Abstracts Category : Other

Investigating the differences between the juvenile and adult court system in Florida: With regards to similar juveniles who were retained versus transferred; focusing on plea bargaining

by Jos R Rijo

This research comprised of 475 juvenile matched pairs, consisted of a juvenile that was retained in the juvenile justice system and a similar counterpart who was transferred over to the adult court system. The juveniles were analyzed in different ways to see which variables, with a special focus on plea bargaining, affected the chance of them receiving an incarceration sentence. The outcome of interest was incarceration to examine whether the treatment vs. punishment orientations of the juvenile and adult court systems mattered. We found a variety of differences when different independent variables were added to the logistic regression. We found that plea bargaining was more likely to lead to incarceration for those juveniles being tried in the adult court system than for their similar matched counterparts who were retained in the juvenile justice system. The likelihood for incarceration differed between other independent variables both in the juvenile justice system and for those juveniles transferred to the adult court system. It appears that having a punitive approach or a treatment oriented approach may have an effect on incarceration. Lastly, we examined how the treatment or punishment emphasis may play out differently with other independent variables in the two different court systems. ( en )