What Juvenile Justice Data Reveal — And What the Numbers Can’t Tell Us

When the sub­ject is youth crime, trends and data don’t paint a com­plete pic­ture. For any­one who lives in a com­mu­ni­ty that has expe­ri­enced high rates of crime for gen­er­a­tions, there’s not much com­fort hear­ing that things used to be 50% worse. Youth crime isn’t some­thing that can be described by abstract num­bers on a chart — espe­cial­ly when it has touched you personally.

How­ev­er, when we think about how gov­ern­ment and soci­ety should respond to crime, espe­cial­ly crime com­mit­ted by young peo­ple, trends do mat­ter. They ground us in facts and give us con­text to help make sense of this moment and lean into proven solutions.

What the Data Tell Us

There’s no per­fect mea­sure of youth crime, but we can look at sev­er­al indi­ca­tors, such as:

• crimes report­ed to the police;
• arrests;
• court referrals;
• deten­tion admissions;
• self-report­ed crimes; and 
• vic­tim­iza­tions. 

For three decades, data from these sources have told a sim­ple, con­sis­tent sto­ry: Law-break­ing by young peo­ple fell sharply. Accord­ing to FBI data com­piled by the Coun­cil on Crim­i­nal Jus­tice, juve­nile arrests fell 71% from 1995 to 2019. The decrease includ­ed seri­ous vio­lent crimes, which declined 67% — more than twice as much as adult vio­lent arrests declined (31%) over the same peri­od. As shown in Chart 1, the num­ber of delin­quen­cy cas­es dis­posed in juve­nile courts fol­lowed a sim­i­lar pat­tern, peak­ing in the mid-1990s and declin­ing more than 60% through 2019.

Over those same years, juve­nile jus­tice sys­tems became less reliant on incar­cer­a­tion and more focused on diver­sion and reha­bil­i­ta­tion. While it took sev­er­al years of declin­ing arrests before deten­tion admis­sions began to fall, the two then declined in tan­dem for more than a decade between 2003 and 2019.

The Pan­dem­ic Disruption

With the 2020 COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, the juve­nile jus­tice sys­tem was jolt­ed. Ini­tial­ly, arrests, delin­quen­cy cas­es and deten­tion admis­sions fell pre­cip­i­tous­ly. But no soon­er did this his­toric decline set in, than the preva­lence of some very seri­ous crimes went up, espe­cial­ly those involv­ing guns and car thefts. By 2022 and 2023, those juve­nile jus­tice indi­ca­tors that had been falling for decades were ris­ing again. For the first time since the 1990s, there appeared to be an upswing in youth crime.

Thank­ful­ly, this has proven to be an inter­rup­tion in the long-term trends — not a rever­sal — as shown in the analy­sis below.

The first impor­tant piece of evi­dence is the nation­al data on juve­nile arrests for 2024 that have recent­ly become avail­able. They show that juve­nile arrests are down: 28% low­er than 2019 (before COVID) and 4% low­er than 2023. Notably, since 2019, arrests of young peo­ple have declined by more than arrests of adults.

What about arrests for seri­ous vio­lent crimes? Fol­low­ing an unprece­dent­ed 28% drop in 2020, juve­nile arrests for these offens­es did increase through 2023, essen­tial­ly catch­ing up with the rate of change in adult vio­lent arrests. But in 2024, vio­lent arrests went down again for both adults and juve­niles and remained sig­nif­i­cant­ly low­er than in 2019 (by 16% for adults and 12% for juveniles).

The sec­ond piece of evi­dence is pro­vid­ed by the Casey Foundation’s Month­ly Youth Deten­tion Sur­vey. Since the start of the pan­dem­ic, the Casey Foun­da­tion has run a month­ly sur­vey of youth deten­tion across a large swath of the coun­try. Over the last six years, trends in the sur­vey have aligned quite close­ly with oth­er nation­al indi­ca­tors when those even­tu­al­ly became avail­able. The month­ly sur­vey sites reached a post-pan­dem­ic peak for youth deten­tion admis­sions in May 2023. They’ve trend­ed down­ward since then and were near­ly 30% below the pre-COVID lev­el as of the end of 2025.

Nation­al data for 2025 will not be avail­able for some time, but oth­er lead­ing indi­ca­tors like the Real Time Crime Index are send­ing the same sig­nal as the Casey sur­vey: The decline in both vio­lent and non­vi­o­lent crimes that began in 2023 has been accel­er­at­ing since then. There is every rea­son to think that when nation­al data for 2025 becomes avail­able, it will show that youth crime con­tin­ued to decline.

This is not to say that the lev­el of youth crime today is ​“accept­ably low.” It isn’t. It can go low­er. All of us should be deeply con­cerned about how to low­er it and work dili­gent­ly to do so. Youth crime is an address­able prob­lem, and these data make clear it is trend­ing downward.

