Recommending Juvenile Offenders for Pretrial Release

Abstract

Courthistories of 501 juvenile offenders prosecuted in adult court were followed as part of an effort to develop a point scale recommendation system for a large pretrial services agency. The point scale and two variations used criteria that predicted a warrant (failure to appear for one or more scheduled appearances) more accurately than when other traditional criteria used for adults were applied to this population. The juvenile offenders, although facing trial on charges of high severity, had lower warrant and recidivism rates during court processing than comparable samples of 16-year-old adult defendants. Implications are discussed for the efficacy of prosecuting juveniles in the adult system and the feasibility of separate pretrial recommendation systems to enable a higher proportion of reliable defendants to secure release pending trial.