No Place for Kids: The Case for Reducing Juvenile Incarceration

States confine juvenile offenders in many types of facilities, including group homes, residential treatment centers, boot camps, wilderness programs, or country-run youth facilities (some of them locked, others secured only through staff supervision). But the largest share of committed youth--about 40 percent of the total--are held in locked long-term youth correctional facilities operated primarily by state governments or by private firms under contract to states. Yet these institutions have never been found to reduce the criminality of troubled young people. Quite the opposite: For decades now, follow-up studies tracking youth released from juvenile corrections facilities have routinely reported high rates of recidivism. Meanwhile, reports of pervasive violence and abuse have been regularly emerging from these facilities for as long as anyone can remember. The main body of this report details six pervasive flaws in the states' long-standing heavy reliance on large, prison-like correctional institutions. Specifically, the report will show that these facilities are frequently: (1) dangerous, (2) ineffective, (3) unnecessary, (4) obsolete, (5) wasteful, and (6) inadequate. A subsequent chapter addresses the question of public safety, finding that states where juvenile confinement was sharply reduced in recent years experienced more favorable trends in juvenile crime than jurisdictions which maintained or increased their correctional facility populations. Finally, the report provides recommendations for states on how to reduce juvenile incarceration and redesign their juvenile corrections systems. (Contains 12 figures and 145 endnotes.) [For "No Place for Kids: The Case for Reducing Juvenile Incarceration. Issue Brief," see ED527945.]