By Brian Nam-Sonenstein and Wendy Sawyer  
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Press Release
August 25, 2025

Table of Contents

Demographics and disparities

Decisions leading to disparities

Most youth are held in prison- and jail-like facilities

Juvenile court terminology

Types of facilities

Some facility types are much worse than others

Pretrial detention: Locked up before they’re even tried

Confined for minor offenses

Progress toward decarceration of the juvenile legal system

Conclusions

Appendix

Footnotes

Read about the data

In the past 25 years, the number of youth confined in facilities away from home as a result of juvenile or criminal legal system involvement has dropped by over 70%, to about 31,900 at last count in 2023. In the criminal legal system context, this is an unparalleled rate of decarceration. But while the juvenile system’s shift from carceral punishment to more community-based responses to law- and rule-breaking behavior offers lessons for the broader criminal legal system, our analysis of the most recent data shows this work is far from complete.

Tens of thousands of children and adolescents are still held under lock and key each day, most in restrictive facilities that look and feel a lot like adult prisons and jails. In fact, the U.S. still confines youth at a rate that’s more than twice the global average, and well above that of all other NATO member countries.¹ Many are detained before even having a trial or are accused of only low-level charges. By our estimation, nearly 45% of youth in confinement could likely be safely released today.

To make matters worse, some jurisdictions seem determined to drive youth confinement even higher, abandoning successful juvenile legal system reforms and returning to 1990s-style tough-on-youth-crime approaches. As politically lucrative as such moves may be, they fly in the face of what we know about youth development and intervention. They also risk repeating the same failed policies that have placed millions of kids and adults behind bars and under supervision. Considering that nearly 7 out of every 10 adults in state prison were first arrested before the age of 19, increased criminalization of youth serves as a bad omen for a wave of adult criminalization in the not-so-distant future.

What explains the remarkable decline in youth confinement over the last 25 years? How are the juvenile and adult criminal legal systems different, and how are they similar? Perhaps most importantly, can people working to reduce the number of adults behind bars learn any lessons from the progress made in reducing youth confinement?

This report answers these questions, beginning with a snapshot of how many system-involved youth are confined, where they are held, under what conditions, and for what offenses. It offers a starting point for people new to the issue to consider the ways that the problems of the criminal legal system are mirrored in the juvenile system: from racial disparities and disgraceful living conditions, to the aggressive and harmful use of pretrial detention and overcriminalization. While acknowledging the philosophical, cultural, and procedural differences between the adult and juvenile legal systems,² this report highlights these issues as areas ripe for reform for youth as well as adults.

This updated and expanded version of our Youth Pie report, last published in 2019, also examines the dramatic reduction in the confined youth population, and offers insights and recommendations for advocates and policymakers working to shrink the adult criminal legal system. There have been several notable changes to the system since our last report, which included data from 2017. As of 2023, the most recent year for which data are available:

• There are far fewer kids in juvenile confinement facilities, and far fewer facilities — especially large facilities that hold over 100 kids;
• Racial disparities have worsened, particularly among Black and Indigenous children;
• Greater proportions of kids are held in more restrictive youth jails and prisons;
• Greater proportions of kids are held for longer periods of time;
• Greater proportions of kids are awaiting hearings and disposition (sentencing);
• And a greater proportion of kids in confinement are held in long-term facilities and for violent offenses.

Demographics and disparities among confined youth

Generally speaking, state juvenile legal systems handle cases involving defendants under the age of 18.³ (This is not a hard-and-fast rule, however; every state makes exceptions for younger people to be prosecuted as adults in some situations or for certain offenses.⁴) Of the 29,300 youth in juvenile facilities, more than two-thirds (68%) are aged 16 or older. Troublingly, about 400 confined children are no more than 12 years old.⁵

Gender. The vast majority (85%) of confined youth are boys,⁶ but girls make up a greater proportion of the youngest kids in the system: 45% of girls in confinement are under 16 compared to 30% of boys. Below age 13, these differences grow even starker, as nearly 1 in 10 girls in the system are younger than 13, compared to nearly 1 in 20 boys.

