Taking its cue from Black's The Behavior of Law, this article tests a number of hypotheses concerning the relationship between legal and nonlegal social control in the juvenile justice system. Data collected on a cohort of youth, randomly sampled from eight California counties, is analyzed using a multivariate modeling technique. The results indicate that the quantity of law afforded to offenders at three juvenile justice processing points is dependent, in part, on the amount of nonlegal social control they are already subject to.
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