Structure Matters: Predicting Juvenile Justice System Behavior
October 2015
ISBN-13: 9781593328047 / Hardcover
Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.5 / x, 164 pages
Cooke examines the value of ecological structures in predicting juvenile justice system behavior, specifically during risk assessment, prosecution, and sanction determination. Her analysis considers religious establishments, public housing sites, and retail liquor stores as the ecological indicators and views them as stigmatizing and determinant of system behavior Through aggregating ecological, legal, and demographic data by zip code, the examination determined (a) associations between social ecology and juvenile justice decision points and (b) the degree to which juvenile probation officers and judges were more stringent and judgmental toward delinquents from neighborhoods with greater concentrations of the analyzed ecological structures.