Striving for equality in the court processing of youth: theoretical applications and empirical studies in Honor of Michael J. Leiber

As guest editors, we approached this special collection with a single objective in mind: how to best celebrate and honor Dr. Michael J. Leiber’s legacy and commitment to equality in juvenile court processing, the juvenile justice system, and issues surrounding juvenile delinquency following his unexpected passing in 2020. We present this special collection across two issues in the Journal of Crime and Justice. Part I includes four articles in Volume 25 (Issue 3), and Part II includes this introduction and three articles in Volume 25 (Issue 4). This compilation, collectively titled ‘Striving for Equality in the Court Processing of Youth: Theoretical Applications and Empirical Studies in Honor of Michael J. Leiber’ is not only an opportunity to highlight Mike’s empirical interests and contributions but most importantly. We hope to encourage through continued research, the furtherance of knowledge to effectively address racial/ethnic and social injustices in the juvenile and criminal justice systems.

Mike will be remembered not only for his impact as a respected colleague, collaborator, mentor, and friend but, above all, for his distinguished scholarship and career in the field of criminology and juvenile justice. While his research interests ranged to include topics surrounding law and the deprivation of liberty, theories of criminal behavior, and the evaluation of juvenile justice programs, his passion and expertise focused on the impacts of race, ethnicity, and gender on juvenile justice decision-making and delinquency. His life’s work was guided by a desire to see the world become a fairer and more equitable place for all, as evidenced by his unwavering commitment to advancing knowledge and practices that promote social justice.

His significant contributions to the advancement of racial/ethnic justice in the field of criminology are broadly recognized. Mike was the recipient of several awards, including the W.E.B. Du Bois Award from the Western Society of Criminology, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Division on People of Color and Crime (American Society of Criminology), the Becky Tatum Excellence Award from the Division of the Minorities and Women Section (Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences), and the Distinguished Research Alumni Award from the School of Criminal Justice at the University at Albany (SUNY).

Mike was a graduate of the University at Albany (SUNY) and held faculty positions at the University of Northern Iowa, Virginia Commonwealth University, and the University of South Florida (USF), where he served as Chair of the Department of Criminology at USF from 2011 to 2019. He also served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Crime and Justice from 2010 to 2019, and most recently, as Co-Editor of Justice Quarterly. His knowledge and expertise led to his contracting as a consultant over the span of 20 years in various capacities for the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency (OJJDP). Specifically, he was appointed the Equal Protection Monitor for the Juvenile Court of Memphis and Shelby County by DOJ which required bi-yearly evaluations of Juvenile Court data and the production of compliance reports to ensure that mandated reforms were executed. Within OJJDP, he provided training, development, and assessment of tools and programs aimed at reducing minority overrepresentation of youth in the juvenile justice system. Mike also received more than $700,000 in the form of grants, contracts, and fellowships to conduct his research, which is detailed in over 100 publications, including 76 peer-reviewed articles and more than two-dozen government reports.

Even after leaving the Midwest for Virginia and later Florida, Mike remained committed to the regional Midwestern Criminal Justice Association (MCJA), where his involvement was wide-ranging and spanned over three decades. He served as President of the association in 2003, Editor-in-Chief of MCJA’s official publication (the Journal of Crime and Justice) from 2010 to 2019, and was the recipient of the Tom Castellano Award for dedicated service to MCJA in 2013. Mike presented research papers each year at the association’s annual meetings and encouraged students from his department to attend as well. In fact, numerous students presented their first academic paper at MCJA through Mike’s mentorship. We especially appreciate MCJA for its continued support and willingness to commemorate Dr. Leiber’s contribution, guidance, and mentorship over the years. Some examples include the featured panel ‘A Tribute to Michael Leiber: Research on Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Juvenile Court’ at the 2020 annual conference, the initial steps to create an award in his name for a student to attend and present at the annual conference, and publication of this special collection.

