Juvenile Crime, Courts, and Corrections

Juvenile crime, as commonly defined in the United States, is comprised of all the offenses committed by persons younger than eighteen years of age. According to the most recent figures available from the Bureau of Justice Statistics National Crime Victimization Survey, which serves as the national barometer of crime trends, in 1997 juveniles under eighteen years of age committed 27 percent of all the serious violent crimes in the United States, 14 percent of the sexual assaults, 30 percent of the robberies, and 27 percent of the aggravated assaults. Yet, only 42 percent of serious juvenile crimes were reported to law enforcement agencies, so the nation's official crime statistics (that is, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Reporting Program) did not accurately reflect the actual number of crimes committed, including those committed by juveniles. According to the official crime reports on homicide, juveniles committed 12 percent of the nation's homicides in 1997. Nationally, there were [Page 870]61.8 cases of juvenile crime for every one thousand juveniles, and 368 out of every one hundred thousand juveniles were incarcerated. Of those incarcerated, 86 percent were male and 14 percent were female, and in almost every state there was a disproportionate number of juvenile minorities imprisoned.

Since juvenile crime emerged as a distinct social problem in the early nineteenth century, males have accounted for most of it. During the twentieth century, males committed approximately 75 percent of juvenile crimes, though by the 1990s the female rate of juvenile crime was increasing dramatically. The majority of juvenile offenses committed by males and females have involved (and still involve) property crimes, such as theft, or status offenses. Status offenses are behaviors that are criminal only because the person is of a young age, not because of the behavior itself. For instance, truancy and curfew laws generally apply only to young people. Although status offenses have been a major factor in American juvenile crime, it should be noted that a number of Western nations, including Canada and Germany, do not recognize status offenses.

Juvenile crime is different from adult crime in three significant ways. First, juveniles are much more likely than adults to commit crimes in groups. Second, juvenile crime is most prevalent from 3:00 P.M. to 4:00

P.M. on school days, while adult offending begins at 11:00 A.M. and increases every hour, until it peaks at 11:00 P.M. Third, the juvenile justice system, instead of the adult criminal justice system, processes the majority of cases of juvenile crime, roughly 4,800 cases per day. Because the ratio of cases to juveniles is three to two, juvenile courts annually hear about 1.2 million individual cases of juvenile crime.