboards exist, counties are quicker to identify patterns—like disproportionate probation revocations—and address them with new policies.

What Works

Dashboards succeed when they include both context and consequence. Arkansas’s YARI+ model pairs raw counts with population-adjusted rates, letting users see proportionality rather than totals. Missouri’s system adds qualitative measures, like youth satisfaction surveys by race and gender, to detect hidden bias. Transparency extends beyond the numbers: both states allow families, advocates, and journalists to export data for their own analyses.

Visual tools are changing courtroom culture too. Judges and prosecutors report that seeing their own jurisdiction’s disparities on screen fosters reflection and reform. In Jefferson County, Arkansas, equity dashboard data prompted a review of detention decision-making, which led to a 15% reduction in racial disproportionality within a year.

Future Outlook

The next generation of dashboards will go beyond counts to measure fairness in opportunity: which youth get access to diversion, education, or mental health support. The federal Juvenile Justice Reform Act encourages states to use such dashboards as compliance tools by 2026. Arkansas, Missouri, and Tennessee are poised to meet that benchmark early.

Making disparities visible does not solve them, but it does remove the excuse of ignorance. Data transparency transforms equity from an abstract ideal into a trackable public promise.

Sources

Arkansas Administrative Office of the Courts, YARI+ Dashboard Technical Report, 2024.
Missouri Division of Youth Services, Equity Scorecard Summary, 2025.
Tennessee AOC, Juvenile Justice Transparency Initiative, 2025.
Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Racial Equity Data Standards, 2024.