We’re Locking Up Fewer Kids, And That’s A Good Thing

A new study levels a devastating critique of juvenile incarceration.

My significant other and I once had dinner with another couple, one a lawyer, one not. The lawyer and I were talking shop when the non-lawyer chimed in: “I could never be with someone who defends criminals. Those lowlifes don’t deserve lawyers. Send ‘em straight to jail.”

In the United States, that attitude is not uncommon. It’s one reason we have by far the highest population of imprisoned adults in the world. We usually have the highest adult incarceration rate too, though apparently we were recently dethroned by the Seychelles.

But that’s adults. What about kids who commit crimes?

It turns out that our juvenile incarceration numbers have been declining rapidly over the past several years (though from an international perspective, they’re still really high). In 1999, over 107,000 juveniles were “detained, incarcerated, or placed in residential facilities,” while by 2011, that number had dropped to about 61,000 — a 43% decline.

And a new report suggests that’s a very good thing.

The Pew Charitable Trusts recently released “Re-Examining Juvenile Incarceration,” and the report’s subtitle pretty much sums it up: “High cost, poor outcomes spark shift to alternatives.” The report is a quick-hit compendium of recent research on juvenile incarceration and how, for all but high-risk juvenile offenders, it doesn’t really work. Here are some highlights:

  1. “Juvenile incarceration fails to reduce recidivism.”

Sponsored

Remember learning about the rationales that drive criminal sentencing? Deterrence, rehabilitation, incapacitation, retribution, and all that? Many of these boil down to the same thing: reducing the commission of new crimes by the person being sentenced. If an offender is deterred from committing another crime, there’s no recidivism. If an offender is rehabilitated, no recidivism. Etc.

So the conclusion that “juvenile incarceration fails to reduce recidivism” is pretty damning of the practice.

Indeed, the report notes that “placement in correctional facilities does not lower the likelihood of juvenile reoffending and may, in fact, increase it.” And, even worse, “youth who reported the lowest levels of offending before being placed were more likely to reoffend following institutional stays.”

  1. There’s “no consistent relationship between the length of out-of-home placements and recidivism.”

Some studies show similarly situated juveniles having higher recidivism rates following longer periods of incarceration. Others show something different — reduced recidivism following “longer treatment periods or more contact hours.” There may be qualitative differences between programs that explain these differences, but in the end it’s unclear whether there’s any real benefit from longer incarceration periods in most cases. The costs, however, are clear: longer incarceration periods are expensive to taxpayers.

Sponsored

Which leads us to …

  1. Juvenile incarceration yields “a poor return on public investments.”

Juvenile incarceration doesn’t work very well, but it is very expensive. And there are cheaper alternatives that work better.

Regarding effectiveness, here’s one example from the report: researchers in Ohio studied a community-placement program and found that “the recidivism rate for low- and moderate-risk juveniles in facilities [read: incarcerated] was at least twice that of comparable youth under supervision or in programs in their communities.”

And regarding cost, here’s another example from the report: in South Carolina, it costs $426 a day (over $150,000 a year) to house an incarcerated juvenile, while it costs only $13 a day to supervise a juvenile subject to “intensive probation.”

Of course, the cost is worth it in some cases. I’m not saying that an underage axe murderer should be given a supervised position at the local hardware store with the goal of rehabilitating her through her natural love of axes. The report is clear that incarceration makes sense for high-risk offenders. On this, the data — and common sense — are consistent. It’s the lower-risk kids we should be interested in keeping out of expensive placements that may actually encourage them to reoffend.

All this leads the report to conclude with good news: many states are passing laws to reduce juvenile incarceration, either by expanding the categories of juvenile crimes for which incarceration is not available as a penalty or by limiting mandatory minimum sentences for juveniles.

It turns out that sometimes compelling data do bring about corresponding changes in public policy.


Sam Wright is a dyed-in-the-wool, bleeding-heart public interest lawyer who has spent his career exclusively in nonprofits and government. If you have ideas, questions, kudos, or complaints about his column or public interest law in general, send him an email at PublicInterestATL@gmail.com.