In your initial post, discuss some of the differences in legal definitions concerning what constitut

A juvenile is generally defined as a youth below the consent age of a particular state. Some other definitions refer to the age that is between puberty and adulthood (Champion, Merlo, & Benekos, 2013). Another definition is a person who is not old enough to be held liable for any criminal act. In mosts states the age limit for a juvenile is 18 years of age, however in some states such as Wyoming, the age limit is 19 and in New York, Connecticut and North Carolina the age limit is 16 (Champion, Merlo, & Benekos, 2013).

Juvenile delinquency can be measured from the Uniform Crime Reporting Program (UCRP) and cohort studies (Bartollas, & Schmalleger, 2014). The Uniform Crime Reporting Program is an FBI database that collects information on different crimes yearly. This record keeping was authorized by the Congress in 1870 when the Department of Justice was created. The Uniform Crime Reporting Program is a nationwide collaboration effort of all types of law enforcement agencies that choose to join in providing the FBI data on the statistics of different types of crimes (Bartollas, & Schmalleger, 2014). The data which is normally given are crimes which the police know about and did not discover on their own through leads and so forth or by accident, the number of arrests the law enforcement agencies made during the past year excluding repeated offenders and finally the total number of individuals arrested along with their demographic details. This data can be used to measure crime rates of a particular area as well as other things. Cohort studies, on the other hand, is the researching and recording of the lives of specific individuals, born in the same year and living in the same country or city. It is basically a kind of controlled case study of people living in the same areas and of the same generations, to see if they are affected by the same things, or think the same way and so forth (Yablonsky, 2000).

I think the Uniform Crime Reporting Program is a more effective way of measuring juvenile delinquency, and this method allows every participating law agency to be able to monitor the crime rates in their jurisdiction better as well as compare them to other jurisdictions. It also allows them to be able to see the results of their previous year's juvenile crime data as opposed to the present year and evaluate hat to do about the data being seen.