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...

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…