New Thinking in Community Corrections V E R I TAS

HARVARD Kennedy School

Program in Criminal Justice

Policy and Management

 

 

 

 

OCTOBER 2016 • NO. 2
 


The Future of Youth Justice: A Community-Based Alternative to the


Youth Prison Model 

Patrick McCarthy, Vincent Schiraldi, and Miriam Shark 

Executive Session on 


Community Corrections 


This is one in a series of papers that will be 


published as a result of the Executive Session on 


Community Corrections. 


The Executive Sessions at Harvard Kennedy 


School bring together individuals of independent 


standing who take joint responsibility for 


rethinking and improving society’s responses to 


an issue. Members are selected based on their 


experiences, their reputation for thoughtfulness, 


and their potential for helping to disseminate the 


work of the Session. 


Members of the Executive Session on Community 


Corrections have come together with the aim of 


developing a new paradigm for correctional policy 


at a historic time for criminal justice reform. The 


Executive Session works to explore the role of 


community corrections and communities in the 


interest of justice and public safety. 


Learn more about the Executive Session on 

Community Corrections at: 

NIJ’s website: www.NIJ.gov, keywords “Executive 

Session Community Corrections” 

Harvard’s website: http://www.hks.harvard.edu/ 

criminaljustice/communitycorrections 

Introduction 

[F]airly viewed, pretrial detention of a juvenile 

gives rise to injuries comparable to those associated 

with the imprisonment of an adult. 

—Justice Thurgood Marshall 

It is, in all but name, a penitentiary. 

—Justice Hugo L. Black 

Is America getting what it wants and needs by 

incarcerating in youth prisons young people who 

get in trouble with the law? 

If not, is there a better way? 

For 170 years, since our first youth correctional 

institution opened, America’s approach to youth 

incarceration has been built on the premise that a 

slightly modified version of the adult correctional 

model of incarceration, control, coercion, and 

punishment — with a little bit of programming 

sprinkled in — would rehabilitate young people. 

Sometimes the names attempt to camouflage the 

nature of the facility, but whether they are called 

“training schools” or “youth centers,” nearly all of 

these facilities are youth prisons.1 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2 | New Thinking in Community Corrections 

Whether the benefits and costs of youth prisons are 

weighed on a scale of public dollars, community 

safety, or young people’s futures, they are damaging 

the very people they are supposed to help and have 

been for generations. It is difficult to find an area of 

U.S. policy where the benefits and costs are more 

out of balance, where the evidence of failure is 

clearer, or where we know with more clarity what 

we should be doing differently. 

This ill-conceived and outmoded approach is a 

failure, with high costs and recidivism rates and 

institutional conditions that are often appalling. Our 

approach to youth in trouble with the law requires 

a watershed change to one that is more effective, 

more informed by evidence of what works, more 

likely to protect public safety, more developmentally 

appropriate, more humane, and more community 

based. Every youth prison in the country should be 

closed and replaced with a network of communitybased programs and small facilities near the youth’s 

communities. Closing these failed institutions 

requires a clear-headed, common-sense, bipartisan 

policy approach, and a commitment to replace these 

facilities with effective alternatives that are already 

available. 

History 

Around 170 years ago, with the opening of 

Massachusetts’ Lyman School for Boys in 1846 (Miller, 

1991), American reformers began experimenting with a 

“new” approach to troubled youth (Schiraldi, Schindler, 

Cite this paper as: McCarthy, Patrick, Vincent Schiraldi, and Miriam Shark. 

The Future of Youth Justice: A Community-Based Alternative to the Youth 

Prison Model. New Thinking in Community Corrections Bulletin. Washington, 

D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice, 2016. 

NCJ 250142.

and Goliday, 2011). As the social and economic forces 

of the time brought more rural and immigrant families 

into America’s urban environments, philanthropists 

and child advocates of the 1800s struggled to resolve 

what they saw as rising misbehavior by the young, 

urban poor (Krisberg and Austin, 1993). 

In a departure from the primacy of the family as the 

principal foundation of social control, reformers of 

the time turned to a new and untested institution — 

the reformatory. Viewed alternately as a humane 

response to poorhouses and prisons or as a means 

to control and punish unruly immigrant youth, 

“reform schools” became increasingly popular as 

a government response to what was perceived as 

a rising threat from ungovernable urban juveniles 

(Siegel and Senna, 1985). This struggle between the 

humanistic and punitive instincts of the youth justice 

system and its facilities is evident to the present day, 

and was woven into its very creation (Platt, 1977; Butts 

and Mitchell, 2000). 

Reliance on these large, congregate facilities has 

resulted in scandalous abuses, unconstitutional 

conditions, and poor public safety outcomes almost 

since their inception, sometimes despite yeoman 

efforts to improve them. Although they were founded 

with great fanfare to remove wayward youth from city 

streets and reform them in rural environments, the 

facilities quickly revealed many of the ills that plague 

them to this day. Cruelly regimented schedules were 

enforced by whippings and isolation. Youth were 

leased out to sometimes harsh working conditions, 

leading to accusations of profiteering and concerns 

that cheap inmate labor was depressing wages. 

Although nominally dedicated to helping turn 

young people’s lives around, many facilities were 
 

 

 

 

 

 

The Future of Youth Justice: A Community-Based Alternative to the Youth Prison Model | 3 

merely warehouses, with scant differences from their 

adult cousin — the penitentiary (Rothman, 1980). 

Furthermore, the majority of youth confined in these 

19th-century institutions were incarcerated not for 

law violations, but for status offenses such as running 

away from home and ungovernability. 

Ironically, the zeal of Progressive Era reformers 

in the early 1900s may have served to justify and 

increase the use of institutions, renamed “reform 

schools” by Progressives to paint on them a more 

professionalized and hopeful veneer. After the 

founding of the first separate court for juveniles in 

Chicago in 1899, besieged wardens found solace in 

the court’s rehabilitative ethos as a defense for their 

beleaguered institutions, and admission rates rose in 

the aftermath of the new court’s inception (Rothman, 

1980). 

Despite their problems, youth prisons and the less 

formal court environments endured side by side 

without significant changes until the 1960s. That is 

when concern that youth were neither being helped 

to get back on track nor provided due process 

protections led to a raft of landmark decisions by 

the U.S. Supreme Court granting youth, for example, 

the rights to counsel, to confront witnesses, and to 

be “adjudicated delinquent” (the juvenile system’s 

euphemism for “convicted”) with proof beyond a 

reasonable doubt. Concerned that the rehabilitative 

ethic of the court was a poor excuse to deny due 

process to youth accused of crimes, the court wrote 

that juveniles in family court got the “worst of both 

worlds” — “neither the protection accorded to adults 

nor the solicitous care and regenerative treatment 

postulated for children.” 

Responses to the drug epidemic of the late 1980s 

and early 1990s, along with a spike in violent youth 

crime, ushered in an era of even more stringent 

approaches to youth incarceration. Public fear was 

stoked by media coverage and by “tough-on-crime” 

stances taken by many public officials. Social 

scientists such as James A. Fox, John DiIulio, and 

others promulgated doomsday scenarios. In 1995, 

for example, Fox predicted a “bloodbath in about 10 

years.”2 In 1996, DiIulio predicted that there would 

be “270,000 more young predators on the streets” 

(DiIulio, 1996). Pronouncements like these were 

wrapped in racialized, demonizing language that 

further inflamed public alarm. “The black kids who 

inspire the fear seem not merely unrecognizable but 

alien,” wrote DiIulio (1996), calling young people 

who came into contact with the justice system 

“radically impulsive, brutally remorseless” (Bennett, 

DiIulio, and Walters, 1996). The most memorable and 

damaging description was “superpredator” (DiIulio, 

1995). 

Neither Fox nor DiIulio noted that violent youth crime 

had actually begun to decline a few years earlier. It 

has been plummeting ever since. Violent crime 

arrests of youth dropped by 68 percent between 1994 

and 2014, and youth homicides, which peaked in 1993, 

have declined by 83 percent since then. 

Although Fox and DiIulio have since acknowledged 

that their predictions were based on faulty analyses 

and recanted, the damage was done. The public was 

encouraged to see young people not as individuals 

who had gotten off track and needed help but as scary, 

dehumanized predators from whom they needed to 

be protected at all costs. Policymakers responded to 
 

 

 

4 | New Thinking in Community Corrections 

I recall vividly my first visit to a youth prison many years 

ago. More than a hundred teenagers in a building built for 

40. Bright, glaring lights everywhere. A constant barrage 

of noise, reverberating off hard surfaces. Kids in sweats, 

many with holes. Kids in shackles and handcuffs. Mace 

on the belts of the uniformed guards. A row of isolation 

rooms, every one with the face of a young boy in solitary 

confinement, staring out of a narrow window. The air 

dripping with pervasive stress, fear, anger and tension 

and a sense of imminent violence. 

Patrick McCarthy, Keynote Speech to the National 

Juvenile Defender Leadership Summit, Salt Lake City, 

Utah, October 23, 2015 

DiIulio’s exhortation that we “will need to incarcerate 

at least 150,000 juvenile criminals in the years ahead” 

(DiIulio, 1995), resulting in record numbers of young 

people confined in adult-style prisons and giving 

rise to a wave of youth prison construction. For 

example, at the heart of the Violent Crime Control 

and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 was a program 

that provided billions in federal funds for states to 

build or renovate prisons. With this funding, more 

than half of the states built, expanded, or renovated 

youth prisons and detention facilities, and contracted 

for additional detention and correctional beds. For 

example, California spent $250 million of those funds 

to build nearly 3,500 beds in 38 counties (Bureau of 

Justice Assistance, 2012). The number of youth in 

juvenile prisons peaked in 1999 at 109,000. 

