ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the impact of concentrated disadvantage on juvenile court outcomes. It focuses on whether juveniles living in a concentrated disadvantaged neighborhood experience harsher dispositions than their counterparts. The chapter explores whether disadvantage interacts with race when influencing juvenile court outcomes. It discusses the operationalization of independent, dependent, and control variables. Community-level variables were analyzed based on information obtained from the 2010 US Census and the American Community Survey. Two-level hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) was employed to examine if concentrated disadvantage at the census tract level impacted the juvenile court outcomes. HLM permits the estimation of the impact of individual-level variables across each census tract. Race/ethnicity has been shown to influence juvenile justice processing. Race and ethnicity was coded based on the race/ethnicity of the youth referred to the DJJ. Interactions of race/ethnicity with concentrated disadvantage were estimated in order to assess whether the impact of concentrated disadvantage varies for youth of different races/ethnicities.
