| Popis: |
This study addresses several issues related to judicial decision-making. An important part of the research was the application of a theoretical perspective -- the labeling/conflict model -- to the analysis of judicial decision-making in the juvenile court. Three propositions concerning the nature of the determinants of case disposition were derived from this theoretical framework. From each proposition, five more specific hypotheses were deduced. The primary concern was to assess the relative importance of the clusters of legal and extra-legal variables. The data consisted of a systematic random sample of cases abstracted from the official court records of two urban juvenile court jurisdictions (N=2,161). The sample was characterized by a large amount of missing data on certain social background variables. This necessitated the subdivision of the analysis in two parts. The first part consisted of the analysis of the subsample with complete information on all fifteen independent variables. In the second part of the analysis, the seven background variables which had a large proportion of missing information were replaced by a single variable reflecting the number of items on which information was missing. Extra-legal variables proved to be relatively more important predictors of the severity of final disposition. However, the standard social disadvantage variables typically used by labeling/conflict theorists to account for differential processing appeared to have poor predictive power. Thus, the empirical findings indicate that the extent to which discriminatory practices exist in formal social control agencies may have been exaggerated by proponents of the labeling/conflict perspective. |
