Agenda - 12-16-1997 - 10e - Laserfiche WebLink

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Report on the Teen Court Pro- 23 A identify those that they would have referred to Teen Court had it been an available resource at that time. To do this, they considered the age of the juvenile, the nature of the offense, whether the juvenile had a prior record, and whether information in the file suggested whether the juvenile would have been amenable to a Teen Court referral (e.g., the juvenile admitted guilt). For those cases identified as being appropriate for Teen Court referral, data on demographic factors, the nature of the offense, and future intake involvement or adult criminal record was collected as for the Teen Court sample. Comparison of the Samples. The Teen Court sample comprised 95 juveniles, and the Pre-Program sample comprised 97 juveniles. The ages of the Teen Court sample ranged from 11.9 years to 16.2 years, with an average age of 14.5 years; the ages of the Pre-program sample ranged from 9.8 years to 16.1 years, with an average age of 14.1 years. (This difference in average age was statistically significant.) The samples were similar in terms of racial makeup: the Teen Court sample contained 54.7% Black, 42.1% White, 2.1% Hispanic, and 1.1% Asian offenders; the Pre-program sample contained 51.5% Black, 41.2% White, and 7.2% Hispanic offenders. The Teen Court sample comprised 64.2% males and 35.8% females; the Pre-program sample comprised 68.0% males and 32.0% females. Comparison of the samples based on the offense for which the juvenile was referred (or would have been referred, for the Pre-program sample) indicated some differences. Offense type was originally coded using 12.offense categories; for the regression analyses described below, these offense codes were collapsed into 3 primary offense types -- Property Offenses, Minor Assaults, and Other Offenses. The following table shows the frequency of the-various offense types (for the juvenile's primary offense if there were multiple offenses) for each sample. (Note the larger numbers of driving, weapon, controlled substance, and alcohol offenses in the Teen Court sample. This difference illustrates one of the primary drawbacks of j using a non-contemporaneous comparison sample: substantive changes in policy and j procedure may affect the composition of the samples, making them different on significant i characteristics. In this case, at least two reasons can be offered for the difference in the types of offenses in the two groups. First, the greater number of weapon offenses can be explained in large part by a legislatively mandated change in how juveniles who bring weapons onto school property are handled. During the period of the Teen Court sample, schools were required to report these cases to law enforcement, whereas previously, they had the discretion to handle them through other procedures. Second, the greater number of alcohol offenses can largely be explained by a group of students from one school who repeatedly gathered and drank alcohol; this misbehavior received media attention, and the school decided to report these incidents to law enforcement, whereas the more typical response to alcohol offenses on the part of school administrators would be to handle the juveniles through school disciplinary procedures.)