The Annie E. Casey Foundation The Annie E. Casey Foundation

Youth Detention Survey During COVID-19

To under­stand the effects of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic on youth deten­tion pop­u­la­tions, the Annie E. Casey Foun­da­tion is sur­vey­ing juve­nile jus­tice agen­cies across the coun­try every month and report­ing on youth deten­tion trends. Start­ed in April 2020, this sur­vey is unique because it cap­tures data in close to real time from a large group of juris­dic­tions that span all regions of the Unit­ed States and range from large urban coun­ties to small rur­al courts. In a typ­i­cal month, the Foun­da­tion receives data from more than 150 juris­dic­tions in more than 30 states, con­tain­ing more than 30% of the nation’s youth pop­u­la­tion (ages 10 to 17).

The sur­vey is con­duct­ed with assis­tance from Empact Solutions.

Youth Deten­tion Sur­vey Results

The Lat­est Data Release

Pre­vi­ous Sur­vey Results

What Is Juve­nile Detention?

Deten­tion cen­ters are dif­fer­ent than youth pris­ons or oth­er res­i­den­tial place­ments where young peo­ple could be sen­tenced after being adju­di­cat­ed delin­quent. Rather, juve­nile deten­tion is a cru­cial ear­ly phase in the juve­nile jus­tice process. It is 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 195,000 young peo­ple spend time in deten­tion facil­i­ties nation­wide, despite the neg­a­tive effects of deten­tion on young peo­ple — includ­ing like­ly deep­er sys­tem involve­ment, sep­a­ra­tion from their fam­i­lies, health risks and a derailed edu­ca­tion — and per­sis­tent racial dis­par­i­ties in who is detained.

About the Survey

Casey’s month­ly sur­vey pro­vides a unique glimpse at the two levers that con­trol the size of the detained pop­u­la­tion: how many young peo­ple are admit­ted and how quick­ly they are released. The sur­vey gath­ers the fol­low­ing information:

  • What was the total pop­u­la­tion of youth in secure deten­tion on the first day of the month, in each of the past months start­ing in Jan­u­ary 2020? This infor­ma­tion pro­vides the size of the pop­u­la­tion both imme­di­ate­ly before and after the pandemic’s spread in March 2020. Two fac­tors con­tribute to pop­u­la­tion gains: high­er admis­sions and longer lengths of stay of youth already in detention.
  • How many young peo­ple were admit­ted to secure deten­tion each month since Jan­u­ary 2020? Casey’s analy­ses of the sur­vey track admis­sions using a rate of admis­sions per day, to adjust for dif­fer­ences in the num­ber of days in each month. This data point pro­vides a direct mea­sure of the rate at which young peo­ple were com­ing into deten­tion, and it enables cal­cu­la­tion of the rate at which they were leav­ing. The num­ber of young peo­ple in deten­tion at the start of the month, plus the num­ber admit­ted dur­ing the month, minus the num­ber in deten­tion at the start of the next month, equals the num­ber of youth who were released dur­ing the month.
  • What’s the release rate? The pace of releas­es is mea­sured using a met­ric called the release rate, which is the num­ber of young peo­ple released from deten­tion dur­ing a month divid­ed by the num­ber of young peo­ple who spent time in deten­tion dur­ing that month. A high­er release rate means that young peo­ple are get­ting out of deten­tion faster. A faster release rate reflects a) faster res­o­lu­tion of cas­es by juve­nile courts; b) greater use of alter­na­tive to deten­tion options (ATDs) to keep young peo­ple safe and on track in their home and com­mu­ni­ty until the courts resolve their case; or c) a com­bi­na­tion of these factors.
  • How can this infor­ma­tion be dis­ag­gre­gat­ed by race and eth­nic­i­ty? Rec­og­niz­ing that sites cap­ture racial and eth­nic data in dif­fer­ent ways, these data help deter­mine the best way to col­lect this infor­ma­tion across sites and in as much detail as possible.
  • How many deten­tion cen­ters had con­firmed or sus­pect­ed cas­es of COVID-19 at the time of the sur­vey among youth or staff? This enables analy­sis of how the pan­dem­ic is expand­ing from month to month.

Data Caveats

There is no cur­rent nation­al cen­sus against which this total can be com­pared to give a sense of how large a sam­ple this sur­vey reflects. But the most recent nation­al cen­sus of youth in deten­tion cen­ters by the fed­er­al Office of Juve­nile Jus­tice and Delin­quen­cy Pre­ven­tion, dat­ed Octo­ber 2019, found that there were 14,344 detained youth in res­i­den­tial place­ment at that time.

This is not a nation­al esti­mate. This is a snap­shot of a par­tic­u­lar sub­set of juris­dic­tions — specif­i­cal­ly com­mu­ni­ties involved in the Juve­nile Deten­tion Alter­na­tives Ini­tia­tive® (JDAI). Begun near­ly three decades ago as a pilot project to reduce reliance on deten­tion, JDAI® reach­es near­ly one-third of the total U.S. youth pop­u­la­tion and is active in more than 300 cities and coun­ties in 40 states and the Dis­trict of Columbia.

Juve­nile Jus­tice Relat­ed Resources