Race and ethnicity. Black and Indigenous youth are overrepresented in juvenile facilities, while white youth are underrepresented.⁷ These racial disparities⁸ are particularly pronounced among both Black boys and Black girls, and while Indigenous girls make up a small part of the confined population, they are extremely overrepresented relative to their share of the total youth population. While 14% of all youth under 18 in the U.S. are Black, 47% of boys and 39% of girls in juvenile facilities are Black — a level of disparity that has actually worsened in recent years.⁹ In some jurisdictions, Black children make up more than 60% of the confined youth population.¹⁰ And even excluding youth held in Indian country facilities, Indigenous children make up 3% of girls and 2% of boys in juvenile facilities, despite comprising less than 1% of all youth nationally.¹¹

Decisions leading to disparities

Some of these disparities can be traced back to differences in how cases are handled for kids of different races and ethnicities. As is the case with Black adults, Black children are particularly targeted with overcharging and harsher treatment, making them far more likely to be incarcerated than white children. Black children, and especially Black girls, are also subject to an added burden of adultification: when a child is perceived as older, more culpable, and more responsible than their peers. Similar to the racist “super predator” myth that was used to rationalize harsh punishments in the 1990s by portraying Black youth as more violent and unruly than their white peers, adultification leads to harsher consequences within the juvenile legal system.

More specifically, Indigenous children of all ages — but especially those aged 13 and younger — and Black children were more likely than white children to have their cases handled formally rather than informally in 2022 (the most recent year for which case data are available).¹² The decision about how to handle a child’s case in the juvenile legal system is a crucial one: they can be petitioned (“formally handled”) which involves a formal request for a juvenile court to adjudicate the case or to prosecute the child in criminal court, or they can be nonpetitioned (“informally handled”). This approach involves a judge, referees, probation officers, or other court officers screening youth for intervention outside of court. Informal handling more often leads to less severe case outcomes, including dismissal, fines, community service, restitution, or services outside of court supervision.¹³

Racial disparities are also evident in decisions to transfer youth from juvenile to adult court. In 2022, Black youth made up 37% of delinquency cases, but well over half (59%) of all youth judicially transferred from juvenile court to adult court. Meanwhile, white youth accounted for 43% of all delinquency cases, but made up only 26% of judicial transfers to adult court. And although the total number of youth judicially transferred in 2022 was less than half what it was in 2005, the racial disproportionality among these transfers has actually worsened over time.¹⁴ Reports also show that in Florida, prosecutors send Black boys to adult court via “direct file” at seven times the rate of white or Latino boys, and that Indigenous youth are 1.8 times more likely than white youth to receive an adult prison sentence.

Ultimately, as is the case in the adult criminal legal system, the racially disproportionate confinement of children starts with policing, not criminality. The Sentencing Project notes that white youth and youth of color have similar patterns of offending when it comes to weapons possession, alcohol and other drug use, and fighting. The difference is that Black and brown kids “encounter police more often than their white peers and are disproportionately arrested.” Longstanding and intensifying racial disparities reflect police practices and politicians’ policy choices “to criminalize adolescence rather than adolescents’ criminal behaviors, particularly when the adolescents were Black or brown.” In other words, Black and brown kids are not a growing segment of the confined youth population because they have a greater propensity toward lawbreaking, but because they are targeted for surveillance, arrest, and punishment in ways that white kids are not.

Most youth are held in prison- and jail-like facilities

System-involved youth are held in a number of different types of facilities. (See “types of facilities” sidebar.) Some facilities look a lot like prisons, some are prisons, and others offer youth more freedom and services. For many youth, “residential placement” in juvenile facilities is virtually indistinguishable from incarceration.

Most youth in juvenile facilities¹⁹ experience distinctly carceral conditions, in facilities that are locked and long-term. Almost all (96%) youth in juvenile out-of-home placement are in locked facilities — a greater share of youth than were locked-in in 2017 (92%). According to a recent report, 61% of long-term secure facilities, 38% of detention centers, and 52% of reception/diagnostic centers also use “mechanical restraints” like handcuffs, leg cuffs, restraining chairs, strait jackets, etc. Fifty-two percent of reception/diagnostic centers, 47% percent of long-term secure facilities and 37% of detention centers isolate youth in locked rooms for four hours or more. Meanwhile, two-thirds (67%) of youth are held for longer than a month; about a quarter (24%) are held over 6 months; around 2,700 youth (9%) are held for over a year.²⁰ Disturbingly, 88 kids that were locked up for over a year were only 13 or younger at the time of their admission.

