The Political and Religious Context of Juvenile Punishment: A Multilevel Examination of Juvenile Court Dispositions in Three Southern States

We examine the relationship between political and religious context and juvenile court dispositions, including whether case-level indicators of focal concerns are moderated by community politics and religion. Using a sample of 55,328 juvenile defendants across 175 counties in three states, we first employ multilevel modeling to estimate the direct effects of political and religious context on odds of placement. Second, we examine cross-level interactions between political and religious context, on the one hand, and major case-level predictors of placement, on the other. We found mixed support for the hypotheses. While neither political nor religious context were directly associated with odds of placement, religious context moderated several case-level effects. Specifically, findings indicated that violent offenders were punished more harshly in more religious and more religiously homogeneous counties, defendants with a prior record were punished less harshly in more religious and more religiously homogenous counties, Hispanic defendants were punished less harshly in more evangelical counties, and male defendants were punished less harshly in more religiously homogeneous counties. Juvenile punishment varies across different courts and systems, yet major contextual hypotheses for this variation (e.g., minority threat) have received limited empirical support. Our findings indicate that other aspects of community context, most notably religiosity, may moderate the relationship between case-level factors and juvenile court punishment.