Census of Juveniles on Probation, United States, 2012 (ICPSR 37438)

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Formal probation includes youth adjudicated for one or more delinquency or status offenses, and includes school-based probation if a court ordered it following adjudication. This also includes juveniles supervised via contract by private agencies.

The Census of Juveniles on Probation (CJP) also includes:

• Juveniles receiving aftercare/reentry supervision if it is a continuation of formal court-ordered probation following release from residential placement.
• Juveniles who were legally the responsibility of a responding agency but were supervised outside its jurisdiction, such as through an interstate compact agreement.

The CJP does not include the following:

• Persons under the jurisdiction of an adult court.
• Juveniles under informal probation supervision. Informal juvenile probation is the supervision of persons who have reached an agreement with the probation authority to be supervised in the school or community. Those individuals have not been ordered by a court to serve a period of community supervision following their adjudication.
• Juveniles on school-based probation if it was not ordered by a court following adjudication.
• Juveniles residing in a correctional facility, detention center, boot camp, residential treatment facility, or other community-based facility, even if they are also on probation.
• Those juveniles are counted by another OJJDP data collection.
• Juveniles on parole.
• Juveniles supervised on behalf of another jurisdiction through interstate compact.

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Universe View help for Universe

All juveniles on formal court-ordered probation, including those on court-ordered aftercare or reentry supervision on the reference date of October 24, 2012 in the United States.

Unit(s) of Observation View help for Unit(s) of Observation

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Description of Variables View help for Description of Variables

DS1: Probationer's sex, race, age, year and month of birth, most serious offense, and weights. DS2: Factors for national analysis.

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Some agencies did not respond. There are many reasons for non-response. In some cases, agencies simply did not have the ability to pull data at all or could not provide it in the requested format, while other agencies did not have the staff resources to provide the data requested. In some instances, agencies elected not to participate. If a reporting agency did not respond, all juvenile data kept by the agency were considered missing. The reporting agencies varied in their coverage of geographic areas and types of juvenile probationers. Some agencies reported individual juvenile probationer data for their entire state, whereas the majority of reporters covered a single county. Some states had multiple reporters, with one that reported for the majority of their state and other reporters that represented smaller geographic areas. Sometimes, other reporters handled specific types of juvenile probationers across the entire state regardless of the area.

Twenty-six states reported individual-level data for all juvenile probationers in their states, 17 states reported data for slightly less than 100% of youth on formal probation, and the remaining 8 states reported little to no individual data. Among the 8 incomplete states, 4 were able to provide aggregate counts of the number of youth on formal probation, but could not provide any individual details.

The original 2012 CJP survey frame included 783 agencies, which was reduced to 694 after removing duplicates and ineligible agencies discovered after data collection. Of these 694 agencies, 368 provided individual level data on juvenile probationers. As such, the agency level response rate for reporting agencies is 53% (368/694). However, relying on this response rate alone is misleading because one reporting agency could either represent an entire state or a single local jurisdiction. Therefore, the more informative response rate for CJP is the response rate associated with the individual juveniles on probation, not of reporting agencies. This alternative response rate was calculated for 50 states and DC by dividing the national estimate of youth on probation (247,050) by the number of probationers reported by participating agencies (176,426), which yields a response rate of 71%. The large difference between the agency-level response rate and juvenile-level response rate indicates that larger reporting agencies responded more often.

Original Release Date View help for Original Release Date

2020-01-30

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To produce national estimates, a series of non-response adjustments were performed. The CJP was confronted with two types of nonresponse in juvenile-level data: item level and unit-level. Item-level non-response refers to missing information on an individual record, e.g., missing gender. Westat's proprietary software, AutoImpute, which uses a combination of regression modeling and hot-deck imputation, was used to solve item-level missing. Nationally, item nonresponse ranged from 8% to 27% across individual-level variables. In most cases, imputation was performed within state. In some instances, however, donor records from other states with the same upper age of juvenile court jurisdiction were used in hot-deck imputation.

Unit-level nonresponse refers to situations where the respondent provided little or no youth-level data for juvenile probationers. Unit-level missing was addressed through weighting. Most states (26 of 43 states with usable data) had a response rate of 100%, which did not need nonresponse adjustment weighting. For states reporting less than 100% of their juvenile probation data, nonresponse adjustment weighting was used to estimate the state juvenile probation population.

To develop national estimates, states were treated as primary sampling units (PSUs) and stratified into four strata based on youth population size and state upper age of juvenile court jurisdiction. The final weight was obtained through post-stratification of the state-level weights using youth population data. The variables used for post-stratification included demographic variables (age, gender, and race/ethnicity).