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Attributions and Institutional Processing: How Focal Concerns Guide Decision-Making in the Juvenile Court

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Abstract

This paper investigates institutional decision-making processes and identify mechanisms that link case processing with subsequent outcomes. Using a sample of juvenile court cases containing probation officers’ narratives, this study investigated court actors’ focal concerns and how such priorities shape attributions about youth. This paper adds to existing sociological work on institutional decision-making by (1) illustrating court actors’ focal concerns that are used to process juvenile cases, (2) identifying decision-making mechanisms that link norms and values to case assessments and outcomes, and (3) theorizing about the ways in which individual and case characteristics can influence institutional decision-making.

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Notes

  1. For a more detailed review of these perspectives and how they relate to racial disproportionally in the juvenile justice system, see Engen et al. (2002).

  2. In the United States, there are generally three types of legal mechanisms used to “waive” youth from juvenile court jurisdiction and transfer them to the adult criminal justice system for prosecution and punishment. The “judicial waiver” system grants juvenile court judges the discretion to determine whether or not youth are appropriate for treatment as juveniles. The “prosecutorial waiver” system grants juvenile court prosecutors the discretion to determine whether youth are appropriate for treatment in the juvenile or criminal justice system. And, the “automatic” or “legislative exclusionary” waivers prescribe by statute which type of youth and offenses are “automatically waived” to criminal court. However, under this system, prosecutors have a large amount of discretion in determining which types of offenses and circumstances to bring against a youth.

  3. Supporting argument for Proposal 21, www.caltax.org/elections/March2000/prop21.htm.

  4. Kent provided eight legal criteria to guide waiver hearings including the seriousness, nature, and extent of the offense, the prospective merit of the complaint, the desirability of prosecuting a case with all defendants together, the sophistication and maturity of the minor, the record and previous history of the minor, and the prospects for protecting the public and rehabilitating the minor.

  5. This coding sheet was a combination of codes used by Bridges and Steen (1998) and key themes that had emerged from a similar research study conducted by the author on judicial discretion in waiver hearings (Harris 2007, 2008).

  6. Because the same coding form was not used by both coders (the aim of one was to codify the narratives, while the aim of the other was to identify longer passages that illustrated the intersection among codes) inter-rater reliability for assigning themes to cases is not an issue.

  7. Juvenile justice processing—like many other institutional settings—does not follow a linear course, but is better characterized as a pinball process. As evident in this sample, not all of the cases that were waiver-eligible or petitioned for transfer had a fitness hearing, nor were all of the cases transferred actually prosecuted in criminal court.

  8. Although, one consideration of the processing decision could be to “get by” (McCleary 1978). That is, the decision to essentially pass the youth onto the adult criminal justice system could be a consideration reliving one’s caseload of a “problem” youth. This could be a downstream consequence (and payoff) considered by probation officers and/or judges. Future observational and interview research with court actors to explore such decisions are needed.

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Acknowledgments

This study was funded in part by the Macarthur Foundation, Research Network on Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice and the University of Washington Institute for Ethnic Studies in the United States. I am very grateful for the research assistance provided by Suzanna Ramirez and Leslie Paik and for the extensive comments of Sara Steen, Robert Crutchfield, and Lauren Krivo on earlier drafts of this paper.

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  1. Department of Sociology, University of Washington, Box 353340, Seattle, WA, 98195-3340, USA

    Alexes Harris

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Harris, A. Attributions and Institutional Processing: How Focal Concerns Guide Decision-Making in the Juvenile Court. Race Soc Probl 1, 243–256 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12552-009-9020-4

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