An economic model of the intake disposition of juvenile offenders

Journal of Public Economics 32 (1987) 79-99. North-Holland

AN ECONOMIC MODEL OF THE INTAKE DISPOSITION OF JUVENILE OFFENDERS

Kevin LANG

University of California, Irvine, CA 92717, USA

National Bureuu of Econotn~c Research, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA

Duran BELL*

University of California, Irvine, CA 92717, USA

Received September 1985, revised version received October 1986

In Becker’s model, punishment is not constrained by a normative ‘socially acceptable’ level. Carr-Hill and Stern show that the justice system requires a concept of ‘appropriate’ punishment which places either an upper bound on punishment or a cost of deviating from the ‘appropriate’ penalty. We estimate the social loss function implicitly minimized by police intake officers processing of juvenile offenders. The calculation of social cost appears to ignore both the private costs of punishment and the seriousness of the crime. This suggests that concepts of rights and appropriate penalties affect decisions and provide a nonbinding upper bound on punishment.

I. Introduction

In his seminal article, Becker (1968) argues that law enforcement agents should and do select levels of detection and punishment that minimize the social loss associated with crime. In Becker’s view, they should weigh the costs of conviction and punishment, including the cost of punishment to the offender, against the social cost of crime. While there have been a considerable number of studies of the effect of punishment and detection on the crime rate, as well as studies of the allocation of police expenditures in terms of costs and benefits, there have been no attempts to ascertain the extent to which the factors identified by Becker’s mode1 are operative in the determination of punishment.

In this paper we estimate the social loss function implicitly minimized in

*This is our second joint paper. In order to emphasize our joint authorship of both papers, we are alternating the order in which our names are listed. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the American Economics Association meetings, San Francisco, Dec. 1983. We are grateful to Ken Small, Nick Stern, Ann Witte and two anonymous referees for helpful comments and to Paul Hunt for able research assistance. This study was financed in part by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Department of Justice under award number 81- JN-AX-0006. The opinions expressed in this article are strictly those of the authors.

004772727/87/$3.50 cl 1987, Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. (North-Holland)

80 K. Lank and D. Bell, Intake disposition of juvenile oflenders

the ‘intake’ processing of a sample of juvenile offenders. The intake process is of special interest because it requires police officers or probation officers to assign all arrested juveniles into treatment categories, varying from simple ‘counsel and release’ to a ‘detain petition’ (pre-trial detention).

The model which is estimated includes Becker’s model as a special case

but permits consideration of two modifications of that model as well. We find that the observed treatment of the offenders is consistent with the view that a social loss function is being minimized, where the effect of punishment on the crime rate and on the social cost of punishment are taken into account together with the direct social harm due to offenses. Hence, it appears that Becker’s ‘economic approach’ to the analysis of crime and punishment is descriptive of actual decision processes within the system of juvenile justice. However, our investigation does not sustain Becker’s sugges- tion that the calculation of social loss includes the private cost of punishment incurred by the offender.

2. The model

Becker has argued that social loss should be represented by

L = D( 0) + C( 0, p) + hpf’0.

where L is the social loss from crime, D is the direct social damage from crime net of the consumption benefits to the offender, C is the cost of catching and convicting offenders, ,f’ is the private cost of punishment, b is a factor translating private into social costs of punishment, p is the probability of detection and 0 is the offense rate. It should be noted that in the event that penalties consist only of monetary transfers from offenders to the general public, the parameter b is zero. Moreover, b will be lower, ceteris paribus, when the public gains utility from knowing about, or observing, the punishment of offenders.

Becker’s characterization of social loss has been criticized by Carr-Hill and Stern (1979) and Stern (1978) for failing to place any normative upper bound on the socially acceptable penalty. Following Becker, they argue that a monetary line involves only a transfer payment and, hence, no net social cost. However, since the detection of offenders is costly, a system using only fines can always obtain a given level of deterrence at lower cost by reducing the probability of detection and increasing the level of punishment. The optimal policy, then, is to apply an indefinitely large tine while expending few resources on detection.

Since we do not observe infinitely large fines, there must be other constraints which limit their size. Polinsky and Shave11 (1979) argue that if individuals are risk averse and if the ‘crime’ is sometimes desirable, as in the

K. Lang and D. Bell, Intake disposition of juvenile offenders 81

case of double-parking, a low detections probability/high tine combination is the least expensive way of deterring crime, but it may impose an inefficiently high cost on those committing desirable crimes. It is unlikely that any of the crimes committed in our sample could be construed as potentially desirable. Nevertheless, the Polinsky/Shavell argument suggests that the validity of a

modified Becker model should be tested on empirical grounds, the focus of this paper.

Walker (1972) has suggested that punishment is limited by notions of an ‘appropriate’ punishment. Individuals have rights. While the commission of a crime entails the loss of rights, the loss of rights is commensurate with the crime. Thus, the notion of rights places a limit on the punishment an offender may receive. In addition, the existence of rights suggests that not all consumption should be treated equally. In particular, the cost to the offender of being deprived of property or liberty is not a cost to society since the offender has forfeited his right to this consumption. If punishment is guided by a notion of rights, social loss would be minimized subject to the constraint that the punishment not exceed the appropriate punishment; moreover, the calculation of social loss will not include the offender’s gain from crime and loss from punishment.

