What does decriminalization of delinquency mean?
With aggressive advocacy on behalf of delinquent youth, the overall policy response was to break out these youth from the delinquency category and insert them most frequently into their own status-offense category or less frequently into the dependency/neglect category. This separation action became known as decriminalization. Status offenses were recategorized by different labels and names in different statutes: person in need of supervision, PINS (New York); minor otherwise in need of supervision, MINS (Illinois); juvenile in need of supervision, JINS (New Jersey); child in need of supervision, CHINS (Colorado); youth in need of supervision, YINS (Montana); a child of a family in need of services, FINS (New Mexico); unruly child (Georgia, Ohio); section 601 juvenile (California); and undisciplined juvenile (North Carolina). An enormously influential and very significant response came when the U.S. Congress enacted Public Law 93-415, the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act
