Between 2000 and 2020, the number of young people incarcerated in the U.S. declined by 77 percent.
"If you think of juvenile incarceration as a mountain, we reached the summit in 2000, and until 2020 we sprinted straight downhill," writes Yale law Prof. James Forman Jr. in the New York Times Magazine. In 2021 and 2022, however, the number of incarcerated juveniles rose 10 percent. As the number of young people held in juvenile facilities has gone down, so, too, has the number of youth charged as adults — by 2020, 56 percent fewer young people were transferred to adult court than in 2006. The U.S. has 58 percent fewer youth prisons than it did in 2000. Large facilities — those holding more than 100 juveniles — have closed at an especially rapid clip. In 2000, there were 264 youth facilities of that size; by 2020, there were just 42.
How can it be that a country as punitive as ours reduced its juvenile incarceration rate to a level last seen when Calvin Coolidge occupied the White House? And can that progress be sustained, or is the nation about to reverse course and embark on another juvenile incarceration binge?, Forman asks. He suggests looking at California, which incarcerated 10,122 youths in 1996. Rather than build new youth prisons, the state filled existing ones beyond capacity. By the mid-1990s, youth prisons were overcrowded and violent. The situation began to change in the early 2000s, as lawyers and journalists exposed horrific abuses. Declining crime rates helped make reform efforts politically feasible, says Nate Balis of the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Many programs provide counseling and mental health services to young people and their families, with the goal of helping them address the factors that have led them to break the law. Others, like the national Youth Advocate Programs and Boston’s Roca Inc., pair young people with histories of violence or delinquency with mentors who offer therapy and connect them to education and employment services. These programs have evidence to support their effectiveness. Says Richard Mendel of the Sentencing Project, “The research is clear that kids who are placed in one of these programs tend to do better than those who are sent to a juvenile facility. And the group that does best of all is those who are diverted from the system entirely.”
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