Juvenility and Punishment: Sentencing Juveniles in Adult Criminal Court*

Abstract

The study outlined in this article addressed a key limitation of prior research on the punishment of juveniles transferred to adult court by employing propensity score matching techniques to create more comparable samples of juvenile and young adult offenders. Using recent data from the Maryland State Commission on Criminal Sentencing Policy, it tested competing theoretical propositions about the salience of juvenile status in adult court. Findings indicate that even after rigorous statistical matching procedures, juvenile offenders are punished more severely than their young adult counterparts. We found no evidence that this “juvenile penalty” is exacerbated by an offender's race or gender, but it does vary starkly across offense type and mode of transfer, being driven primarily by drug crimes and discretionary waivers. The import of these findings is discussed as they relate to the future of juvenile justice policy regarding the continued use of juvenile transfer to adult court.

Recent Developments and New Directions in Sentencing Research

“…Paternoster and Brame (2008) recently applied this method to assess offender race/victim race disparity in death penalty sentences in Maryland. Kurlychek and Johnson (2010) recently used propensity scoring methods to study the sentencing of juveniles in adult court. Given critiques of traditional regression methods in connection with issues of selection and omitted variable bias, we may see increased use of propensity scoring methods to compare sentencing outcomes of different kinds of cases and offenders.…”

Reassessing and Redirecting Research on Race and Sentencing

“…Berk et al, 2005). Some recent research that focuses on the role of juvenile waivers to adult courts provides a nice example how propensity score matching can enhance the capacity to make group comparisons in sentencing research (Kurlychek & Johnson, 2010), but I am not aware of any research that has supplemented the typical regression-based approach with such methods. It would be refreshing to see the modal approach to studying race and sentencing enhanced by adopting alternative estimation procedures for identifying group differences.…”

Juvenile Waiver as a Mechanism of Social Stratification: A Focus on Human Capital*

“…First, our results indicated that waived individuals are incarcerated for a larger proportion of time during the time frame when we assessed aggregate earnings. Although it is possible that removal from the community during this time frame is linked with the initial petition to court and harsher punishments for waived offenders compared with similarly situated counterparts (see Kurlychek and Johnson, , ), it is also possible that removal from the community 6 and 7 years after the initial offense is a result of newly incurred punishments associated with increased rates of offending after waiver as the findings from some research suggest that waiver has a criminogenic effect at least among some offenders (Loughran et al., ; for a review see Zane, Welsh, and Mears, ). Either way, removal from the community in and of itself is a barrier to legal employment and stymies income generation.…”