While the US court system has begun to favor rehabilitation over harsh sentences in recent years, questions continue as to whether or not these changes have applied evenly across races. In new research, Patrick Lowery looks at juvenile sentencing data in South Carolina. He finds that while race alone does not significantly predict harsher punishments, black defendants from more disadvantaged backgrounds were likely to be punished more harshly via secure confinement, unless the judges were from a minority background.
African Americans have long been overrepresented in juvenile justice, starting at arrest and all the way through to confinement. Importantly, some scholars argue examining "back-end" processes of juvenile justice and exploring the utility of different theoretical frameworks may aid in explaining African American overrepresentation. Drawing on two similar theoretical explanations, symbolic and racial threat, this study examines whether disparities are explained better by perceived threats to the dominant group norms and values, as well as between-group inequalities (symbolic threat) or Black encroachment into the political and economic resources of the dominant (White) group (racial threat). Notably, this study explores the effects of symbolic and racial threat on reduced and dropped charges within one states' juvenile court. Hierarchical generalized linear models are utilized to analyze official Department of Juvenile Justice files, which were supplemented with American Community Survey data. Results indicated strong support for the symbolic threat perspective but fail to support the tenants of racial threat. Implications of these findings and future directions for research were discussed.