As Mike was our mentor during and after our time as graduate students at USF, we can attest that this undeniable commitment, guidance, and mentorship has been instrumental in the development of our careers and more generally in our growth and development as individuals. We value this opportunity to honor the legacy of our close friend and mentor, as well as share his impact and influence with the criminology and juvenile justice community more generally with this special collection. We know that Mike would be proud to see that several of his previous co-authors continue to work towards ensuring greater social justice and that some of his past mentees have become mentors in their own rights (please see the included articles by Sara Bryson/Jennifer Peck and Ellen Donnelly/Christen Asiedu).

The contributors in this compilation are colleagues, co-authors, mentees, and friends of Mike throughout his time in academia. As evidenced throughout this special collection, Mike’s work continues to hold relevancy under the current climate and remains an inspiration to researchers focused on issues of race/ethnicity and juvenile justice. The articles in the collection encompass a broad range of themes identified throughout Mike’s career, such as identifying disproportionate minority contact (DMC) in the juvenile justice system, applying various theoretical frameworks to juvenile court processing, and examining under what conditions racial/ethnic minority youth experience greater social control than their White counterparts. Each article is in some way connected to Mike’s scholarly achievements, helps encourage directions for future research, and demonstrates the need for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to continue the fight for equality for youth in our juvenile and criminal justice systems. In all, across the seven manuscripts that comprise the special collection, 37 distinct published works of Mike’s are directly referenced/cited.

The lead article in Part I of the collection (Volume 45, Issue 3) is, Margaret Goldman and Nancy Rodriguez’s research titled ‘Juvenile Court in the School-Prison Nexus: Youth Punishment, Schooling and Structures of Inequality’. This study explores the relationship between school referrals, school enrollment, and juvenile court outcomes (dismissal, diversion, and petition.) They expand on Mike’s scholarly history of inquiries to understand potential contextual factors that may influence juvenile court processing by applying the school-prison nexus framework on referrals to juvenile court. Using a population of justice-involved youth in Maricopa County, Arizona, results demonstrate that youth who were not enrolled at school were less likely to be diverted, more likely to be petitioned, and less likely to have their cases dismissed by a judge. The findings suggest that juvenile court actors may be perceiving youth who are not enrolled in school (either being unwilling or unable) as needing greater social control from the juvenile court, as they are not under surveillance of another social institution (i.e., school). While race/ethnicity did not significantly predict juvenile court outcomes through direct effects, Goldman and Rodriguez highlight that the absence of racial/ethnic disparities does not imply that racism does not exist, but rather that issues surrounding racialized dispossession, abandonment, and structural violence that are intertwined between schools and juvenile courts cannot be measured through direct racial/ethnic effects. This study addresses critical components in studies of juvenile court outcomes, in that scholars must consider what it means to ‘measure race and ethnicity’ and the way that school matters in juvenile justice decision-making.

In the second study of the collection (Part I – Volume 45, Issue 3), Sara Bryson and Jennifer Peck expand on Mike’s prior research on the individual and interactive effects of a juvenile’s age and race on juvenile court outcomes (see Leiber and Johnson 2008; Leiber et al. 2016) in their study titled “Age, Race, and Offense Type on Receiving a ‘Youth Discount’ in Juvenile Court.” As Mike’s research has found that the “youth discount” in juvenile case processing is not universal across racial/ethnic groups (see Leiber and Johnson 2008), Bryson and Peck investigate whether the age/race relationship is consistent across youth who are charged with a status or delinquent offense. Results indicate the presence of the “youth discount” emerged at petition (but not disposition) decisions, yet race did not condition this relationship across either decision-making stage. Specifically, race had the greatest influence on petition and dispositional outcomes (more so than age and offense type), yet youth charged with a status offense were less likely to have their case dismissed, regardless of their age or race. The findings relate to the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (JJDP) Act, with the authors suggesting that issues of racial disparities and institutionalization of status offenders should not have separate agendas but should be examined jointly in the context of the treatment of youth in the juvenile justice system.

