To date most of the research on the juvenile justice system has focused on individual-level case processing, examining variations within a given jurisdiction that could be explained by either case or defendant-specific characteristics. Probably the most common topic has emphasized how "extra-legal" factors such as race, social class, and gender influence court decisioning. This tradition of work has added substantially to our understanding of juvenile justice and the workings of the court. The picture, however, is necessarily incomplete. Despite the vast number of studies on the micro causes of juvenile justice processing (i.e., within court variation), there are few efforts that have examined its macro causes; that is, differences among court systems that can be attributed to the characteristics of the communities in which they reside. The study being undertaken by Dr. Sampson represents a major advance in current research on official reactions to juvenile delinquency by shifting from micro level concerns to macro level interests in examining how environmental and structural factors affect the operations of the juvenile courts. Specifically, the research asks the question: how do features of the community-- especially urbanization, population density, heterogeneity, concentration of poverty, and court-organizational structure-- influence rates of referral, formal petitioning, secure pre- disposition detention, release, and placement. These five dimensions of justice court processing, classified by crime type, age, race, and sex, will be analyzed in conjunction with social, economic, demographic, and court organizational data for over 300 counties in 1985 and 1990. Both stability and change in the macrostructural context of juvenile courts will be examined as they bear on theories of the underclass and social dislocations, political economy, conflict, and social control. Through rigorous analysis of how contextual factors shape juvenile court processing across jurisdictions and over time, this study is likely to produce important new knowledge that will establish the research agenda for years to come.
