Survey: 52% Drop in Admissions to Youth Detention in Two Months Matches Reduction Over 13 Years

The rate of young peo­ple admit­ted to deten­tion has fall­en by 52% dur­ing the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, accord­ing to a new sur­vey of juve­nile jus­tice agen­cies in 33 states — equal­ing in two months a nation­al decline that took 13 years.

The two-month rapid decline in admis­sions seen in March and April 2020 is reflect­ed in an Annie E. Casey Foun­da­tion sur­vey of juris­dic­tions around the coun­try aimed at assess­ing the effects of the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic on juve­nile jus­tice sys­tems. Work­ing with the Pre­tri­al Jus­tice Insti­tute and Empact Solu­tions, the Foun­da­tion first col­lect­ed data just weeks after the coro­n­avirus arrived in the Unit­ed States.

But while admis­sions into deten­tion have dra­mat­i­cal­ly slowed, sys­tems also have slowed the rate at which they release young peo­ple from facil­i­ties — leav­ing many still liv­ing in con­fine­ment with­out access to oppor­tu­ni­ties or con­nec­tions, and poten­tial­ly vul­ner­a­ble to the virus. After a burst of releas­es in March, the rate of release of young peo­ple from secure deten­tion in April dropped below its pre-COVID-19 lev­el, the lat­est data col­lect­ed by the sur­vey showed.

“It is under­stand­able and laud­able that juris­dic­tions have focused so much of their ener­gy on keep­ing youth out of deten­tion,” says Nate Balis, direc­tor of the Foundation’s Juve­nile Jus­tice Strat­e­gy Group. ​“The next fron­tiers are get­ting youth out of deten­tion more quick­ly and under­stand­ing and tack­ling the obsta­cles stand­ing in the way.”

The juve­nile deten­tion pop­u­la­tion fell more steeply for African Amer­i­can youth than for white youth, based on a sub­set of juris­dic­tions that respond­ed with infor­ma­tion dis­ag­gre­gat­ed by race and eth­nic­i­ty. While the pop­u­la­tion reduc­tions for African Amer­i­can youth were only slight­ly larg­er, they are sig­nif­i­cant sim­ply because youth jus­tice prac­ti­tion­ers have strug­gled for decades to make progress in reduc­ing dis­par­i­ties for young peo­ple of col­or, who are con­sis­tent­ly over­rep­re­sent­ed in the nation’s court­rooms and deten­tion cen­ters, youth pris­ons and oth­er res­i­den­tial institutions.

The juris­dic­tions respond­ing to the lat­est sur­vey are home to 35% of the U.S. youth pop­u­la­tion, ages 10 to 17. Most of the respond­ing com­mu­ni­ties are involved in the Juve­nile Deten­tion Alter­na­tives Ini­tia­tive® (JDAI), a net­work of juve­nile jus­tice prac­ti­tion­ers and oth­er sys­tem stake­hold­ers across the coun­try work­ing to build a bet­ter and more equi­table youth jus­tice system.

Begun almost three decades ago as a pilot project to reduce reliance on deten­tion, JDAI is active in more than 300 cities and coun­ties in 40 states and the Dis­trict of Columbia.

The Role of Deten­tion Cen­ters in Juve­nile Justice

Deten­tion cen­ters are dif­fer­ent than youth pris­ons or oth­er res­i­den­tial place­ments where young peo­ple could be sen­tenced after being adju­di­cat­ed delin­quent. Rather, deten­tion is a cru­cial ear­ly phase in the juve­nile jus­tice process. It’s the point at which the courts decide whether to con­fine a young per­son pend­ing their court hear­ing or while await­ing place­ment into a cor­rec­tion­al or treat­ment facil­i­ty rather than allow­ing the young per­son to remain at home.

Every year, an esti­mat­ed 218,000 young peo­ple spend time in deten­tion facil­i­ties nation­wide, despite the neg­a­tive effects of deten­tion on young peo­ple and per­sis­tent racial dis­par­i­ties in who is detained.

Key Find­ings From Juve­nile Jus­tice Survey

The sur­vey find­ings include the following:

Secure deten­tion pop­u­la­tions fell by a third.

Secure deten­tion pop­u­la­tions fell by 32% from March 1 to May 1 (from 4,515 to 3,081). This decrease occurred broad­ly, with 68% of respond­ing juris­dic­tions see­ing a decrease from March 1 to May 1. Fif­teen per­cent saw no change and 17% had an increase in population.

