Assessing the impact of North Carolina Teen Court on recidivism

Abstract Despite their theoretical benefits on restoring youth, there are mixed results surrounding the effectiveness of teen courts in the literature. We acknowledge that the previously inconsistent and substantively small effects of teen court are at least in part due to methodological limitations in previous research designs examining this topic. In the form of a quasi‐experimental research design, we examine every juvenile in North Carolina across every teen court in the state and other diversion programs as well as the comparable youth who entered the traditional justice system, totaling 6554 juveniles. We find that Teen Court has a statistically significant reductionary effect on recidivism when compared to the other processing alternatives. Teen court is not only a practicable alternative to traditional juvenile justice processes but also a more effective one in terms of its ability to reduce recidivism.