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Legal, Individual, and Environmental Predictors of Court Disposition in a Sample of Serious Adolescent Offenders

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Law and Human Behavior

Abstract

Historically, the juvenile court has been expected to consider each youth’s distinct rehabilitative needs in the dispositional decision-making process, rather than focusing on legal factors alone. This study examines the extent to which demographic, psychological, contextual, and legal factors, independently predict dispositional outcomes (i.e., probation vs. confinement) within two juvenile court jurisdictions (Philadelphia, Phoenix). The sample consists of 1,355 14- to 18-year-old male and female juvenile offenders adjudicated of a serious criminal offense. Results suggest that legal factors have the strongest influence on disposition in both jurisdictions. For example, a higher number of prior court referrals is associated with an increased likelihood of secure confinement in both jurisdictions. Juveniles adjudicated of violent offenses are more likely to receive secure confinement in Phoenix, but are more likely to be placed on probation in Philadelphia. Race is unrelated to dispositional outcome, but, males are consistently more likely than females to be placed in secure confinement. Importantly, individual factors (e.g., developmental maturity) generally were not powerful independent predictors of disposition. Finally, an examination of the predictors of juvenile versus adult court transfer in Phoenix indicated that males, older juveniles, and those with a violent adjudicated charge were more likely to be transferred to adult court, while juveniles scoring high on responsibility as well as those juveniles with an alcohol dependence diagnosis were more likely to be retained in juvenile court.

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Notes

  1. Specifically, for the regression analyses, we created three dichotomous variables. Blacks were scored 1 for black, 0 for Hispanic, and -1 for white. Hispanics were scored 1 for Hispanic, 0 for Black, and -1 for white. Whites were scored 1 for white, and -1 for black and Hispanic. Alternative coding procedures yielded similar substantive conclusions with regard to the null race/ethnicity effects, nor did the alternative coding procedures alter other coefficient estimates.

  2. Approximately 89% of the participants had collateral information, with the biological mother being the modal informant (67%).

  3. Because of the number of tests conducted in Table 1, we also employed a Bonferroni correction, which is a correction made to the alpha level when multiple statistical tests/comparisons are being performed simultaneously. The Bonferroni correction is given by alpha/n, where alpha is the significance level (.05 in our case) and n is the total number of comparisons (28 in our case). This calculation adjusts the alpha level from the standard p < .05 to p < .001. When this correction is made to the comparisons found in Table 1 (where we originally reported 20 significant differences across the two sites), four comparisons are no longer significant at the Bonferroni corrected alpha level (age, prior court referrals, alcohol abuse, grades), and sixteen remain significant. In short, the substantive conclusions do not change very much with such a correction.

  4. A reviewer correctly noted that only four of the eight significant effects reported are consistent predictors across the sites, and that this may be due to increased statistical power in the combined sample. We note that given the large number of predictor variables, it is not surprising that for the individual site analyses only a handful of predictors were significant. Thus, the fact that eight variables were significant in the full sample is likely due to increased power from a larger sample size. At the same time, when we estimated the effect of the independent variables in a block fashion across sites (i.e., demographic only, legal only, individual-general only, individual-psychological only, and environmental only), we were led to substantively similar conclusions. That is, independent variables that were significant in the block fashion were also significant in the full estimation, and conversely independent variables that were not significant in the block fashion were not significant in the full estimation.

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Acknowledgments

Pathways to Desistance, the study on which this study is based, is supported by grants from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, the National Institute of Justice, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the William T. Grant Foundation the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the William Penn Foundation, the Pennsylvania Council on Crime and Delinquency, and the Arizona Juvenile Justice Commission. We are grateful to our collaborators, Robert Brame, Sonia Cota-Robles, George Knight, Sandra Losoya, Edward Mulvey, and Carol Schubert for their comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript, and to the many individuals responsible for the data collection and preparation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Psychology & Social Behavior, 3355 Social Ecology II, University of California, Irvine, 92697, Irvine, CA, USA

    Elizabeth Cauffman

  2. University of Florida, 201 Walker Hall, P.O. Box 115950, 32611-5950, Gainesville, Florida, USA

    Alex R. Piquero

  3. Psychology & Social Behavior, 3325 Social Ecology II, University of California, Irvine, 92697, Irvine, CA, USA

    Eva Kimonis

  4. Department of Psychology, Temple University, 19122, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Laurence Steinberg

  5. Department of Psychology, Arizona State University, Box 871104, 85287, Tempe, AZ, USA

    Laurie Chassin

  6. School of Public Health, Columbia University, 600 West 168th Street, 10032, New York, NY, USA

    Jeffery Fagan

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  1. Elizabeth Cauffman
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  2. Alex R. Piquero
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  3. Eva Kimonis
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  4. Laurence Steinberg
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Correspondence to Elizabeth Cauffman.

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Cauffman, E., Piquero, A.R., Kimonis, E. et al. Legal, Individual, and Environmental Predictors of Court Disposition in a Sample of Serious Adolescent Offenders. Law Hum Behav 31, 519–535 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10979-006-9076-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10979-006-9076-2

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