Contextualizing the political economy of juvenile court decision-making

Abstract

There is a long tradition in juvenile justice research to examine and try to explain the influence of so-called "extra-legal" variables on juvenile court outcome. Differences between the treatment of girls and boys, and between girls and boys of different racial and ethnic backgrounds, have been the focus of extensive research. However, there still exists a dearth of research relating contextual conditions of the court environment and structure to juvenile court decisions. The purpose of this study is to use Hasenfeld and Cheung's (1978) seminal study on the political economy of court decisions as the point of departure and adapt it to individual-level, more recent juvenile court data, while merging it with publicly available context data.The goal of this dissertation is to examine how dimensions of the political economy affect juvenile court decisions, and whether they can be used to explain variation in gender and race/ethnicity effects across one state in the United States. On the one hand, this study tries to ascertain how the effects of gender and race/ethnicity vary across jurisdictions. On the other hand, it aims to identify relevant dimensions of a court's environment that could help explain observed gender and race/ethnicity differences. Individual-level data on all juveniles referred to juvenile court in Florida from 2009-2014 is used and merged with contextual data from the U.S. Census Bureau, as well as other publicly available data sources. Logistic regression analysis, with fixed effects for categorical context variables, is employed to examine the effect of gender and race/ ethnicity across jurisdiction at the stages of transfer, adjudication, and disposition decisions. Results suggest a direct effect of context variables across all stages of the juvenile justice process, and relevant interactions with gender and race/ethnicity at most stages. The political economy perspective allowed for the identification of important stratifying variables, and the current analysis suggests that differences between girls and boys, and girls and boys of differing racial/ethnic background, are generally less salient in metropolitan circuits, and more salient in rural, disadvantaged circuits. Directions for future research on the political economy perspective, as well as implications for juvenile justice research and policy in general, are also discussed, before a general conclusion is offered.--Author's abstract