On the State and Fate of Status Offenders

The handling of status offenders is reviewed in the context of the historical development of juvenile justice in this country. Discrepancies between the legal code and the actual practice are noted and discussed in the light of present tendencies and likely developments concerning status offenders. On the basis of a nationally representative sample of 1467 juvenile offenders a procedure is developed to estimate the actual number of status offenders committed to public correctional facilities in the nation as a whole and in the 48 contiguous states. These estimates are correlated with a battery of socio-demographic factors. The analysis suggests that the phenomenon of status offenders is mainly a problem of the modern way of life characterized by urbanization, industrialization, and affluence. Some policy recommendations are the natural result of the present analysis. The noble intention of the justice system to exempt minors from the full force of criminal law ironically has resulted in one of the worst legal situations on record (Platt, 1969; Mattick and Aikman, 1969; Sarri, 1974). In 1899 Illinois became the first state to enact a juvenile court act, and within thirty years all but two states had followed suit by drafting special juvenile statutes designed to eliminate formal procedures and stigmatizing labels for minors and to emphasize individual treatment on the basis of parens patriae ideologies. Since the juvenile justice system was intended strictly for the protection and well-being of the youth, neither procedural guidelines nor jurisdictional boundaries were thought necessary for inclusion in juvenile statutes (Levin and Sarri, 1974). The lack of such regulations as well as extensive misconceptions of the goals of the reformers have resulted in a most tragic overreach by the juvenile justice system: the presumed or actual possession of jurisdiction over status offenders (Lemert, 1970). A status offender is commonly defined as a minor who engages in conduct which would not result in a criminal charge if committed by an adult. Typical examples of such conduct are “truancy”, “running away”, “using profanity”, “growing up in idleness”, and “incorrigibility”. These examples make clear that status offenses refer to both violation of specific ordinances and to general character or personality shortcomings and disorders. The indiscriminate handling of status offenders thus not only offends our sense of justice but also invites serious questioning of the efficacy of the present approach to cope with status offenders. In short, an institution designed to protect the most vulnerable population — the nation's youth, that is — has turned into a formal procedure by the system in which “the child is least helped and most abused” (Orlando, 1975). The failure to distinguish between status offenses and violations of penal laws by minors has resulted in jammed pretrial detention centers, inadequate and perfunctory court processing, and oversized correctional facilities crowded with status offenders and serious delinquents (including murderers) together. Thus immeasurable damage is inflicted upon youth at an absolutely forbidding cost to society at large. For these reasons the handling of status offenders should be removed from the juvenile justice system and be entrusted to a special service organization which does not have judicial power over its clients. Recent Supreme Court decisions have begun to move in this direction, 1 but few states thus far have successfully incorporated this development into the juvenile statutes, and no state has fully implemented the rulings issued by the highest court in this land. In this paper an attempt is made (1) to review the statutory distinctions and disposition differences concerning status offenders and juvenile delinquents, (2) to estimate the number of detained status offenders as a percentage of all the youth committed to public correctional facilities, 2 and (3) to examine some structural correlates of the forty-eight contiguous states which might explain the differences in the proportion of status offenders detained in public correctional facilities.