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Abstract
In recent decades, the number of juvenile defendants transferred to criminal court has increased dramatically, in large measure due to an expansion of available transfer mechanisms. While transfer traditionally occurred by judicial waiver of jurisdiction, alternatives have emerged and eclipsed judicial waiver as the primary route to adult court. The present study examines whether the mechanism of waiver—judicial, prosecutorial, or legislative—affects sentencing outcomes for juvenile defendants transferred to adult court. Results from multilevel models that control for state-level variation indicate that sentencing outcomes are inextricably tied to method of transfer. Most notably, non-criminal outcomes are most likely for cases that arrive in criminal court by legislative waiver. This suggests that legislative waiver is an ineffective means of sending juvenile offenders to criminal court, and provides some empirical support for the notion that judicial waiver is the most appropriate method of transfer.
Notes
1 The author also located a master’s thesis that addresses the influence of transfer mechanism (Samuelson, Citation2010). Findings indicated that juveniles transferred by judicial and prosecutorial waiver were more likely to be incarcerated compared to juveniles transferred by legislative waiver. The study also found that youth transferred by prosecutorial waiver received shorter sentences compared to legislative waiver.
2 Four out of seven prior studies that address transfer mechanism used this data-set, including all prior multi-jurisdictional research (Howell & Hutto, Citation2012; Jordan & Freiburger, Citation2010; Rainville, Citation2008; Samuelson, Citation2010). None of these studies employed multilevel modeling, however.
3 Additional missing data (n = 283) was also dropped rather than imputed.
4 While cases returned to juvenile court could still result in harsh sanctions, the focus of the present analysis is the criminal court disposition (as opposed to “final” disposition).
5 The original measure for race also included American Indian or Alaskan Native (n = 28), Asian (n = 66), and Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander (n = 21). Rather than drop these cases from the analysis, they were included in the reference category. Sensitivity analysis revealed no significant differences if these cases were dropped or combined as a separate “other race” category.
6 The STATA user-written command “GLAMM” was used to perform the multilevel analyses.
7 Random coefficient models are not used since the primary focus of this analysis is on the type of transfer used, which does not vary within every level-2 cluster (i.e. some states only have one transfer mechanism, some have two, and some contain all three).
8 The structure of the data imposes some limitations on the number of meaningful level-2 predictors that can be included in the model (Bell, Morgan, Kromey, & Ferron, Citation2010). With 19 level-2 units, more than five covariates risks estimation errors. As described above, state-level predictors were selected to assess possible confounding influences of jurisdictional differences in types of transfer, sentencing policies (guidelines), and age of criminal majority.
9 This finding is not universal, however. In their study of juvenile offenders and matched adults in Maryland, Kurlychek and Johnson (Citation2010, p. 747) found that the majority of juvenile drug offenders reached criminal court by judicial waiver, while “most statutory exclusions occur for select violent offenses.”
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Steven N. Zane
Steven N. Zane is a doctoral student in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University. He holds a J.D. from Boston College Law School. His research interests include judicial decision-making, juvenile transfer policy, and evidence-based social policy. Recent and forthcoming articles appear in the British Journal of Criminology, the Journal of Criminal Justice, and Criminology & Public Policy.