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Abstract
The relationship between race/ethnicity, community dynamics, and juvenile court processes has long been established. Prior research has relied on city‐ or county‐level measures of community characteristics (e.g., racial composition, poverty) to examine how racial groups are processed within juvenile courts. To date, no study has utilized finer scale measures of geographic areas to examine how characteristics of juveniles’ communities impact court decisions. By utilizing official juvenile court data from a city in the southwest, this study draws upon attribution theory to examine how economic and crime community‐level measures directly and indirectly influence detention outcomes. Findings reveal that the effect of race and ethnicity in detention outcomes varies across communities, and the effect of ethnicity in detention decisions is mediated by economic community‐level measures. The theoretical and policy implications of the study findings are discussed.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Editor Chet Britt, Elizabeth Eells, and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
Notes
1. While examining whether the effect of race/ethnicity in court outcomes is interrelated with other extralegal factors (e.g., gender, age) and legal criteria (e.g., prior record) is certainly important (see Bishop & Frazier, Citation1996; Frazier & Bishop, Citation1985), the focus here is on the interactive effects that may exist between race/ethnicity at the individual‐level and economic and crime conditions at the community‐level.
2. According to the racial threat hypothesis, when comparing judicial decisions across multiple jurisdictions, judges will likely treat racial/ethnic minorities more or less punitively given the differences in levels of perceived threat to power. Extending such a theoretical framework to a study of a single jurisdiction would require the following assumption: a judge perceives threat according to the racial/ethnicity make‐up of juveniles’ communities. Wooldredge and Thistlethwaite (Citation2004) provide a similar explanation and discussion on why it is inappropriate to rely on racial threat theory in studies of single jurisdictions.
3. While Bridges and Steen (Citation1998) used three measures of context (i.e., court, probation officers’ race, and probation officer), their focus was on differences between and not within courts.
4. In this particular study, analytical focus is on one jurisdiction (i.e., city) and not on tribal or federal jurisdictions. While it possible that American Indians are treated differently across different types of jurisdictions, the focus of this study is not to examine how American Indians are processed in various jurisdictions but rather on their likelihood of detention relative to other racial and ethnic groups in one juvenile court system.
5. These data exclude violations of probation, warrants, traffic violations, and status offenses.
6. Citations involve traffic or curfew violations, where grading by the County Attorney’s Office is not necessary. Citations often result in informal processing (i.e., diversion).
7. It is highly probable that detention outcomes differ for physical and paper referrals. Any examination of detention outcomes which does not account for important differences in case processing (e.g., difference in time before juveniles appear in court for an advisory hearing) should be suspect.
8. The operationalization of this variable may result in the masking of some effects (i.e., offense type or offense severity) on detention outcomes.
9. Maricopa County Juvenile Court policy states that juveniles who score a 12 or higher on the detention screening tool be automatically detained. Scores below 12 are discretionary, and thus detention staff make decisions on a case‐by‐case basis on whether to detain or release a juvenile prior to the detention hearing.
10. Unfortunately, this study was unable to control for psychological risk factors and family‐related variables.
11. This is by no means discounting the importance of other larger and smaller measures of community context (e.g., counties and census tracts) in studies of juvenile court decision‐making processes. In this study, zip code is used as a proxy for community given the important role that zip codes play in this particular juvenile court.
12. Kane (Citation2006) presents the importance of examining linear and non‐linear terms in studies of police practices and crime. In order to avoid possible mis‐specification of relationships between community characteristics and detention outcomes, this technique is also utilized in this study.
13. These models were also estimated with grand‐mean centered Level 1 predictors. It should be noted there were no substantial statistical differences between group mean‐centered and grand mean‐centered estimates.
14. Significance tests in this study are used to demonstrate the strength of the relationship between variables.
15. Because the Black coefficient showed statistically significant variance, indicating that its effect on detention varied across communities, it was left unconstrained and allowed to vary across zip codes. Interactions were conducted between Blacks, extralegal, and legal criteria in order to better estimate the effect of Blacks in detention outcomes, yet none of the interactions were significant predictors of the detention decision.
16. It is important to note that models were estimated with and without non‐linear terms. When models excluded the square terms, the effects of unemployment rate and poverty rate were statistically significant, yielding a positive effect on mean rate of detention.
17. All other variables were held constant at their mean.
18. Full models are available from the author upon request.
19. Relative Rate Index (RRI) is the new recommended method for measuring disproportionate minority contact as required by the 2002 Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act 2002 (JJDP). This measure is not only more accurate but also more useful in determining the extent to which racial and ethnic minorities are processed at higher rates than White juveniles. See Butts (Citation2003) for a full review of RRI.