Even though youth crime and youth incarceration 

have been steadily declining since the mid-1990s, we 

are left with the legacy of this era in the form of deeply 

ingrained images of young offenders as thugs, policies 

that still over-rely on incarceration, and youth prisons 

that stubbornly resist closure efforts, maintaining 

hundreds of empty beds waiting to be filled. 

Inherently Flawed Model 

The failure of youth prisons to help young people get 

back on track, as well as their failure to protect public 

safety, flows from inherent flaws in the model itself. 

Adult-style prisons that emphasize confinement 

and control are devoid of the essentials required 

for healthy adolescent development — engaged 

adults focused on their development, a peer group 

that models prosocial behavior, opportunities for 

academic success, and activities that contribute to 

developing decision-making and critical thinking 

skills (Bonnie et al., 2013). At the same time, these 

facilities provide too many of the elements that 

exacerbate the trauma that most confined youth have 

already experienced and reinforce poor choices and 

impulsive behavior. Maltreatment is endemic and 

widespread. 

We have 100 boys sleeping in one room 40 by 80 feet, 

low ceiling, and the beds are ‘two story’; there are no 

bathroom privileges of any kind in the building.... Can 

we not prevail upon this assembly to give us relief? In 

the name of humanity! 

—Superintendent, St. Louis House of Refuge, 1893 

(Abrams, 2004) 

It is not surprising that an incarceration-based 

approach is so ill-suited to its task when the mismatch 

between the intervention and the population is 

considered. Youth prisons contravene everything 

we know about adolescent development in general, 

and especially the population of youth who come 

into contact with the system. Instead of helping kids 

get back on track, these facilities exacerbate many of 

the factors that brought them to the attention of the 

courts in the first place. 
 

 

The Future of Youth Justice: A Community-Based Alternative to the Youth Prison Model | 5 

Brain science, developmental psychology, and 

human experience underscore what developing 

youth in the catchment age of the juvenile justice 

system3 need to become mature, successful adults. 

Adolescents differ from adults in important ways 

that make adult-model incarceration ill-matched to 

their needs. Adolescents have less capacity for selfregulation in emotionally charged situations; their 

sensitivity to environmental influences is heightened 

and they have not yet learned to make decisions with 

a future orientation (Bonnie et al., 2013). 

In a series of decisions concluding that youth should 

not be eligible for the death penalty and limiting life 

without parole sentences for youth, the U.S. Supreme 

Court elevated the new science on youth development 

as never before. In Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551, 

127 S.Ct. 1183 (2005), the Court wrote that youth 

have a “‘lack of maturity and an underdeveloped 

sense of responsibility,” leading to recklessness, 

impulsivity, and heedless risk-taking. In Miller v. 

Alabama, No. 10-9646, 567 U.S. (2012), the Court 

also found that children “are more vulnerable ... to 

negative influences and outside pressures”; they have 

limited “control over their own environment” and are 

therefore unable to extricate themselves from crimeproducing settings; and since a child’s character is 

not as “well formed” as an adult’s, his traits are “less 

fixed” and his actions less likely to be “evidence of 

irretrievabl[e] deprav[ity].”4 

Such youth need positive adult-youth interactions, 

feedback loops, and learning opportunities that 

help them with the developmental tasks of impulse 

control, judgment, future orientation, and emotional 

maturity. The punitive, coercive atmosphere of youth 

prisons provides none of these critical experiences. 

Beatings of children in custody were commonplace, 

inmates stuffed clothing around the toilets to keep out 

rats and cockroaches, young people were locked up for 

so long they often defecated or urinated in their cells. 

Youth who came in clean tested positive for marijuana 

after 30 days of confinement, suggesting it was easier 

to score drugs in my facility than on the streets of the 

District of Columbia. 

Vincent Schiraldi, New York Times, 2015 

Justice-involved youth often have histories of abuse 

and failure by adults around them that add to the 

complexities of normal adolescent development. 

The trauma many of these young people have 

experienced makes them especially sensitive to 

environmental triggers, and yet, many are kept in 

institutional environments that seem designed to 

trigger trauma and rage: long periods of isolation; 

harsh, sterile surroundings; bright lights; a constant 

din; and a near-constant threat of violence. 

A critical task of adolescence is to refine and deepen 

the sense of self and self-image (Erikson, 1959). Young 

people who come into contact with the juvenile 

justice system typically have experienced failure in 

a variety of settings and are in need of experiences 

that help them build a positive and prosocial selfimage. Youth prisons communicate to young people 

constantly and in a variety of ways that they are 

dangerous, feared, worthless, and have no real future. 

With this identity firmly in place, with more trauma 

and more deeply entrenched behaviors, they are sent 

back to their communities with little follow-up or 

connection to help get them back on track (Schubert 

and Mulvey, 2014). 
 

 

 

6 | New Thinking in Community Corrections 

Many of the youth who come into contact with 

the youth justice system enter it with diagnosable 

mental health and substance abuse problems, yet 

few receive help with these issues. A longitudinal 

study of 1,300 youth who were confined for serious 

offenses noted that few received services related to 

mental health issues in the residential setting. Even 

fewer received care once released, despite the finding 

that each added month of service reduced the odds of 

recidivism by 12 percent (Schubert and Mulvey, 2014). 

Finally, life-course criminological research has found 

that youth must cross several critical developmental 

“bridges” on the path to maturing out of delinquent 

behavior, with stable marriage and career path 

employment being two of the most important 

(Sampson and Laub, 1997). Yet commitment to a 

youth prison makes both less attainable (Holman 

and Ziedenberg, 2011). 

No new institutions for adults should be built and 

existing institutions for juveniles should be closed. 

—National Advisory Commission on 

Criminal Justice Standards and Goals, 1973 

The failure of the institutional model is not a new 

insight. More than 40 years ago, in 1973, the National 

Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards 

and Goals found “The prison, the reformatory, and 

the jail have achieved only a shocking record 

of failure. There is overwhelming evidence that 

these institutions create crime rather than prevent 

it” (National Advisory Commission on Criminal 

Justice Standards and Goals, 1973). The Commission 

recommended that “no new institutions for adults 

should be built and existing institutions for juveniles 

should be closed.” Hundreds of thousands of young 

people have been subjected to these conditions since 

that report appeared. 

Abuse is Endemic 

Staff at the facilities routinely used uncontrolled, 

unsafe applications of force, departing both from 

generally accepted standards and [departmental] 

policy. Anything from sneaking an extra cookie 

to initiating a fistfight may result in a full prone 

restraint with handcuffs. This one-size-fits-all control 

approach has, not surprisingly, led to an alarming 

number of serious injuries to youth, including 

concussions, broken or knocked-out teeth, and spiral 

fractures. 

—U.S. Department of Justice, 2009 

That the type of maltreatment outlined above 

is endemic, rather than idiosyncratic, argues 

convincingly to abolish, rather than attempt to 

reform, the youth prison model. 

From 1979 to 2004, lawyers, the media, and advocacy 

organizations uncovered and documented abuses 

in state, local, or privately operated youth facilities 

in the District of Columbia and 23 states: Arizona, 

Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, 

Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, 

Missouri, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, 

Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, 

South Carolina, South Dakota, and Utah (Schiraldi 

and Soler, 2004). 

In 2008, the Associated Press surveyed every youth 

justice agency overseeing youth in confinement in 

the U.S. for information on the number of deaths, 

as well as the number of allegations and confirmed 

cases of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse by 
 

 

The Future of Youth Justice: A Community-Based Alternative to the Youth Prison Model | 7 

Figure 1. Systemic or recurring maltreatment in juvenile corrections facilities in the 

states: 1970 to present 

Violent/abusive conditions clearly documented after 2011 

Violent/abusive conditions clearly documented after 2000 but not since 2011 

Violent/abusive conditions clearly documented after 1990 but not since 2000 

Violent/abusive conditions clearly documented after 1970 but not since 1990 

Evidence but no proof of violent/abusive conditions since 2011 

For this map, “systemic or recurring maltreatment” is identified when clear evidence has emerged from 

federal investigations, class-action lawsuits, or authoritative reports written by reputable media outlets or 

respected public or private agencies showing that — at least at one particular time — one or more statefunded youth corrections facilities repeatedly failed to protect youth from violence by staff or other youth, 

sexual assaults, or excessive use of isolation or restraints. “Evidence but no proof” is indicated when 

credible reports of maltreatment have emerged, but not enough to satisfy the above criteria. 

For more information, visit aecf.org. 

Source: Mendel, 2015. 

systemic maltreatment had been 

identified in the vast majority of 

states since 1970. In nearly half of the 

states, this clear record of systemic 

maltreatment had been documented 

in juvenile correctional facilities since 

2000. No Place for Kids also identified 

57 lawsuits in 33 states, the District of 

Columbia, and Puerto Rico since 1970 

that resulted in a court-sanctioned 

remedy in response to allegations 

of systemic problems with violence, 

physical or sexual abuse by facility staff, 

or excessive use of isolation or physical 

restraints (see figure 1). 

In 2015, Casey issued an update 

(Mendel, 2015) to No Place for Kids that 

showed that such atrocities were hardly 

a thing of the past: 

staff members from 2004 to 2007. The survey revealed 

13,000 allegations of abuse in facilities that housed 

46,000 youth in 2007 (Holbrook, 2008). 

