Early Court Adjudication of Juvenile Offenders: Giving the Data Another Chance

A critical analysis is presented of a study purporting to show that juveniles who are adjudicated delinquent at first offence are less likely to go on to prison in adulthood than are first offenders who are more leniently treated It is argued that this study was fatally flawed in that it compared adjudicated first-offenders with only those nonadjudicated first-offenders who had a record of reoffending as juveniles; the exclusion from the sampling frame of nonadjudicated juveniles who did not reoffend precludes any evaluation of the relative prognoses of adjudicated and nonadjudicated first-offenders, it is further argued that the researchers' causal conclusions, and the extension of these to the explanation of age- and race-related differences in prognosis, are fallacious irrespective of the adequacy of the sampling frame.