How Many Offenses are Really Committed per Juvenile Court Offender?

Abstract

This article compares juvenile court petitions and self-reported offending between ages 13 and 17 for 506 boys followed up in the Pittsburgh Youth Study. There were 2.4 self-reported offenders for every petitioned offender, and 80 self-reported offenses for every petitioned offense. The prevalence of self-reported offenders stayed constant with age, but the prevalence of petitioned offenders increased with age. Conversely, the individual offending frequency stayed constant with age according to court petitions but increased with age according to self-reports. Therefore, prevalence and frequency did not vary similarly with age, and did not vary similarly in self-reports and court records. With increasing age, more and more of the self-reported offenders were formally petitioned, but they were formally petitioned for fewer and fewer of their offenses. The probability of an offender being petitioned to court increased with the number of offenses that he committed, but the probability of each offense leading to a court petition decreased with the number of offenses committed. There was little overlap between self-reported and official chronic offenders. It is concluded that researchers should always measure both self-reports and official records in studying offending, and that the juvenile court should seek to intervene earlier in delinquency careers.

Keywords:

• self-reported offending
• juvenile court petitions
• longitudinal study
• probability of detection

This research was supported by cooperative agreement no. 1999-JN-FX-K002 awarded to the National Center for Juvenile Justice by the U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. We are very grateful to Howard Snyder for his helpful comments. Points of view or opinions in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of OJJDP or the U.S. Department of Justice.

Notes

¹There was a question about using heroin but no boy admitted this at these ages.

²The City of Pittsburgh covered an inner city population of about 370,000 in 1990. It is included in and surrounded by Allegheny County, which had a population of about 1,336,000 in 1990 (Hoffman, 1991). Generally juveniles who live in Allegheny County are processed by the Allegheny County Juvenile Court even if they commit offenses outside Allegheny County (unless they commit offenses outside Pennsylvania).

³The most relevant year is 1990, because the boys in this sample were aged 15–16 at that time.

⁴Unless otherwise stated, all figures in the tables are weighted estimates, so that they apply to the population of boys in public schools in the City of Pittsburgh rather than the sample of boys who were followed up.

⁵In a very small number of cases, a boy had more court petitions than self-reported offenses. No attempt has been made to make adjustments for this.

⁶The exact equations are as follows: 213.23 × .8243 = 175.77 (self-report) 34.99 × 6.305 = 2.206 (court).

⁷These figures are related as follows: 2.356 × 33.816 = 79.67.

⁸One reason for this pattern is that the court referrals of younger offenders are less likely than those of older offenders to be processed formally (i.e., with a petition) by the juvenile court. In the United States in 1990, 45% of referrals of 13-year-olds led to a petition, compared with 54% of referrals of 17-year-olds (Stahl et al., 2007).

⁹The decrease from age 13 to age 14 may have occurred because offenses are sometimes more likely to be self-reported in a first assessment than in later assessments (Lauritsen, 1999; Thornberry, 1989). Alternatively, admissions may have been greater at younger ages because they were based on two six-monthly assessments rather than one yearly assessment at later ages.

¹⁰This may be because the number of charges does not greatly affect the sentencing options of the juvenile court.

¹¹In order to investigate the overlap between formally petitioned and self-reported offenders, this analysis was based on unweighted data. There were 471 boys known on self-reports because we required that the boy had to be interviewed at most ages between 13 and 17 in order to be included in the analysis. There were 488 boys known on court petitions because 18 boys did not consent to having their court records searched.