Peer Court: The Relationship Between Offense, Sanction, and Sentence Completion
The current study focused on factors that influence completion rates of juvenile offenders who participate in a Teen Court program. Teen Court is a diversion program that gives first-time, low level juvenile offenders the option to avoid traditional processing, and appear before a jury of their peers. The peer jury issues sanctions of varying degrees that juvenile offenders must agree to follow and complete. The typical completion time for offenders is three months. The current study focused on the relationship between the severity of offenses, the type and amount of sanctions given to juvenile offenders, and completion rates (whether or not the juvenile offenders complete the program). The author hypothesized that as severity of offense and time commitment to sanctions increased the completion rates of the juvenile offenders would decrease. A multiple regression was used to analyze the data.
School:
Loyola University at New Orleans
Department:
N/A
Research Advisor:
Mark Aber
Department of Research Advisor:
Psychology
Year of Publication:
2002