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Diverting and Abdicating Judicial Discretion: Cultural, Political, and Procedural Dynamics in California Juvenile Justice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Alexes Harris
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Abstract

Although tensions between substantive and formal rationality in the adult criminal justice system have received a great deal of attention, the existence of these tensions in the juvenile justice system has received little scholarly consideration. I seek to remedy this gap by exploring how punitive policies associated with the war on crime impact the formal and informal process of justice, the court community and work group, and the exercise of discretion in the juvenile courts. Drawing on qualitative data collected in three juvenile courts in Southern California, I identify the mechanisms by which prosecutors divert judicial discretion from the traditional rehabilitation-oriented bench officers to bench officers who are more accepting of the criminalization of juveniles. In addition, I investigate how and why rehabilitation-oriented bench officers at times abdicate their decisionmaking authority and make rulings that contradict their own assessments. My findings suggest that as the war on crime is extended to youth, the juvenile courts increasingly share the criminal courts' emphasis on offense rather than offender, enhanced prosecutorial power, and adversarial relationships within the court.

Type
Articles of General Interest
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , June 2007 , pp. 387 - 427
Copyright
© 2007 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

An earlier version of this article was presented at the American Sociological Association Conference in August 2003, Atlanta, Georgia. I am grateful for the extensive comments of Bob Emerson and Katherine Beckett on earlier drafts of this article, and for the thoughtful suggestions for the development of the article from Sara Steen, Ross Matsueda, and Joan Graham. I would also like to thank the Law, Society and Justice working group at the University of Washington; the Macarthur Research Network on Juvenile Competency and Culpability; and the LSR editor and reviewers for the critique they provided in developing the ideas in this article.

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