Date of Award

4-2025

Document Type

Thesis

Department

Political Science

First Advisor

Patrick Donnay

Abstract

One of the largest problems that plague the juvenile justice system today is how to better handle juvenile crime without causing the juvenile to revert back to that behavior, but still helping them understand and acknowledge the crime they have committed. The state of Minnesota has created juvenile diversion programs as an attempt to aid in that endeavor. These programs however are under researched. The goal of this article is to shed some light on what those programs look like and how some counties programs vary from other programs on other counties; specifically focusing on the variation between offense-targeting for high-risk youth. This study uses county level data collected from the Minnesota Department of Public Safety and the American Community Survey to answer the following question: Do programs with more high-risk youth target more severe crimes? Findings suggest that there is a significant correlation between high risk youth and diversion programs which target more severe crimes.

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