In 2012, the Bureau of Justice Statistics conducted a 

national survey of sexual victimization of youth in 

state-funded youth correctional facilities. The study 

found that one in eight incarcerated young people 

reported being victimized sexually by staff or other 

youth in the facility in the year preceding the survey 

(Beck et al., 2013). 

Since 2011, the Annie E. Casey Foundation has 

released two reports on institutional conditions in 

youth prisons. In No Place for Kids (Mendel, 2011), 

Casey found that clear evidence of recurring or 

•		 When No Place for Kids was published, no 

clear recent evidence of recurring or systemic 

maltreatment was available in Colorado, Georgia, 

Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Tennessee, or West Virginia. 

The updated report documented widespread 

maltreatment in each of these states, including 

high rates of youth-on-youth violence, sexual 

abuse, overreliance on physical restraints, 

and/or excessive use of isolation and solitary 

confinement. 

•		 Compelling evidence of states violating the 

constitutional rights of confined youth continued in 

seven states — Arkansas, California, Florida, Nevada, 

New York, Ohio, and Texas — identified originally 

in No Place for Kids. In some cases, widespread 
 

 

 

8 | New Thinking in Community Corrections 

Correctional... 

Picture MJ, a 16-year-old who is on his way to the Elm Tree Correctional Center to begin serving an 18-month sentence. He is 

shackled and placed in the back of a van with three other teenage boys. He knows one of the guys, with whom he has hung out 

in his neighborhood, but the uniformed correctional officer tells them to shut up when anybody starts to talk. After about three 

hours, they arrive at an old and dingy building surrounded by two tall fences topped with razor wire. One big gate opens, they 

pull the van forward, and before the next gate opens, the one behind them clanks closed. The van doors open, and another officer 

yells his last name and tells him to get moving. They are directed into a vestibule where the door behind them bangs shut loudly. 

Then, the door in front of them buzzes and unlocks, and MJ is directed into a small cell. He hears doors clanging, voices yelling, 

walkie-talkies squawking, somebody barking out orders. After a while, two officers come in. He is told to strip naked and they 

conduct a detailed search of his body, including body cavities. He is handed an orange jumpsuit, underwear, socks, and slip-on 

shoes — most of which have obviously been worn by others in the past — and ordered to put them on. He is then led down a 

long hallway and into a large room with metal tables in the center, bolted down, ringed by a series of metal doors, each with a 

small window, some of which have faces staring blankly out of them. He doesn’t see any youth out of their cells in the common 

area. He is taken over to one of the doors, the officer unlocks it and tells him to go in, and then the door is locked behind him. 

His cot has a thin blanket on it, with no sheets or pillow on his plastic mattress, and there is a metal toilet-sink combination 

in one corner of the room. There is another bunk with another guy on it who was sleeping before he got there. His “cellie” just 

glares at him. A little while later, the door bangs open and he follows the other guys in a line down the corridor into a cafeteria, 

putting his hands behind his back as he notices the other boys do. The noise reverberates all around him as he takes a seat at a 

metal table, on an attached metal stool. A tray of food is placed in front of him, with plastic utensils to eat it with. It is something 

full of tomatoes and he knows he gets sick if he eats those things, so he just sits and watches. 

After dinner, he follows the line of boys back to their unit. When they get there, everyone hangs out in the big room, some 

watching TV, others playing cards. He starts to sit at one of the tables but realizes the only open seat is broken. And besides, the 

guys at the table glare at him, making it plain he is not welcome there. At 8 p.m., they are ordered into their cells. In there, he has 

nothing to do; his roommate has sneaked in a book (books are “contraband” in the rooms), so there’s not much conversation 

with him. The metal door with a scratched-up, barely transparent window is locked behind them with one of many big keys that 

the officer wears on his belt. At 10 p.m., staff yell that it’s “lights out” time and the light in his room is turned off from the outside. 

He is awake most of the night, frightened by what he has seen and experienced during the day and the sounds he hears during 

the night. The next day, he is awakened at 6:30 a.m. by a bang on the door and his room’s light being turned back on. He takes 

a group shower with a bunch of other guys while one of the male officers looks on. After breakfast, he and the others in his unit 

are lined up and moved to the school room. Class is supposed to run from 8:30 to noon, but a fight breaks out in the hallway, 

so classes don’t start until 9:30. He hears a couple of the guys placing bets on how long this teacher will last. He has already 

been there a month, longer than some others. It is hard to tell when class officially gets under way, since kids keep getting 

into verbal — and sometimes physical — fights with other kids, staff, and teachers. Two of the guys get removed from the 

classroom, and he hears the officer tell one of them he’s going to solitary confinement and that both of them will lose their 

weekly family visitation and calls. 

At the end of his first 24 hours in Elm Tree, MJ has no idea what to expect next. All he knows is that he has never felt so alone 

and afraid in his life. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

The Future of Youth Justice: A Community-Based Alternative to the Youth Prison Model | 9

 ...Versus Home-Like Atmosphere 

Now, picture DS, also 16 years old, who is on his way to the Back on Track House where he knows he will stay at least through the 

end of the school year, around six to nine months, depending on his behavior. He is driven about 10 minutes to the house by a guy 

who calls himself a “counselor” and wears khaki pants and a “Back on Track” polo shirt. DS recognizes the building and the block it’s 

on; it’s a former school just around the corner from the barber shop where his uncle works. When they arrive, the counselor walks 

him to the door and rings a doorbell. He notices a fence much like the one that was there when it was a school, but now there’s no 

way to enter it or exit the school yard from the street. Another staff member opens the door, says hello, and escorts him into what 

used to be the principal’s office, calling him by his first name and saying that he’s been expecting him. The two counselors explain 

the need to pat him down, after which they walk him into a room with “Imani” (the name of the unit) posted in wooden letters on the 

outside. The room has some sofas and beanbag chairs in the middle, and some desks with computers on the side. 

There are three or four guys there who immediately introduce themselves to him. One of them, RM, comes over and says he is to 

be DS’s “buddy” to help him get settled and learn the ropes. With staff always within seeing and hearing range, RM takes DS down 

a short hallway with bedrooms on either side. The doors are open and he can see inside. Each has two beds; he can see people’s 

clothes and some family pictures on the walls. They get to his room and he meets his roommate, who tells him not to look so scared, 

that this place could actually help him if he works the program. He points to a poster on the wall that lists what is expected of every 

resident; he, his roommate, and his “buddy” go over the house rules while staff look on, chiming in occasionally. They show him 

where the bathrooms are, down the hall, and tell him to wash up for dinner. In the dining room, he sits next to his roommate at one 

of the wooden tables, along with eight or nine other guys and a counselor. The food is passed around family style, and there is a 

moment of silence so people can pray if they want to (but they don’t have to) before everyone starts eating. He is told that this room 

doubles as a place where kids’ families come and visit, which is allowed most evenings and is required with counseling staff twice 

a month. The counselor asks if anybody has something to bring up, and one of the guys suggests they give DS some pointers on 

what to expect and says he remembers how scared he was at the beginning. After dinner, his buddy tells him they are going back 

to the “day room” with the beanbags for “circle,” where they will talk about how their day went. After circle, everybody spreads out 

and starts to do homework. He doesn’t have any, so he picks a book from the bookshelves and reads. At 10 p.m., everybody heads 

to their rooms and to bed. The wooden door to their room is closed and locked for the evening by one of the counselors. 

Before going to bed, his roommate helps him set his alarm clock and reminds him of the house rule that they’re all responsible for 

getting showered and to breakfast on time. The next morning, just as his alarm is going off, staff unlock the doors, greet the young 

people, and hang around the bathrooms while they shower in their own stalls and use the toilets. Breakfast, like dinner, is family 

style, and everybody cleans up after themselves. After breakfast and before school, they have a quick circle, more like a check-in 

to see where everyone is; people take special time to see how DS is doing, as it’s his first day. 

After circle, he and the other nine boys in the Imani unit go to class together. In his classroom is a teacher, plus someone else he 

hasn’t met yet (he later learns that the man’s name is Raheem and he’s called an aide) as well as his unit’s counselor. The first class 

is history, and several of the guys make a PowerPoint presentation for a report they researched online about something he had 

never heard of (but which was really interesting) called the “Edmund Pettus Bridge.” 

After school, which ended at 3 p.m., his buddy tells him he can choose from “electives” — that day, a computer class or a poetry 

class — that groups from outside the facility run and where kids from Imani mingle with boys from other units. He chooses the 

computer class, which lasts until 4 p.m. The boys head back to their units and have free time until dinner. DS calls his mom, who 

tells him she’ll be coming by to visit him on Saturday with his uncle after the barber shop closes. They’ll all be meeting with one 

of the counselors to discuss DS’s treatment plan. He gets a little more information about what to expect from that session, when, 

during circle that evening, it was explained that he soon would have to develop (with the counselors and feedback from the group) 

goals for his time in treatment as well as a poster that explains his autobiography. He could see a few examples that other kids had 

done hanging on the walls of the day room. The group asks DS how he feels about his first day and he explains that, although he 

still wishes he was home, he’s beginning to feel like this place might help him get back on track. 
 

 

10 | New Thinking in Community Corrections 

maltreatment has persisted even years after states 

signed consent decrees agreeing to remedy 

problematic conditions within their facilities. 

