Understanding the Subgroup Complexities of Transfer: The Impact of Juvenile Race and Gender on Waiver Decisions

While prior research has consistently found the presence of extralegal disparities in juvenile justice decision-making, less research has investigated the combined effects of a juvenile’s race and gender on the decision to transfer youth to adult court. The current study examines both the individual and joint influence of race and gender on transfer decisions of all judicial waiver-eligible youth in a Northeast state from 2004 to 2014. Results indicate that Black males had the highest likelihood of being judicially waived, followed by White males, then Black females. White females had the greatest chance of being retained in juvenile court. The findings have important implications for juvenile court processing by informing researchers, practitioners, and policyholders about potential reform efforts that target judicial waiver.

Spare the Needle but Not the Punishment: The Incarceration of Waived Youth in Texas Prisons

The primary purpose of judicial waiver is to impose more severe sanctions on offenders than are available in juvenile court. This article explores two dimensions of sanction severity, sentence length and actual time served, to determine if juveniles waived to adult court do receive more severe sanctions. Data were collected on all youth waived to adult court from 1981-1993 and sentenced to prison (n = 946). Juveniles in this population consistently received longer sentences than are available in juvenile court. When actual time served was taken into consideration, however, these youth rarely served more lengthy sentences than are available in juvenile court, serving an average of only 27% of their original sentence.

Legislative Policies toward the Serious Juvenile Offender

The problems of waiving juvenile court jurisdiction and transferring young offenders to the criminal courts for prosecution as adults raise virtually every issue of juvenile jurisprudence and pose a variety of substantive and procedural questions for legislatures. This article critically examines the prevailing judicial waiver process and statutes that require juvenile court judges to make individualized determina tions as to a youth's amenability to treatment and danger to society. Such decisions simply cannot be made with an acceptable degree of accuracy using current methods of clinical prediction; the broad dis cretion given judges in making transfer decisions results in abuse, in consistency, and discriminatory application that undermine the fairness and predictability of the judicial process. Although it is not possible, at present, to predict clinically a youth's amenability to treat ment or his dangerousness, a legislature may use actuarial tables with various combinations of present offenses and past records to identify those juveniles who pose the greatest threat to public safety and re quire longer confinement than is available within the juvenile justice system. The article contends that a legislative redefinition of juvenile court jurisdiction that automatically excludes certain youths from the juvenile justice system on the basis of their present offenses and past records not only identifies more accurately those youths who should be transferred, but also, by eliminating judicial discretion, reduces the dangers of discrimination and increases predictability. The article also suggests some of the beneficial effects on juvenile and adult sentenc ing policies that may follow from legislatively mandated "automatic adulthood."