Summary Of Overrepresentation In The Juvenile Justice System

Introduction
The topic of this article is the overrepresentation of minority individuals in the juvenile justice system. Through the criminal justice system there is a problem of overrepresentation of minority individuals and the juvenile justice system is not an exception. In the adult criminal justice system focal concerns are often to blame for the overrepresentation of minority individuals, while the juvenile justice system has seen little explanation. This articles major objective is to use organizational coupling to explain why there is a minority overrepresentation in the juvenile justice system. The minor objective is to explain how cultural stereotypes effect organizational decision making. The author focuses on loose coupling or …show more content…
For the juvenile justice system many organizations exist and many have competing goals. It is argued that because the juvenile justice system is composed of so many different organizations that it is a nonsystem and that the only thing that makes it a system is the flow of cases form the domain of one organization to another. This is a process that begins at intake and extends to judicial disposition with the organizations only working together with the common goal of managing their client population and response to offenders. Competing goals exist because each organizations have specialized expertise and unique perspectives and interests, which differ from the expertise and orientations of personnel in other organizations that they share the responsibility of responding to offenders. Often times these organizations make cases for the response that seems most fitting and tolerates or accommodates input from others. Competing goals can and does cause interorganizational conflict between organizations within the juvenile justice system. Even organization rationality struggles in the juvenile justice system. Often times when these organizations do work together they fail to come to a rational or consistent decision. This is because bits and pieces of each organization’s goal and combined into one decision to work towards each organizations …show more content…
These sources would be juvenile court case files over a period of 21 years, but only looking at each individual’s case once. The author was very clear on how data was obtained and what variables were used in the research. Data was taken on sociodemographic variables: race, age, and gender. Legal variables were also taken into account. The author looked at the number of prior contacts the juvenile had with the system, if the juvenile was already under formal court authority or supervision at the time of the current offense, crime severity (misdemeanor or felony), and the offense type (property, person, drug, and public order). Two contextual variables were used. The first being family structure, whether the juvenile belonged to a two parent household or single parent house hold. The second contextual variable was school status which factored in whether the child was attending school without behavioral infections, attending school with behavioral infractions, or had dropped out of school all together. Dependent variables were the outcomes at each stage: intake, formal charges, adjudicatory stage, and judicial disposition. The author was less than clear about whether the study was cross sectional or longitudinal. This had to be derived by using context