JUVENILE WAIVER AS A MECHANISM OF SOCIAL STRATIFICATION: A FOCUS ON HUMAN CAPITAL*

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12136
• Author: MEGAN BEARS AUGUSTYN,THOMAS A. LOUGHRAN
• Date: 01 May 2017
• Published date: 01 May 2017

JUVENILE WAIVER AS A MECHANISM OF SOCIAL

STRATIFICATION: A FOCUS ON HUMAN CAPITAL∗

MEGAN BEARS AUGUSTYN1and THOMAS A. LOUGHRAN2

1Department of Criminal Justice, University of Texas at San Antonio

2Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of

Maryland—College Park

KEYWORDS: juvenile waiver, human capital, social stratification, education, income

The historic transformations of the criminal justice system must be justified and in-

terpreted through the effects on criminals (Maruna and Immarigeon, 2011). The push

for harsher sentencing policies for juvenile offenders specifically through the use of ju-

venile waiver to criminal court is one such policy that is not well understood in terms

of its effects on offenders, especially in terms of broader outcomes beyond recidivism.

We use data from the Pathways to Desistance Study, which consists of a sample of

adolescent offenders followed for 7 years postadjudication, to investigate the effect ju-

venile waiver has on human capital acquisition and yield among 557 adolescents from

Maricopa County, Arizona. By using various matching specifications, our findings

demonstrate that juveniles transferred to adult court experience no deleterious effects

on human capital in terms of educational acquisition compared with similar youth

retained in the juvenile system, yet they still earn considerably less income 7 years

postadjudication. These results suggest that an important and unintended collateral

consequence of juvenile waiver is an increase in social stratification potentially through

labeling and labor market discrimination.

∗Additional supporting information can be found in the listing for this article in the Wiley Online

Library at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/crim.2017.55.issue-2/issuetoc.

This research relies on data collected from the Pathways to Desistance Study. Support and funding

for the data collection were provided by the Arizona Governor’s Justice Commission, the Center

for Disease Control and Prevention, the MacArthur Foundation, the National Institute on Drug

Abuse (R01 DA 019697 05), the National Institute of Justice (2008-IJ-CX-0023), the Office of

Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (2005-JK-FX-K001), the Pennsylvania Commission

on Crime & Delinquency, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the William Penn Foundation,

and the William T. Grant Foundation. The authors would like to thank Edward Mulvey, Daniel

Nagin, Holly Nyugen, Raymond Paternoster, and Katie Kunitzer for comments on earlier versions

of this article. We also are grateful to D. Wayne Osgood and three anonymous reviewers for their

helpful and insightful comments.

Direct correspondence to Megan Bears Augustyn, Department of Criminal Justice, Univer-

sity of Texas at San Antonio, 501 W. Cesar Chavez Blvd., San Antonio, TX 78207 (e-mail:

megan.augustyn@utsa.edu).

Editors’ note: During the production process for this article, the authors brought to our attention

that Crime & Delinquency had published online an article that also used the Pathways to Desis-

tance data to address the effect of transfer to adult court on education and employment outcomes

(Sharlein, Jeffrey. “Beyond Recidivism: Investigating Comparative Educational and Employment

Outcomes for Adolescents in the Juvenile and Criminal Justice Systems”). The Crime & Delin-

quency article appeared online November 14, 2016, whereas Augustyn and Loughran originally

submitted their article to Criminology January 17, 2016, and we accepted the final version for pub-

lication November 2, 2016. Our reading of the two articles indicates that they are independent

works and that neither is derivative from the other.

C2017 American Society of Criminology doi: 10.1111/1745-9125.12136

CRIMINOLOGY Volume 55 Number 2 405–437 2017 405

406 AUGUSTYN & LOUGHRAN

The relationship between punishment meted through the criminal justice system

and social inequality is a key subject of interest to scholars. For instance, Western

(2006) outlined a strong linkage between incarceration and a range of difficulties

faced by former prisoners in terms of personal, economic, and social costs. To date,

this line of work has primarily been focused on studying the impact of incarceration

on adult offenders, and the results have come to an unequivocal conclusion regard-

ing the detrimental effects of incarceration on subsequent outcomes for offenders,

specifically in terms of wages and wage growth (Western, 2002), access to housing and

employment (Pager, 2003; Western, Kling, and Weiman, 2001), postrelease physical

and mental health problems (Massoglia, 2008; Porter, 2014; Schnittker and John,

2007), and a damaging impact on families (Wakefield and Wildeman, 2014; Wildeman

and Muller, 2012). In fact, Wakefield and Uggen (2010: 388) argued the influence of

punishment is “too big to ignore,” especially when considering mechanisms of social

stratification.

