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There are four sets of policy positions which are of interest and utility in predicting juvenile detention populations.

These

are the time factors involved in: (1) whether there is initial hearing, or whether the child is screened out, (2) whether there is an initial hearing and a social study, (3) whether there is initial hearing plus trial, and (4) whether there is initial hearing, trial, plus social study. Each of these refers to a number of defendants. These sets were labelled, by the Office of Crime Analysis in its projections, D-1 to D-4, and their sizes N-1 to N-4 and then the The formular then would

population of interest were specified.

run as follows:

An examination of court policies and plans suggests that: (1) time to initial hearing will be no more than 24 hours, (2) the time for a social study will be approximately 30 days, (3) the time for trial will be approximately 60 days, on average. The formular for calculating population, therefore, would look as follows:

While these time factors can be relatively easily specified,

the number of offenses cannot. Some estimates from available data

about past trends were then developed, and are presented in the chart that follows.