In our last Youth Pie report, we noted that larger facilities (with more than 50 beds) held the greatest share of youth in confinement in 2017.²¹ In 2023, these proportions have changed considerably: 43% are in facilities of over 50 youth, with only 2% in the largest youth prisons, which hold more than 200 (this is down from 11% in 2017). These larger facilities are often very old and brutal in their treatment of children, with razorwire fences, locked doors, solitary confinement, routine a lack of food and hygiene products, and staff practices such as the use of chemical restraints, wrap restraints, and hogtying. Additionally, they’re often located in remote rural areas far from home.

Fortunately, a closer look at the changes in the kinds of facilities holding youth over the past two decades shows a clear shift away from the largest facilities in favor of smaller ones. In 2000, there were 264 youth prisons with over 100 beds; by 2022, there were just 42. The number of youth held in these facilities fell by about 90% over that same time, accounting for most of the overall drop in confined youth. Meanwhile, smaller facilities with 20 or fewer beds had the smallest population declines. While the trend away from large youth prisons is encouraging, it is far from complete: in 2023, nearly 6,000 youth were still held in facilities with more than 100 beds.

Nearly four out of every five confined youth (78%) are held in the most restrictive facilities — in youth jails and prisons or in adult jails and prisons. Unfortunately, the proportion of youth held in the most restrictive settings has grown since our last report.²² The most recent data show 2,437 confined youth — about 1 in 13 — are incarcerated in adult jails and prisons, where they face greater safety risks and fewer age-appropriate services are available to them.^{23 24} At least another 22,361 are held in the three types of juvenile facilities that are best described as prison- and jail-like correctional facilities: (1) detention centers, (2) long-term secure facilities, and (3) reception/diagnostic centers.²⁵ Almost all (99.8%) youth confined in these three types of correctional facilities are “restricted by locked doors, gates, or fences”²⁶ rather than staff-secure.²⁷ It’s important to note that racial disparities appear to be especially acute in these harsher facilities, particularly for Black and Indigenous youth: the proportion of Black children in these facilities is roughly 3.5 times higher than their share of the general population, and the share of Indigenous children is roughly twice their share of the population.

Detention centers. The largest share of confined youth are held in detention centers. These are the functional equivalents of jails in the adult criminal legal system. Like jails, they are typically operated by local authorities, and are used for the temporary restrictive custody of defendants awaiting a hearing or disposition (sentence). Over 82% of youth in detention centers fall into those two categories — an increase of about 20% since 2017.²⁸ In other words, a larger percentage of kids in youth jails were awaiting a hearing or disposition (sentence) — rather than actually found guilty and serving a sentence — than there were before.

But how many of the nearly 13,500 children and teenagers in juvenile detention centers should really be there? According to federal guidance, “…the purpose of juvenile detention is to confine only those youth who are serious, violent, or chronic offenders… pending legal action. Based on these criteria, [it] is not considered appropriate for status offenders and youth that commit technical violations of probation.” Yet almost 3,000 youth are held in detention centers for these same low-level offenses. And nearly 2,000 more have been sentenced to serve time there for other offenses, even though detention centers offer fewer programs and services than other facilities. In fact, “National leaders in juvenile justice… support the prohibition of juvenile detention as a dispositional option.”

Long-term secure facilities. The most common placement for committed (sentenced) youth is in long-term secure facilities, where the conditions of confinement invite comparisons to prisons. Often called “training schools,” these are typically the largest and oldest facilities, sometimes holding hundreds of youth behind razor wire fences, where they may be subjected to pepper spray, mechanical restraints, and solitary confinement.²⁹ Despite their likeness to prisons, these facilities hold considerable numbers of very young children: around 15% of kids aged 13 and under are held in long-term secure facilities.

Reception/diagnostic centers. The third prison-like facility type, reception/diagnostic centers, are often located adjacent to long-term facilities; here, staff evaluate youth committed by the courts and assign them to correctional facilities. Like detention centers, these are meant to be transitional placements, yet 72% of the youth they hold are there longer than 90 days. Nearly three in ten youth in these “temporary” facilities are held there for over a year. And again, in 2023, these facilities held a larger share of kids for longer periods of time than they did in 2017.³⁰

Residential-style facilities. Outside of youth jails and prisons, another 6,953 youth are in more “residential” style facilities that are ostensibly less restrictive, but vary tremendously, ranging from remote, stringent wilderness camps to group homes where youth may leave to attend school or go to work. Most of these youth (82%) are still in locked facilities rather than staff-secured, and conditions in some of these settings are reportedly worse than youth prisons.³¹ Almost nine out of ten youth in these more “residential” facilities are in residential treatment facilities — which a 2024 U.S. Senate report describes as “warehouses of neglect” — or group homes. Less frequently, youth are held in ranch or wilderness camps or shelters.

