“…Blalock’s (1967) minority group threat theory, Tittle and Curran’s (1988) symbolic threat perspective, and Sampson and Laub’s (1993) structural inequality perspective, for example, are three frameworks that detail the macro-level contingencies of the increased social control of youth in juvenile justice proceedings, especially minority youth. Today, juvenile justice scholars continue to invoke one or more of these three macro-level perspectives to explain the overrepresentation of minority youth at intake (Leiber & Peck, 2019; Leiber et al, 2016), petitioning (Lowery, 2018), adjudication (Maroun, 2019), and secure confinement (Lowery & Burrow, 2019; Lowery et al, 2018). Most macro-level studies use county-level data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau to operationalize the theoretical tenets of each perspective and thus define the structural conditions of each court jurisdiction (Hayes-Smith & Hayes-Smith, 2009; Leiber et al, 2016; Thomas et al, 2013).…”