Over decades of reduc­ing youth crime, the field has learned a lot about what helps young peo­ple move for­ward to a safe, law-abid­ing, pro­duc­tive adult­hood — and what holds them back. We don’t have to throw out that play­book. Rather, we need to recom­mit to doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

Two Stub­born Truths

It’s impor­tant to acknowl­edge two things that have not changed over the years, despite those big swings in youth crime indicators.

First: The salience of race and eth­nic­i­ty con­tin­ue to be unde­ni­ably and unac­cept­ably high. Com­mu­ni­ties of col­or — espe­cial­ly Black fam­i­lies — still bear the heav­i­est bur­dens of crime and sys­tem involve­ment. Kids of col­or — espe­cial­ly Black boys — are still more like­ly to face the juve­nile jus­tice system’s harsh­est sanc­tions. Those dis­par­i­ties have, if any­thing, wors­ened in recent years. Focus­ing on those dis­par­i­ties is essen­tial, not just as a mat­ter of fair­ness, but in terms of effec­tive­ness. If we want safer com­mu­ni­ties and more young peo­ple reach­ing their poten­tial, the data are telling us which com­mu­ni­ties we must lis­ten to, lift up and work along­side. We don’t have to choose between being more equi­table and more effec­tive. The two go hand in hand.

Sec­ond: It remains a mis­take to con­flate youth crime and vio­lent crime. Vio­lent crimes are shock­ing and trag­ic, and the extra jolt of con­cern we feel when they’re com­mit­ted by a young per­son is a jus­ti­fied human impulse. But the fact is that vio­lent crime is over­whelm­ing­ly an adult prob­lem. The most seri­ous vio­lent crimes account for less than 10% of all juve­nile crime, and juve­niles account for only about 10% of all arrests for those crimes. Focus­ing only on the nar­row inter­sec­tion between youth crime and vio­lent crime fails to address the bulk of either prob­lem. It’s not just unfair to blame young peo­ple for soci­ety-wide trends in vio­lence, it’s also coun­ter­pro­duc­tive.

Two Take­aways

There are two big take­aways from recent trends in youth crime.

First, from three decades of reform, we’ve seen that strate­gies built on the fol­low­ing pil­lars work:

• pri­or­i­tiz­ing diver­sion and rehabilitation;
• pro­vid­ing account­abil­i­ty in tan­dem with resources and opportunities;
• con­nect­ing young peo­ple with car­ing adults; and
• restor­ing ties to fam­i­ly and com­mu­ni­ty, not sev­er­ing them.

Sec­ond, the evi­dence tells us that less youth incar­cer­a­tion is still com­pat­i­ble with less youth crime. Incar­cer­a­tion isn’t a com­ple­ment to the strate­gies that work. It’s a dis­trac­tion from them at best and can active­ly under­mine them at worst.

Call to Action

When young peo­ple harm oth­ers or break the law, account­abil­i­ty is essen­tial — but it’s not the whole answer. Young peo­ple also need oppor­tu­ni­ties, sup­port and, most impor­tant­ly, car­ing adults to help them find a pos­i­tive path for­ward. If you ask young peo­ple who’ve emerged and moved on from involve­ment in crime what helped them get back on track, they will rarely name a facil­i­ty or a pro­gram. They’ll always name a person.

So let’s take the prob­lem of youth crime seri­ous­ly. Let’s not set­tle for forms of account­abil­i­ty that fail to pro­vide the oppor­tu­ni­ty, sup­port and con­nec­tion that young peo­ple need. Let’s com­mit to doing what works for every child who breaks the law. Let’s make our com­mu­ni­ties safer by help­ing all chil­dren thrive.

Sources used for Charts 1 and 2

• Juve­nile arrests: Coun­cil on Crim­i­nal Jus­tice, Who Gets Arrest­ed in Amer­i­ca: Trends Across Four Decades, 1980–2024 (Decem­ber 2025).
• Delin­quen­cy cas­es: Juve­nile Court Sta­tis­tics Pro­gram (JCS), delin­quen­cy cas­es dis­posed for the years 1990–2022.
• Detained Youth (recent­ly admit­ted): Cen­sus of Juve­niles in Res­i­den­tial Place­ment (CJRP) count of youth in res­i­den­tial place­ment with detained sta­tus.
• Youth Deten­tion Admis­sions: Month­ly Youth Deten­tion Sur­vey (MYDS) spon­sored by the Casey Foun­da­tion. Annu­al deten­tion admis­sions tab­u­lat­ed based on month­ly admis­sions in MYDS par­tic­i­pat­ing juris­dic­tions from Jan­u­ary 2020 through June 2025 (annu­al fig­ures esti­mat­ed for 2019 based on admis­sions in the pre-COVID months of Jan–Mar 2020; and for 2025 based on month­ly totals for Jan–jun 2025). The MYDS cov­ers approx­i­mate­ly 20% of the Unit­ed States youth pop­u­la­tion. Trends in MYDS admis­sions from 2020 through 2023 have close­ly tracked nation­al deten­tion admis­sion indi­ca­tors from the JCS and CJRP.