NCJ Number
212722
Journal
Justice Quarterly Volume: 22 Issue: 4 Dated: December 2005 Pages: 521-539
Date Published
December 2005
Length
19 pages
Annotation
This study examined referrals for all delinquent acts from 65 counties in a northeastern State during 1990 (n=8,289) to identify the factors that influenced the preadjudication detention of juveniles.
Abstract
The focus was on the individual characteristics of juvenile defendants and county-level contextual characteristics. The dependent variable was the detention of a juvenile delinquent prior to adjudication, defined as "the care and custody of a juvenile prior to adjudication in a secure, residential detention facility resulting from a substantiated referral for a delinquent act as opposed to the release of a juvenile to the community prior to further court processing." The independent variables included individual-level measures of the legal and extralegal characteristics of the juvenile delinquents associated with each referral, as well as county-level characteristics. Individual-level characteristics included offense type, the number of prior referrals for new crimes, family income, living arrangement, age, gender, and ethnicity. County-level characteristics were urbanization, racial composition, racial income inequality, crime rate, and detention rate. A two-level hierarchical generalized linear modeling strategy was used for the analysis. The findings showed that although individual characteristics of the juvenile offender were important predictors, much of the variation in preadjudication detention decisions was explained when contextual factors of individual counties were included. Counties with a higher percentage of non-White population were more likely to detain juveniles referred for delinquent acts prior to adjudication. Based on these findings, the authors encourage researchers to explore variables relative to the interaction between contextual variables and other types of extralegal variables when examining factors that influence decisions about preadjudication detention. 2 tables, 44 references, and appended correlation matrix of contextual county-level variables and the correlation matrix of juvenile delinquent characteristics