Net Widening and Juvenile Criminal Diversion: Heterogeneous Impacts of a Peer Jury Diversion Program

• In Event: Early Stages of the Juvenile Justice System: Diversion and Attitudes Related to the Police

Abstract

Early contact with the juvenile justice system may have lasting impacts on adolescent life trajectories, even for youths who are never re-arrested. Diversion programs attempt to lessen these impacts by assigning less stigmatizing sanctions, often within a restorative justice framework; however, justice systems may respond to diversion pathways by “widening the net,” diverting youth who would have otherwise faced release to a responsible adult instead of formal criminal prosecution (e.g. Macallair & Male, 2004). Youth courts, in which adolescents take on crucial court roles, are a widespread diversion option, processing more than 130,000 cases annually, or approximately 9% of all juvenile court cases (Schneider, 2007). Compared with other diversion program models, youth courts are relatively understudied. Using four years of Chicago juvenile arrest and processing data combined with longitudinal education data, I estimate the impact of having an arrest processed through a peer jury program. Generalized boosted regression is used to simultaneously estimate an arrest’s propensity to be diverted, processed through the traditional criminal system, or adjusted to receive minimal sanction. The propensity scores are then used as inverse probability weights to construct plausibly causal estimates of the impact of the peer jury program compared to the relevant counterfactual.

Author

• Rebecca Hinze-Pifer, University of Chicago