The Survey of Juveniles Charged in Adult Criminal Courts (SJCACC) was designed to collect information on the characteristics of cases and persons ages 12 to 17, or juveniles, in the 50 states and District of Columbia (DC) who were charged in adult criminal courts between January 1 and December 31, 2014.
The SJCACC was a dual frame sample of all 50 states and DC regarding the characteristics of criminal cases involving defendants age 17 or younger, regardless of the upper age of jurisdiction in the state. The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) conducted the SJCACC through a cooperative agreement with Westat, Inc., and the National Center for Juvenile Justice (NCJJ), with support from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.
The SJCACC defined a case as the total set of charges (up to five) against a single defendant arising from a single incident. The SJCACC requested that adult criminal courts provide or construct person-cases, regardless of how the state prosecutor filed charges in the court. The 23 states that provided the data used in this report indicated that they were able to meet this definition, but not all jurisdictions provided an anonymized person-identifier as requested. Thus, this report refers to cases rather than persons.
Cases eligible for inclusion met the following requirements: (1) The case had a final finding (e.g., adjudication, verdict) between January 1, 2014 and December 31, 2014; (2) The defendant had to be a juvenile at the time of the offense; (3) The record had information on the type of charge at case disposition.
Court data in states can be centralized, where one or a few agencies are able to report data for the entire state, or decentralized, where access and reporting of court data is the responsibility of the individual counties with little to no state collection of data. The SJCACC began by contacting the state court administrator to determine whether the state had centralized data collection.
Data collection began in the centralized states. For the census portion of the data collection, 26 states and DC were able to provide at least some data for the entire state or jurisdiction, for a response rate of 79%.
Five states provided partial data that were not responsive to the request. These states could not be placed with the decentralized states as the usability of the data was discovered too late in the data collection process.
Seven centralized states were added to the 16 states unable to provide complete extracts. These states were divided into primary sampling units (PSUs) within each state by the size of the population age 17 or younger.
For the sample portion of the data collection, PSUs were selected proportionate to the size of the population age 17 or younger. The 38 selected PSUs consisted of 65 counties. Of the 65 counties, 35 counties (representing 16 PSUs) confirmed that they had no eligible cases (e.g., no persons age 17 or younger charged in adult criminal courts in calendar year 2014), or provided data for a total response rate of 54%. The remaining 30 counties declined to participate or otherwise did not respond to the request. After conducting a nonresponse bias analysis, BJS concluded that the sample data were not sufficient for reporting.