Private facilities. Overall, around one in five kids confined in the juvenile legal system are held in privately-operated facilities. In particular, more than half of kids in shelters, group homes, and residential treatment facilities are in private facilities. These facilities also tend to hold a greater proportion of girls (24%) than boys (18%).

Some facility types are much worse than others

The type of facility where a child is confined can affect their health, safety, access to services, and outcomes upon reentry. Adult prisons and jails are unquestionably the worst places for youth. They are not designed to provide age-appropriate services for children and teens, and according to the Campaign for Youth Justice,³² youth in adult facilities may be placed in solitary confinement to comply with the PREA safety standard of “sight and sound” separation from incarcerated adults. Youth in adult facilities are also five times more likely to commit suicide than those in juvenile facilities.

Juvenile detention centers (or “youth jails”) and long-term secure “youth prisons” are often very harmful environments, too. In the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement, more youth in detention and corrections programs reported sexual victimization, fear of attack, solitary confinement, strip searches, use of restraints, unnecessary use of force, and poor relations with staff. Youth jails and prisons also tend to be larger, and youth in larger facilities (with more than 25 beds) report higher rates of sexual victimization. Youth in detention centers, in particular, report receiving the fewest education services, such as special education, GED preparation, and job training. These youth are also most likely to report difficulty sleeping because of light, indicating that, like many adult facilities, the lights are left on even at night. For a youth population that typically come with a history of trauma and victimization, confinement under any conditions leads to worse outcomes, but the punitive youth jails and prisons facilities are especially dehumanizing.

Pretrial detention: Locked up before they’re even tried

To be sure, many system-involved youth are found guilty of serious offenses and could conceivably pose a risk in the community. But pretrial detention is surprisingly common; judges choose to detain youth in a quarter (25%) of delinquency cases, resulting in a disturbing number of youth in juvenile facilities who are not even serving a sentence.

Nearly 9,000 youth in juvenile facilities — or three in ten — haven’t even been found guilty or delinquent, and are locked up before a hearing (awaiting trial). Another 4,400 are detained awaiting disposition (sentencing) or placement. Most youth detained pretrial are held in detention centers, but nearly 2,000 are locked in long-term secure facilities — youth prisons — without even having been committed. Compared to data from 2017, this represents a considerable rise in the number of kids detained pretrial in long-term facilities.³³ Of those in detention, just over half are accused of violent offenses.³⁴ While a small number of youth do commit violence so severe that temporary incapacitation may be justified, holding kids in such deplorable conditions for long periods of time puts them at serious risk of physical and mental harm, and is counterproductive to public safety in the short and long term. Whenever possible, youth can and should be offered opportunities to take accountability safely in their homes and communities instead of being removed from them.

Still, over 2,000 youth are detained pretrial for “behaviors that are not law violations for adults”³⁵ — more specifically, technical violations of probation or parole, or for status offenses. A handful of states are driving pretrial detention for such exceedingly minor offenses: only eight states are responsible for detaining 64% of all kids held pretrial for technical violations,³⁶ and ten states are responsible for detaining 61% of all kids held pretrial for status offenses.³⁷

Once again mirroring the adult criminal legal system, youth pretrial detention is marred by racial disparity. Only 18% of white youth with delinquency cases are detained, compared to 30% of Hispanic youth, 29% of Black youth, 23% of Indigenous youth, and 27% of Asian, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander youth. Time held pretrial isolates youth from their families and communities and exposes them to the risk of victimization while detained. Yet in 2023, more than half of youth detained pretrial had been held for longer than 30 days, and nearly 700 had already been detained for over a year.³⁸ Those 700 held pretrial account for over , one-quarter of all youth held for a year or more.

Finally, youth that are transferred to the adult system can be subject to pretrial detention if their family or friends cannot afford bail. As a result, they may be jailed in adult facilities for weeks or months without even being convicted.

Confined for minor offenses

Far from locking up youth only as a last resort, the juvenile legal system confines large numbers of children and teenagers for the lowest-level offenses. For nearly one in seven youth in juvenile facilities, the most serious charge leveled against them is a technical violation of supervision (11%) or a status offense (3%).³⁹ These are behaviors that would not warrant confinement except for their status on probation or as minors.