Rather than assume that actual penalties cannot exceed some fixed upper bound, Carr-Hill and Stern (1979) assume that there is a cost associated with violating individual rights and that these costs will be incurred when the benefits of doing so are sufficiently great. This adaptation of the rights model is called the ‘retribution’ model. In the retribution model, there are costs that arise whenever the actual penalty deviates from the ‘appropriate’ penalty in either direction. However, Carr-Hill and Stern do not relate these social costs to the private costs of offenders. In any case, the retribution model implies that, given the actual penalty, the appropriate penalty will affect the public cost of punishment.

Social loss minimization may be questioned on positive as well as normative grounds. Some will question whether anyone seeks to minimize anything while others will recognize that in complex organizations where individuals have varying objective functions, the organization may not maximize any objective function even though each individual behaves with perfect rationality.

In this paper we are concerned with the decisions made by intake officers whose critical task is to decide which of the arrested youth should be sent to juvenile court. In accordance with the formal objectives of the system, all apparently culpable youth should be sent before the judge of the juvenile court, and in the presence of the offender’s parents and representatives of the social welfare system, the judge should consider the case informally with the objective of determining how best to treat him or her. The goal of the system is rehabilitation, and incapacitation is to be used only in cases of failure.

82 K. Lang and D. Bell, Intake disposition of juvenile oj’enders

The realities appear to be quite different [Rubin (1976)]. The number of judges is insufficient to handle all the cases which might come before the court. Moreover, recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions guaranteeing due process to juveniles have induced the juvenile justice system to become ‘adversarial’ in its procedures, much like the adult system [Blankenship and Scarboro (1978)]. In this context the courts have become increasingly the province of offenders who have committed serious offenses. The function of the intake officer is to provide non-juridical penalties to lesser offenders and to decide which of the more serious offenders should impose on the limited resources of the court.

In the political jurisdiction in which our observations were made, intake officers possess detailed guidelines regarding the kind of dispositions that should be allocated to various types of offenders. Moreover, any ‘petition to juvenile court’ is reviewed by the office of the district attorney and is subject

to rejection if the case appears difficult to prosecute or is not serious enough to justify court time. Intake officers are aware of the number of such rejections. Hence, there is a multiplicity of constraints upon intake officers that reduces the likelihood of recommendations that are excessive relative to system resources.

Before embarking on this project, we talked with a number of police offrcers involved in the intake process in order to determine what they perceived to be the determinants of intake dispositions. The police consider their fundamental task to be ascertaining the degree to which offenders have been assimilated into a criminal subculture. It is on the basis of this factor that they attempt to determine whether harsher penalties will promote or retard the process of criminalization for a particular offender. Hence, much of the focus of their decision-making activity is on assessing the impact of punishment on the offender’s future criminal activity. However, there are also indications, particularly in the case of gang members, that police officers take account of the deterrence effect on others. In sum, police officers appear to seek to minimize the harm caused by future crimes.

On the other hand, intake officers are acutely aware of the limited

resources available to them. They must take account of the (shadow) cost of the facilities they use, because they operate with a nearly fixed availability of jail cells, court time and places in social welfare agencies among which offenders must be allocated. If these constraints were perfectly inflexible, it would be appropriate to view intake ofticers as minimizing the harm caused by crime subject to resource constraints. Use of these resources entails both a direct cost and the potential that they will be unavailable when they are needed later. For example, Noam (1977) reports that increased court loads lead to more plea bargaining and therefore lower average sentences for convicted offenders. Consequently, we model intake officers as minimizing the harm caused by crime plus the cost of punishment, where the cost of punishment includes the shadow price of resources diverted from elsewhere.


An important issue that must be resolved is the extent to which individual intake officers make atomistic decisions with respect to each juvenile offender rather than following a rule. The formal role of the juvenile justice system is paternalistic, which suggests that intake officers should concern themselves solely with the effect of punishment on the juvenile. Moreover, even in the

absence of this formal objective, individual intake officers are likely to perceive the deterrence effects of their decisions to be small and thus to

ignore them. As a consequence, individual decisions are likely to be

suboptimal unless intake officers are constrained by rules which effectively internalize this externality by ensuring that the deterrence effects of intake decisions are not ignored. Our conversations with intake officers suggest that while intake officers have considerable freedom of action, they are also

constrained by rules. Since our own assessment is that the rule approach prevails, we present the model in that form in the next section. Footnote 2 discusses empirical evidence which rejects the atomistic/paternalistic model.

3. An empirical model

Since our conversations with police officers indicated that it is reasonable to model intake officers as minimizing social loss, we begin by developing a specification of social loss which incorporates the variants discussed in the previous section:

L = wo, PI + Pw-*, f)O,

where H is the harm caused by crime and includes both Becker’s D and C, S is the social cost of punishing an offender and f* is the appropriate punishment for the crime.’

The intake officer does not have a continuum of punishment options from which to choose. Instead, he must choose among a limited number of specific dispositions each of which is associated with an expected private and public

cost of punishment and a perceived effect on the offense rate. We can, without loss of generality, consider the social loss corresponding

to each disposition relative to that associated with the most severe penalty, a detain petition. Eq. (2) becomes:

minLi-L,,= H(Oi)+SiOi-H(O,p)-S,pO,p, I

‘It is likely that, contrary to Becker’s original specitication, the unit social cost of punishment is not constant but rather depends on the level of apprehensions. However, since an intake ofiicer’s behavior is likely to have a negligible effect on the crime and detention rates, for the empirical purposes of this paper the cost per apprehended offender can reasonably be treated as constant.

