aecf-NoPlaceForKidsFullReport-2011

IntroductionFor more than a century, the predominant strategyfor the treatment and punishment of seriousand sometimes not-so-serious juvenile offendersin the United States has been placement intolarge juvenile corrections institutions, alternativelyknown as training schools, reformatories,or youth corrections centers.Excluding the roughly 25,000 youth held indetention centers daily awaiting their court trialsor pending placement to a correctional program,the latest official national count of youth in correctionalcustody, conducted in 2007, found thatroughly 60,500 U.S. youth were confined in correctionalfacilities or other residential programseach night on the order of a juvenile delinquencycourt. 1 For perspective, that’s more adolescentsthan currently reside in mid-sized Americancities like Louisville, Kentucky; Nashville,Tennessee; Baltimore, Maryland; or Portland,Oregon. A high proportion of these confinedyouth are minority. According to the most recentnational count, two of every five confined youthare African Americans and one-fifth are Hispanic;non-Hispanic white youth, who comprisethree-fifths of the total youth population, werejust 37 percent of the confined youth.America’s heavy reliance on juvenile incarcerationis unique among the world’s developed nations.(See Fig. 1 on p. 3.) Though juvenile violentcrime arrest rates are only marginally higher inthe United States than in many other nations,a recently published international comparisonfound that America’s youth custody rate (includingyouth in both detention and correctionalcustody) was 336 of every 100,000 youth in 2002—nearly five times the rate of the next highestnation (69 per 100,000 in South Africa). 2 Anumber of nations essentially don’t incarcerateminors at all. In other words, mass incarcerationof troubled and troublemaking adolescents is neitherinevitable nor necessary in a modern society.State juvenile corrections systems in the UnitedStates confine youth in many types of facilities,including group homes, residential treatmentcenters, boot camps, wilderness programs, orcounty-run youth facilities (some of them locked,others secured only through staff super vision).But the largest share of committed youth—about 40 percent of the total—are held in lockedlong-term youth correctional facilities operatedprimarily by state governments or by privatefirms under contract to states. 3 These facilitiesare usually large, with many holding 200–300youth. They typically operate in a regimented(prison-like) fashion, and feature correctionalhardware such as razor-wire, isolation cells, andlocked cell blocks.Yet these institutions have never been found toreduce the criminality of troubled young people.Quite the opposite: For decades now, follow-up2