Over 4,000 children and teenagers are confined for these two especially low-level offense categories, including 750 locked in long-term secure youth prisons. Younger children and girls in particular are ensnared by the system for these relatively minor infractions. For kids aged 14 and under, technical violations and status offenses make up a larger share of their offenses (19%) than for kids aged 15 and older (13%). And confined girls are twice as likely (24%) as confined boys (12%) to be in out-of-home placement for these low-level offenses.

These are youth who are locked up for not reporting to their probation officers, for failing to complete community service or follow through with referrals — or for truancy, running away, violating curfew, or being otherwise “ungovernable.”⁴⁰ Some of this is driven by the degree to which kids are put on probation in the first place: one-third (34%) of juvenile court cases in 2022 ended in probation, making it the most common juvenile case disposition other than dismissal (also 34%).⁴¹ And although probation might seem like a more lenient approach than incarceration, such forms of supervision often come with restrictive conditions that set kids up to fail just like they do in the adult system.

Children in different states face very different odds of out-of-home placement for the lowest-level offenses. Our analysis found that a relatively small group of states — led by Alabama, Pennsylvania, and Texas — are driving youth confinement for technical violations and status offenses:

• Four states are responsible for nearly 60% of all kids confined for “incorrigibility,”⁴²
• Five states are responsible for just over 50% of all kids confined for running away,⁴³
• Six states are responsible for 53% of all kids confined for truancy,⁴⁴ and
• Two states are responsible for half of all kids confined for underage drinking.⁴⁵

When such minor cases lead to confinement, they can result in long stays or placement in the most restrictive environments. The vast majority of kids held for technical violations and status offenses are held in locked facilities (94% and 84% respectively). Just over one-third (35%) of youth held for status offenses are held for more than 90 days, and a similar proportion (32%) are held in prison or jail-style youth facilities.

Progress toward decarceration of the juvenile legal system

The fact that nearly 32,000 youth are confined today — often for low-level offenses or before they’ve had a hearing — signals that reforms are still badly needed in the juvenile legal system. Yet some jurisdictions appear to be doubling down on failed policies, and in doing so threaten to reverse the decarceration trend of the past two decades:

Confinement remains a punishing, and often traumatizing, experience for youth who typically already have a history of trauma and victimization. Without discounting the many ongoing problems discussed in this report, however, there is another, more positive story about juvenile legal system reform.

Policymakers focused on the juvenile legal system have responded far more rationally to the falling crime rate and to the mounting evidence of “what works” compared to those working on the adult criminal legal system. At a time when a 50% reduction in the adult prison and jail population over 10 or 15 years still seems radical to many, the juvenile system has already cut the number of confined youth by 73% since 2000. The number of youth in adult prisons and jails has also dropped by almost 80% since 2000, and 47% since our last report.⁴⁷ From 2000 to 2022, nearly 1,800 juvenile facilities (58%) closed,⁴⁷ including nearly 85% of the largest facilities.⁴⁸ From an adult criminal legal system reform perspective, this is enviable progress.

Prior to the pandemic, the juvenile legal system was decarcerating at a rate of roughly 5% year over year. This trend accelerated in 2020, as courts experienced pandemic-related disruptions to normal operations; by 2021, the number of youth in juvenile facilities had dropped by 11,600, or 32% of what it was in 2019. Starting in 2022, however, the system has quickly rebounded to 80% of its 2019 size. While the confined youth population remains well below pre-pandemic levels, its upward trend nonetheless signals a need for vigilance against continued growth, particularly given the resurgence of past failed policies.

The progress toward decarceration in the juvenile system can’t be attributed to any single change; rather, historical factors, ongoing research, and dogged advocacy efforts all played important roles. Youth crime rates dropped. Some of the most egregious conditions of confinement were widely publicized, jolting policymakers to action. Adolescent brain research made it impossible to deem youth fully culpable and incapable of change. Evidence piled up showing that confinement leads to worse outcomes.

Much of the progress can be attributed to the work of advocates who pushed for federal legislation to protect confined youth (especially PREA and the JJDPA), and for state laws that “raised the age” of juvenile court jurisdiction, discouraged transfers to adult courts, and allowed for more individualized sentencing. Many of these strategies have parallels in the criminal legal system reform movement, such as repealing mandatory minimum sentences, while others, like “raise the age,” don’t really apply. But juvenile legal system reform advocates have also had success with strategies to both improve conditions and reduce the use of confinement that the broader criminal legal system reform movement can adopt.

