This document provides an overview and introduction to 2020’s juvenile court statistics, and is organized into the following chapters: National Estimates of Delinquency Cases, detailing counts and trends, case rates, age at referral, gender, and race; National Estimates of Delinquency Case Processing, detailing information on referral, detention, intake decision, waiver, adjudication, dispositions for out-of-home placement and probation, and case processing by various categories; National Estimates of Petitioned Status Offense Cases, with information on counts and trends, case rates, age at referral, gender, race, source of referral, detention, adjudication, dispositions, and case processing; it also includes appendices and an index of tables and figures.
This document describes delinquency cases and petitioned status offense cases handled between 2005 and 2020 by U.S. courts with juvenile jurisdiction. The preface provides a history of juvenile court statistics reporting, dating back to 1929, while the introduction provides details on the measurement methodology for the reports, their scope of coverage, juvenile court caseloads and processing, data quality, validity of the estimates, the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, the structure of the report, data access, and other sources of juvenile court data. Chapters two through four provide detailed reports on National Estimates of Delinquency Cases, National Estimates of Delinquency Case Processing, and National Estimates of Petitioned Status Offense Cases.