Race, Racial Context, and Withholding Adjudication in Drug Cases: A Multilevel Examination of Juvenile Justice

Abstract

In the Florida juvenile justice system the decision to withhold adjudication can serve as a less punitive action by the courts and could prove to be more beneficial for the youth receiving this concession. The current study examined how individual-level variables and community context, with a focus on race and racial context, may influence the decision to withhold adjudication for all juvenile drug cases adjudicated between the years 1999 and 2001. Using hierarchical generalized linear modeling, the results indicated that Black youth were less likely to have adjudication withheld compared to their White counterparts. However, contextual county-level variables did not explain variation in the overall probability of a county to withhold adjudication, nor did these variables affect the Black-adjudication withheld relationship. The implications of these results for future research on racial threat at the individual and contextual levels are discussed.