Court Context and Discrimination: Exploring Biases across Juvenile and Criminal Courts

Abstract

Prior research on juvenile and criminal courts argues that because of contextual differences between these two forums, court actors' perceptions of guilt and culpability may be more influenced by racial/ethnic or gender stereotypes in juvenile courts than in criminal courts, regarding the prosecution of adolescents. In this article, the authors explore this differential bias hypothesis, using both quantitative and qualitative data. After comparing the factors that shape sentencing outcomes across court types, the article turns to qualitative data to understand whether the contextual distinctions between these two types of courts create greater opportunity for discrimination in juvenile court. Neither the quantitative nor qualitative results support this differential bias hypothesis. The quantitative analyses do not find a significantly different effect of race/ethnicity or sex across court types. The qualitative analyses help explain this result; although juvenile courts may expose adolescents to greater risks of being judged according to stereotypes, two contextual features protect adolescents by mitigating the impact of these potential hazards: aggressive and well-organized public defenders in juvenile court and the similarity of case processing during the sentencing phases of juvenile and criminal court.

A Multilevel Test of the Racial Threat Hypothesis in One State’s Juvenile Court

“…Notwithstanding, this research seems to demonstrate that context matters insofar as processes within the juvenile courts that mitigate some of the harsher aspects of juvenile adjudications. For example, Kupchik and Harvey (2007) found little evidence for racial bias; however, there was some evidence that contextual factors, such as highly trained defense attorneys, shielded many minority offenders from the vagaries of illusory “therapeutic care” (pp. 431-432).…”

Noise, voice and silencing during immigrant court-case performances in Swedish district courts

“…Concerns about the handling of ‘immigrant’ court cases exist not only in Sweden. Patterns indicating different forms of ‘ethnic discrimination’ within the judicial field are discussed in, for instance, the US (Banks, 2004; Kupchik and Harvey, 2007; Zatz, 2000) and in Great Britain (Feilzer and Hood, 2004; Jones and Singer, 2008). Like the Swedish findings mentioned earlier (Diesen et al., 2005; Sarnecki, 2006a), they point at a statistic tendency for an unfair treatment of immigrants and/or ethnic minorities – or groups based on skin colour – in court and hearing contexts.…”

A Preliminary Assessment of the Impact of Plea Bargaining Among a Sample of Waiver-Eligible Offenders

“…In view that only a total of seven juvenile offenders were waived to adult court from this country during the time frame under investigation, we could not examine whether there were any substantive differences in the plea bargaining process for these two groups of offenders. Recent waiver research has emphasized the importance of examining outcomes across multiple offender groups in order to gauge the true import of policies and practices (Kupchik & Harvey, 2007;Kurlychek & Johnson, 2010). According to these studies, there must be a systematic examination of court outcomes in order to avoid a ''winnowing'' process that would reduce sample to only the ''worst of the worst'' (Lanza-Kaduce et al, 1999).…”