In the third study of the collection (Part I – Volume 45, Issue 3), Ellen Donnelly and Christen Asiedu’s research titled “Meeting the Disproportionate Minority Contact (DMC) Mandate: Lessons from State Assessments of Minority Overrepresentation and Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Juvenile Justice Systems” directly aligns with Mike’s most recognized accomplishments. Racial/ethnic minority overrepresentation in the juvenile justice system, and specifically DMC, was Mike’s primary research interest that often guided his scholarly endeavors. In this article, Donnelly and Asiedu describe how recent revisions to, and enforcement of, the DMC Mandate provides the opportunity to conduct a systematic review and content analysis of state DMC assessments from 1992 to 2019. Analyzing the content of almost 30 years of DMC reports identified several findings, where all reports included some type of quantitative analyses, half of the assessments included a qualitative component, most assessments disaggregated across numerous racial/ethnic groups (versus White to Non-White comparisons), more than five juvenile court outcomes were assessed, and most reports included a statewide assessment of DMC. The authors recommend that practitioners should continue to invest in DMC studies, which aligns with Leiber and Rodriguez’s (2011) suggestion of statewide DMC assessments every five years. Further suggestions include evaluating DMC over longer periods of time, include rigorous measures of race/ethnicity in all studies, and analyze data with multivariate and quasi-experimental methods when able.

The symbolic threat perspective is a theoretical framework that Mike applied throughout his research of juvenile court processing (Leiber et al. 2007; Leiber, Peck, and Beaudry-Cyr 2016; Leiber, Donnelly, and Lu 2021; Leiber and Mack 2003; Leiber and Peck 2020), along with studies that have examined the role of family structure in juvenile justice and delinquency (Leiber and Mack 2003; Leiber, Mack, and Featherstone 2009; Mack et al. 2007; Mack, Peck, and Leiber, 2015). Paralleling and extending this line of research, Patrick Lowery and Sarah Jane Brubaker investigate the intersection of a youth’s race, family status, and community characteristics on judicial disposition outcomes in juvenile court in the next study titled “Exploring Race, Family, and Community Variation in Juvenile Institutionalization through the Perspective of Symbolic Threat” concluding Part I of the special collection (Volume 45, Issue 3). Using data on all adjudicated referrals in Virginia, results reveal consistent (but not complete) support for the symbolic threat perspective. Racial disparities emerged in institutionalization decisions yet having a “middle class” family status did not mitigate this relationship for Black youth. Furthermore, juveniles who resided in communities with concentrated disadvantage and larger percentages of divorced households were more likely to be institutionalized instead of receiving community-based sanctions. Overall, the findings suggest that the symbolic threat perspective is a worthy framework in explaining “back-end” juvenile court outcomes and provides detailed insight into how community factors and familial context translate to greater social control for youth, and especially Black youth.

Mike’s scholarly initiatives to identify and alleviate racial and ethnic disparities in juvenile justice settings are parallel to the study ‘Predictive Validity and Measurement Quality in Juvenile Risk Assessment: Implications for Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Juvenile Justice’ by Christopher Sullivan, James McCafferty, Jamie Newsom, and Amber Mandalari. As this lead article in Part II of the collection (Volume 45, Issue 4) highlights, while the use of juvenile risk and needs assessments (JRNA) has become commonplace within juvenile justice settings in recent years, the predictive validity and performance of these tools across racial/ethnic groups has been mixed. Using data extracted from juvenile case records, the authors examine the utility of the Ohio Youth Assessment System-Residential (OYAS) tool in a Western state that includes a large population of Hispanic youth. Results indicate significant racial/ethnic differences across a variety of measures (i.e., risk and need domains, recidivism), and the measurement analysis reveals that some domains, one being family and living arrangements, did not fit in the overall factor structure when comparing White and Hispanic youth. These findings have important implications for what measures should be included in JRNAs, along with the notion that structured decision-making tools cannot (on their own) eradicate the presence of racial/ethnic disparities in the juvenile justice system, especially if their predictive validity and overall performance are not consistent across various groups of youth.