An inexhaustive list of successful reform strategies that have been used to decarcerate the juvenile legal system, and that could be be adapted and applied to the adult criminal legal system, includes:

• Closing and repurposing prisons and detention centers, and redirecting resources to serve people in their communities: No form of confinement is without harms, and pursuing smaller facilities with more rehabilitative approaches over large, punitive youth prisons (as has been done in Missouri) would represent an improvement over the status quo. However, closing facilities also presents opportunities to break out of the cycle of youth incarceration altogether by thoughtfully repurposing them, redirecting funds spent on youth and adult incarceration to social capital and local infrastructure, like quality schools, community centers, and healthcare facilities. Texas, for example, repurposed the Dawson State Jail as a nonprofit office and community space. As the Sentencing Project notes, such repurposing is currently the exception, not the norm, as youth facilities are often transferred into the adult system rather than taking carceral capacity completely offline, which is why they urge jurisdictions to prioritize community reinvestment and prioritize approaches that employ decarceration and non-correctional uses.
• Developing programs to safely serve people charged with violent offenses in their homes and communities: While efforts to reduce adult prison and jail populations generally exclude people charged with violent offenses, juvenile legal system experts have pushed for “no reject policies,” recognizing that home- and community-based interventions are more effective than incarceration for youth charged with all kinds of offenses. The field has developed evidence-based programs that reduce violence and delinquent, criminal, and aggressive behavior among youth with “elevated risk levels” — without confinement. Criminal legal system reform advocates have begun to recognize the need for new approaches to violence, and can look to these programs as models for supportive, non-carceral alternatives.
• Changing laws to make certain offenses “non-jailable”: In the context of the juvenile legal system, states like Utah and Massachusetts have removed status offenses from juvenile court jurisdiction, and federal legislation (the JJDPA) mandates the deinstitutionalization of status offenders. (The JJDPA makes an exception for youth who have violated a valid court order, but several states have passed laws to counteract that exception.) A number of states have also ended commitment to secure juvenile facilities for low-level or nonviolent offenses.
• Restricting supervision to only the most necessary cases, and reorienting supervision conditions around positive reinforcement: As noted by the Council of State Governments’ Justice Center, Washington State developed a pilot project to make probation conditions more developmentally appropriate and realistically achievable for youth placed under supervision. Reorienting supervision conditions around positive reinforcement versus punishment can promote success for people on supervision rather than set them up to fail.
• Issuing civil citations in lieu of arrest to divert people away from court intervention: Delaware’s Juvenile Civil Citation program and Florida’s Prearrest Delinquency Citation program are examples of two statewide efforts to offer youth accused of misdemeanors alternative, community-based sanctions, such as family counseling and treatment for substance abuse or mental health, and restorative measures such as community service, apology letters, community impact statements, restitution, etc. While cite-and-release programs are common in the adult criminal legal system, they generally serve to prevent jail detention, not prosecution. These youth programs, however, allow youth to avoid prosecution and its consequences altogether. From June 2024 to May 2025, nearly 10,000 (or 64%) of eligible youth in Florida avoided formal prosecution through pre-arrest diversion.
• Capping sentences to reduce time under correctional supervision: Kentucky, Utah, and Tennessee have set limits on the amount of time youth can be in an out-of-home placement, on probation, and/or under court supervision, and Georgia reduced maximum sentences for certain felonies from 5 years to 18 months. Such limits are rare in the adult system, where, for example, indeterminate sentences are the norm and long probation sentences often lead to further supervision or incarceration — but California’s cap on probation sentences (AB 1950)⁴⁹ stands out as one example of this strategy applied in the adult system.
• Shifting funding to develop and expand community-based alternatives to incarceration: Equally as important as decarcerating is the shifting of funding and resources from confinement to the community. The LiberateMKE campaign, for example, reduced Milwaukee’s police budget by $900,000 in 2020 while increasing funding for “summer jobs for young people, affordable quality housing, and non-police violence prevention.” And in 2023, Washington State provided counties with more than $10 million to support evidence-based therapy, education, and employment programs in the community, geared toward youth at high or moderate risk to reoffend. This “justice reinvestment” model has been implemented in many states’ adult systems as well, but these examples show the value in focusing on “front end” reforms to reduce overall incarceration.
• Recognizing and addressing the impact of trauma on system-involved populations: An estimated 90% of system-involved youth have experienced serious trauma in their lifetime. Understanding the impact of trauma on cognitive development and behavior, policymakers and practitioners have increasingly called for trauma-informed care — not punishment — for system-involved youth. Yet although incarcerated adults also typically have a history of traumatic victimization, recognition of past trauma has yet to inform sentencing and treatment for most system-involved adults. Making policymakers and the public more aware of the link between victimization and legal system involvement could help shift political winds to take a less punitive, and more supportive, approach.