84 K. Lang and D. Bell, Intake disposition of juvenile oflenders

where DP refers to detain petition and i denotes the disposition option. Note that since the officer views the probability of arrest as a parameter, it can be incorporated into S. Rearranging terms of eq. (3) and normalizing the cost of a detain petition to equal zero gives:

min H’[Oi - On,] + Si[Oi - On,] + SiODP, i

where H’ is defined as dH/dO, the marginal harm caused by crime. H’ is treated as a constant since the marginal harm caused by crime is likely to be constant over the range that individual intake decisions affect the overall crime rate.

Our task is to determine the variables affecting the choice of intake dispositions for juvenile offenders. This, in turn, requires a delineation of the factors affecting the several terms of eq. (4): the harm caused by crime, the social cost of each disposition, and the offense rates associated with the various forms of punishment.

3.1. The measurement qf’ social harm

The marginal social harm (H’) attributable to the illegal activity of any offender is determined by the seriousness of the current offense. One possible

way to assess the seriousness of an offense would be to use offense seriousness scores of the kind developed by Wolfgang and Sellin ( 1964) and Wolfgang, Figlio and Sellin (1972). These scores would be appropriate because they were developed by use of survey data of public attitudes regarding offenses, but they pertained to a much more limited set of offenses than that which is available to intake officers.

A second approach is to use an index of the length of sentences received by individuals, both adults and juveniles, convicted of the crime within the State jurisdiction. Such a measure of seriousness has prima facie legitimacy to the extent that punishments reflect differences in the harm associated with crimes. On the other hand, there is no guarantee that intake offtcers concur with the seriousness of offense rankings implicitly held by judges, although Rossi et al. (1974) do report fairly strong agreement across socioeconomic groups regarding this issue.

In this study we shall employ the sentence length criterion as the indication of social harm; however, in doing so we must take account of several factors. First, although juvenile offenders are unlikely to specialize in specific crimes [Wolfgang, Figlio and Sellin (1972), Peterson and Braiker (1980)], there does appear to be some distinction among criminals who commit crimes against persons versus crimes against property. Schmidt and Witte (1984) find that whether an individual was convicted of a felony or a misdemeanor is correlated with the seriousness of future offenses and that the


probability of committing a crime against property or against persons is related to the types of offenses committed in the past. Hence, intake officers

may judge the seriousness of crimes in broad categories such as crimes against persons, crimes against property and status offenses. The social harm indicator used in this study is a broad three-point ordinal scale derived by grouping together offenses that have similar penalty scores. The most serious category includes assault with a deadly weapon and robbery; the second most serious category includes assault, grand theft and burglary, and the least serious offenses include misdemeanors and status offenses.

We assume that marginal harm depends on the seriousness category of the offense:

Hi = a, + a 1 MostSeriousj + a2 MiddleSeriousj, (5)

where the subscript j denotes the jth individual. Note that the harm done by crime is assumed to depend on the crime and not the punishment.

Of course, the harm caused by the present offense is only an imperfect measure of the set of offenses the juvenile may commit. Thus, intake officers may be concerned not only with the burglary committed by the juvenile but also with his potential to commit robberies. Nevertheless, as discussed above, there is sufficient cross-crime correlation in the seriousness of the offenses committed by particular individuals that it is legitimate to use seriousness of the present offense as a measure of harm.

3.2. The measurement of social costs

The determinants of the social costs of punishment depend on which of the models discussed in the previous section is used. In all cases, factors affecting public costs should be taken into account. Schmidt and Witte (1984) review the existing literature and conclude that the institutional cost of incarceration is highest for persons in their late teens and early twenties, increasing in most institutions as the average age of inmates increases through the teen years. Schmidt and Witte find that the racial composition of an institution has an effect on the total cost of incarceration but no effect on marginal cost in federal institutions and only mixed effects in California institutions. Hence,

age and possibly race seem to affect public costs of institutionalization. We find the effect of race on the public costs of punishment to be surprising. Since the findings are mixed, it may be that race is a proxy for some other variable or that the appropriate variable is degree of integration of the facility.

Becker suggests that the offender’s costs should be considered as a component of the social cost of punishment. For juveniles the private costs are twofold: the immediate psychic costs of punishment and the effects of

86 K. Lang and D. Bell, Intake disposition of juvenile offenders

intake dispositions on future economic productivity and social standing. Both of these factors will be negatively related to the degree to which a person has adopted a criminal life style; so that the number of prior arrests should be an indicator of private costs. Moreover, assuming that the offense rate is negatively related to the cost of punishment, individuals with many priors will tend to be those with the lowest cost of punishment.