As Mike was an avid proponent of the inclusion of theory in guiding research, policy, and practice, the next three studies pay homage to this matter, by examining juvenile and criminal justice outcomes for justice-involved youth through the lenses of the liberation hypothesis, symbolic threat perspective, and racial/ethnic threat theory. The study by Peter Lehmann titled ‘Juvenile Transfer Status and the Sentencing of Violent Offenders: A Test of the Liberation Hypothesis’ examines if the ‘juvenile penalty’ and/or ‘youth discount’ appear in criminal court sentencing, and if this occurrence remains depending on the type of offense. In the second article of Part II of the collection (Volume 45, Issue 4), Lehmann frames his study through the liberation hypothesis as a theoretical framework to explain the relationship between legal and extralegal factors with sentencing outcomes. Using data from Florida circuit courts, results show that transferred youths are sentenced more severely than adults when convicted of less serious offenses (e.g., assault/battery, resisting arrest with violence), yet juveniles receive shorter prison terms than their adult counterparts for numerous types of violent offenses (e.g., murder, robbery/carjacking, manslaughter). The findings suggest that juvenile status within the criminal justice system can act as an aggravating or mitigating factor depending on the type of outcome examined (type of sentence versus length of sentence), and limited support for the liberation hypothesis was found regarding sentence length. Therefore, it may be that decision-makers perceive juveniles as amenable to treatment, even if they are waived to adult court for serious and violent offenses. Lehmann’s research theoretically contributes to the literature surrounding youth and case outcomes as a form of social control and suggests that refinements may be needed to investigate under which specific conditions offense type and offense seriousness may play a role in the decisions of judges. Future research could benefit from applying a revised version of the liberation hypothesis to various justice-involved populations and case outcomes.

Another theoretical framework that Mike applied to juvenile court outcomes more recently in his career was the racial/ethnic threat perspective (see Leiber, Peck, and Rodriguez 2016; Leiber, Donnelly, and Lu 2021). To conclude the Part II (Volume 45, Issue 4) of the special collection, Kareem Jordan and Rimonda Maroun expand on the racial/ethnic threat perspective by including the argument that shrinking White populations may also constitute a measure of ‘threat’ and result in greater social control for youth. In their research ‘Examining the Impact of Racial/Ethnic Threat on Juvenile Court Outcomes: A Multi-Level Approach’, they analyzed all delinquent referrals from a Southern state during a five-year timeframe, with results providing some support for the theoretical framework. While the measures of racial threat (e.g., Black population) were less influential on the type of sentence that youth receive (dismissal, probation, residential commitment), the relationship between indicators of ethnic threat and juvenile court outcomes was more consistent with the theoretical perspective. Furthermore, changes in the White population in communities also result in differences in court outcomes for youth. These findings have important theoretical implications for the racial/ethnic perspective, especially if future research considers potential cross-level interaction effects between these measures and court processing outcomes for youth of different racial/ethnic backgrounds.

To conclude, we are excited to share this research with you to honor Mike Leiber. We believe that these articles are a dedication to Mike’s imprint in the areas of juvenile justice and delinquency. We would like to thank Dr. George Burruss, the current Editor of the Journal of Crime and Justice, for providing us with the opportunity to be guest editors for this special collection. We would also like to thank the journal’s former Managing Editor, Jacquelyn Burckley, for working in close liaison with us and Taylor & Francis throughout the completion of the project. Thank you to the reviewers of this special collection, who provided valuable insight and suggestions to improve the quality of each article. Finally, thank you to the readers. We hope that Mike’s work and the articles in this special collection across two issues provides you with the momentum to continue your own research, policy, and practice to make the world a fairer and more equitable place.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jennifer H. Peck

Jennifer H. Peck, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at the University of Central Florida. Her most recent research appears in Justice Quarterly, Crime & Delinquency, and Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice. Her research interests surround racial/ethnic disparities in the juvenile justice system and the treatment of vulnerable populations in criminal justice settings.

Maude Beaudry-Cyr

Maude Beaudry-Cyr, MA, is a graduate student in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs at Northeastern University. Her research has been published in Crime & Delinquency, Justice Quarterly, and Criminal Justice & Behavior. Her research and practical interests center on ensuring greater social justice for youth belonging to marginalized populations through the development and evaluation empirically based public policies, programs, and interventions, especially as they relate to juvenile justice proceedings.