A Justice Policy Institute Report By Barry Holman and Jason Ziedenberg

The Impact of Incarcerating Youth in Detention and Other Secure Facilities

The Dangers of Detention:

The Impact of Incarcerating Youth in Detention and Other Secure Facilities

The Dangers of Detention:
A Justice Policy Institute Report by Barry Holman and Jason Ziedenberg

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The Dangers of Detention1 Introduction: The Growing Impact of Youth Detention
Despite the lowest youth crime rates in 20 years, hundreds of thousands of young people are locked away every year in the nation’s 591 secure detention centers. Detention centers are intended to temporarily house youth who pose a high risk of re-offending before their trial, or who are deemed likely to not appear for their trial. But the nation’s use of detention is steadily rising, and facilities are packed with young people who do not meet those high-risk criteria—about 70 percent are detained for nonviolent offenses.2

“[F]airly viewed, pretrial detention of a juvenile gives rise to injuries comparable to those associated with the imprisonment of an adult. ” –Justice Marshall for the minority in Schall v. Martin, 1984.

“Detention: A form of locked custody of youth pre-trial who are arrested— juvenile detention centers are the juvenile justice system’s version of “jail, in which most young people are being held before the court has ” judged them delinquent. Some youth in detention are there because they fail the conditions of their probation or parole, or they may be waiting in detention before their final disposition (i.e. sentence to a community program, or juvenile correctional facility). 3 ”

The increased and unnecessary use of secure detention exposes troubled young people to an environment that more closely resembles adult prisons and jails than the kinds of community and family-based interventions proven to be