Court Context and Discrimination: Exploring Biases across Juvenile and Criminal Courts

Abstract

Prior research on juvenile and criminal courts argues that because of contextual differences between these two forums, court actors' perceptions of guilt and culpability may be more influenced by racial/ethnic or gender stereotypes in juvenile courts than in criminal courts, regarding the prosecution of adolescents. In this article, the authors explore this differential bias hypothesis, using both quantitative and qualitative data. After comparing the factors that shape sentencing outcomes across court types, the article turns to qualitative data to understand whether the contextual distinctions between these two types of courts create greater opportunity for discrimination in juvenile court. Neither the quantitative nor qualitative results support this differential bias hypothesis. The quantitative analyses do not find a significantly different effect of race/ethnicity or sex across court types. The qualitative analyses help explain this result; although juvenile courts may expose adolescents to greater risks of being judged according to stereotypes, two contextual features protect adolescents by mitigating the impact of these potential hazards: aggressive and well-organized public defenders in juvenile court and the similarity of case processing during the sentencing phases of juvenile and criminal court.