A new China-developed system for doing psychological profiles on juvenile offenders began yesterday in Shanghai, replacing a US test, the People’s Prosecutors’ Office announced.

This new test, developed by that office, Beijing Normal University and a drug rehabilitation center in Sichuan Province, was trialed on 406 juvenile offenders in Shanghai during a five-month pilot project that ended last month. The test is designed to determine which youthful offenders should be charged and which should be treated with lenience.

In the trial program, Shanghai prosecutors withdrew charges on 142 minors who committed lesser crimes and who showed in the profiling that they were unlikely to break the law again. That compares with some 77 cases of such leniency in the same period last year.

“Previously, we often used a foreign system for juvenile psychological assessment,” said Fan Rongqing, an official at the prosecutors’ office. “But it didn’t really meet our needs.”

The new system will be applied in the juvenile justice system in 17 provinces across China, local prosecutors said.

Fan said some foreign psychological assessment tests, such as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, is designed for both minors and adults and doesn’t address the unique circumstances of the young. Then, too, culture and language differences may ignore quintessential Chinese characteristics.

“A question, even translated into Chinese, might be understood in different ways by Chinese because of a different way of thinking,” Fan said. “Moreover, some migrant youth offenders couldn’t even understand some of the questions.”

Shanghai courts sentenced 33,602 minors in the last three decades, according to the Shanghai Higher People’s Court. Annual convictions dropped to 1,045 in 2013 from a peak of 2,682 in 2007. The decline was attributed to better crime prevention and control in the realm of juvenile offenses.

The new domestic test assesses the psychological state of offenders, their social backgrounds and the likelihood of recidivism. One juvenile offender, aged 16, who grabbed a handbag containing 900 yuan (US$145) while bicycling past a pedestrian, was given the new test after police nabbed him. The test showed he suffered from lack of family love, delusions and self-contempt.