On the margin: Who receives a juvenile referral in school and what effect does it have?

Abstract

Involvement with the juvenile justice system carries immense consequences both to detained youth and to society more broadly. Extant research on the “school-to-prison pipeline” has often focused on school disciplinary practices such as suspension with less attention on understanding the impact of school referrals to the juvenile justice system on students. Using novel administrative data from North Carolina, we link 3 years of individual educational and disciplinary infraction records to juvenile justice system records to identify the effect of juvenile justice referrals for school-based offenses on academic and behavioral outcomes. We find that, even for the same offense type and circumstance, relative to students only punished internally in the school, students referred to juvenile justice experience lower academic achievement and increased absenteeism, and are more likely to be involved in future disciplinary infractions and juvenile system contact. We show that these juvenile referrals are not inevitable and instead reflect a series of discretionary choices made by school administrators and law enforcement. Moreover, we find that female students, Black students, and economically disadvantaged students are more likely to receive referrals even for the same offense type and circumstances.