•		 All told, since 2000, systemic maltreatment has 

been documented in the juvenile corrections 

facilities of 29 states, with substantial evidence of 

maltreatment in three additional states. 

Impervious to Reform 

Almost from inception and continually through 

today, significant yet sporadic, uneven, and 

ultimately unsuccessful efforts have been made to 

reform these reformatories.5 An impressive array of 

civil litigators arose at the national (e.g., Youth Law 

Center/National Center for Youth Law, 1970; the 

American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison 

Project, 1972) and local (e.g., Juvenile Law Center, 

Pennsylvania, 1975; Prison Law Office, California, 

1979) levels to litigate conditions of confinement. In 

1980, the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons 

Act was enacted to protect the rights of people 

incarcerated in (among other places) youth facilities, 

energizing the U.S. Department of Justice’s role in 

youth prison litigation. 

Although significant victories have been won by civil 

litigators working to improve conditions, the basic 

nature of youth prisons remains. In 1994, the Office 

of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention 

(OJJDP) conducted a study of 995 public and private 

facilities in which youth were incarcerated in the 

U.S., including conducting site visits to 95 facilities 

and interviews with 475 youth. The agency reported 

“substantial and widespread” problems in living 

space, health care, security, and control of suicidal 

behavior. It also found deficiencies to be widespread 

and that few facilities it examined were without 

deficiencies (Parent et al., 1994). 

Reformers come and reformers go. State institutions 

carry on. Nothing in their history suggests they can 

sustain reform, no matter what money, what staff, 

and programs are pumped into them. The same 

crises that have plagued them for 150 years intrude 

today. Though the cast may change, the players go 

on producing failure. 

—Jerome G. Miller, former Massachusetts Secretary 

of the Department of Youth Services 

That these facilities have been impervious 

to reform efforts suggests that the harmful 

effects of incarceration are embedded in the 

physical facilities themselves and the nature 

of institutionalization. Changes in leadership, 

training, or enriched programming ultimately 

are trumped by correctional physical plants, the 

great distance most facilities are from families and 

oversight mechanisms, and the bureaucratization 

and institutionalization such facilities engender. 

Large, institutional structures, surrounded by 

razor wire and filled with noise and harsh lighting, 

create a toxic environment. The staff and kids 

are inevitably caught in their roles of guard and 

prisoner, locking both into a struggle of power and 

resistance. Life in these places is about violence and 

control, submission, and defiance, leaving little 

room for the guidance, learning, role-modeling, 

and caring relationships that young people need 

(Rothman, 1980). This guard versus prisoner 

dynamic, which is evident in adult settings as 

well (Zimbardo et al., 1972), is exacerbated by the 

general power differential that exists between 

youth and adults. 
 

 

 

 

 

The Future of Youth Justice: A Community-Based Alternative to the Youth Prison Model | 11 

There have been efforts at reform, but they typically 

have been isolated and short-lived. In the 1970s, 

Massachusetts Secretary of the Department of Youth 

Services, Jerome G. Miller, attempted to reform the 

facilities under his jurisdiction, which included 

two of the first training schools opened in America, 

the Lyman and Shirley Schools. Miller sought to 

create therapeutic communities with humanized 

living environments in which youth were treated 

with dignity and respect. Therapeutic communities 

are characterized by self-help and peer-centered 

strategies, traits typically alien to youth prisons. 

Miller’s modest, incremental reform efforts were 

met with intense opposition — and occasional 

sabotage — from entrenched staff (Krisberg, 

forthcoming). Eventually, instead of trying to 

change what he came to believe was the essential 

nature of youth prisons, Miller decided to close 

them. Over a two-year period, he closed all eight 

Massachusetts youth prisons that housed more 

than 600 young people. 

He described what led him to decide to close — rather 

than continue to attempt to reform — Massachusetts’ 

training schools: “But whenever I thought 

we’d made progress [in reforming the training 

schools] something happened — a beating, a 

kid in an isolation cell, an offhand remark by a 

superintendent or cottage supervisor told me what 

I envisioned would never be allowed. Reformers 

come and reformers go. State institutions carry on. 

Nothing in their history suggests they can sustain 

reform, no matter what money, what staff, and 

programs are pumped into them. The same crises 

that have plagued them for 150 years intrude today. 

Though the cast may change, the players go on 

producing failure” (Miller, 1991). 

When custody meets care, custody always wins. 

—David Rothman 

Correctional historian David Rothman explains that 

it is the deep-rooted nature of these institutions that 

argues for their elimination: “There is [a] character 

to institutions that is not easily curbed — and 

this is in two senses. For one, institutions appear 

so convenient to the ordinary citizen, so easy a 

way of getting rid of troublesome or ugly or needy 

persons, that as long as the institutional option 

exists, alternatives will never be properly organized 

and supported. For another, the heads and direct 

beneficiaries of institutions, be they employees 

or building contractors, have a way of dominating 

the budgets so as to prevent the growth of quality 

alternatives. That this institutional tenacity ... is 

deep rooted and perhaps even inevitable, emerges 

from an examination of the fate of earlier Progressive 

efforts to move to community care” (Rothman, 1980). 

Or, as Rothman later stated more succinctly, 

“When custody meets care, custody always wins’’ 

(Newsweek staff, 1994). 

Rothman’s analysis of the resistance of the 

institutional model to downsizing holds true to the 

present day. Gladys Carrión, former commissioner 

of New York state’s Office of Children and Family 

Services, which manages the state’s youth prisons, 

encountered fierce opposition from facility staff 

and local elected officials as she tried to (and did) 

close youth prisons in New York. The resistance 
 

 

12 | New Thinking in Community Corrections 

included numerous votes of no confidence in 

legislative bodies and intense organizing efforts to 

fight facility closures — even when facilities were 

fully or almost completely empty of youth (Bernstein, 

2014). Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services 

Director Vincent Schiraldi was subject to two votes 

of no confidence by facility staff when he closed 

Washington, D.C.’s notorious Oak Hill Youth Center, 

despite the fact that the facility had been under a 

consent decree for abusive and unconstitutional 

conditions for more than 20 years when it finally 

closed (McCabe, 2006). And Jerome Miller 

experienced numerous acts of staff sabotage and 

enormous political pressure when he closed all of 

Massachusetts’ youth prisons in the early 1970s 

(Miller, 1991). 

The recurring and ubiquitous scandalous conditions 

that have plagued youth prisons since their 

inception — sometimes despite the best efforts of 

very dedicated people — strongly suggest that it is the 

nature of these institutions themselves, rather than 

the temporary misbehavior of this superintendent or 

that juvenile corrections administrator, that is at the 

heart of the problem with the youth prison model. As 

Miller points out, the history of correctional reform 

reveals a cycle of scandal and abuse, followed by 

surface-level reforms; followed by gradual entropy 

during a period of calm; followed inevitably by 

scandal, abuse, and once again, calls for reform 

(Miller, 1987). The consistent failure of youth prisons 

to protect youth and improve their outcomes — along 

with the institutional model’s stubborn resistance to 

transformation — argues for the replacement, rather 

than the improvement, of youth prisons. 

High (and Rising) Costs, Negative Benefits 

Youth prisons are not just a failed and harmful 

strategy. Their financial costs are enormous. 

According to a 2015 report by the Justice Policy 

Institute, the cost of incarceration varies from state to 

state, but averages $401 per day and $146,302 per year 

in each state’s high-cost facilities. Taking length of 

stay into account, 34 states report spending $100,000 

or more to incarcerate one young person (Justice 

Policy Institute, 2015). Moreover, the financial costs 

continue to grow long after release from confinement. 

Being incarcerated has lifelong negative effects on 

the young people whose prospects are dimmed. The 

long-term financial costs to society can be estimated 

in such terms as lost future earnings and government 

tax revenue, and higher spending on Medicaid and 

Medicare. It is estimated that the long-term societal 

costs generated by one year of incarcerating youth in 

the U.S. range from $8 billion to $21 billion (Justice 

Policy Institute, 2015). 

The practice of committing youth to large institutions 

that fail to provide for their developmental needs 

is both costly in financial terms and ineffective in 

furthering the goal of crime prevention. 

—National Research Council 

It is reasonable to ask what we get when we subject 

young people, society, and public budgets to these 

human and financial costs. There is evidence that 

youth who have been institutionalized get into 

worse trouble, are more likely to commit worse 

crimes, are less employable, are more likely to be 

on a path toward lifelong failure, and are more 

likely to pass their problems on to their children.6 
 

 

 

 

 

The Future of Youth Justice: A Community-Based Alternative to the Youth Prison Model | 13 

For example, Nguyen and colleagues (2016) found 

that correctional environments can facilitate the 

accumulation of “criminal capital” and might 

actually encourage offending by serving as a “school 

of crime” and increasing post-release earnings from 

crime. If one were looking to create a feeder system 

for adult prisons, one could hardly do better than our 

current approach. 

Despite the high costs that states expend each year 

on juvenile prisons, the outcomes are sorely wanting. 

Even if our only goal was to improve public safety, 

youth prisons would be deemed a failure. Each 

state reports its own recidivism rate using unique 

definitions, so there is no single national measure. 

However, state-by-state data reveal that 70 to 

80 percent of incarcerated youth are rearrested 

within two to three years (Mendel, 2011). Mounting 

evidence from the best statistical analyses suggests 

that incarceration of youth may actually increase the 

likelihood of recidivism (Aos et al., 2004; Baglivio, 

2009; Greenwood et al., 1996; Lipsey, 1992). 