In all likelihood, the profound impact of sanctions on inequality production is not lim-

ited to the increased use of incarceration among adult offenders. We consider the so-

cioeconomic ramifications of another sanctioning policy that expanded substantially over

the past 25 years—juvenile transfer, where youthful offenders are taken out of the ju-

risdiction of the juvenile justice system originally designed to rehabilitate and protect

youth from the negative consequences of punishment and placed into the more punitive

adult or criminal court. A good deal of scholarship has been aimed at considering the

role of transfer on subsequent recidivism (e.g., Bishop and Frazier, 2000; Loughran et al.,

2010; McGowan et al., 2007), but in comparison, a paucity of researchers have noted the

broader effects of transfer on life-course outcomes, including whether this sanctioning ex-

perience exacerbates social stratification among impacted youth. This gap in knowledge

corresponds with the call by Laub (2014: 6) to increase the understanding of the effects of

punishment on youth:

[T]he most fruitful endeavor would be to focus on reducing fundamental inequities in

the United States, while also focusing on how the justice system response exacerbates

existing inequality among young people in America.

In this article, we consider the potential impact of juvenile waiver on human capital

(Becker, 1962; Schultz, 1961), or the stock of knowledge that is highly useful for per-

forming labor and producing economic value. The acquisition of human capital is impor-

tant as it informs one’s social position and drives occupational opportunities and, conse-

quently, social mobility (Cunha et al., 2006; Heckman and Mosso, 2014). Moreover, a lack

of human capital further contributes to social stratification through subsequent income

inequality (Tumin, 1967). We use a unique sample of adolescent offenders for whom we

observe detailed education and labor market outcomes over a period of 7 years to test for

two separate ways in which juvenile waiver may contribute to social stratification. First,

we consider whether juvenile waiver affects human capital acquisition. In other words,

we test whether transferred individuals are hampered in educational attainment (both

traditional and vocational), which is vital to future labor market success. Second, we ex-

amine whether juvenile transfer affects human capital yield, which is the rate of return

on investments afforded by the labor market measured by income. Specifically, we con-

sider whether transfer affects the subsequent aggregate earnings of the individual, along

JUVENILE WAIVER AND HUMAN CAPITAL 407

with several intermediate outcomes such as hours supplied and wage rate, which might

also explain overall income disparities by which waiver may produce income inequality.

Notably, we study the impact of being transferred to criminal court in early adulthood,

a critical period of development in the life course when most individual determinants of

future economic success are typically already acquired and begin to come to economic

fruition (Huggett, Ventura, and Yaron, 2011).

JUVENILE WAIVER

As juvenile violent crime rates were rising in the late 1980s and early 1990s, questions

were raised regarding the effectiveness of the juvenile justice system. As some believed

that the juvenile court failed to deliver on its rehabilitative promises and a new juvenile

superpredator was abound (DiIulio, 1995), there was a push for harsher punishments for

juveniles (Bernard and Kurlychek, 2010). One potential remedy was placing juveniles

(younger than 18 years of age) under the jurisdiction of the adult criminal justice sys-

tem, rather than under the juvenile justice system, after an arrest (McGowan et al., 2007).

Between 1992 and 1999, all but one state expanded legislation to increase the use of juve-

nile waiver by adding statutory exclusions that increased the set of crimes that qualified

for transfer, lowering the eligible age for transfer (e.g., age 10 in Vermont for murder),

reducing the maximum age of jurisdiction for juvenile court (e.g., age 15 in North Car-

olina), and completely lifting age restrictions on transfer for certain types of offenses (e.g.,

Arizona allows the use of discretionary waiver at any age where it is deemed in the best

interest of public safety; Griffin et al., 2011; Hansen, 2001). In fact, most states imple-

mented multiple ways to impose adult sanctions on juvenile offenders including judi-

cial waiver (i.e., mandatory, presumptive, and/or discretionary), prosecutorial discretion

(direct file by the prosecutor), and “once an adult, always an adult policies” (Griffin et al.,

2011). Overall, these changes produced a substantial increase in the rate of transferred

individuals in the late 1990s and early 2000s (Fagan, 2008; Penney and Moretti, 2005). For

instance, after expanding its transfer provisions from discretionary judicial waiver only to

include statutory exclusion, presumptive judicial waiver, direct file, and “once an adult,

always an adult” policies, the number of youths tried in adult court in Arizona nearly

doubled from 565 to 1,076 (or 7 percent of all juvenile cases) in 1998 even though juvenile

crime rates were declining (Children’s Action Alliance [CAA], 2003).

Although 23 states have passed laws attempting to stem the flow of juveniles to criminal

court during the past decade, recent figures from the Bureau of Justice Statistics indicate

that each year an estimated 200,000 youth younger than 18 years of age are prosecuted,

sentenced, and incarcerated in the adult system (Carson and Golinelli, 2014). Although

originally intended as an option to deal with the most serious (violent) and chronic juve-

nile offenders, the expansion of this policy diluted the pool of transferred youth and cast

a wide net, including “a broad range of offenders who are neither particularly serious nor

particularly chronic” (Bishop and Frazier, 2000: 227). Schubert et al. (2010) confirmed

this assertion by using data from two jurisdictions in the United States, which indicated

only 52 percent of their sample of transferred youth were charged with a Part I felony

against a person (felonious assault or felony with a weapon) and the average age at the

first petition to court (either juvenile or criminal) was 15.

Given the push for harsher juvenile punishments, it is remarkable that little is known

about the outcomes of youth who experience juvenile transfer (Mulvey and Schubert,