Next, national estimates of petitioned status offense cases are presented. Together, these sections provide a detailed national portrait of juvenile court cases, including the offenses involved, sources of referral, detention practices, and dispositions ordered. Few terms in the field of juvenile justice have widely accepted definitions. The terminology used in this Report has been carefully developed to communicate the findings of the work as precisely as possible without sacrificing applicability to multiple jurisdictions. Finally, the appendix presents a detailed list of the number of delinquency, status offense, and dependency cases handled by juvenile courts in 1997, by State and county.
Table notes , at the end of the appendix, indicate the source of the data and the unit of count.
With the support of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, NCJJ distributes this package to facilitate independent analysis of Archive data while eliminating the need for statistical analysis software. 1 Mechanisms of transfer to criminal court vary by State. In some States, a prosecutor has the authority to file juvenile cases that meet specified criteria directly in criminal court. This Report, however, includes only cases that were transferred as a result of judicial waiver. A Study to Assess the Validity of the National Estimates Developed for the Juvenile Court Statistics Series .