For example, Aizer and Doyle (2013) used the 

incarceration tendency of randomly assigned judges 

to estimate the causal effects of youth incarceration 

on high school completion and adult recidivism. 

Examining more than 35,000 juvenile offenders 

over 10 years, they found that youth incarceration 

results in substantially lower high school completion 

rates and higher adult incarceration rates, including 

incarceration for violent crimes. Furthermore, they 

found that incarceration for this age group was 

extremely disruptive, greatly reducing the likelihood 

of ever returning to school, and, for those who do, 

significantly increasing their likelihood of being 

classified with an emotional or behavioral disorder 

(Aizer and Doyle, 2013). Numerous other studies 

suggest that incarceration produces worse outcomes 

for low-risk youth when compared with home-based 

services. 

An incarceration program is not an employment 

program... [We] don’t put other people in juvenile 

justice facilities to give some people jobs. 

—New York Governor Andrew Cuomo 

In 2013, the National Research Council, the nation’s 

premier, nonpartisan research institute, published 

a comprehensive review of research on juvenile 

justice in the U.S. The Council concluded that welldesigned community programs are more likely to 

reduce recidivism and improve youth well-being than 

institutionalization. Citing the harm from placement 

in large, distant institutions, they found that, for the 

small number of youth who require confinement, 

proximity to their communities is less disruptive. “The 

practice of committing youth to large institutions that 

fail to provide for their developmental needs is both 

costly in financial terms and ineffective in furthering 

the goal of crime prevention” (Bonnie et al., 2013). 

As youth incarceration declines, it can lead to 

skyrocketing per-youth costs as staff reductions and 

facility closures fail to keep up with the decline in 

incarcerated youth. Connecticut’s sole remaining 

youth prison, the 250-cell Connecticut Juvenile 

Training School, has a $53 million annual budget 

but houses only 43 boys (Kovner, 2016). When he was 

first elected governor, New York’s Andrew Cuomo 

toured a youth prison in upstate New York running 
 

14 | New Thinking in Community Corrections 

sidebar on page 21) (Steinhart, 2013). Figure 2. Youth in California state-operated facilities and annual institutional cost 

per ward, 1996 to 2008 California’s state-incarcerated youth 

Population		 Cost population plummeted to just 600 

12,000 

9,572 

8,599 

7,570 

7,188 

6,291 

5,379 

4,607 

3,643 

$92,545 

$115,000 

$178,000 

$218,000 

$252,000 

2,719 

3,133 

2,287 

$83,220 

1,704 

$63,961 

$56,240 $49,110 $43,560 $40,520 $36,110 $39,420

Incarcerated youth population down 82% 

Institutional costs per 

youth up almost sevenfold 

7,938 

$300,000 inmates by 2013; during this period, 

per-capita costs also declined, but 10,000 $250,000

then leveled out in order to support 

8,000 $200,000		 improved programming for the serious 

offenders who remained in state 

6,000 $150,000

custody. 

4,000 $100,000

Although many systems need to 

2,000 $50,000 increase their cost per youth to 

provide better staff-to-youth ratios and 

0 $0 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 improve programming, it is clear from 

End-of-year population for youth in Annual institutional cost per ward custody in California state-operated facilities these and other examples that political 

Source: Steinhart, 2013 (population); Schiraldi, Schindler, and Goliday, 2011 (cost per ward). pressures make it difficult for even 

cost-conscious policymakers to close 

with ample staff but housing no youth, prompting youth prisons as fast as they downsize. 

Cuomo to exclaim in his state-of-the-state address, 

Change at Scale Is Possible “An incarceration program is not an employment 

program ... [We] don’t put other people in juvenile With the right models, technical assistance, and 

justice facilities to give some people jobs. That’s not leadership, incarcerated youth populations can 

what this state is all about, and that has to end.” be significantly downsized without negatively 

affecting public safety. In 1993, the Annie E. Casey 

As youth crime declined in California and the Foundation launched the Juvenile Detention 

state legislature passed a series of laws to reduce Alternatives Initiative (JDAI). At a time when 

youth incarceration, the number of confined youth adult and youth incarceration rates were sharply 

dropped from nearly 10,000 in 1996 to around 1,700 increasing nationally, JDAI challenged firmly rooted 

by 2008. During that time, the cost of incarceration but outmoded beliefs, countering deeply entrenched 

in the state’s youth prisons rose almost sevenfold, interests and reinforcing the political courage of 

from $36,000 per youth per year to $252,000 key leaders to reform the youth detention system. 

(Schiraldi, Schindler, and Goliday, 2011) (see figure Working collaboratively with sites, advocates, 

2). California policymakers learned this lesson and, experts, researchers, philanthropies, and providers, 

effective in 2008, disrupted this pattern by banning JDAI is now in place in nearly 300 local jurisdictions 

commitments of all but the most serious juvenile across 39 states. 

offenders to state institutions, closing eight of its 

11 large youth corrections facilities by 2012 (see 
The Future of Youth Justice: A Community-Based Alternative to the Youth Prison Model | 15 

to spur closures, but he also created a Figure 3. International youth incarceration rates (per 100,000 in 2010) 

$50 million fund and tax credits to aid 

USA 94.68 Cyprus 46.50 Colombia 37.00 Hungary 28.80 Romania 28.60 Costa Rica 27.02 Panama 23.48 Estonia 21.38 Hong Kong 20.87 Lithuania 20.70 Ukraine 20.23 Russian Federation 17.09 

Republic of Moldova 16.73 

Australia 16.23 

Dominican Republic 15.04 

Kosovo 14.56 

Mexico 14.09 

Slovakia 12.69 

Burundi 10.42 

Montenegro 10.29 

Austria 9.85 

Bulgaria 7.09 

New Zealand 5.80 

Serbia 4.59 

Armenia 4.13 

Sweden 2.29 

Finland 1.01 

Slovenia 0.58 

communities in which a youth or adult 

prison closed (King, 2011). 

International Context 

Nations in the rest of the world either 

never went down this road or are far 

ahead of us in abandoning it in favor of 

more effective systems. By all measures 

available, the United States incarcerates 

youth at a substantially higher rate 

than does any other country. Although 

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 

Rate ! international comparisons of juvenile 

Source: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2011. incarceration rates are challenging 

due to reporting variations, the U.S. is 

The Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and 

Social Policy at the University of California, Berkeley 

(2012), found that within 23 states where JDAI was 

operating prior to 2010, detention populations had 

fallen 2.5 times more in participating counties 

(down 42 percent) than in the states as a whole 

(17 percent). Furthermore, the 112 JDAI sites that 

provide data reported that they sent 5,254 fewer 

youth to correctional facilities in 2011 than in the 

year prior to joining JDAI. Ninety percent of JDAI 

sites reported data showing improved public-safety 

outcomes versus pre-JDAI (Mendel, 2014). Although 

these findings focus on declining rates of youth in 

preadjudication detention, they suggest that it is 

possible to have both fewer incarcerated youth and 

less youth crime. 

Policymakers and advocates will need to be mindful of 

both fiscal and political forces as they push for facility 

closures. In New York, for example, Governor Cuomo 

not only used the bully pulpit of the governor’s office 

consistently found to be greatly “out

incarcerating” other countries. For example, a study 

published in 2008 (Hazel, 2008) reported that the U.S. 

incarceration rate for our youth was nearly five times 

that of the next closest country, South Africa. Similarly, 

using 2006 data from the European Sourcebook of 

Crime and Criminal Justice Statistics and the United 

States’ Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics, 

Killias, Redondo, and Sarnecki (2012) found that the 

youth incarceration rate in the U.S. consistently and 

dramatically exceeds that of European countries. 

The latest data available from the United Nations 

Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) (Jandl, 2016) 

also show that rates of youth incarceration in the 

U.S. far exceed those of other countries (see figure 

3). According to the UNODC data, published in 

2011 (using data from 2010), the U.S. incarcerates 

youth at more than twice the rate of the next highest 

incarcerating country (Cyprus) and nearly six times 

the rate of the Russian Federation. 

­

 

 

 

 

16 | New Thinking in Community Corrections 

Figure 4. Disparity in youth incarceration rates, 2013 

Youth of color versus white youth 

Greatest gap 

Smallest gap 

1.4 

2.4 

3.2 

4.1 

5.1 

13.0 

Source: W. Haywood Burns Institute, 2016. 

in youth prisons underscores 

both the effect of socioeconomic 

disparities in American society on 

youth outcomes and the impact of 

race on dispositions. In 2013, rates 

of confinement were 2.7 times higher 

for youth of color than rates for white 

youth (Petteruti, Schindler, and 

Ziedenberg, 2014). Black youth that 

year were incarcerated at 4.7 times the 

rate of white youth, Native American 

youth were incarcerated at 3.3 times 

the rate of white youth, Latino youth 

were incarcerated at 1.7 times the 

rate of white youth, and Asian youth 

Which Youth Are Behind Bars? 

Higher rates of youth incarceration are not 

inevitable; rather, they are driven by policy choices 

made by adults. First, a substantial majority of youth 

incarcerated in the U.S. are not behind bars for the 

kinds of crimes that scare most Americans. Sixtythree percent of locked-up youth were incarcerated 

for something other than a person offense, such as 

drug or public order offenses or property crimes 

(Sickmund et al., 2015). This category includes 

17 percent who were incarcerated for probation 

violations (technical violations) and five percent 

who were there for status offenses (behaviors that 

would not be considered a crime if committed by an 

adult) (Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency 

Prevention, 2013). 

