Drawing on Feld’s (1991) “justice by geography” thesis, we examined whether juvenile court outcomes and case-level influences on those outcomes varied across urban and rural courts. Using a sample of 60,068 juvenile referrals across 66 counties in one state, we estimated direct effects of urbanism on detention, petition, adjudication, and judicial placement, as well as cross-level interactions between urbanism and several case-level factors for each outcome. We found limited support for the hypotheses. First, findings indicated that odds of detention were significantly greater in more urban courts, but indicated no differences in other outcomes. Second, findings also indicated greater extralegal differences (race, sex, and age) in more urban courts—contrary to hypotheses. Taken together, findings highlight the localized yet complex nature of juvenile justice processing and emphasize the need for additional multilevel research assessing the role of other contextual factors as potential sources of variation across macrosocial units.
AguinisH.GottfredsonR. K.JooH. (2013). Best-practice recommendations for defining, identifying, and handling outliers. Organizational Research Methods, 16(2), 270–301.
2.
AiC.NortonE. C. (2003). Interaction terms in logit and probit models. Economics Letters, 80(1), 123–129.
3.
AlbonettiC. (1986). Criminality, prosecutorial screening, and uncertainty: Toward a theory of discretionary decision making in felony case processing. Criminology, 24(4), 623–644.
4.
AlbonettiC. (1987). Prosecutorial discretion: The effects of uncertainty. Law & Society Review, 21(2), 291–313.
5.
AlbonettiC. (1991). An integration of theories to explain judicial discretion. Social Problems, 38(2), 247–266.
6.
ArazanC. L.BalesW. D.BlombergT. G. (2019). Courtroom context and sentencing. American Journal of Criminal Justice, 44(23), 23–44.
7.
ArmstrongG. S.RodriguezN. (2005). Effects of individual and contextual characteristics on preadjudication detention of juvenile delinquents. Justice Quarterly, 22(4), 521–539.
8.
AustinT. L. (1981). The influence of court location on type of criminal sentence: The rural-urban factor. Journal of Criminal Justice, 9(4), 305–316.
9.
BartonW. H. (2012). Detention. In FeldB. C.BishopD. M. (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of juvenile crime and juvenile justice (pp. 636–663). Oxford University Press.
10.
BishopD. M.LeiberM. J. (2012). Racial and ethnic differences in delinquency and justice system responses. In FeldB. C.BishopD. M. (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of juvenile crime and juvenile justice (pp. 445–484). Oxford University Press.
11.
BishopD. M.LeiberM. J.JohnsonJ. (2010). Contexts of decision making in the juvenile justice system: An organizational approach to understanding minority overrepresentation. Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice, 8(3), 213–233.
12.
BlackmonB.CainD. S.LivermoreM. (2015). Juvenile court dispositions in the deep south: Examining the concept of justice by geography. Journal of Social Sciences, 11(2), 82–90.
BrayT. M.SampleL. L.Kempf-LeonardK. (2005). Justice by geography: Racial disparity and juvenile courts. In HawkinsD. F.Kempf-LeonardK. (Eds.), Our children, their children: Confronting racial and ethnic differences in American juvenile justice (pp. 270–290). University of Chicago Press.
15.
BridgesG. S.CrutchfieldR. D.SimpsonE. E. (1987). Crime, social structure and criminal punishment: White and non-white rates of imprisonment. Social Problems, 34(4), 345–361.
16.
BridgesG. S.SteenS. (1998). Racial disparities in official assessments of juvenile offenders: Attributional stereotypes as mediating mechanism. American Sociological Review, 63(4), 554–580.
17.
BrittC. L. (2000). Social context and racial disparities in punishment decisions. Justice Quarterly, 17(4), 707–732.
18.
BushwayS. D.JohnsonB. D.SlocumL. A. (2007). Is the magic still there? The use of the Heckman two-step correction for selection bias in criminology. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 23(2), 151–178.
19.
DeJongC.JacksonK. C. (1998). Putting race into context: Race, juvenile justice processing, and urbanization. Justice Quarterly, 15(3), 487–504.
20.
DixonJ. (1995). The organizational context of criminal sentencing. American Journal of Sociology, 100(5), 1157–1198.
21.
EisensteinJ.FlemmingR. B.NardulliP. F. (1988). The contours of justice: Communities and their courts. Little Brown & Co.
22.
ElwertF.WinshipC. (2014). Endogenous selection bas: The problem of conditioning on a collider variable. Annual Review of Sociology, 40, 31–53.
23.
EngenR. L.SteenS.BridgesG. S. (2002). Racial disparities in the punishment of youth: A theoretical and empirical assessment of the literature. Social Problems, 49(2), 194–220.
24.
FarrellA.WardG.RousseauD. (2009). Race effects of representation among federal court workers: Does black workforce representation reduce sentencing disparities?The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 623(1), 121–133.
