An Assessment of the Hypercriminalization Thesis: Evidence from Juvenile Justice and Human Service Practitioners in the
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An Assessment of the Hypercriminalization Thesis: Evidence from Juvenile Justice and Human Service Practitioners in the USA Darren R. Beneby 1
& Jonathan
W. Glenn 2 & Lorraine C. Taylor 2
Received: 20 April 2020 / Revised: 23 August 2020 / Accepted: 28 August 2020 / Published online: 22 September 2020 # Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020
Abstract One of the most salient effects of racial discrimination in the USA is the criminalization of youth of color (YOC). Using a deductive approach to evaluate Rios’s hypercriminalization theory, this study analyzes 79 human service and juvenile justice practitioners’ professional experiences with witnessing the criminalization of YOC. The results of a priori coding revealed that criminalization is a baseline experience for YOC that occurs in a variety of social settings, and it is linked to the disproportionate contact of YOC with the juvenile justice system. Practitioners reported that criminalization also impacted YOC’s self-concept and contributed to their development of destructive attitudes. The study concludes with suggestions for future research and recommendations for combatting the criminalization of YOC in professional work settings. Keywords Social control . Criminalization . Punishment . Juvenile justice . Race
Introduction Theories of social control delineate how individuals and groups define individuals as criminal and how normative behavioral boundaries are maintained through formal and informal social control (Black 1983). Extensive work in this area has examined how the juvenile justice system, as a mechanism of social control, engages in the practice of criminalization, which is a process by which individuals are labeled as criminals and subsequently policed and punished (Chan and Chunn 2014). The underlying themes within research on the process of criminalization include the profound differences
* Darren R. Beneby [email protected]
1
Department of Criminal Justice, North Carolina Central University, Durham, NC 27707, USA
2
Juvenile Justice Institute, North Carolina Central University, Durham, NC, USA
168
Journal of Applied Youth Studies (2020) 3:167–180
between the contact of youth of color (YOC) with the justice system and that of their white counterparts. In recent years, the disparate criminalization of justice-involved YOC has been captured by the literature on racial and ethnic disparities (RED) and the school-toprison pipeline. Scholars have found that YOC are more likely than white youth to receive harsher sanctions and to be forced further into the juvenile justice system at each stage of juvenile justice decision-making, including the referral (Bishop and Frazier 1996), intake (Bishop and Frazier 1996; Peck and Jennings 2016), detention (Leiber 2013; Rodriguez 2010; Wordes et al. 1994), judicial disposition (Peck and Jennings 2016), out-of-home placement (Fader et al. 2014), and decision-making stages. Additionally, when waived to adult courts, YOC are more likely than their white peers to be sentenced to jail or prison and longer le
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