Furthermore, the likelihood of being incarcerated 

is influenced by individual, family, and social 

characteristics (Gatti, Tremblay, and Vitaro, 

2009). The heavy concentration of boys of color 

were incarcerated 30 percent more 

frequently than were white youth. 

These national disparities mask much more 

profound disparities at the state level. For example, 

African-American youth in New Hampshire, New 

Jersey, and Wisconsin were incarcerated at 36.5, 

25.3, and 16.3 times the rate of white youth in their 

states, respectively. The map in figure 4 depicts 

the varying rates of racial disparities in youth 

incarceration in the United States. 

Even after controlling for present offense and prior 

record, researchers have found “race effects” — evidence 

of unwarranted racial disparities not explained by 

factors such as offense severity or prior record — in 

the youth justice system. A meta-analysis of 46 

studies of youth justice processing and minority 

status conducted by Pope and Feyerherm revealed 

that two-thirds of the studies showed race 

effects at varying points in the system (Pope and 
 

 

 

 

The Future of Youth Justice: A Community-Based Alternative to the Youth Prison Model | 17 

Feyerherm, 1995). After controlling for other case 

characteristics, they found unwarranted disparities 

in case-processing decisions such as detention, 

prosecution, and commitments to youth prisons. 

Furthermore, the meta-analysis revealed that these 

effects are cumulative. Relatively small differences 

in outcomes at early stages of the process became 

exacerbated as black and brown youth progressed 

through the system. 

Even after controlling for present offense and prior 

record, researchers have found ... unwarranted racial 

disparities ... in the youth justice system. 

Bridges and Steen analyzed 233 probation 

reports for youth in family court and found 

that, controlling for offense severity and prior 

record, probation officers ascribed black youth’s 

delinquency to negative attitudinal and personality 

traits and white youth’s delinquency to external 

environmental issues beyond their control. These 

perceptions led to a heightened assessment of the 

risk of African-American youth and more punitive 

sentencing recommendations for them (Bridges and 

Steen, 1998). 

Disturbingly, as high disparities between people of color 

and whites have declined in the criminal justice system 

in the 1990s and 2000s (Travis, Western, and Redburn, 

2014), black-white disparities in the incarceration of 

youth have increased (Rovner, 2016; Hager, 2015). 

A fundamental reason that the failed youth prison 

model has persisted for 170 years is that the youth, 

families, and communities most affected are 

seen as “others,” not as “ours” (Alexander, 2012). 

For decades, adolescents in trouble with the law 

have been portrayed as scary, predatory, and less 

than human (Schiraldi, 2001).7 Black and brown 

youth predominate in these images, invoking 

all of this country’s predilection for negative 

racial stereotypes. These images dominate our 

understanding and prevent us from seeing them 

as they actually are (Dorfman and Schiraldi, 2001), 

as we would see them if they were our own children 

or a neighbor’s child. They prevent us from seeing 

them as young people with creativity, and energy, 

and smarts, and possibility, in need of help to get 

back on track and very much worth the investment. 

Recommendations — Reduce, Reform, 

Replace, Reinvest 

It is long past time to choose a different path, 

one that aligns the moral, ethical, and human 

imperative with fiscal prudence, safer communities, 

and better youth outcomes. The momentum is 

beginning to shift. Leaders from the President to 

the Pope are calling for a halt to heavy reliance on 

incarceration. Early-adopter states and localities are 

trying alternative approaches. Youth incarceration, 

while still high, is plummeting. Evidence-builders 

are showing the way. 

The call for the closure of youth prisons does 

not mean that there are not some young people 

for whom secure confinement is the right and 

necessary solution. But even for them, harsh, 

punitive, inhumane, and developmentally 

inappropriate settings are not the right place; certainly 

not if the goal is — as it should be — positive youth 

development and rehabilitation. 
 

 

18 | New Thinking in Community Corrections 

The right solution is a comprehensive one, achieved 

through simultaneous and well-sequenced actions 

to reorient the system into one that is driven by 

the goal of helping youth get back on track, and 

prioritizing youth development and accountability 

over mindless punishment. To succeed, such systems 

will need to close down all publicly operated or 

contracted youth prisons and build a developmentally 

appropriate continuum of services. The necessary 

steps comprise four domains of action — reduce, 

reform, replace, and reinvest. 

Reduce 

We can safely reduce the pipeline into youth 

prisons by at least half. States can do so by limiting 

commitment to youth prisons to only youth who 

have committed serious offenses and pose clear 

and demonstrable risks to public safety. Enacting 

statutes that limit the categories of youth who are 

eligible for correctional placement can help make 

this happen (Mendel, 2011). When Texas and 

California statutorily limited youth corrections to 

youth with more serious convictions and reallocated 

savings to counties to fund local solutions to youth 

offending, both states experienced marked declines 

in youth incarceration and offending. 

Indeed, from 2001 to 2013, there was a 53-percent 

decline in youth incarceration in the U.S., with 

youth incarceration declining by double digits in 

48 states. During that time, each of the nation’s 

five largest states experienced youth incarceration 

declines of nearly two-thirds. 

Driven largely by steep reductions in youth crime 

rates, the likelihood that a young person in our 

country will be confined in an out-of-home 

placement is now the lowest in at least 40 years. 

Among youth who are committed to state custody, 

the percentage held in facilities with more than 200 

beds shrunk from 52 percent to 18 percent between 

2001 and 2013 (Sickmund et al., 2015). There were 

970 fewer juvenile facilities operating in the U.S. 

in 2012 than in 2002, a 33-percent decline. The 

largest facilities have closed disproportionately; 

for example, there has been a 66-percent decline 

in the number of facilities with a capacity of more 

than 200 juveniles (Rovner, 2015). 

The footprint of the youth corrections system and 

the facilities themselves have shrunk substantially 

in the past decade, offering a once-in-a-generation 

opportunity to eliminate youth prisons entirely. 

Closing these institutions would enable 

reinvestment of the savings into a system marked 

by rigorous in-home programming, and, for the 

small number of those who need to be incarcerated, 

small, homelike facilities that are close enough to 

the youth’s home communities to maintain and 

encourage family involvement. 

The normal course of adolescent development 

helps make reducing the pipeline by at least half a 

feasible goal. Most youth will age out of challenging 

behaviors if they do not experience the trauma and 

adverse conditions that convert normal, transitory 

risk-taking and impulsive behaviors into deeply 

embedded identity (Bonnie et al., 2013). A review of 

international evidence on young people who come 

into contact with the law found “[D]iversionary 

approaches may be appropriate for young people 

who commit low-level offences, given that some will 
 

 

 

 

 

The Future of Youth Justice: A Community-Based Alternative to the Youth Prison Model | 19 

desist from crime without intervention and [that] 

drawing these young people into the formal youth 

justice system may increase their offending” (Adler 

et al., 2016). 

Part of the reason that the pipeline can be reduced 

so significantly without risk to public safety is that 

so many of those who are sent to youth prisons are 

incarcerated for offenses that the public finds more 

amenable to community-based placement. Nearly 

half (46 percent) of the young people who spent time 

in youth prisons in 2013 were not there for offenses 

against persons or were incarcerated for status 

offenses; another 17 percent were incarcerated for 

technical violations of probation (Office of Juvenile 

Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 2013). 

There are recent and long-standing examples of 

states that have successfully and significantly 

reduced their rates of incarceration without 

an increase in crime. Under the Close to Home 

initiative (see sidebar, page 23), New York City 

reduced the number of youth it confined and 

transferred nearly all city youth from distant, 

upstate facilities to small, local facilities. Youth 

incarceration in the city fell by 53 percent and 

youth arrests declined by half (Schiraldi, 2015b). 

Texas (see sidebar, page 20) achieved a 65-percent 

reduction in the number of youth in state secure 

facilities and a simultaneous 33-percent drop in 

youth arrests (Fabelo et al., 2015). 

Massachusetts offers evidence from a decades-long 

example. Studies of the rapid deinstitutionalization 

there found that youth served in the community 

had levels of recidivism no worse than youth who 

were previously incarcerated (Ohlin, Coates, and 

Miller, 1975). In California, youth arrests, property 

crime, and violent crime all steadily declined over 

a period in which the state was drastically reducing 

its incarcerated youth population from more than 

10,000 to less than 1,000 (Krisberg et al., 2010). 

The case studies that follow illustrate how different 

jurisdictions have experimented successfully 

with efforts to reduce, reform, and/or replace 

their youth prisons and, in some cases, reinvest 

savings into community-based programs. These 

vignettes are for illustration purposes and to spur 

local innovation. To be clear, none of these systems 

has found perfect solutions to all the complicated 

challenges of adolescent delinquency or systemic 

reform, and we know that innovations in one 

jurisdiction cannot be seamlessly transplanted into 

another. Nevertheless, they offer both examples 

and evidence of the feasibility of reducing the 

pipeline, reforming systems of intervention, 

replacing youth prisons, and creating opportunities 

for reinvestment into more effective approaches. 

Reform 

We can reduce the pipeline and close youth prisons 

if we also reform the culture, configuration, and 

decision-making processes so that the entire system 

comes to focus on achieving positive outcomes for 

every youth. To do so means both programmatic 

and practice reforms. 

