The Effects of Juvenile Transfer to Criminal Court on Incarceration Decisions

Abstract

Juvenile waiver laws allow youthful defendants who have not reached the age of adulthood to be transferred out of the juvenile court and into adult criminal court where they are subject to prosecution as if they were an adult. Using data collected from 37 urban counties, this study expands on a recent study by Kurlychek and Johnson (2004) by comparing the pretrial detention and imprisonment outcomes of juveniles transferred to criminal court to those received by adult defendants 29 years of age or younger. This study also examines the potential effects of county context on incarceration rates of the county court communities. Findings revealed that transferred juveniles are disadvantaged at sentencing stage, and that incarceration decisions regarding young defendants are shaped by the context of the county in which they are processed.

Keywords:

• court community
• juvenile
• legal decision
• transfer
• waiver

Notes

1. Juveniles can be transferred to criminal court several different ways. Judicial waiver is the process by which a juvenile court judge may, at his discretion, transfer a juvenile to criminal court. Statutory exclusion, or legislative waiver, is the method by which state legislatures have mandated the exclusion of certain offenses from juvenile court jurisdiction. Direct file, or prosecutorial discretion, authorizes prosecutors to file certain cases in either juvenile or criminal court, under a concurrent jurisdiction statute.

2. In some jurisdictions (for example, California), juvenile defendants sentenced in criminal court begin their sentence in a juvenile facility and are then moved to an adult facility once they reach the age of majority. Since the data set allowed for discriminating between juveniles who were decertified (transferred back to juvenile court) and those juveniles who began adult sentences in juvenile facilities, the latter were included in the measure sentenced to prison.

3. A measure of age was initially included in the models, but it was dropped due to collinearity with transferred juvenile.

4. Sampson and Laub (1993) referred to this measure as “underclass poverty,” and include percent families earning less than $5,000 income. Since the Census Bureau changed the measure (< $10,000) for the 2000 census, the alternative measure was used in the creation of the scale used in this study.

5. It could be argued that a selection effect could be operating between the pretrial and conviction stage, however, ethnographic studies of the courts have uncovered that the two proceedings typically occur in two different types of courts (for example, magistrate and district) and more importantly, in front of two different judges (Eisenstein & Jacob, 1977; Eisenstein et al., 1988).

6. The formula provided by Hanushek and Jackson (1977) was used to transform the coefficient estimates into predicted probabilities. All the other predictors in the models were held at their means.