NCJ Number
177517
Journal
Corrections Today Volume: 61 Issue: 2 Dated: April 1999 Pages: 96-100
Date Published
1999
Length
5 pages
Annotation
Data from the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program as summarized in the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention publication titled Juvenile Arrests 1997 revealed that 123,000 juvenile arrests occurred for violent crimes in 1997 and that juvenile violence has declined substantially during the last few years.
Abstract
The violent crimes included murder, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. The juvenile arrests for violent crimes amounted to one in six arrests for violent crimes. Juveniles were overrepresented in robbery arrests and underrepresented in murder arrests, compared to adults. The juvenile violent crime arrest rate in 1997 was the lowest in the 1990s. The level of violence committed by juveniles in the mid-1990s has returned to the levels of the mid-1970s and the early 1980s. Changes in the size of the juvenile population appear largely unrelated to juvenile violent crime trends. The findings indicate the need for the public and policy-makers to recognize changes in juvenile crime and arrests when they occur and to attribute the changes to empirically supportable causes and not to high-profile news stories or speculation. Tables and figures