Furthermore, the degree to which youth are cooperatioe during their intake interview indicates to intake officers (by their own assertion) whether or not the youth is a ‘criminal’ or can be ‘salvaged’ from criminality by intervention strategies. The question naturally arises as to why demeanor should be a useful screening device for intake officers. It seems likely that most juvenile offenders are aware that uncooperative behavior designed to get the intake officer angry will result in a harsher punishment. Since displaying cooperative behavior seems virtually costless, one cannot help wondering why the

equilibrium is not one in which all juveniles are cooperative so that being cooperative provides no information. In fact, the vast majority of our sample was cooperative. Nevertheless cooperative behavior was not universal. In economic terms, it is possible to interpret intake officers’ beliefs as being that individuals who are uncooperative are those who have the highest psychic cost of being cooperative and that such psychic costs are correlated with being integrated into the criminal subculture. We have no evidence to bring to bear on this belief, but it has intuitive appeal and seems to justify the avowed use of cooperative behavior as a screen. Therefore, being cooperative should be included as a determinant of the perceived private cost of punishment.

The retribution model adds an additional variable to the determinants of the social cost of punishment - the appropriate punishment for the offense or, equivalently, the seriousness of the offense. Moreover, although Carr-Hill and Stern do not explicitly address this issue, their retribution model (like the rights model) is derived from a notion of appropriate punishment, and it may be presumed that in the retribution model private costs of punishment do not enter the calculation of social cost since offenders have forfeited their rights to the consumption of which they are being deprived.

For the same reasons, the rights model suggests that determinants of the private costs of punishment are not included in the calculation of the social cost of punishment. In addition, in a severely resource constrained system such as the one we study, the appropriate punishment is not a binding constraint so that the seriousness of the offense does not affect the social cost of punishment.

Finally, we include race as a potential determinant of perceived costs. The Becker model explicitly permits unequal treatment on the basis of race if race is an indicator of private costs. According to the Becker model, intake officers should treat whites and nonwhites differently if they believe that the


market options of nonwhites are less likely to be seriously affected by a juvenile record. As noted above, race may also be a determinant of

institutional costs in which case it is expected to be a basis for differential treatment under the economic versions of the rights and retribution models. Finally, we do not exclude the possibility that race affects ‘costs’ for other reasons such as discrimination. Race is the variable of central focus of a large literature including a related paper [Bell and Lang (1985)] and is discussed only peripherally here.

We therefore model the social cost of intake disposition i for individual j

as

Sij = b,i + b,,Agej + b,,Priorsj + b,i Whitej + b,iCooperativej

+ b,,JJCj + bciMostSeriousj + b,,MiddleSeriousj (6)

The variable JJC has not been discussed previously. It is a dichotomous variable equal to one if the individual was processed at a Juvenile Justice

Center. The JJC variable is included because the processing procedure is somewhat different at JJCs than at police stations: most importantly, there is no face to face interview. Therefore, the cooperativeness of the juvenile is not a factor in the intake decision.

Without loss of generality we further normalize the social cost of a detain petition to equal zero so that Sij can be viewed as the social cost relative to a detain petition.

The parameters b are the primary focus of this study. We have argued that priors and cooperative are indicators of private costs. Therefore, if intake offtcers do not apply a concept of rights which excludes offenders’ costs from the calculation of social loss but instead follow Becker’s stricture to include the private costs to the offenders, the b,, and bbi parameters should be nonzero.

If intake officers use a concept of an appropriate punishment, the seriousness of the crime should enter the calculation of social cost and thus the bGi and b,i parameters should be nonzero.

3.3. Effect of punishment on offense rates

In the Becker model it is assumed that the crime rate is a function of the expected severity of punishment. During informal interviews, intake officers indicated that they were more concerned with recidivism than with general deterrence. Using a ‘casework’ approach to the determination of appropriate treatment, these officers recommend therapeutic programs when they are deemed efficacious and some form of punishment and incapacitation when they are not. This approach is fully consistent with the implications of


Becker’s model, where the appropriate penalty must have the consequence of reducing offenses sufficiently to justify the social cost of imposing the penalty.

For adult offenders, Schmidt and Witte (1984) find that being white, having an alcohol or drug abuse problem and number of priors are positively correlated with recidivism while age and recidivism are negatively correlated. Hence, one should introduce these factors into the measure of deterrence. Unfortunately, our data do not include information on alcohol or drug abuse. However, since intake officers use bad demeanor during the intake interview as an indicator of incorrigibility, ‘cooperative’ has been included as a factor in the measure of the effectiveness of punishment in reducing offenses. Also missing from our list of variables that influence the perceived effectiveness of punishment are such background variables as whether the individual comes from an intact home, school attendance and social class. While information on these variables is generally not available to intake officers at sheriff’s stations, they are often used at JJCs. Unfortunately, in neither case were they available to the researchers. In sum, for an individual j the effect relative to a detain petition of an intake disposition i on the offense rate is given by

+ c,,Cooperativej + csiJJCj.

It should be noted that this formulation does not distinguish among deterrence, incapacitation and rehabilitation as the mechanisms by which punishment reduces offense rates. Without doubt, all of these factors are operative. Thus, even if diversion to a social agency is used as a means of furthering rehabilitation, it simultaneously keeps the juvenile under super- vision (incapacitation) and is a harsher punishment than counsel and release (deterrence). Since the same variables are likely to affect the usefulness of punishment for all these objectives, our data do not allow us to establish the extent to which each individual objective was operative.

The final element of eq. (4) which must be modelled empirically, is the offense rate associated with a detain petition (On,,). Data limitations discussed below oblige us to treat this as a constant which is somewhat inconsistent with eq. (7). However, it does seem likely that individual

differences account for more of the variance in the change in the offense rate than in the level.

