The Relationship between Juvenile Transfer Laws and Juvenile Crime

As a response to an increase in violent juvenile crime from the mid-1980s through the mid 1990s, state governments passed harsher laws governing the transfer of juveniles to the adult criminal system. This paper finds that changes in juvenile transfer laws cannot be definitively linked to increases or decreases in juvenile criminal activity. Controlling for other factors, two types of juvenile transfer laws (statutory exclusions and direct file provisions) show negative correlations with juvenile crime, but other types show positive correlations with juvenile crime. Even after attempting to account for the endogeneity of the transfer laws, there does not appear to be a consistent relationship between juvenile transfer laws and juvenile criminal activity.