Table 1.

Logical inconsistencies violating data plausibility.

Inconsistency	Definition and examples
Inconsistent petition: yes to diverted and yes to petitioned	If a case is diverted - meaning that the case was dismissed or resolved through “warn and release,” an informal adjustment (written agreement between the juvenile and the Juvenile Court Probation department), or a referral to a treatment program – there should be no petition filed for formal court processing. If the data extraction suggested that a case had been both diverted and petitioned, often the early decision to divert was overturned by the prosecutor, who then filed a petition. In this scenario, the data would be corrected to reflect “no” for diverted and “yes” for petitioned. Another common scenario resulting in an inconsistent petition occurred if the case was originally diverted through an informal adjustment, but a condition of the agreement was violated by the juvenile. Here, the data would be corrected to reflect “yes” for diverted and “no” for petitioned.
Implausible case: no to diverted and no to petitioned	For this plausibility error, a case record was incorrect often because the youth was arrested in one county but held in another county’s detention center. Sometimes the inconsistency meant that a youth was being housed in the local detention center for a case in another county (i.e., a courtesy detention). To correct these data errors, these cases would not be included in the total number of cases within a county, since the court processing occurred in another jurisdiction. In other cases, this type of inconsistency alerted our research team to widespread clerical errors that occurred across the county, which required scrutiny of the entire case chronology.
Excess information: yes to diverted and yes to subsequent decision points	For the purpose of recording a diverted case, the diversion should be the last decision point. Thus, when the data extracts for a diverted case included information on subsequent decision points, it was likely that subsequent arrests for the same youth were erroneously linked to the original diversion. In most cases, the excess information was not applicable to the diversion in question, meaning that the excess information would apply to separate arrests. In other cases, the diversion field was incorrectly filled, requiring a simple correction.
Inconsistent waiver: yes to waived and yes to subsequent decision points	Similar to diversion cases, if the youth is waived to adult court, there should be no further activity in juvenile court related to the same arrest. The data extractions showed that “waived” was the decision point most likely to be incorrectly noted in the CMSs. Data entry corrections resolved these errors.
Inconsistent adjudication: no to adjudicated delinquent and yes to later decisions	An adjudicatory hearing in which the arrest was found “not true” is another way to conclude a juvenile case. There should be no formal probation or confinement in a correctional facility if the youth is not adjudicated delinquent. In most of these inconsistent adjudication cases, the error occurred because the adjudication field was left blank, and subsequent decision points accurately reflected the case outcome.