NCJ Number
84935
Date Published
1982
Length
25 pages
Annotation
Confusion and ambiguity in the major concepts and goals of deinstitutionalization of status offenders complicate the identification of quantifiable evaluation measures for such deinstitutionalization.
Abstract
When Congress identified the deinstitutionalization of status offenders as a major objective of the 1974 Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act, it did not precisely define the meaning of the basic terms of its initiative. The precise meaning of status offender is not only undefined, but the difficulties of determining the meanings of status offense, deinstitutionalization, and diversion, either from Federal or State statutes, further complicate the task of determining the nature of both the preferred and prohibited placement alternatives for status offenders. There is also a lack of standards by which to make and assess detention decisions for juveniles, so it is likely that status offenders will continue to be at risk of detention. While community-based alternatives are recommended under deinstitutionalization policy, the ideal alternative setting has proved to be difficult to define and make operational. In the area of evaluation, determining who and how many status offenders there are and whether and why there are more or fewer of them being identified and labeled as such today is hazardous under circumstances in which the classificatory headings and the behaviors that are grouped under them vary so widely. The problems associated with determining who status offenders are and what a status offense is necessarily have implications for the tasks of discovering where status offenders have gone and what is happening to them.