25.
FeldB. C. (1991). Justice by geography: Urban, suburban, and rural variations in juvenile justice administration. Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, 82(1), 156–210.
26.
FeldB. C. (1993). Criminalizing the American juvenile court. Crime and Justice, 17, 197–280.
27.
FeldB. C. (2003). The politics of race and juvenile justice: The “due process revolution” and the conservative reaction. Justice Quarterly, 20(4), 765–800.
28.
FreiburgerT. L.JordanK. L. (2011). A multilevel analysis of race on the decision to petition a case in the juvenile court. Race and Justice, 1(2), 185–201.
29.
HaganJ. (1977). Criminal justice in rural and urban communities: A study of the bureaucratization of justice. Social Forces, 55(3), 597–612.
30.
HaganJ. (1989). Why is there so little criminal justice theory? Neglected macro- and micro-level links between organization and power. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 26(2), 116–135.
31.
HarrisA. (2009). Attributions and institutional processing: How focal concerns guide decision-making in the juvenile court. Race and Social Problems, 1(4), 243–256.
32.
HaynesS. H.RubackB.CusickG. R. (2010). Courtroom workgroups and sentencing: The effects of similarity, proximity, and stability. Crime & Delinquency, 56(1), 126–161.
33.
HesterR. (2017). Judicial rotation as centripetal force: Sentencing in the court communities of South Carolina. Criminology, 55(1), 205–235.
34.
In re Gault, 387 U.S. 1 (1967).
35.
JohnsonB. D. (2005). Contextual disparities in guidelines departures: Courtroom social contexts, guidelines compliance, and extralegal disparities in criminal sentencing. Criminology, 43, 761–796.
36.
JohnsonB. D. (2006). The multilevel context of criminal sentencing: Integrating judge- and county-level influences. Criminology, 44(2), 259–298.
37.
JohnsonB. D. (2010). Multilevel analysis in the study of crime and justice. In PiqueroA. R.WeisburdD. (Eds.), Handbook of quantitative criminology (pp. 615–648). Springer.
38.
JohnsonB. D.UlmerJ. T.KramerJ. H. (2008). The social context of guidelines circumvention: The case of federal district courts. Criminology, 46(3), 737–783.
39.
KempfK. L.AustinR. L. (1986). Older and more recent evidence on racial discrimination in sentencing. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 2(1), 29–48.
40.
KempfK. L.DeckerS. H.BingR. L. (1990). An analysis of apparent disparities in the handling of Black youth within Missouri’s juvenile justice system. University of Missouri–St. Louis.
41.
Kempf-LeonardK.SontheimerH. (1995). The role of race in juvenile justice in Pennsylvania. In Kempf-LeonardK.PopeC. E.FeyerhermW. H. (Eds.), Minorities in juvenile justice (pp. 98–127). Sage.
42.
KrisbergB.LitskyP.SchwartzI. (1984). Youth in confinement: Justice by geography. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 21(2), 153–181.
43.
LeiberM. J.PeckJ. H. (2019). Clarifying the theoretical tenets of the symbolic threat perspective. Justice Quarterly, 37(6), 1040–1066.
44.
LongJ. S.MustilloS. A. (2018). Using predictions and marginal effects to compare groups in regression models for binary outcomes. Sociological Methods & Research. Advanced online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/0049124118799374
45.
LoweryP. G.BurrowJ. D. (2019). Concentrated disadvantage, racial disparities, and juvenile institutionalization within the context of attribution theory. Criminal Justice Studies, 32(4), 330–355.
46.
LoweryP. G.BurrowJ. D.KaminskiR. J. (2018). A multilevel test of the racial threat hypothesis in one state’s juvenile court. Crime & Delinquency, 64(1), 53–87.
47.
LuY. (2018). Rural and urban differences in gender-sentencing patterns of Pennsylvania. Rural sociology, 83(2), 402–430.
48.
LynchM. (2019). Focally concerned about focal concerns: A conceptual and methodological critique of sentencing disparities research. Justice Quarterly, 36(7), 1148–1175.
49.
MaupinJ. R.Bond-MaupinL. S. (1999). Detention decision-making in a predominantly Hispanic region: Rural and non-rural differences. Juvenile and Family Court Journal, 50(3), 11–23.
50.
MearsD. P.CochranJ. C.StultsB. J.GreenmanS. J.BhatiA. S.GreenwaldM. A. (2014). The “true” juvenile offender: Age effects and juvenile court sentencing. Criminology, 52(2), 169–194.
51.
MetcalfeC. (2016). The role of courtroom workgroups in felony case dispositions: An analysis of workgroup familiarity and similarly. Law & Society Review, 50(3), 637–673.
52.
