It's Not Helping
Within three years of release, approximately 75% of youth are rearrested and 45% to 72% are convicted of a new offense.
This issue brief provides a summary of a larger report, No Place for Kids: The Case for Reducing Juvenile Incarceration. The report assembles decades of research, as well as persuasive new data to demonstrate that America’s heavy reliance on juvenile incarceration has not paid off and, in fact, is a failed strategy for combating youth crime. Sustainable system improvements will require the mobilization of a coordinated juvenile corrections reform movement.
If states adopt the recommendations and best practices highlighted in No Place for Kids and reallocate funds currently spent on incarceration to more constructive supervision and treatment strategies, there is every reason to believe that the end result will be less crime and more successful futures for America’s young people.
Dozens of recidivism studies from systems across the nation have found that these facilities fail to place youth on the path to success. Re-offending rates for youth released from juvenile correctional facilities are almost uniformly high.