As part of the Juvenile Detention Alternative Initiative (JDIA) funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Multnomah County Chair created a Detention Reform Committee composed of a variety of county, State, and city officials; community leaders; and others. With staffing from the Juvenile Department and a full-time program manager, this group formed a variety of work groups and undertook several approaches to modification of the then-existing practices in detention. Each of the work groups focused on strategies designed to reduce the degree of minority youth overrepresentation in juvenile detention. Strategies included the designing of new sets of alternatives to detention, training to increase awareness among decision makers and service providers about overrepresentation, and the design of an objective scoring system for intake decision making. A study of the impact of these strategies shows that the JDIA resulted in lower use of detention and substantial movement toward equalization of detention rates for African-American, American-Indian, and white youth. These findings suggest that efforts to reduce overrepresentation may be more successful if addressed as part of general justice system reform efforts. 4 tables and 11 references