MizeT. D. (2019). Best practices for estimating interpreting, and presenting nonlinear interaction effects. Sociological Science, 6, 81–117.
53.
MustilloS. A.LizardoO. A.McVeighR. M. (2018). Editors comment: A few guidelines for quantitative submissions. American Sociological Review, 83(6), 1281–1283.
54.
MyersM. A.TalaricoS. M. (1986a). Urban justice, rural injustice? Urbanization and its effect on sentencing. Criminology, 24(2), 367–391.
55.
MyersM. A.TalaricoS. M. (1986b). The social contexts of racial discrimination in sentencing. Social Problems, 33(3), 236–251.
56.
MyersM. A.TalaricoS. M. (1987). The Social contexts of criminal sentencing. Springer.
57.
NelkenD. (2010). Comparative criminal justice: Making sense of difference. Sage.
58.
PeckJ. H.JenningsW. G. (2016). A critical examination of “being Black” in the juvenile justice system. Law and Human Behavior, 40(3), 219–232.
59.
PeckJ. H.LeiberM. J.Beaudry-CyrM. (2019). Expanding the applicability of Sampson and Laub’s theory of inequality and social control: A multilevel examination. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 46(6), 902–919.
60.
RaudenbushS. W.ByrkA. S. (2002). Hierarchical linear models: Applications and data analysis methods (2nd ed.). Sage.
61.
RodriguezN. (2008). A multilevel analysis of juvenile court processes: The importance of community characteristics. National Institute of Justice.
62.
RodriguezN. (2010). The cumulative effect of race and ethnicity in juvenile court outcomes and why preadjudication detention matters. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 47(3), 391–413.
63.
SampsonR. J.LaubJ. H. (1993). Structural variations in juvenile court processing: Inequality, the underclass, and social control. Law & Society Review, 27(2), 285–311.
64.
SavelsbergJ. J. (2006). Sociological theory in the study of sentencing: Lighthouse for a traveler between contents. In DeflemM. (Ed.), Sociological theory and criminological research: Views from Europe and the United States (pp. 183–202). Elsevier.
65.
ShamirR. (2007). Weber, Max (1864-1920). In ClarkD. S. (Ed.), Encyclopedia of law & society: American and global perspectives (pp. 1574–1577). Sage.
66.
ShookJ. J.GoodkindS. A. (2009). Racial disproportionality in juvenile transfer: The interaction of race and geography in pretrial detention for violent and serious offenses. Race and Social Problems, 1(4), 257–266.
67.
StolzenbergR. M.RellesD. A. (1997). Tools for intuition about sample selection bias and its correction. American Sociological Review, 62(3), 494–507.
68.
TaylorA.GuevaraL.BoydL. M.BrownR. A. (2012). Race, geography, and juvenile justice: An exploration of the liberation hypothesis. Race and Justice, 2(2), 114–137.
69.
TeppermanL. (1973). The effect of court size on organization and procedure. Canadian Review of Sociology, 19(4), 346–365.
70.
TittleC. R.CurranD. A. (1988). Contingencies for dispositional disparities in juvenile justice. Social Forces, 67(1), 23–58.
71.
UlmerJ. T. (2012). Recent developments and new directions in sentencing research. Justice Quarterly, 29(1), 1–40.
72.
UlmerJ. T. (2019). Criminal courts as inhabited institutions: Making sense of difference and similarity in sentencing. Crime and Justice, 48, 483–522.
73.
UlmerJ. T.JohnsonB. D. (2017). Organizational conformity and punishment: Federal court communities and judge-initiated guidelines departures. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 107(2), 253–292.
74.
van WingerdenS.WilsemJ.JohnsonB. D. (2016). Offender’s personal circumstances and punishment: Toward a more refined model for the explanation of sentencing disparities. Justice Quarterly, 33(1), 100–133.
75.
WeberM. (1954). Max Weber on law in economy and society (
RhensteinM. , Trans). Harvard University Press.
76.
ZaneS. N. (2018). Exploring the minority threat hypothesis for juveniles in criminal court: Static versus dynamic threat and diffuse versus targeted effects. Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice, 16(4), 418–441.
77.
ZaneS. N.MearsD. P.WelshB. C. (2020). How universal is disproportionate minority contact? An examination of racial and ethnic disparities in juvenile justice processing across four states. Justice Quarterly, 37(5), 817–841.
78.
ZaneS. N.SingerS. I.WelshB. C. (2021). The right to a good defense: Investigating the influence of attorney type across urban counties for juveniles in criminal court. Criminal Justice Policy Review, 32(2), 162–192.
79.
ZimringF. E. (2014). Minority overrepresentation: On causes and partial cures. In ZimringF. E.TannenhausD. S. (Eds.), Choosing the future for American juvenile justice (pp. 169–186). New York University Press.
