The current study is designed to extend the empirical and theoretical research on disproportionate youth contact with the justice system. Missing from the considerable body of work examining the effects of extralegal factors on police behavior and justice system processing is an examination of the social, political, and economic contextual factors that may influence disparities in justice system contact. The current study addresses this gap by identifying contextual factors associated with severity of justice system response to youth and by identifying the macro-structural environments that disproportionately affect young women and youth of color. Specifically, it examines the direct effects of county and state characteristics on youth risk of arrest and probabilities of charge, a court appearance, conviction, and placement and how the effects of individual characteristics and county and state characteristics interact to disproportionately impact certain groups of youth in certain environments. The main dataset for this study was constructed from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97). Using the confidential NLSY97 Geocode File, the NLSY97 was appended with county- and state-specific data from various publically available sources indicating structural disadvantage, population composition, political conservatism, prosecutor's office characteristics, delinquency petition and crime rates, gender inequity, child health and well-being, and juvenile justice policy punitiveness. To take advantage of the longitudinal nature of the NLSY97 data, a combination of multilevel modeling techniques, event history analysis, and generalized linear modeling was employed to examine the effects of individual characteristics and contextual conditions on youths' risk of arrest and probabilities of charge, a court appearance, conviction, and placement. The findings suggest that the effects of gender and racial/ethnic group on youth penetration into the justice system are more pronounced at some decision-making levels and depend on contextual environment. The results of the analyses by race, gender, and ethnicity suggest three major findings. First, racial disparities are present in youth risk of arrest, which are magnified in predominately non-Black communities. However, this study also found evidence of a compensatory effect whereby Black youth receive more favorable court dispositions than their non-Black counterparts. Second, the gender gap in youth justice system processing depends on state climates of women and children's health and wellbeing. Specifically, as women and children's health and wellbeing decrease, the gender gap in processing narrows and, in the case of court appearance, reverses. Third and finally, Hispanic youth are treated disproportionately more harshly in states with poor climates of children's health and wellbeing and in states with less punitive juvenile justice systems. Overall, the findings indicate that the reduction of gender and racial/ethnic disparities is unlikely without commitment to the structural reform of inequalities. Intervention efforts to reduce disparities should be multifaceted and include community-based youth-serving organizations and human services agencies, in addition to criminal and juvenile justice agencies
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