ABSTRACT
Justice practitioners have tremendous discretion on how to handle less serious juvenile offenders. Less serious juvenile offenders are those that commit offenses that are of moderate or low severity, and that often do not have or have a limited prior record of contacts with legal authorities. Police officers, district attorneys, juvenile court intake officers, juvenile and family court judges, and other officials can decide whether the juvenile should be “officially processed” by the juvenile justice system, diverted from the system to counseling or services, or released altogether. An important policy question is which strategy leads to the best outcomes for juveniles. Although some experts believe that entry or further “penetration” into the formal juvenile justice system can help deter future criminal behavior by juveniles, others believe that it could 114lead juveniles to commit more crimes in the future, perhaps due to a “labeling” effect. A further consideration for policymakers is that release or diversion options may be cheaper than juvenile court processing, so that even a net gain of “zero” (no crime impact whatsoever) favors the release or diversion group in a cost-benefit analysis. The question on how to handle such offenders is not a trivial one. For example, in 2005 there were nearly 1.7 million delinquency cases processed at the intake stage by U.S. juvenile courts, and nearly 60 percent were formally processed, with 40 percent being diverted or otherwise “kicked out” of the system (Puzzanchera and Sickmund, 2008).
