Criminal Justice in the Lives of American Adolescents: Choosing the Future

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Abstract
Although most adolescents break the law – indeed, abstaining from involvement in at least petty delinquencies might be considered “deviant” – only a relatively small percentage of the youth population is brought into the criminal justice system in any given year. In the United States, for example, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (1999) compiles annual data on arrests for “Crime Index” offenses – an index composed of eight offenses that is meant to assess serious violent and property crime. A little over 4 percent of youths nationally are arrested for any Crime Index offense over the course of a year (Cook and Laub 1998). Perhaps more revealing, only a tiny percentage of juveniles in the United States – less than one-half of 1 percent of youths ages 10 to 17 – are arrested for violent offenses on the Crime Index (Snyder, Sickmund, and Poe-Yamagata 1996). Further, even among adolescents who are arrested, 44 percent are diverted from formal processing by the criminal justice system, with their cases handled informally (Stahl 1999). Growing up in the United States, then, most youngsters do not have their lives decidedly circumscribed by the criminal justice system. They may experiment with illegal activities, but their criminality is not serious enough and persistent enough to draw sustained attention from enforcement officials or to prompt their incarceration. This observation is not advanced here as a prelude to our arguing that criminal justice interventions are of little consequence – as we will see shortly.

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