The Contingent Effect of Race in Juvenile Court Detention Decisions

Abstract

Race and racial stereotypes have long been recognized as influencing the formal social control of youth. Recent analyses have moved beyond identifying disproportionate minority contact (DMC) and toward assessing the contingencies under which race has a lesser or greater impact on juvenile court outcomes. While often confounded, the racial threat and symbolic threat perspectives offer conceptually distinct explanations for DMC. The racial threat perspective proposes that racial disparities in sanctioning are at least partly the result of perceptions among Whites that the minority group threatens their economic and political hegemony. Alternatively, the symbolic threat perspective proposes that intergroup inequality fosters perceptions that minorities are a threat to middle class norms, values, and standards motivating Whites to discriminate. The current study employs hierarchical generalized linear modeling to discern the salience of these two perspectives to understanding racial bias in preadjudication detention. To do this, we merge county-level Census data with data on nearly a decade’s worth of delinquency cases in one Southeastern state. Our results offer limited support for the racial threat perspective but strongly support the symbolic threat perspective in indicating that the impact of race on detention is contingent upon interracial socioeconomic inequality in the community at large.