Pathways to Adult Court: Does the Road Traveled Impact the Final Destination?

Abstract

The current study examines whether the process by which a juvenile reaches adult court influences later sentencing outcomes. Previous research has found that juveniles who were judicially waived to adult court faced a penalty at sentencing and suggested that this bias may be due to either 1) increased assessments of risk based on the offender's young age, or 2) a stigmatization of the offender by the transfer process itself. By examining a population of 16- and 17-year-old felony defendants in a state that automatically defines such youth as adults, this research directly tested these notions. Findings revealed that in this state, 16- and 17-year-old defendants actually received more lenient sentences than a matched sample of 18- and 19-year-old offenders, which is contrary to what would be expected if the previously found juvenile penalty was related to assessments of risk based on age. Moreover, in a second analysis comparing judicially waived youth (ages 13 to 15) in this same state to the 16- and 17-year-old defendants, it was found that the waived youth received significantly more severe sentences. The results are interpreted as support for the stigmatization hypothesis, suggesting that the process by which a youth reaches adult court does have significant meaning for later court outcomes.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Barnes

, & Franz

R. S.

(1989). Questionably adult: Determinants and effects of the juvenile waiver decision. Justice Quarterly, 6(1), 117–135.

Bernard

T. J.

, & Kurlychek

M. C.

(2010). The cycle of juvenile justice (2nd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.

Bishop

D. M.

(2000). Juvenile offender in the adult criminal justice system. In Tonry

(Ed.), Crime and justice: A review of research (pp. 81–167). Ch-cago: University of Chicago Press.

Bishop

D. M.

Frazier

C. E.

, & Henretta

J. C.

(1989). Prosecutorial waiver: Case study of a questionable reform. Crime and Delinquency, 35(2), 179–201.

Blackstone

(1769). Commentaries on the laws of England (Vol. IV). Oxford, England: Clarendon Press.

Blumstein

Cohen

Roth

J. A.

, & Visher

C. A.

(Eds.). (1986). Criminal careers and “career criminals” (Vols. 1–2). Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Bortner

M. A.

(1986). Traditional rhetoric, organizational realities: Remand of juveniles to adult court. Crime and Delinquency 32 (1), 53–73.

Champion

D. J.

(1989). Teenage felons and waiver hearings: Some recent trends, 1980–1988. Crime and Delinquency, 35(4), 577–585.

Clement

M. J.

(1997). A five-year study of juvenile waiver and adult sentences: Implications for policy. Criminal Justice Policy Review, 8(2–3), 201–219.

10.

Emerson

R. M.

(1969). Judging delinquents: Context and process in juvenile court. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co.

11.

Emerson

R. M.

(1983). Holistic effects in social control decision-making. Law and Society Review, 17(3), 425–455.

12.

Fagan

(1991). The comparative impacts of juvenile and criminal court sanctions on adolescent offenders (Report). Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice.

13.

Fagan

(1995). Separating the men from the boys: The comparative advantage of juvenile versus criminal court sanctions on recidivism among adolescent felony offenders. In Howell

J. C.

Krisberg

Hawkins

J. D.

, & Wilson

J. J.

(Eds.), A sourcebook: Serious, violent, and chronic juvenile offenders (pp. 238–260). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

14.

Fagan

(1996). The comparative advantage of juvenile versus criminal court sanctions on recidivism among adolescent felony offenders. Law and Policy, 18(1–2), 77–114.

15.

Fagan

Forst

, & Vivona

T. S.

(1987). Racial determinants of the judicial transfer decision: Prosecuting violent youth in criminal court. Crime and Delinquency, 33, 259–286.

16.

Feeley

M. M.

, & Lazerson

M. H.

(1983). Police-prosecutor relationships: An interorganizational perspective. In Boyum

K. O.

& Mather

(Eds.), Empirical theories about courts. New York: Longman.

17.

Feld

B. C.

(1987). The juvenile court meets the principle of the offense: Legislative changes in juvenile waiver statutes. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 78, 471.

18.

Giedd

Blumenthal

Jeffries

Castellanos

Liu

Zijdenbos

Paus

Evans

, & Rapoport

(1999). Brain development during childhood and adolescence: A longitudinal MRI study. Nature Neuroscience, 2(10), 861–863.

19.

