The Juvenile Penalty: A Comparison of Juvenile and Young Adult Sentencing Outcomes in Criminal Court*

Abstract

This study uses criminal court data from the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing (PCS) to investigate the sentencing of juvenile offenders processed in adult criminal court by comparing their sentencing outcomes to those of young adult offenders in similar situations. Because the expanded juvenile exclusion and transfer policies of the 1990s have led to an increase in the number of juveniles convicted in adult courts, we argue that it is critical to better understand the judicial decision making processes involved. We introduce competitive hypotheses on the relative leniency or severity of sentencing outcomes for transferred juveniles and interpret our results with the focal concerns theoretical perspective on sentencing. Our findings indicate that juvenile offenders in adult court are sentenced more severely than their young adult counterparts. Moreover, findings suggest that juvenile status interacts with and conditions the effects of other important sentencing factors including offense type, offense severity and prior criminal record. We discuss these results as they relate to immediate outcomes for transferred juveniles, criminal court processes in general and the broader social implications for juvenile justice policy concerning the transfer of juveniles to criminal court.

Decriminalizing Delinquency: The Effect of Raising the Age of Majority on Juvenile Recidivism

“…Another explanation is that the offenders in our sample received similar rehabilitative services and punishment in the juvenile and adult systems. Indeed, scholars have found mixed evidence on the relative severity of punishment in the juvenile and adult systems (Fagan 1996;Kurlychek and Johnson 2004;Lemmon et al 2005), which leads some to conclude that these two systems differ more in their procedural elements than in their substantive effects (Feld 1999). It is particularly plausible that the subjects in our sample-older adolescents who commit less serious crimes-receive similar treatment in the juvenile and adult systems.…”

The Myths and Realities of Correctional Severity: Evidence from the National Corrections Reporting Program on Sentencing Practices

“…The latter result should come as no surprise. The former is perhaps less expected, but is in fact consistent with a growing sociological literature that suggests courts impose harsher sentences on younger-and particularly younger black male-defendants (Steffensmeier et al 1998, Spohn and Holleran 2000, Ulmer and Johnson 2004, Kurlychek and Johnson 2004. As Bushway and Piehl (2007) point out, at least one state, Virginia, makes the youthfulness of an offender an aggravating factor in its sentencing guidelines.…”

“…For example, much of the work on age and sentencing length cited above (Steffensmeier et al 1998, Ulmer and Johnson 2004, Kurlychek and Johnson 2004 relies on data from a single state, Pennsylvania; Spohn and Halleran (2000) use data from three cities. The results here, derived from data rarely used to address the issue, indicate that the localized findings in these studies hold across a range of states over many years.…”

Sentencing disparities for juvenile offenders sentenced to adult prisons: An individual and contextual analysis

“…More specifically, between 1983 and 1998 there has been a 366 percent increase in the number of juvenile offenders in adult jails and a 218% increase in the number of juveniles in adult prisons (Austin, Dedel, & Gregoriou, 2000). Research also shows that, once in the adult criminal justice system, juveniles are more likely to receive incarceration when compared to youth in the juvenile system (Myers, 2003) and that juveniles are sentenced more harshly than similarly offending young adults (Kurlycheck & Johnson, 2004). Conventional explanations for this increasingly punitive response to juvenile crime often point to youths' involvement in serious violent offenses.…”