Conclusions

This “big picture” report not only reveals ways in which the juvenile legal system must improve, but also offers lessons from progress that has already been made. States have reduced the number of youth in confinement by more than half without seeing an increase in crime — a victory that should embolden policymakers to reduce incarceration further, for youth and adults alike.

By our most conservative estimates, states could release at least 14,200 more youth today without great risk to public safety. These include almost 800 youth held for status offenses, around 750 held for drug offenses other than trafficking, nearly 2,000 held for public order offenses not involving weapons, and around 3,300 held for technical violations.⁵⁰ States should also look more closely at youth detained pretrial. Beyond youth detained for those low-level offense categories, around 7,300⁵¹ others are held before they’ve been found guilty or delinquent; many, if not all, of these youth would be better served in the community.

Beyond releasing and resentencing youth, states should remove all youth from adult jails and prisons, close large juvenile facilities, and invest in non-residential community-based programs.⁵² Legislators should continue to update laws to reflect our current understanding of brain development and criminal behavior over the life course, such as raising the age of juvenile court jurisdiction and ending the prosecution of youth as adults.⁵³

But lawmakers who support reducing incarceration among youth should also consider supporting radical reforms to the adult criminal legal system. Like youth confinement,⁵⁴ adult incarceration inflicts lasting physical, mental, and economic harm on individuals and families. And falling rates of both youth crime and youth incarceration provide evidence that bold reforms — such as making more offenses “non-jailable” and expanding community-based alternatives to incarceration — could be applied to the adult system while maintaining public safety.

Like the criminal and juvenile legal systems themselves, the efforts to reverse mass incarceration for adults and to deinstitutionalize system-involved youth have remained curiously distinct. But the two systems have more problems — and potentially, more solutions — in common than one might think. The momentum of decarceration in the juvenile legal system must continue, and it should inspire bolder reforms in the criminal legal system as well.

About the authors

Wendy Sawyer is the Research Director at the Prison Policy Initiative. Along with directing the organization’s research priorities, Wendy is the author (or co-author) of major reports including Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie, Beyond the Count: A deep dive into state prison populations, Arrest, Release, Repeat: How police and jails are misused to respond to social problems, and the previous Youth Confinement: The Whole Pie reports. Wendy also publishes briefings on recent data releases, academic research, women’s incarceration, pretrial detention, probation, and more.

Brian Nam-Sonenstein is a Senior Editor and Researcher at the Prison Policy Initiative. He is the author of several publications, including reports analyzing how prison disciplinary policies are used as a tool for mass punishment and the systemic problems shaping ‘healthcare’ behind bars, as well as briefings explaining why ending mass incarceration is an economic justice issue and how providing housing can help interrupt a major pathway to prison created by the criminalization of homelessness. In addition to his work as a researcher, Brian plays a pivotal role in supporting other members of the Research Department in shaping the framing and messaging of their publications in a way that maximizes their impact and reach.

About the Prison Policy Initiative

The non-profit, non-partisan Prison Policy Initiative was founded in 2001 to expose the broader harm of mass criminalization and spark advocacy campaigns to create a more just society. Alongside reports like this that help the public more fully engage in criminal justice reform, the organization leads the nation’s fight to keep the prison system from exerting undue influence on the political process (a.k.a. prison gerrymandering) and plays a leading role in protecting the families of incarcerated people from the predatory prison and jail telephone industry and the video visitation industry.

Acknowledgments

This report was made possible by the generous contributions of individuals across the country who support justice reform. Individual donors give our organization the resources and flexibility to quickly turn our insights into new movement resources.

All Prison Policy Initiative reports are collaborative endeavors, but this report builds on the successful collaborations of the several versions of this report we have produced since 2018. The authors would like to thank their Prison Policy Initiative colleagues for their feedback and assistance in the drafting of this report, as well as Elydah Joyce, who helped design the main graphic, and Bob Machuga, who created the cover. We also acknowledge all of the donors, researchers, programmers and designers who helped the Prison Policy Initiative develop the Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie series of reports.