Youth Confinement: The Whole Pie 2025
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.
