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Applying Black’s Theory of Law to Juvenile Justice Decisions

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Abstract

An abundance of research has examined the impact of legal and extra-legal variables on juvenile justice processing. Much of this research, whether explicitly or implicitly, investigates the extent to which extra-legal variables, such as race, ethnicity, and gender, impact decision making. Some of these studies have also considered how social situational factors shape outcomes. However, there remains a need for theoretical development to improve our understanding of how the social structure of a case influences processing. Informed by an interpretation of Black’s theory of law, the current study investigated the influence of family structure, school performance, prosocial activities, and demographic variables on intake and adjudication decisions in delinquency cases in a mid-Atlantic state. Overall, we found moderate support for Black’s theory. Findings suggested that race, gender, and age consistently conditioned juvenile justice processing, but that social situational variables had inconsistent effects on intake and adjudication. Implications for theory, policy, and practice are discussed.

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Notes

  1. In a later publication, Black (2011) provided an empirical measure of crime seriousness, effectively combining both social and legal elements into a single concept which he termed ‘social time.’ He conceptualized the origin of conflict as ‘movement of social [relational, vertical, and cultural] time,’ which is the “the dynamic aspect of social life” (see Phillips & Cooney, 2015, p. 727; Phillips & Richardson, 2016). Black (2011) contends that movements of social time (e.g., offense seriousness) depend both on the act itself as well as the social characteristics of the offender and victim and their relationship to each other. Thus, according to Black, “seriousness” is not solely about the act itself, but who did the act to whom, their level of intimacy, etc.

  2. We recognize that there is some overlap between Black’s theoretical concepts and the measures used (e.g., in prior studies, race has been used as a measure of stratification and culture, and age has been used as a measure of vertical location/stratification). According to Michalski (2014), who has published extensively on Black’s theory, “specification of the degree and the manner in which the different statuses overlap or operate independently or conjointly have not yet been determined with any degree of precision” (p. 6). Further, according to Horwitz (1983, p. 381), “It is likely that the propositions will not be universally true and so will have to be modified to reflect variation in the conditions under which they hold.” Given the practical realities of juvenile justice practice, we made subjective decisions regarding the operationalization of Black’s concepts.

  3. Bootstrapping refers to the practice of issuing detention orders through findings of contempt of court, violations of probation, or violations of court orders for underlying status offenses or minor delinquent behavior (Sherman, 2005). Some evidence suggests more females are detained prior to adjudication for these types of charges than their male counterparts (Espinosa, Sorensen, & Lopez, 2013).

  4. The measures were taken from the most recent YASI completed for the sake of simplicity and consistency (some youth have more than one YASI on file via prior court referrals). It is difficult to discern the exact timing of when the YASI was administered, though many were either on file from prior cases or conducted early in the process (intake).

  5. Since the unit of analysis is the case, as with many studies on juvenile intakes, it is possible for youth to be involved in more than one case (especially over the span of three years). However, if they had multiple charges, these were aggregated at the case level. For example, there were some youth with as many as 50+ charges for one case, however these were restructured to represent only one case in the final dataset. We did not find any significant differences across models or issues with intra-class correlation.

  6. In separate models (not shown here), we controlled for year and did not receive any significantly different results.

  7. Court summons were collapsed into a category with petitions as they both represent a formal action to initiate court proceedings (i.e., more law than dismissal or diversion but less law than detention). Court summons comprised only 5% of the cases.

  8. Detention requires a petition; this variable differentiates between detention with petition and petition only/court summons.

  9. Race and ethnicity were treated as mutually exclusive categories (i.e., youth who self-identify as Hispanic were coded as Hispanic).

  10. ‘Prosocial activities’ measures whether the youth is involved in prosocial community organizations, school activities, or structured recreational activities at the time of the YASI.

  11. Detention is used as an independent variable in the adjudication model only.

  12. The upper age of juvenile court jurisdiction is 17, but extended jurisdiction allows supervision until age 21.

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  1. Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA, 23529, USA

    Allison T. Chappell & Scott R. Maggard

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Chappell, A.T., Maggard, S.R. Applying Black’s Theory of Law to Juvenile Justice Decisions. Am J Crim Just 46, 461–482 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-020-09566-w

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