Juvenile Justice System Dashboards

The Washington State Center for Court Research partnered with the Washington State Department of Children, Youth, and Families Office of Juvenile Justice (OJJ) and the Washington Partnership Council for Juvenile Justice to develop a series of dashboards to fill important gaps in our knowledge of the juvenile justice system. The intent of the dashboard series is to make criminal justice data from various institutions accessible in one place and allow officials and other interested parties to view trends on justice-related decision points, including where disparities may be occurring.

We have produced two dashboards.

The first is our Juvenile Law Enforcement Data Analysis (LEDA) dashboard which displays arrest data from the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs (WASPC) and population data from the Office of Financial Management. We calculated the number of arrests per 1,000 youth in each jurisdiction. By showing the data in this fashion, we are able to create a contextualized, universal unit of measure that allows the public and stakeholders to compare rates across the state at the county and law enforcement jurisdiction (city) level.

Law Enforcement Data Analysis Dashboard

The second dashboard is our Juvenile Court Dashboard which displays court data at the referral, case, and adjudication stages of the court system. Court data comes from local courts who enter their data into case management systems shared with the Washington State Administrative Office of the Courts. Court clerks enter charge and demographic information when the referral is made and update that information as the referral moves through the court process. We used the population-based unit of measure as we did with the LEDA dashboard, showing the number of referrals, cases, adjudications per 1,000 youth in the population for each jurisdiction.

Dashboard Coming Soon!

We mapped the arrest and court offense categories as closely as we could to each other to maintain consistency. The exceptions were shoplifting, which was a common offense description at arrest, but was not listed as a court charge. Based on an examination of electronic records, we believe those arrests likely become theft charges at the court and were placed in the Other Property Offenses for the court dashboard. In addition, there were a number of offenses related to the administration of justice that we did not see in the offense descriptions in the arrest data, but were present in court cases.

There were 1,059 unique charge descriptions during the dashboard time period. Follow this link to see the complete list of charges for each offense category.

Court Dashboard Charge Descriptions by Offense Category

The Juvenile Dashboard Series is produced by the Washington State Center for Court Research. It was developed through collaboration with the Office of Juvenile Justice and funding from the Washington State Partnership Council for Juvenile Justice, Title II sub-awards, #2016-JF-FX-4047, #2017-JF-FX-4040, and #2018-JX-FX-4030 awarded by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this project are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of Justice.