The Juvenile Justice Coalition of Ohio (JJC) today released a report highlighting a lack of data on thousands of youth and families involved in Ohio’s juvenile justice system.

The report notes that about 95,000 status offense (offenses that only apply to youth, such as truancy) and delinquency cases go through Ohio’s juvenile courts each year as reported to the Ohio Supreme Court. JJC said comprehensive state-level data is available on less than 5 percent of those cases, or on 4,800 youth.

To improve Ohio’s data collection, juvenile justice decision-making, and community safety, JJC said Ohio should assign a centralized entity to collect juvenile justice data; create a uniform date collection form; provide court tools to collect data; and make data publically available.

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