A plenitude of research on juvenile recidivism exists within the criminological literature, and some scholars have suggested using the Latino paradox and racial invariance thesis to make sense of racial and other disparities in recidivism. However, there is an extremely limited body of literature that tests one or both of these theories on juvenile recidivism, and the research which does exist is limited in its generalizability. To address this gap, we use statewide data from Virginia’s Department of Juvenile Justice over 5 years to test the Latino paradox and racial invariance thesis. Furthermore, given the nested nature of the data (juveniles within counties/independent cities), we merged county-level data from the Virginia State Police and American Community Survey into the data and used two-level hierarchical generalized linear models to analyze the data. Our findings largely supported the Latino paradox and offered some support for the second interpretation of the racial invariance thesis. Implications for theory and recommendations for public policy are discussed.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.