Criminal Justice Data Interpretation

Justice System Criminal Justice Data Interpretation In December of 2014 the National Center for Juvenile Justice published its fourth "comprehensive report on juvenile crime, victimization, and the juvenile justice system." (Sickmund, 2014, pg iii) This report was prepared in order to present the most important information on the juvenile justice system and those who come under its jurisdiction. In order to understand the many influences on the lives of juveniles, the report examines the variety of characteristics within the population of juveniles included in the report.

While this includes such information as demographics, population data, living arrangements and high school dropout rates, one of the most important characteristics is the rate of births attributed to juveniles. Page 13 of the report includes a table which describes the teenage birthrate in the United States compared with a number of other industrialized nations.

The data used was collected from the United Nations Statistics Division's "Adolescent Birth Rate, per 1000 women," however, since a single year for all countries involved was not available, they used data collected over a range of years from 2007 to 2010. (Sickmund, 2014, p.13) Compared to other industrialized nations such as Russia, Portugal, Belgium, Japan, Switzerland and others, the United States has the highest teenaged birth rate at 39.1 babies born per every 1000 females aged 15 to 19.

In comparison, only three nations, Russia, New Zealand, and the U.K., had teenage birthrates in the 20-30 range, while every other industrialized nation had a teenage birthrate under 16 births per 1000 women. In other words, the United States had a teenage birthrate of more than twice the rate of almost every other industrialized nation in the world. And while this rate has been decreasing since 2000 in the United States, it is still nearly 10 times the rate of the nations with the lowest rates; Japan and Switzerland. The U.S.

Department of Justice's Bureau of Statistics website contains a number of statistics involving the Justice system and those involved in it. One particular article on the website, titled "Recidivism of Prisoners Released in 30 States in 2005: Patterns from 2005 to 2010," contains a table on page 4 which compares the percentage of recidivism for various offenses within three years of the original release in eleven states for the years 1994 and 2005.

(Durose, 2014, p.4) The offenses included violent crimes, property crimes, drug crimes and public order crimes and in almost every case the percentage of individuals re-arrested for these crimes dropped in the decade from 1994 to 2005. Violent, property, and drug offense recidivism rates all dropped between 4% and 6%, with the exception being public order arrests which increased a little more than 13%.

In other words, the percentage of those prisoners released from prison and re-arrested for violent, property, or drug offenses dropped slightly between 1994 and 2005, while the percentage of those re-arrested for public order crimes increased dramatically.

(Durose, 2014, p.4) The obvious question posed by these results is why did public order arrests increase so significantly while other arrests dropped? The answer may lie in the fact that violent, property, and drug offenses are considered felonies and serious misdemeanors and in 1994 the reporting of these crimes was taken more seriously by law officers than.