Upward Departures from Structured Recommendations in Juvenile Court Dispositions: The Intersection of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender

Abstract

Much prior research has examined racial and ethnic disparities in juvenile court interventions, and the evidence suggests that minority youth are sanctioned more harshly than similarly situated White youth. Additionally, scholars have explored the potential negative consequences of juvenile justice contact, and some research indicates that more intensive juvenile court dispositions are associated with increased reoffending, particularly among minority youth. What is unknown, however, is the relevance of race, ethnicity, and gender for these outcomes under a structured disposition guidelines system, which is intended to aid judges’ decision-making and reduce recidivism following justice system intervention. Analysis of youth sanctioned under Florida’s disposition matrix (N = 56,913) shows that Black youth are more likely to receive upward departures from the guideline-recommended sanctions and that the increased likelihood of recidivism resulting from receiving an upward departure is particularly pronounced among minority males. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Keywords:

• Juvenile justice
• race and ethnicity
• recidivism
• guidelines
• labeling theory

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Eric Stewart, Patricia Warren, and Ted Chiricos for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. They would also like to thank Mark Russell and other staff at the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice for providing the data required to conduct this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Mark A. Greenwald joined the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice in 2002 and is currently the director of Research and Planning. He received his bachelor’s degree in criminology and criminal justice from Florida State University, a master’s degree in justice policy and management from Florida Atlantic University and is currently a doctoral student in the Florida State University College of Criminology and Criminal Justice. He supervises 24 professional researchers and data integrity officers throughout Florida. He oversees the analysis, production, and publication of all department research and evaluation projects.

Notes

1 The north region was selected as the reference category in light of anecdotal evidence as well as some initial exploratory analyses which suggested that juvenile courts in the north region of Florida are disproportionately likely to make use of above-guidelines dispositions.

2 A dichotomous variable indicating whether or not the youth was given secure residential commitment—the most intensive sanction available to judges—was selected over a more precise multicategory measure of disposition because, among cases that received upward departures (N = 1692), the only sanctions that were assigned by the judges included day treatment (N = 88), nonsecure residential commitment (N = 801), and secure residential commitment (N = 803). No youth who received an upward departure was assigned to diversion or probation. Thus, the use of any other coding strategy for this control variable results in the omission of disposition categories due to collinearity.

3 Much prior research on recidivism makes use of Cox Proportional Hazards models rather than ordinary regression analysis. This strategy allows researchers to consider not only whether the offender recidivated but also the timing of the recidivism. Unfortunately, these data only contain a single binary measure of whether each youth was rearrested within 12 months of completing the disposition, thus precluding the possibility of conducting this type of analysis.

4 It should be emphasized that, while the dataset includes a very large number of cases, only 3% of these cases are above-guidelines dispositions, and only 914 of the above-guidelines cases are Black males. Thus, the three-way interaction of interest involves only 1.6% of all the youth in the sample. While the use of a stricter statistical significance level (e.g. .01 or .001) would generally be preferable in this context, due to these sample size limitations we rely on the traditional alpha level of .05 in order to avoid Type II error.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peter S. Lehmann

Peter S. Lehmann is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Sam Houston State University. His research interests include juvenile justice and delinquency, racial and ethnic disparities in sentencing, and public opinion on crime and criminal justice policy. His recent work has focused on the predictors and consequences of justice system involvement for juvenile offenders. His recently published work has appeared in Justice Quarterly, Crime & Delinquency, Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice, and other journals.

Ryan C. Meldrum

Ryan C. Meldrum is an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida International University. His current research interests include juvenile and criminal justice case processing, prosecutorial discretion in decision-making, child and adolescent development, and the intergenerational continuity of antisocial behavior. His recent research has appeared in Developmental Psychology, Intelligence, Journal of Youth and Adolescence, Journal of Criminal Justice, and other outlets.