The participants and Research Assistants involved in the Legal Disruption Project are students at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Their demographics reflect the demographics of the institution as a whole. John Jay is a Minority- and Hispanic-Serving institution, with approximately 50% of its 11,000 person student body identifying as Hispanic and nearly 20% identifying as Black.
Employment
About 70% of respondents work full or part-time while pursuing their education
Male 21%
Prefer not to say 4%
Non-binary 1%
Gender
Female 74%
Racial and ethnic diversity
Like John Jay as a whole, participants in the focus groups are mostly people of color.
The majority of participants are part of immigrant families, indicating that either they themselves or their parents moved to the United States from another country. The complexity of juggling school, work, and immigration concerns for family members came out in many of the focus groups.
Geographic diversity
LDP participants live in every borough of New York City, with about two-thirds living in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx.
More than 300 of 414 participants named one or more country in response to the question of whether they or their family moved to the US from another country.
There were 62 different countries named by LDP participants as their country of origin (see Places).
Selected quotes
“I keep hearing that, you know, New York City, it’s very diverse and we’re very liberal... but we’re also very segregated. [...] I live in Harlem. And I went to a high school that was like two hours away from where I lived so I could go to a school that was well funded and was predominantly white on the Upper East Side. But not all kids can afford to travel that long, because some of them have jobs and some of them help their parents with their siblings and they have to stay in their neighborhoods. And those schools don’t have the resources that a white—even a white public school—on the Upper East Side or Upper West Side has… they’re staying in their neighborhoods, they’re staying in these schools that are poorly funded and then they don’t have the adequate tools or preparation to attain a higher education. ”
