Juvenile Justice System and Risk Factor Data - Illinois Criminal ...

Conclusion
This report provides all the readily available juvenile justice and risk factor data on youth in
Illinois to juvenile justice professionals and policymakers. The data in this report give users a
better understanding of who is being served by the juvenile justice system and who is at risk of
becoming involved in the juvenile justice system from both a statewide and county perspective.
Notable findings include:
• A 29 percent increase in the juvenile arrest rate between 2000 and 2006.
• A 34 percent decrease in the rate of juvenile delinquency petitions filed and a decrease of
52 percent in the rate of juvenile court adjudications between 1996 and 2006. However,
Cook County did not report juvenile court adjudications in 2006.
• A 16 percent decrease in the rate of juvenile detention admissions between 1996 and
2006.
• A decrease of 13 percent in the rate of juvenile probation caseloads between 1996 and
2006.
• A 4 percent increase in incarceration rate of juveniles ages 13 to 16, but a 6 percent
decrease in the number of court commitments to the Illinois Department of Juvenile
Justice from FY94 to FY04.
• Black youth ages 10 to 16 in Illinois were four times more likely to be arrested and
almost six times more likely to be detained in 2006 compared to white youth. Black
youth were more than four and a half times more likely to be incarcerated in 2004
compared to white youth.
Recommendations
Improve the quantity and quality of juvenile justice data
A significant need exists for more quantity and better quality data on youth in Illinois. Although
available data can describe to state and county practitioners a great deal about the youth they
serve, much more is unknown about youth in the juvenile justice system, and there are
significant limitations to the data that are available. Additionally, the absence of reliable and
consistent race and ethnicity data on youth at all stages of the juvenile justice system process are
barriers to a full understanding of the problem of disproportionate minority contact.
Steps that are needed to improve the quality of juvenile justice data in Illinois include not only
improving the quality of data currently being collected by various state and local agencies, but
also identifying areas in which new or additional data is needed. For example, improvements to
the Juvenile Monitoring Information System (JMIS) should be considered. Although JMIS
makes detention data more readily accessible, data entry errors lead many to question the quality
of the data. Many of these errors have been eliminated through the new eJMIS system, to which
detention centers enter data using a web-based form that notifies the user when an improper
value has been entered. However, some counties do not have the technological capacity to
submit data in this manner. Additionally, Cook County only began reporting to JMIS in 2007. It
96