In order to obtain the final equation for estimation, we substitute (5) (6) and (7) into (4) and set OnP equal to a constant, d, to obtain a single nonlinear expression for the loss associated with a disposition i for an individual j:


L,, = (a, + a, MostSeriousj + a2 MiddleSeriousj)

X (Cgi +cliAgej+C~iPriOrSj+C~iWhitej

+ c,iCooperativej + c,,JJC,)

+ b,,Cooperativej+ b,,JJC,

+ b,,MostSeriousj+ b,,MiddleSeriousj)

x (~,~+c,~Age~+c,,Priors~+c,~White~

+ c,$ooperativej + c,,JJC,)

+ (b,i + b,iAgej + b,iPriorsj + b,i Whitej + b,iCooperativej

+ b,,JJC, + b,iMostSeriousj + b,,MiddleSeriousj) x d. (8)

A number of remarks about eq. (8) are in order. The multiplicative form of (8) inevitably leads to multicollinearity since

variables enter the equation more than once. However, there proved to be sufficient variation in our data to allow us to obtain reasonable parameter

estimates except that we were unable to allow On, to vary among individuals.

Because of its multiplicative form, eq. (8) gives the same estimated loss associated with each disposition if H’ and (Si - S,,) are doubled and (Oi - On,)

and On, are halved. Consequently, we normalize the constant term for H’ to equal one. Neither the t-statistics nor the signs of the parameters depend

on this normalization. It should also be noted that since social loss is measured relative to detain petition, the coefficients for detain petition are normalized to equal zero.

The social loss function outlined above conforms to the Becker model and

to the modifications of that model suggested by the retribution model. In order to conform strictly to Becker’s assumptions, social costs should be a function of the factors determining private costs (age, priors and cooperative) as well as the factor determining public costs (age). However, the seriousness of the offense should not affect the social cost of punishment. According to the retribution model, social costs should be determined by public costs and the seriousness of the offense, but not the private costs to the offender.

The rights model is not nested in the social loss function outlined above

because we have not taken account of the limits placed on punishment by


the existence of rights. However, the juvenile justice system we study is severely resource constrained so that these constraints do not appear to be binding. In this case, the rights model can be posited as a special case of Becker’s social loss function, where social costs are determined only by factors affecting public costs.2

We estimate (8) using multinomial logit (MNL). MNL is appropriate for the analysis of choice among discrete alternatives. MNL assumes that each option is assigned utility or, in the present case a social gain (the negative of social loss):

Gij= - Lij =g(Xj, Bi) + eij,

where g is the negative of eq. (8), Xj is the vector of characteristics of individual j, Bi is the vector of parameters (a, h,c,d) and cij is a random variable which follows the extreme value distribution. All the error terms are

assumed to be independently and identically distributed. Under these assumptions, the probability that an individual ,j selects

‘An alternative formulation of the model treats the juvenile justice system as paternalistic. The loss function is given by the harm to society and the individual offenders of future offenses plus the social cost of the single punishment the offender receives on this occasion. Social costs of future punishments are thus part of the cost of future oflenses. After some manipulation, this gives:

L,-LoP=(X,B,)(X,B,i)+X,B,i, (11)

where X, consists of a constant, Priors, Age, White, Cooperative, JJC, MostSerious and MiddleSerious; X, consists of a constant, Priors, Age, Whife, Cooperative and JJC; X, consists of the same variables as those in X 2 plus MostSerious and MiddleSerious. After some normalizations, this reduces to a model with 31 parameters.

Since the model just described and the model in eq. (8) are not nested, there is no direct way to test them against each other. However, analogy with the literature on non-nested hypothesis testing of nonlinear least squares models [MacKinnon (1983)] suggests the following approach. If eq. (8) is correct, the error term in eq. (I I) includes a misspecitication component given by the right-hand side of eq. (8) minus the right-hand side of eq. (11). Therefore, we include, as an additional variable in eq. (I I), the fitted value of L,- L,, using estimates of the right-hand side of eq. (8) minus the fitted value using estimates of the right-hand side of eq. (I I). If eq. (8) is correct, the coefficient on this new variable should be one; if eq. (1 I) is correct the coefficient should be zero.

Because of multicollinearity, this model is difficult if not impossible to estimate. Moreover, the properties of this test have not been established for multinomial logit. Further difficulties arise because the model in eq. (8) has eleven more parameters than the model in eq. (1 l), and there is no established mechanism for correcting the degrees of freedom of the test in such cases. Nevertheless, if we proceed in a reasonable although somewhat ad hoc manner, it is clear that the model in eq. (1 I) can be rejected. To see this, note that the likelihood value for the extended model cannot be less than the likelihood value for the model given by eq. (8) (set the coefficient on the ‘error term’ equal to I and leave the other coefficients unchanged). The chi-squared statistic for the non-nested hypothesis test is therefore at least twice the difference between the likelihood values of models (8) and (I I) which in this case gives a chi-squared statistic of 42.4 which is easily signiticant at conventional levels even using eleven degrees of freedom. Thus, we can safely reject the model in eq. (I 1).


option i is given by

The log-likelihood is just the log of (10) summed over all individuals in the sample. We estimated the parameters using the Berndt-Hall-Hall-Hausman (1974) algorithm.

