This report presents statistics on juvenile delinquency cases and petitioned status offense cases processed between 2005 and 2019 by U.S. courts with juvenile jurisdiction.
National estimates of juvenile court delinquency caseloads in 2019 were based on analyses of 513,719 automated case records and court-level statistics summarizing an additional 38,717 cases. Estimates of status offense cases formally processed by juvenile courts in 2019 were based on analyses of 61,317 automated case-level records and court-level summary statistics on an additional 3,402 cases. The data used in the analyses were contributed to the National Juvenile Court Data Archive by about 2,500 courts with jurisdiction over 87 percent of the juvenile population in 2019. This report focuses on cases that involved juveniles charged with law violations. The unit of count is the number of “cases disposed,” which means that a definite action was taken as the result of the referral to juvenile court. Two chapters of the report present national statistics on delinquency cases disposed by the juvenile courts in 2019, along with caseload trends since 2005. A third chapter traces the flow of delinquency cases from referral to the court through court processing to the point of judicial disposition. Data are provided on the demography of the juveniles processed and the charged offenses. The report uses a format that combines tables, figures, and text that highlights data presentation. The data indicate that in 2019, courts with juvenile jurisdiction disposed of an estimated 722,600 delinquency cases. Between 2005 and 2019, the number of cases decreased for all offense categories. For 2019, the percentage of dispositions for person offenses was 33 percent, 30 percent for property offenses, 13 percent for drug offenses, and 24 percent for public order offenses.