Though the number of youth confined nationwide has declined significantly over the past two decades, our country still incarcerates far too many young people.
It does so despite overwhelming evidence showing that incarceration is an ineffective strategy for steering youth away from delinquent behavior and that high rates of youth incarceration do not improve public safety.
And the use of confinement is plagued by severe racial and ethnic disparities. It begins by describing recent incarceration trends in the youth justice system. This assessment finds that the sizable drop in juvenile facility populations since is due largely to a substantial decline in youth arrests nationwide, not to any shift toward other approaches by juvenile courts or corrections agencies once youth enter the justice system.
Most youth who are incarcerated in juvenile facilities are not charged with serious violent offenses, yet the United States continues to confine youth at many times the rates of other nations. And it continues to inflict the harms of incarceration disproportionately on Black youth and other youth of color β despite well-established alternatives that produce better outcomes for youth and community safety.
Part 1 of the report reviews the research on the outcomes of youth incarceration. The evidence reveals these key findings:. Incarceration does not reduce delinquent behavior. State-level data on recidivism consistently show that youth who are released from correctional confinement experience high rates of rearrest, new adjudications in juvenile court or convictions in adult court , and reincarceration. Studies that track youth outcomes into adulthood have found that an alarming share of young people incarcerated in youth correctional facilities are later arrested, convicted, and incarcerated as adults.
