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Delinquency Involvement: An Evaluation of the Non-Intervention Strategy

The official response by agents of the juvenile justice system to adolescent involvement in victimless and status offenses currently is under attack from a variety of sources. While several complex issues are involved in the debate concerning the proper handling of such offenders (the inherent vagueness of the statutes, and whether or not their codification and enforcement violates constitutionally guaranteed rights, for example), this paper is concerned only with the non-intervention argument that the official processing of such offenders be discontinued. The primary rationale underlying the non-intervention strategy is that not only are such offenders involved in relatively petty forms of delinquency, but also that they are unlikely to participate in more serious types of misbehavior. As such, proponents of this view suggest that since official processing only can have the negative consequences of stigmatization and the production of increased levels and more serious forms of delinquency involvement, it should be avoided. Self-report data collected from a representative sample of 412 male high school students provide little support for these assumptions. Rather than being specialized, as suggested at least implicitly by the non-intervention approach, these data indicate that delinquency involvement is quite versatile, typically including participation in a wide variety of offense types. While involvement in victimless offenses is the most frequent delinquent activity, such concentration does not preclude significant participation in more serious property and personal offenses. In fact, high levels of involvement in victimless offenses is strongly associated with high levels of participation in property and personal offenses. As a result, and while recognizing that many of the existing delinquency statutes are certainly open to criticism on numerous grounds, any strategy based on the assumption that victimless offenders are unlikely to be involved in other more serious delinquent activities as a rationale for non-intervention appears untenable in light of the findings reported in this study.