The Impact of Concentrated Affluence and Disadvantage on the Pre-Adjudication Detention Decision: A Status Characteristics Approach

Abstract

Studies of racial disparities in juvenile justice are primarily organized around four theoretical frameworks: focal concerns, racial threat, symbolic threat, and attribution theory. Moreover, juvenile justice research sometimes neglects to pay close attention to the front-end outcome of pre-adjudication detention. Therefore, the present study contends that status characteristics theory may broaden our understanding of how and why disparities in pre-adjudication detention arise. Moreover, the present study seeks to find how juvenile justice disparities in pre-adjudication detention emerge across races, among other social, legal, and community factors. Therefore, the present study focuses on the pre-adjudication detention decisions of judges and probation officers, utilizing quantitative data from the Virginia Department of Juvenile Justice and merged with American Community Survey data.