Sentencing other people’s children: the intersection of race, gender, and juvenility in the adult criminal court

ABSTRACT

In light of the punitive transformation of the juvenile justice system in recent years, several scholars have explored disparities in criminal punishments between adult offenders and juveniles who have been transferred to the adult criminal court, and these findings have been somewhat mixed. While juvenility in itself might influence sentencing outcomes, it is theoretically possible that Black and Hispanic male transferred youth may be sentenced particularly harshly relative to other juvenile and adult offenders. Indeed, previous research suggests that the issue of youth crime as well as the practice of transfer to adult court are conceptually associated with Black and Hispanic males. However, no prior work on the influence of extralegal offender characteristics in sentencing has assessed potential joint effects among race, gender, and juvenility. Analysis of data on felony offenders in Florida circuit courts (n = 1,107,233) reveals that Black male juveniles are sentenced more harshly than many other juvenile and adult defendant subgroups and, for two of the four sentencing outcomes considered, receive the most severe punishments of all offenders.

KEYWORDS:

• Juvenile transfer
• sentencing
• race and ethnicity

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Ted Chiricos and Justin T. Pickett for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. I also thank William Bales for providing the data that were used to conduct this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. These age categories are consistent with those used by some prior sentencing research exploring the joint effects of race/ethnicity, sex, and age (e.g. Kramer and Ulmer 2009; Warren, Chiricos, and Bales 2012). However, supplementary models were estimated in which the adult age groups were divided into more precise categories (i.e. 18–20, 21–29, 30–39, 40–49, 50–60, and 60 and older). The findings from these models were substantively similar to those presented.

2. A concern that arises when modeling sentence length is that, because the subpopulation of offenders sentenced to incarceration is not random, the estimates of sentence length might be affected by selection bias. One possible solution to this problem is the calculation of the hazard rate using the Heckman correction procedure. However, as Bushway, Johnson, and Slocum (2007) demonstrated, researchers rarely have access to useful exclusion restrictions in the selection model which predict incarceration but not sentence length, and the inclusion of the correction term can thus introduce bias due to collinearity between the hazard term and the predictors of sentence length. In these data, no such exclusion restrictions are available, and the inclusion of the Heckman correction indeed resulted in a variance inflation factor (VIF) that far exceeded the recommended thresholds. Therefore, following the example of recent scholarship (e.g. Franklin 2015; Steffensmeier, Painter-Davis, and Ulmer 2017), the uncorrected sentence length estimates are presented with the understanding that they are likely affected by sample selection bias.

3. Due to the large number of cases, most of the regression coefficients are likely to be statistically significant. Additionally, because this dataset include the entire population of felony offenders ages 14 and older who were sentenced in Florida between 1995 and 2006, the significance tests have no relevance for any sampling design. Therefore, while the significance levels are presented in the tables, the effect sizes are more useful for purposes of interpretation.

Additional information

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Peter S. Lehmann

Peter S. Lehmann is a doctoral student in the College of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida State University. His current research focuses on racial and ethnic disparities in punishment, theories of juvenile offending, public opinion on crime and criminal justice policy, and school discipline and safety. His recently published work has appeared in Justice Quarterly, Crime & Delinquency, Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice, and other outlets.