Juvenile Sentencing: A Mixed-Methods Approach

Abstract

How do socially relevant attributes in luence juvenile criminal sentencing? While judicial decisions should, in principle, be fully based on legally relevant factors such as the seriousness of the offense and the defendant's criminal record, I ask whether and how extralegal characteristics related to the adolescent's position in structural relations affect the decision-making process. I propose a mixed-methods design to study mechanisms of criminal sentencing. Using data from a representative sample of the São Paulo juvenile justice system records, I estimate mixed-effects logistic models to assess the probability of being sentenced to coninement given certain extralegal attributes, while controlling for legally relevant variables. Interaction effects show that adolescents registered as full-time students and classi ied as drug users are more likely to be sentenced to con inement than their counterparts, even when the arraignment is the same. The second step involved weekly visits to the juvenile courthouse in São Paulo over four months to observe judicial hearings. Prosecutors are central to the decision-making process. The standard decision-making mechanism is based on police documents and legally relevant information. When there is a rupture in the de inition of the situation (usually when non-minority defendants enter the courtroom), a new mechanism emerges and more lenient decisions are made.

From an offender-based to an offense-based justice: Changes in sentencing patterns in the juvenile justice system in São Paulo from 1990 to 2006

“…These documents are all filed at Complexo do Tatuapé. The unit of analysis of the empirical part of this study, therefore, refers to the population of adolescents who were institutionalised for the first time in a FEBEM-SP centre between 1990 and 2006 (See Alvarez et al, 2009;Vinuto, 2014;Oliveira, 2017Oliveira, , 2019.…”