It should be noted that MNL is not a perfectly general econometric

method. Instead, it relies on restrictive assumptions regarding the distribution of the error terms. In particular, the eij are assumed to be indepen- dent. This implies that if the omitted variables cause counsel and release to be preferred relative to a release petition, this tells us nothing about the relative ranking of counsel and release versus a detain petition.

Although the independence assumption is obviously quite restrictive, its practical import is not well established. Ruud (1983) shows that if the explanatory variables are normally distributed, MNL estimation is consistent up to a scale factor even if the distribution of the eij is misspecified. On the other hand, Monte Carlo experiments indicate that the estimated coefficients may be subject to a significant bias so that results must be regarded as tentative. However, the tentativeness of the results must be weighed against the computational impossibility of using techniques such as multinomial probit which use somewhat less restrictive distributional assumptions.

3.4. The data

The data used here are from a study of the dispositions received by juvenile offenders between 8 February and 29 March 1982 in nine sheriffs’ stations and two Juvenile Justice Centers (JJCs) in Los Angeles County, California. Trained observers recorded information regarding the individual’s socioeconomic characteristics, prior record, demeanor at the intake interview and disposition received by the juvenile.

As in the adult system, the juvenile justice system leaves considerable discretion to the police. Police officers must decide whether to arrest the offender and, after he or she has been arrested, intake officers (who are often police ofticers) decide which disposition to recommend to the district attorney. In our sample, fully 98 percent of the dispositions were within the set of four options: counsel and release, diversion to a social agency, released pending petition to juvenile court, and detained pending petition to juvenile court. The remaining options such as exonerated or turned over to the probation department are applied only in special circumstances and are therefore dropped from the analysis.

The observed intake processes involved 783 male and 174 female youth. The female group was too small for purposes of analysis and is not discussed

92 K. Lang and D. Bell, Intake disposition of juaenile offenders

in this paper. In addition, individuals who received a disposition other than the four listed above or for whom values of some explanatory variables were not recorded were dropped from the analysis. The final sample consists of 533 cases.

4. Results

Table 1 gives the means of the variables for each disposition. The juveniles receiving diversion to a social agency tend to be relatively young, while those receiving the more severe dispositions tend to be older. Although we should avoid reading too much into zero order correlations, it is striking that average age is not monotonic with respect to the severity of the disposition. It appears that intake officers may view diversion as most effective for younger offenders.

The variables with the strongest relation to severity of disposition are number of priors, cooperative, JJC and, to a lesser extent, having committed a crime in the most serious category. Not surprisingly, having more priors and having committed a more serious crime tend to result in a harsher disposition while being cooperative tends to result in a less harsh disposition. The greater severity of punishment at Juvenile Justice Centers is somewhat

surprising since the Centers are intended to be more responsive to the needs of juveniles. It is also surprising that there is no clear relation between the middle seriousness of offense category and the nature of the disposition received.

In contrast to what might be expected, blacks seem to receive relatively mild dispositions, counsel and release, while whites are disproportionately represented in the intermediate dispositions, diversion and release petition, Hispanics, the residual group, tend to receive the harshest disposition, detain

petition.

Table I

Means of variables by intake disposition.

Counsel and release

Age 15.13 14.89 15.54 15.84 Priors 0.44 1.21 2.89 4.32 Black 0.36 0.23 0.24 0.26 White 0.21 0.34 0.43 0.25 Cooperative 0.46 0.41 0.31 0.24 JJC 0.51 0.57 0.61 0.66 MostSerious 0.37 0.46 0.50 0.50

MiddleSerious 0.27 0.31 0.25 0.30 N 90 101 223 119

Diversion Release petition

Detain petition

K. Lang and D. Bell, Intake disposition of juvenile offenders

Table 2

The determinants of the intake dispositions of juvenile offenders (linear model).

Counsel and release Diversion

Release petition x2

Age

Priors

Black

White

Cooperative

JJC

MostSerious

MiddleSerious

Constant

-0.26 -0.38 -0.10 11.4

(2.0) (3.1) (1.0)

~ 0.82 -0.34 -0.1 I 82.1

(7.7) (6.0) (3.1)

0.07 -0.31 0.16 2.0

(0.2) (0.8) (0.5)

-0.17 0.30 0.98 19.2

(0.4) (0.8) (3.4)

1.53 1.89 0.43 8.2

(2.1) (2.3) (0.9)

0.85 1.15 0.04 3.7

(1.2) (1.5) (0.1)

- 1.50 - 0.82 -0.53 12.1

(3.5) (2.0) (1.7)

-0.57 0.01 -0.47 4.1

(1.3) (0.0) (1.4)

4.79 5.58 2.48 7.3

(2.2) (2.5) (1.5)

In table 2 we present the results of a simple linear MNL analysis of the disposition decision. The linear loss function implicit in this analysis may be thought of as a linear approximation to eq. (8). For those not familiar with MNL, a guide to table 2 may be appropriate. The coefficients represent the ‘value’, ‘utility’ or ‘social gain’ (negative of social loss) associated with a variable vis-a-vis a particular option. Hence the Age coefficient, -0.26 for counsel and release, means that there are 0.26 fewer units of social gain from counsel and release relative to a detain petition. Social gain is measured using an arbitrary normalized scale. The numbers in parentheses are asymptotic t-ratios which indicate the statistical significance of the particular coefficient. For some purposes we may wish to ask not whether a variable affects the social gain associated with a particular option, but rather whether it affects the gain associated with all the options. In this case the appropriate statistical test is the x2 test of the joint significance of the coefficients for that variable for all three dispositions. The Wald version of this statistic is presented in the last column.