Programmatically, this means expanding 

dispositional alternatives, especially communitybased and family-centered programs that are 

proven to work with young people who have 
 

 

20 | New Thinking in Community Corrections 

serious problems, and ensuring that youth are 

matched with the right programs (Schiraldi, 

Schindler, and Goliday, 2011). Such an expanded 

array of alternatives would give judges better 

options for matching youth needs and the degree of 

supervision needed with effective options (Mendel, 

2011). Effectively using an expanded array of 

services depends on changes in policies, practices, 

and procedures throughout the system, so that each 

youth is matched to the most appropriate services, 

including diverting those for whom no formal court 

procedure is necessary. Rigorous assessment of 

community programs to ensure that public dollars 

are being spent wisely, and that such programs are 

improving outcomes and public safety, are critical 

elements in maintaining the confidence of the 

public and system stakeholders in a communitybased (rather than an institution-based) system. 

Programmatic and practice reforms go together 

hand-in-glove, and must be implemented 

simultaneously to maximize effectiveness. 

The National Research Council of the National 

Academies, in Reforming Juvenile Justice: A 

Developmental Approach, describes a number of 

programmatic components that are essential to 

well-designed community-based programs. These 

principles include (Bonnie et al., 2013): 

1.	 	 Limiting and structuring contact with antisocial 

peers and encouraging contact with prosocial 

peers. 

2.	 	 Keeping youth proximate to their communities, 

which is less disruptive of their developmental 

progress. 

3.	 	 Involving parents and ensuring family engagement. 

4.	 	Providing a social context that has ample 

opportunity and structures for healthy 

development and that provides youth with the 

tools to deal with negative influences that might 

be present in the settings they will encounter in 

the future. 

Texas — Reduce, Reinvest 

In 2007, the Texas legislature enacted reforms intended to significantly reduce the pipeline of youth into state custody. SB 103 

prohibits the commitment to state-run secure facilities of youth who are adjudicated delinquent for misdemeanors and limits 

stays in youth prisons to age 19. This policy change was accompanied by the creation of a formula-based block grant program 

that allocates funds to counties to help cover the costs of local supervision and treatment of youth who would no longer be sent 

to state facilities. Since these changes were enacted, the number of youth confined in state-run secure facilities has decreased 

by more than two-thirds (2,800 youth) and eight Texas state youth prisons have been closed, saving the state $150 million. Over 

this period, state funds allocated for local programs have increased by 38 percent. However, it is up to each county to determine 

how to deploy the funds. Some counties have chosen to establish county-run secure facilities, so some number of the youth 

covered by SB 103 are still being housed in secure facilities. Partially as a response, the Community Connections Diversion 

Program was established in 2009, and $50 million was appropriated to provide financial incentives to county governments to use 

alternatives to confinement. The overall Juvenile Justice Department budget also reflects the state’s emphasis on alternatives. 

For fiscal year 2014, one-half of the department’s total budget was allocated to community juvenile justice, including prevention 

and intervention, supervision, community programs, diversion initiatives, alternative education, and mental health services. 

Source: Fabelo et al., 2015. 
 

 

The Future of Youth Justice: A Community-Based Alternative to the Youth Prison Model | 21 

5.	 	 Offering opportunities for academic success and 

activities that contribute to developing decisionmaking and critical thinking skills. 

This kind of prosocial, developmentally appropriate 

milieu creates the context in which youth can be 

provided with high-quality/high-expectation 

programs and early work experience that will 

enable them to get back on track and move forward 

on the school-to-work pathway. These types of 

skills and experiences are as vital to ensuring long

term success as are the prosocial cognitive and 

behavioral interventions. 

Policies and practices that can divert youth from 

entering the system include rethinking zero-tolerance 

school discipline policies, making better use of police 

and diversion, and instituting detention reforms 

such as those implemented and proven effective at 

reducing detention populations without risk to public 

safety under JDAI. In addition, enhancing the legal 

representation that youth receive can help ensure that 

their individual circumstances and needs are taken 

­


into account, reducing unnecessary confinement 

while also ensuring that rehabilitative needs are 

identified and met. 

Probation reforms are needed to ensure a calibrated 

response to rule violations, so that each case is 

carefully considered and a decision to confine is 

carefully reviewed (Mendel, 2011). Community 

corrections staff, whether public employees or 

staff of nonprofits, should be thoroughly trained 

on adolescent development and on positive youth 

development so they can deliver asset-focused, 

trauma-informed care to the youth under their 

supervision, and can recommend removal from 

the home only when other options are exhausted. 

Community-based services offer a public policy 

“win-win” — they achieve better outcomes than do 

institutional placements at lower cost. Compared 

with $400 per day or more for incarceration, 

individualized, community-based wraparound 

services can cost as little as $75 per day (Justice 

California — Reduce, Reform, Reinvest 

Over the past 20 years, California has instituted a number of reforms aimed at reducing the number of youth in state custody. 

AB 2312, enacted in 1996, required counties to cover a share of the cost of committing local youth to state facilities and 

appropriated $33 million to support local youth justice programs to provide counties with more options. Simultaneously, 

challenge and facilities grants gave counties funds to create a graduated series of sanctions and to build local youth facilities. 

In 2007, legislation was enacted that further narrowed the pipeline by reserving commitments to state facilities for youth who 

have committed serious offenses. Along with these changes, the state has also enacted programs to increase prevention (AB 

1913 in 2000) and to incentivize diversion from state custody to county probation (the California Probation Subsidy Act). The 

result of these changes has been a dramatic 80-percent decrease in youth in state facilities (700 in 2015 versus 10,000 in 1996) 

and the closure of eight of California’s 11 large youth prisons (Steinhart, 2013). Nevertheless, some youth still are housed in 

prisonlike settings, managed by the county rather than the state. Moreover, Proposition 21 passed in 2000, making it much 

easier for youth to be tried as adults and sentenced to adult facilities. A ballot initiative, supported by Governor Jerry Brown, 

will appear on the ballot in November 2016 to overturn most of the provisions of Proposition 21 and return the decision about 

whether youth will be tried as adults to judges. 

Source: Krisberg et al., 2010. 
 

 

 

 

22 | New Thinking in Community Corrections 

Policy Institute, 2014) for those youth who need such 

services (and many do not). Research confirms that 

there is no intervention that is more effective when 

delivered in an institutional setting than when 

delivered in a community-based one. Moreover, 

helping youth in community settings avoids the 

additional negative experiences of confinement in 

youth prisons (Howell and Lipsey, 2012). 

Any intervention that places youths within a deviant 

group therefore risks exacerbating and consolidating 

their antisocial behavior. 

—Gatti, Tremblay, and Vitaro (2009) 

A continuum of community-based services should 

emphasize evidence-based family intervention 

models. A family is the best place for kids — birth 

families where possible, or other family settings 

such as kin or supportive foster care when it is 

not. Effective programs help families provide the 

guidance, support, and structure that help kids 

get back on track. A good example is Treatment 

Foster Care Oregon, an evidence-based alternative 

to incarceration or group placement for young 

people who have been adjudicated delinquent. 

Community families are recruited, trained, and 

closely supervised as they provide treatment and 

intensive supervision. Boys who participated in the 

program had fewer subsequent arrests, fewer days 

of incarceration, less self-reported drug use, fewer 

violent offense referrals, and fewer self-reported 

incidents of violence than did a control group 

(Blueprints for Healthy Youth Development, 2012). 

Other evidence-based family intervention models 

include Multisystemic Therapy and Functional 

Family Therapy (for youth with tenable families), 

among others (Mendel, 2011). 

But these kinds of family-based interventions are 

not enough. The youth justice system must also 

provide services, supports, and opportunities that 

connect young people to school; employment; 

and prosocial adults, peers, and activities. Butts, 

Bazemore, and Meroe (2010) have coined the 

phrase “positive youth justice” to describe an 

approach to building on the strengths of youth in 

the delinquency system, rather than merely trying 

to extinguish their deficits. In guidance to states 

that are creating their annual juvenile justice plans 

pursuant to the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency 

Prevention Act, OJJDP urges state advisory 

groups to create opportunities “for positive youth 

development that assist delinquent and other 

at-risk youth in obtaining (1) a sense of safety and 

structure, (2) a sense of belonging and membership, 

(3) a sense of self-worth and social contribution, 

(4) a sense of independence and control over one’s 

life, and (5) a sense of closeness in interpersonal 

relationships” (Butts, Bazemore, and Meroe, 2010). 

In some cases, it becomes necessary to remove 

kids from their own families or neighborhoods for 

a period. Such removals should strive to maintain 

family and community ties as much as possible by 

using close-to-home/community-based facilities 

and limiting the duration to the shortest possible, 

as determined by the young person’s readiness. 

Research supports the importance of having a 

continuum of community-based programs that 

can match services to youth’s needs. One study 

concluded that “any intervention that places youths 
 

 

 

The Future of Youth Justice: A Community-Based Alternative to the Youth Prison Model | 23 

within a deviant group therefore risks exacerbating 

and consolidating their antisocial behavior” and that 

“the more restrictive and more intense the justice 

system intervention was, the greater was its negative 

impact” (Gatti, Tremblay, and Vitaro, 2009). 

Research comparing placement in youth facilities 

with community-based treatment finds that 

community-based treatment is associated with 

better overall outcomes in terms of schooling 

and other markers of successful adjustment for 

individual young people (Lipsey, Wilson, and 

Cohen, 2000). 

