DOI: 10.3886/icpsr38418.v1
title: National Juvenile Court Data Archive, United States, 1985-2019
title: Version 1

description: The National Juvenile Court Data Archive houses over 15 million automated records of cases handled by courts with juvenile jurisdiction. Although some states' data contain traffic and dependency cases, the majority are delinquency and status offense records. The collection itself dates back to the 1920s when it was under the Children's Bureau, however in 1974 the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), within the U.S. Department of Justice assumed responsibility for the work of promoting access to automated juvenile court data sets for juvenile justice research and policymaking efforts. The Archive contains the most detailed information available on juveniles involved in the juvenile justice system and on the activities of U.S. juvenile courts. The Archive houses a sizable collection of automated juvenile court data files that not only support the national estimates but also support the study of a wide range of national and subnational juvenile justice issues. Designed to facilitate research on the juvenile justice system, the Archive's data files are available to policy-makers, researchers, students, and the public. The data have been used to explore a broad range of topics, from investigating the effectiveness of juvenile court programs and examining policy developments in individual jurisdictions, to monitoring the impact of legislative changes, and guiding juvenile justice system reform.
description: The National Juvenile Court Data Archive's goal is to maintain and expand the current program and continue providing detailed information on juvenile court case processing of delinquency and status offense cases to assist research and policymaking efforts. The most recent national estimates are based on data from nearly 2,500 courts with jurisdiction over 87% of the juvenile population. <strong>The Archive continues to pursue three general objectives:</strong> <em>Juvenile court data collection and processing</em> involves extracting research data files from administrative data sets, creating standardized data files, producing national estimates, and documenting and preserving data. <em>Juvenile court data use and dissemination</em> are achieved through the Juvenile Court Statistics reports and other publications, preparing data for OJJDP's Statistical Briefing Book, the Archive's website that facilitates researchers' use of Archive files, and responding to information requests. <em>Juvenile court case data quality improvement and technical assistance</em> are addressed through efforts to expand the sample of reporting courts, monitor data quality, provide technical assistance to state and local agencies to help them expand/improve their information systems and information sharing capabilities, and, improve the national estimates. The project's primary report is the annual <em>Juvenile Court Statistics</em> (JCS) report publicly available online at the Archive's website. JCS describes the National Juvenile Court Data Archive and its rationale, research design, sampling and recruitment, time frame, geography, data collection and processing procedures including descriptions of recodes and other transformations, imputation methods, and estimation procedures. JCS also presents national estimate descriptive statistics for all variables included in the analysis and a glossary of terms that defines all variables and their values. <strong>Through <em>Juvenile Court Statistics</em> and other related dissemination products, the Archive answers the following research questions annually:</strong> How many delinquency and status offense cases are handled in U.S. juvenile courts?<br> What are the caseload trends?<br> What is the offense profile of the cases processed?<br> Do the volume of cases and offense profiles vary by demographic characteristics?<br> What are the case processing characteristics of the cases handled?<br> Does case processing vary by demographic characteristics?<br> What case disposition options are associated most often with which offenses and demographic characteristics?<br> What is the extent of disproportionality in case handling of minority youth?<br> What is the extent of gender disparity in case handling?<br>
description: The national estimates for 2019 are based on data from nearly 2,500 courts with jurisdiction over 87% of the nation's juvenile population (youth age 10 through the upper age of original juvenile court jurisdiction in each state). The unit of count is a case disposed. A "case" represents a youth processed by a juvenile court on a new referral regardless of the number of law violations contained in the referral. A youth charged with four burglaries in a single referral would be represented by a single case. A youth referred for three burglaries and referred again the following week on another burglary charge would contribute two cases, even if the court eventually merged the two referrals for more efficient processing. The fact that a case is "disposed" means that a definite action was taken as the result of the referral -- i.e., a plan of treatment was selected or initiated. It does not mean a case was necessarily closed or terminated in the sense that all contact between the court and the youth ceased. For example, a case is considered to be disposed when the court orders probation, not when the term of probation supervision is completed.
description: For information on the Archive's multivariate weighting procedures, please see the JCS 2019 Methods PDF file.
description: The national estimates presented in the Juvenile Court Statistics reports were generated with data from a large nonprobability sample of juvenile courts. The sample of juvenile courts that provide data to the Juvenile Court Statistics series varies each year. Most courts in the sample provide detailed information on each delinquency case they handled in the year. Other courts are only able to provide an aggregate count of their delinquency caseloads with no detail on case characteristics.
description: Datasets: DS1: National Juvenile Court Data Archive, United States, 1985-2019
description: All cases disposed by courts with juvenile jurisdiction within the United States.
description: The Project Documentation PDF file included here contains contact information for the Social Science Analyst, Ben Adams, who should be contacted with any questions.Researchers are encouraged to explore the National Juvenile Court Data Archive web site for a summary of Archive holdings, procedures for data access, as well as data analysis and application tools.