The decrease in pop­u­la­tion was dri­ven pri­mar­i­ly by a steep decline in the rate of admissions.

In Feb­ru­ary, these juris­dic­tions report­ed an aver­age of 207 admis­sions per day. But in April, the aver­age was less than 100 admis­sions per day ― 52% below the pre-pan­dem­ic rate.

Most juris­dic­tions were able to increase the rate at which they were releas­ing young peo­ple from secure deten­tion in March, but in April the rate of releas­es slowed to less than their pre-COVID-19 rate.

In Feb­ru­ary, an aver­age of about 56% of young peo­ple who were in deten­tion dur­ing the month were released by the end of the month. In March, even while admis­sions were plum­met­ing, that release rate increased to 61%. But in April, it fell to 53%.

Pop­u­la­tion declines were slight­ly steep­er for youth of color.

Among juris­dic­tions that pro­vid­ed infor­ma­tion dis­ag­gre­gat­ed by race and eth­nic­i­ty, about one-fifth of detained young peo­ple are white, while more than half are African Amer­i­can and near­ly one-fourth are Lati­no. As deten­tion pop­u­la­tions have grad­u­al­ly fall­en year by year, white youth have often seen high­er rates of decrease than youth of col­or. But over the first two months of the pan­dem­ic cri­sis, the largest per­cent­age decreas­es in deten­tion have been among youth of col­or. While the num­ber of white youths in deten­tion fell by 26% from March 1 to May 1, the num­ber of African Amer­i­can youths and Lati­no youths fell by 30% and 29% respec­tive­ly. This has been a result both of larg­er decreas­es in the rate of admis­sions and small­er decreas­es in the release rate among youth of col­or than among white youth.

Most juris­dic­tions report­ed no cas­es of COVID-19 as of May.

At the time of the sur­vey in May, 65% of the juris­dic­tions respond­ing said that they had access to infor­ma­tion about COVID-19 cas­es among youth and/​or staff in deten­tion facil­i­ties. Among those with access to that infor­ma­tion, the vast major­i­ty (85%) report­ed no con­firmed or sus­pect­ed COVID-19 cas­es among their staff or youth.

Among the 15% that did, they iden­ti­fied a total of 65 youth cas­es as of May and anoth­er 19 youth recov­ered. The sur­vey was not designed to cal­cu­late COVID-19 preva­lence rates for indi­vid­ual facil­i­ties, but among juris­dic­tions report­ing any youth cas­es, the num­ber of cas­es they report­ed was about 8% of their com­bined pop­u­la­tions as of May 1. They report­ed a sim­i­lar num­ber of staff cas­es, with 60 cur­rent cas­es con­firmed or sus­pect­ed and anoth­er 20 recovered.

The ear­li­est report­ed case among staff was March 10 and the most recent on May 19. The ear­li­est report­ed case among youth was March 26 and the most recent on May 15.

About the Survey

This sur­vey, con­duct­ed from May 6 to 15 and cov­er­ing the peri­od from Jan­u­ary 1 to May 1, is unique because it reports on data from hun­dreds of juris­dic­tions in close to real time. Infor­ma­tion came from large urban coun­ties and small rur­al courts, among a wide range of juris­dic­tions that col­lec­tive­ly held more than 4,500 youths in secure deten­tion on March 1, 2020. For per­spec­tive, approx­i­mate­ly 15,660 young peo­ple are held in deten­tion nation­al­ly on any giv­en night, accord­ing to the most recent fed­er­al data in 2017.

There are no direct points of com­par­i­son that place this two-month reduc­tion in con­text. Avail­able data on deten­tion uti­liza­tion from nation­al sur­veys indi­cate that sig­nif­i­cant changes in deten­tion typ­i­cal­ly accrue over sev­er­al years.

This is a non-ran­dom sam­ple, so it is not an accu­rate source from which to derive nation­al esti­mates nor deter­mine sta­tis­ti­cal­ly how rep­re­sen­ta­tive this group of juris­dic­tions is of the nation as a whole. A greater num­ber of juris­dic­tions replied to the sur­vey in May than dur­ing the ini­tial data col­lec­tion in April, so their results can­not be direct­ly compared.

Addi­tion­al resources

• Read our news release about the juve­nile jus­tice survey
• Find a set of ques­tions that can help juve­nile jus­tice lead­ers reduce youth detention