Juvenile Court Statistics, 1985

• NCJ Number: 115752
• Author(s): H N Snyder; T A Finnegan; E H Nimick; M H Sickmund; D P Sullivan; N J Tierney
• Date Published: 1989
• Length: 187 pages
• Grant Number(s): 85-JN-CX-0012
• Sponsoring Agency: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP)
• Corporate Author: National Ctr for Juvenile Justice
• Sale Source: National Institute of Justice/; NCJRS Photocopy Services
• Publication Type: Statistics
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This report describes the number and characteristics of the approximately 534,000 juvenile delinquency and 88,000 status offenses cases disposed during 1985 by courts with juvenile jurisdiction in the United States.

Abstract

The cases represented a 7 percent increase over the 1984 workload. Property offenses accounted for 55 percent of all formally handled delinquency cases. The charge was a personal offense in 21 percent of the cases and a drug law violation in 6 percent of the cases. Three-fourths of the petitioned cases disposed by the courts were referred by law enforcement agencies. Parents, schools, victims, probation officers, and others referred the cases. Youths in 34 percent of the cases were securely detained at some point between the referral to court and the disposition, with personal offense cases the most likely to be detained. Two percent of the cases were waived to criminal court, where the youth was processed as an adult. In 64 percent of the cases the youth was adjudicated delinquent. Status offense cases increased 11 percent over 1984 and were nearly equally divided among runaway, truancy, ungovernable, and status liquor law violation cases. Tables and appended methodological information.