This report presents statistics on delinquency cases processed by U.S. courts with juvenile jurisdiction between 1985 and 2013, as well as status offense cases processed between 1995 and 2013.
One chapter documents the volume of delinquency cases referred to juvenile court and reports the characteristics of these cases, including types of offenses charged and the demographic characteristics of the involved juveniles (age, gender, and race). It focuses on the cases disposed in 2013 and shows trends since 1985. A second chapter provides statistics on the flow of delinquency cases through the following stages of the juvenile court system: referral, detention, intake, waiver, adjudication, and disposition. A third chapter presents national statistics on petitioned status offense cases, which are acts that are illegal only because the persons committing them are juveniles. The cases covered in the report involved running away, truancy, curfew violations, ungovernability, and underage liquor law violations. The cases processed in 20 13 are reported, and trends since 1995 are shown. Other data on status-offense cases are the demographic characteristics of the juveniles, types of offenses charged, and the flow of cases through processing stages. The national estimates of juvenile court delinquency caseloads in 2013 were based on analyses of 749,722 automated case records and court-level statistics that summarize an additional 14,219 cases. Estimates of status offense cases formally processed in 2013 were based on analyses of 75,411 automated case-level records and summary statistics on an additional 4,820 cases. Data used in the analyses were contributed to the National Juvenile Court Data Archive by just over 2,400 courts with jurisdiction over 84 percent of the juvenile population in 2013. Extensive tables and figures