The results in table 2 largely confirm the simple descriptive statistics of table 1. As offenders become older the value of the milder dispositions, particularly diversion to a social agency, declines. Having priors and

J.P.E D


committing crimes in the most serious category increases the value of the more severe dispositions, while being cooperative reduces it. Whites are viewed as particularly likely candidates for a release petition.

There are two sharp departures from the results of table 1. Offenders processed at a JJC, everything else equal, are more likely candidates for milder not harsher dispositions, although this result is not statistically significant at conventional levels. Also, there does not appear to be any difference in the treatment of Hispanics and blacks. Since neither the individual coefficients for blacks nor the x2 test of their joint significance approach significance, in the structural analysis we treat nonwhites as a single category.

In practice it proved impossible to include both offense seriousness variables as measures of the social cost of punishment. Since the middle seriousness category proved insignificant in the linear model, it was excluded from the social cost element of the structural model.

We turn now to the structural model. Our principal concern has been in addressing the descriptive relevance of the specific assumptions made by Becker, relative to modilications of the Becker model that have been suggested by other writers. However, the most fundamental result of this analysis is that the ‘economic model’ appears to model effectively the disposition decisions of intake officers. In particular, rather than base decisions on the magnitude of the direct social harm of current and expected future offenses, as would be the case in a simple justice model, intake officers are concerned with the social cost of punishment and with the relative effectiveness of punishment among individuals in reducing future crimes.

These results do not prove that punishment actually deters crime, nor that public cost should affect the determination of penalties in a socially optimal system. Rather, they show that persons with critical decision-making re-

sponsibility within the system of juvenile justice act as though they take these factors into consideration.

Our statistical analysis began with the estimation of a full version of eq. (8) including both the seriousness of the offense and indicators of private costs in our measure of costs. We then performed likelihood ratio tests of the following hypotheses: that seriousness of the offense does not affect the perceived cost of punishment, that indicators of private costs do not affect the perceived cost of punishment, and that neither seriousness of the offense nor indicators of private costs affect the perceived cost of punishment.

In all three cases we were unable to reject the null hypothesis at conventional significance levels. ’ Thus, our results do not provide support

‘The x2 statistics for the three tests were 5.4 with three degrees of freedom which is significant at only the 0.2 level for seriousness of offense, 13.6 with nine degrees of freedom which is significant at only the 0.2 level for indicators of private costs, and 18.5 with twelve degrees of freedom which falls just short of signiticance at the 0.1 level for the joint tests.


for Becker’s assumption that private costs are relevant to the social loss

function; nor do we find support for the assumption that the seriousness of the offense is relevant to the cost of punishment, as suggested by the retribution model. We do not wish to overemphasize the significance of these findings since it is not evident how powerful our tests are. Given the multiplicative form of eq. (8) the full model entails considerable multicollinearity which may reduce the power of tests even on sets of parameters. Nevertheless, we cannot reject a simple rights model in favor of the strict Becker model, the retribution model or a combination of the two.

The results of estimating the rights model (which excludes seriousness of offense and indicators of the private cost of punishment from measures of costs) are presented in table 3, which can be read as follows. The first section gives the coefficients for the effect of the variable on lowering the crime rate [deterrence and incapacitation effects: the c coefficients in eq. (S)]. Thus, the reduction in offenses from counsel and release declines ( - 1.02) with age or, in other words, counsel and release is believed to be less effective (relative to

Table 3

The determinants of the intake dispositions of juvenile offenders


Release petition x2

A. Effectiveness in reducing the crime rate Age -1.02 -0.30

(0.41) (0.33)

Priors - 1.19 -0.34 (0.41) (0.10)

White -3.04 0.08 (1.3) (0.87)

Cooperative 1.98 1.42 (0.89) (0.73)

J/C 0.83 0.80 (0.72) (0.66)

Constant 13.1 2.78

(5.2) (4.7)

0.46 (0.30)

-0.11 (0.04)

0.65 (0.76)

0.25 (0.39)

-0.13 (0.36)

-7.51

(5.0)

B. Cost of punishment

Age - 0.08 0.01 0.08 (0.03) (0.05) (0.05)

White -0.22 -0.03 -0.01 (0.06) (0.12) (0.12)

Constant 0.88 -0.30 - 1.42 (0.47) (0.74) (0.80)

C. Harm = 1 + 0.65MostSerious +O.OIMiddleSerious (0.35) (0.08)

Note: Standard errors are in parentheses.

7.08

13.8

6.48

6.73

3.70

7.10

8.10

0.17

7.30


a detain petition) at reducing crimes as the offender gets older. For each variable there is a coefficient associated with each of the three options (relative to the omitted option); the x2 statistic measures the joint significance of these coefficients.