Hamparian

D. M.

Estep

L. K.

Muntean

Priestine

R. R.

Swisher

R. G.

Wallace

P. L.

, & White

J. L.

(1982). Major issues in juvenile justice information and training: Youth in adult courts— between two worlds. Washington, DC: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

20.

Howell

(1996). Juvenile transfers to the criminal justice system: State of the art. Law and Policy, 18, 17–60.

21.

Kupchik

(2004). Youthfulness, responsibility and punishment: Admonishing adolescents in criminal court. Punishment and Society, 6(2), 149–173.

22.

Kupchik

(2006). Judging juveniles: Prosecuting adolescents in adult and juvenile courts. New York: New York University Press.

23.

Kurlychek

, & Johnson

B. D.

(2004). The juvenile penalty: A comparison of juvenile and young adult sentencing outcomes in adult criminal court. Criminology, 42(2), 485–517.

24.

Kurlychek

, & Johnson

B. D.

(2010). Juvenility and punishment: Sentencing juveniles in adult criminal court. Criminology, 48(3), 725–758.

25.

Lizotte

(1978). Extralegal factors in Chicago's criminal courts: Testing the conflict model of criminal justice. Social Problems, 25, 564–580.

26.

McCord

Widom

C. S.

, & Crowell

N. A.

(Eds.). (2001). Juvenile crime, juvenile justice. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

27.

Myers

D. L.

(2005). Boys among men: Trying and sentencing juveniles as adults. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishing.

28.

Osgood

D. W.

Finken

L. L.

, & McMorris

B. J.

(2002). Analyzing multipleitem measures of crime and deviance II: Tobit regression analysis of transformed scores. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 18(4), 319–347.

29.

Ostrom

Kleiman

Cheesman

II Hansen

R. M.

, & Kauder

N. B.

(2002). Offender risk assessment in Virginia: A three-stage evaluation. Williamsburg, VA: National Center for State Courts.

30.

Podkopacz

M. R.

, & Feld

B. C.

(1995). Judicial waiver policy and practice: Persistence, seriousness and race. Law and Inequality: A Journal of Theory and Practice, 14, 73–178.

31.

Puzzanchera

C. M.

(2003). Fact sheet: Delinquency cases waived to adult criminal court, 1990–1999. Washington, DC: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

32.

Reddington

F. P.

, & Sapp

A. D.

(1997). Juveniles in adult prisons: Problems and prospects. Journal of Crime and Justice, 20(2), 139–152.

33.

Rosenbaum

P. R.

, & Rubin

D. D.

(1983). The central role of the propensity score in observational studies for causal effects. Biometrika, 70(1), 41–55.

34.

Rudman

Hartstone

Fagan

, & Moore

(1986). Violent youth in adult court: Processes and punishment. Crime and Delinquency, 32(1), 75–96.

35.

Singer

S. I.

(1996). Recriminalizing delinquency: Violent juvenile crime and juvenile justice reform. New York: Cambridge University Press.

36.

Snyder

, & Sickmund

(2006). Juvenile offenders and victims: A national report. Washington, DC: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

37.

Steffensmeier

Ulmer

, & Kramer

(1998). The interaction of race, gender, and age in criminal sentencing: The punishment cost of being young, black and male. Criminology, 36(4), 763–797.

38.

Steiner

(2009). The effects of juvenile transfer to criminal court on incarceration decisions. Justice Quarterly, 26(1), 77–106.

39.

Sudnow

(1965). Normal crimes: Sociological features of the penal code in a public defender office. Social Problems, 12(3), 255–275.

40.

Thaler

(1978). Punishing the innocent: The need for due process and the presumption of innocence prior to trial. Wisconsin Law Review, 2, 441–484.

41.

Tobin

(1958). Estimation of relationships for limited dependent variables. Econometrica, 26(1), 24–36.

42.

Torbet

Gable

Hurst

Montgomery

Szymanski

, & Thomas

(1996). State responses to serious and violent juvenile crime. Washington, DC: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

43.

Tuthill

(1907). Report of the Cook County juvenile court. Chicago: Cook County Juvenile Court.

44.

Winner

Lanza-Kaduce

Bishop

D. M.

Frazier

C.E.

(1997). The transfer of juveniles to criminal court: Reexamining recidivism over the long term. Crime and Delinquency, 43(4), 548–563.

45.

Zatz

(2000). The convergence of race, ethnicity, gender, and class on court decisionmaking: Looking toward the 21st century. Criminal Justice: The National Institute of Justice Journal, 3, 503–552.