Early Profile of the Adolescent Female Offender Before the
mid-1960s, most formal discussions of juvenile offenders and the
juvenile justice system did not include data on the juvenile
female offender. For example, in his 1955 book on gang
delinquency, Albert Cohen goes as far as to describe the
delinquent as "a rogue male" (Cohen 1955, cited in Chesney-Lind
1989, p. 6). However, interestingly enough, during the 1960s and
1970s there was an increase in female delinquency, causing
researchers to notice and begin to track female offending
patterns for the first time. For instance, between 1960 and
1975, arrests of juvenile female offenders rose 254 percent,
causing concern that the country was experiencing a fundamental
new phenomenon of female crime (Chesney-Lind 1979, p. 53). A
profile of the typical juvenile female offender from the late
1960s to the mid 1980s is as follows: she is described as
someone who is approximately 16 years old, lives in an urban
area in a single-parent home, is a high school dropout