The previous section focused on juvenile court processing of delinquency cases as characterized by four general offense categories: person, property, drugs, and public order. These general offense categories are useful for describing case characteristics and examining trends in juvenile court processing, but they tend to mask the variation in the juvenile court's response to the various offenses upon which the general categories are built.

The offenses that constitute the general offense groupings vary widely in severity.⁶ Using more detailed offense categories to examine case processing promotes an understanding of how the juvenile court responds to various delinquency matters. In this section, the general categories are unbundled to examine case processing for specific offenses.

Cases involving more serious offenses are generally more likely to be formally processed than are cases involving less serious offenses. For example, 72% of aggravated assault cases were handled formally in 1997, compared with 49% of simple assault cases (table 50). Similarly, 77% of burglary cases were handled formally by juvenile courts, compared with 41% of larceny-theft cases. Robbery and criminal homicide cases were most likely to be petitioned (87% and 86%, respectively).

Violent Crime Index offenses were more likely to be petitioned (77% or 774 of every 1,000 such cases referred to juvenile court intake) than were Property Crime Index offenses (52% or 524 of every 1,000 such cases referred) in 1997 (figure 15).

More than half (57%) of all formally processed cases in 1997 resulted in the youth being adjudicated delinquent. With the exception of criminal homicide, cases involving more serious offenses were more likely to be adjudicated than were other cases. The relatively low likelihood of adjudication for criminal homicide cases is because nearly one-third (31%) of these cases were judicially waived to criminal court for processing. As a result, petitioned criminal homicide cases were the most likely to receive a formal judicial response—either judicial waiver or adjudication.

The likelihood of adjudication also varied within the general offense categories. For example, within person offenses, 61% of petitioned robbery cases were adjudicated in 1997, compared with 51% of petitioned simple assault cases. In general, the more serious the charge, the more likely the case was to result in adjudication.

More than three-quarters of adjudicated cases received a formal disposition of residential placement or probation. The majority (55%) of adjudicated cases received formal probation as the most restrictive disposition; 29% resulted in a disposition of residential placement. Cases involving youth adjudicated for serious person offenses, such as homicide, forcible rape, or robbery, were most likely to result in residential placement.

Figures 16 and 17 further illustrate variations in case processing for selected person and property offenses.