The Juvenile Court Statistics series details the activities of U.S. juvenile courts

Juvenile Court Statistics has provided data since the late 1920s

The Juvenile Court Statistics series is the primary source of information on the activities of the nation’s juvenile courts. The first Juvenile Court Statistics report, published in 1929 by the Children’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor, described cases handled in 1927 by 42 courts. In the 1950s, the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare took over the work, and, in 1974, the newly established Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) took on the project. Since 1975, the National Center for Juvenile Justice (NCJJ) has been responsible for this OJJDP project.

Throughout its history, the Juvenile Court Statistics series has depended on the voluntary support of courts with juvenile jurisdiction. Courts contribute data originally compiled to meet their own information needs. The data received are not uniform but reflect the natural variation that exists across court information systems. To develop national estimates, NCJJ restructures compatible data into a common format. In 1998, juvenile courts with jurisdiction over virtually 100% of the U.S. juvenile population contributed at least some data to the national reporting program. Because not all contributed data can support the national reporting requirements, the national estimates for 1998 were based on data from more than 2,100 jurisdictions containing nearly 70% of the nation’s juvenile population (i.e., youth age 10 through the upper age of original juvenile court jurisdiction in each state).

Juvenile Court Statistics documents the number of cases courts handled

Just as the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program counts arrests made by law enforcement (i.e., a workload measure, not a crime measure), the Juvenile Court Statistics series counts delinquency and status offense cases handled by courts with juvenile jurisdiction during the year. Each case represents the initial disposition of a new referral to juvenile court for one or more offenses. A youth may be involved in more than one case in a year. Therefore, the Juvenile Court Statistics series does not provide a count of individual juveniles brought before juvenile courts.

Cases involving multiple charges are categorized by their most serious offense

In a single case where a juvenile is charged with robbery, simple assault, and a weapons law violation, the case is counted as a robbery case (similar to the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program’s hierarchy rule). Thus, the Juvenile Court Statistics series does not provide a count of the number of crimes committed by juveniles. In addition, given that only the most serious offense is used to classify the case, counts of—and trends for—less serious offenses must be interpreted cautiously.

Similarly, cases are categorized by their most severe or restrictive disposition. For example, a case in which the judge orders the youth to a training school and to pay restitution to the victim would be characterized as a case in which the juvenile was placed in a residential facility.

Juvenile Court Statistics describes delinquency and status offense caseloads

The Juvenile Court Statistics series provides annual estimates of the number of delinquency and formally processed status offense cases handled by juvenile courts. The reports provide demographic profiles of the youth referred and the reasons for the referrals (offenses). The series documents the juvenile courts’ differential use of petition, detention, adjudication, and disposition alternatives by case type. The series also can identify trends in the volume and characteristics of court activity.

Care should be exercised when interpreting gender, age, or racial differences in the analysis of juvenile delinquency or status offense cases because reported statistics do not control for the seriousness of the behavior leading to each charge or the extent of a youth’s court history.

The series does not provide national estimates of the number of youth referred to court, their prior court histories, or their future recidivism. Nor does it provide data on criminal court processing of juvenile cases. Criminal court cases involving youth younger than age 18 who are defined as adults in their state are not included. The series was designed to produce national estimates of juvenile court activity, not to describe the law-violating careers of juveniles.