The second section of the table gives the coefficients for the determinants of perceived costs [b coefftcients in eq. (S)]. The perceived cost of counsel and release, relative to a detain petition, decreases (-0.08) with age. Again, the x2 statistic measures the joint significance of the variable across options. Below the section giving the coefficients of perceived cost are the determinants of the harm done by crime [u coefficients in eq. (8)].

Number of priors has the most clearcut effect on perceptions of the relative effectiveness of the intake options for reducing crime. The greater the number of priors, the less effective are the lighter punishments. On the other hand, lighter punishments are perceived as being relatively more effective for individuals who are cooperative. Thus, intake officers use demeanor as a signal of the individual’s responsiveness to punishment. Counsel and release is viewed as less effective as the offender’s age increases; however, age does not appear to be related to the relative impact of the other dispositions. Intake officers appear to consider counsel and release to be less effective for whites than for nonwhites. This result implies that they are more likely to presume that some form of ‘treatment’ should be provided to white offenders.

The effect of age is highly significant, although it does not follow a simple

pattern. The cost of counsel and release relative to a detain petition is perceived to decline with age; this might indicate that the relative cost of detention is increasing with age.

The cost of more severe dispositions is viewed as being more costly for whites than for nonwhites. As noted above, this may reflect differences in

perceived private or public costs or discrimination. Our results are also consistent with our definitions of the seriousness of

offenses. The perceived harm associated with crime increases with the seriousness of the offense. Although only the MostSerious variable is significant and only at the 0.1 level, the two variables are jointly significant. The weakness of this result may reflect the ‘therapeutic’ orientation of the intake

process, such that attention is focused more heavily on the ‘needs’ of the individual than on the harm to society, in contrast to the situation that is prominent in adult processing.

Our overall estimates of the perceived costs and perceived impact of the dispositions on crime are consistent with our expectations. Table 4 gives these values as calculated at sample means. The deterrence and incapacitation effects of the disposition increase with its severity. Thus, counsel and release is viewed as being less effective than diversion to a social agency, which in turn is viewed as being less effective than a release petition while a detain petition is seen as being most effective. The perceived costs are


Table 4

Social gain and its components evaluated at sample means.


Release petition

Crime reduction All Whites Nonwhites

Social costs All Whites Nonwhites

Social gain All Whites Nonwhites

- 5.43 - 7.44 - 4.40

-0.37 -0.51 -0.30

-2.59 -0.33 0.74 ~ 2.48 -0.10 1.30 - 2.40 -0.45 0.48

- 1.70 - 0.47 - 1.65 - 0.04 - 1.73 -0.69

- 0.22 -0.18 - 0.24 -0.19 -0.21 -0.18

Notes: All calculations are performed at sample means for characteristics. Calculations for whites and nonwhites are performed at the same characteristic values except for race.

ordered in the same way so that in each case it is necessary to weigh the costs against the benefits.

The net result is that for the mean offender a release petition is the disposition of choice with a social gain of 0.74 compared with 0 for a detain petition, -0.33 for diversion to a social agency and -2.59 for counsel and release. These values translate into a 54 percent probability of receiving a release petition, 26 percent probability of a detain petition, 18 percent probability of diversion and 2 percent probability of counsel and release for an individual with characteristics equal to the sample means. As often occurs with MNL because of the nonlinear probability function, probabilities at the mean are quite different from mean probabilities.

Our results also indicate that whites and nonwhites are treated quite differently. At sample means, the social gain from a release petition is perceived as being much higher for whites than for nonwhites. The result is that whites and nonwhites with characteristics at the means for the entire sample have a 65 percent chance of receiving a release petition compared with 48 percent, respectively. On the other hand, whites have a 12 percent chance of receiving a detain petition compared with 30 percent for nonwhites.

We do not wish to overemphasize the differential treatment by race. It is quite possible that some or all of the differences reflect variables that are observable to the intake officer but not to the econometrician. Thus, we cannot be sure whether blacks and whites are treated differently because of

98 K. Lang and D. Bell, Intake disposition oJ juvenile offenders

‘discrimination’, because race is correctly perceived as being correlated with variables that are unobservable to intake officers or because race is correlated with variables used by intake officers but not included in the data set. Resolution of this problem awaits further investigation.

5. Conclusions

Our results are consistent with the view that intake officers weigh the costs and benefits of the various dispositions among which they may choose when determining a juvenile offender’s intake disposition. Costs are calculated as being higher for what we believe to be the higher cost dispositions. Similarly, the crime reducing effect of harsher punishments is calculated as being greater. The results with respect to offenders’ characteristics also generally conform to our expectations. The deterrence and incapacitation effects of milder dispositions are perceived to increase with the juvenile’s cooperativeness and to decline with the number of priors he has. Counsel and release is deemed to be less effective as the offender gets older. On the other hand, some form of treatment other than counsel and release is considered to be more effective at reducing crime for whites.

We find support for the view that intake officers minimize social loss as suggested by Becker’s seminal work but not for his view that the cost of punishment to the offender should influence the intake officer’s decision. Similarly, a retribution model in which intake officers consider deviations from the appropriate punishment to be costly is not supported by the data. Instead we suggest that committing a crime abrogates some of the criminal’s rights so that, at least up to a point, the pain felt by the criminal who is punished is not taken into account in the calculation of social loss.

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An economic model of the intake disposition of juvenile offenders

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