Replace 

For the few youth for whom secure placement is 

necessary, a commitment is needed to replace 

New York City — Reduce, Reform, Replace, Reinvest 

Over the past several years, New York state and New York City have taken steps to establish a continuum of options to match 

youth needs and decision processes that direct youth to the most appropriate level of supervision and custody. Beginning in 

2003, a variety of reform efforts were instituted that, by 2011, reduced the number of youth being sent to residential placement 

by 55 percent (Ferone, Salsich, and Fratello, 2014). For instance, Esperanza, contracted for by the Probation Department 

(initially from the Vera Institute of Justice), and the Juvenile Justice Initiative (JJI), contracted for by the city’s Administration 

for Children’s Services, provide short-term crisis management and cognitive behavioral therapy (Esperanza) and Multisystemic 

Therapy or Functional Family Therapy (JJI) (Ferone, Salsich, and Fratello, 2014). Furthermore, the city initiated a new detentionrisk-assessment instrument coupled with a range of detention alternatives that reduced detention and preadjudication arrest 

rates, likely resulting in a reduction in youth committed post-adjudication. 

Then, in 2012, the legislature enacted Close to Home, which shifted responsibility for placements from New York state to the 

city. Unlike the distant, prisonlike state facilities traditionally used to house youth, the city’s placements are in small (24 beds 

or smaller) settings almost exclusively within the city’s boundaries and, therefore, close to family and community. In proposing 

Close to Home, Mayor Michael Bloomberg stated, “The current system is not helping kids, it isn’t helping taxpayers, and it isn’t 

helping public safety” (Brooks, 2010). 

The current system is not helping kids, it isn’t helping taxpayers, and it isn’t helping public safety. 

— New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg 

Since bringing placements into the city in smaller, noncorrectional settings, New York City has continued to see the number 

of placements fall considerably, as Close to Home has expanded its use of nonresidential alternatives and introduced a series 

of practice reforms aimed at keeping young people in the community. In addition to the continued use of Esperanza and JJI, 

the city has implemented several additional programs that focus on building skills and competencies. The programs include 

Advocate, Intervene, and Mentor (AIM), through which young people engage with an advocate from their community for at least 

seven hours per week; Every Child Has an Opportunity to Excel and Succeed (ECHOES), through which specialized probation 

officers build positive adult relationships, employment skills, and social-emotional competence; and Pathways to Excellence, 

Achievement, and Knowledge (PEAK), an educational day/evening school-based program for youth who are disconnected from 

school or are disruptive while in school (Ferone, Salsich, and Fratello, 2014). 

An additional key element in New York’s approach is a new, structured decision-making process implemented by the probation 

department to ensure that dispositional recommendations are fair and balanced. This process helps to ensure that each young 

person is matched to the level of supervision and type of services warranted, limiting the use of secure confinement to a last resort. 

Source: Schiraldi, 2015b. 
 

 

 

 

24 | New Thinking in Community Corrections 

Virginia — Reduce, Reform, Replace, Reinvest 

Virginia is one of the most recent states to take on the challenge of closing youth prisons and is doing so with a sequenced, 

multifaceted approach. At the front end, the state is reducing the pipeline through a variety of changes to detention policies, 

procedures, and training, decreasing the number of youth held in secure detention by 20 percent over two years. 

For youth committed to state custody, the creation of alternatives, along with other changes, has helped to reduce the population 

by about 40 percent over two years. A key contributor to this decrease was a 12-percent decrease in the length of stay, achieved 

through improved case management and increased use of stepdown placements. The state’s Secretary of Public Safety, Brian 

Moran, said of youth in state custody, “The longer they stay, the more we spend on them, the worse they are when they get out.” 

The longer they stay, the more we spend on them, the worse they are when they get out. 

— Brian Moran, Virginia Secretary of Public Safety 

Virginia is reinvesting savings from the reduction in the number of incarcerated youth and the closure of one of its large facilities 

into a wider array of alternative residential and nonresidential options located in communities around the state, enabling young 

people to be located closer to home and receive the kinds of assistance that will help them get back on track. The administration 

of Governor Terry McAuliffe has announced its intention to close the remaining two large institutions and continue the cycle of 

reinvesting those savings in expanded rehabilitative options. 

For those youth who are in custody, the state has adopted the Community Treatment Model (CTM), based on the Missouri 

approach. The model is being implemented one living unit at a time, and is expected to be operating statewide by the end of 

2016 to allow for the training, personnel, and policy changes needed to support the model. Key CTM features include revised 

visitation and phone call policies to promote family contact, and expansion of vocational and educational programs to help 

support youth development. 

Source: Martz, 2016. 

youth prisons with much smaller, noncorrectional 

programs that focus on turning lives around. 

These are treatment-intensive, developmentally 

appropriate, secure programs that emphasize 

stronger youth-staff relationships, nurture family 

engagement, and build community connections. 

From the day youth walk in the door, the focus of 

these programs must be on helping them succeed 

when they return to the community. The best 

place for these facilities is close to youth’s home 

communities to facilitate maintaining family ties 

and gradual transitions into community-based 

programming. 

Such facilities rely on close and respectful 

relationships with adults who are actively engaged 

with youth throughout the day. To make this work, 

staff must be caring, highly motivated, extensively 

trained, and well supported by supervisors. 

Missouri, a pioneer of this approach, describes 

this as “eyes on, ears on, hearts on” care. Highquality, rigorous programming throughout the day 

is essential, not just to keep young people engaged, 

but also to boost their educational, social, and 

emotional development. 

Successf ul models like Missouri’s have 

integrated several critical elements, including 
 

 

 

The Future of Youth Justice: A Community-Based Alternative to the Youth Prison Model | 25 

Missouri — Replace 

The state of Missouri won a 2008 Harvard Kennedy School Innovations in Government award (Ash Center for Democratic 

Governance and Innovation, 2016) for its long-standing juvenile justice reforms. Thirty years ago, decision-makers in Missouri 

made a statewide, systemwide shift in their approach. They closed down youth prisons and replaced them with smaller, more 

treatment-oriented programs in communities around the state so that they are located closer to youth’s families and communities 

(Mendel, 2010). 

This multilayered treatment approach is designed to help youth make the behavioral changes that will get them back on track. 

This treatment approach is applied across programs and facilities, regardless of security or restrictiveness level, so that youth 

experience a consistent framework as they transition between settings. A core element of this systemwide approach is a 

rigorous group-treatment process, offering extensive and ongoing individualized attention. Another foundational element of 

the approach is the formation of strong, supportive peer and adult relationships that become the primary vehicle for compliance 

and security, rather than more coercive techniques. 

While cross-state recidivism comparisons are challenging, Missouri reports a recidivism rate of 31 percent; only 6.6 percent 

of youth return to the juvenile justice system and only 6.6 percent are committed to the adult prison system within three years 

(Missouri Division of Youth Services, 2010). The National Research Council found that the Missouri model contained many of 

the elements that research suggests should be available in model facilities, but that rigorous evaluation of Missouri’s approach 

had not yet been conducted (Bonnie et al., 2013). 

Sources: Mendel, 2010; Missouri Division of Youth Services, 2010. 

a homelike and noncorrectional environment, 

programming, staffing inside the facility, and 

parent-family engagement bridging the facility 

and the community. An overall orientation 

toward helping youth get back on track means that 

treatment and developmental programming are 

trauma-informed; delivered by well-trained, wellsupervised, and well-supported staff; and address 

prosocial skill development, academic or vocational 

instruction, work readiness, and work experience. 

Positive youth development also implies that young 

people have leadership development experiences 

and opportunities to serve and give back to the 

community. One of the best opportunities for 

leadership development is to give youth a voice 

in their own treatment options and in informing 

general policy and practice. 

In the National Academies report referenced 

previously (Bonnie et al., 2013), the key tenets of the 

Missouri model are described as follows: 

1.		 Continuous case management. 

2.		 Decentralized residential facilities. 

3.		 Small-group, peer-led services. 

4.	 	 Restorative rehabilitation-centered treatment 

environment. 

5.		 Strong organizational leadership. 

6.	 	 Organizational culture change — a shift from 

providing services under the court and correctional 

systems to instead using the department of social 

services as the primary service provider. Culture 
 

 

 

26 | New Thinking in Community Corrections 

Washington, D.C. — Reduce, Reform, Replace, Reinvest 

For nearly three decades, Washington, D.C.’s juvenile justice agency had been the subject of scathing media critiques, fierce 

community advocacy, lengthy litigation, and successful reform efforts. In 1985, the American Civil Liberties Union and the 

District of Columbia Public Defender Service sued the district alleging unconstitutional conditions of confinement at its three 

youth prisons, resulting in a consent decree in 1986 pursuant to Jerry M. v. District of Columbia. Despite the decree, conditions 

continued to deteriorate badly, resulting in more than a dozen remedial court orders, scathing reports by the district’s inspector 

general and a Blue Ribbon Commission and finally, in 2004, a motion to place the department into receivership. 

At that time, beatings of youth were common. The facility was badly overcrowded, with youth sleeping on plastic cots in common 

space meant for recreation. Youth reported that rats and cockroaches crawled on them while they were sleeping. Young people 

were left in their cells for so long that they often urinated or defecated in them. Youth who entered confinement drug-free tested 

positive for marijuana after 30 days (Schiraldi, 2015a). Solitary confinement and shackling were commonly used. The facility’s 

school was so bad that it was placed under court receivership for a time. 

In 2001, the district’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Juvenile Justice Reform issued a report recommending the replacement of 

the lone remaining youth prison — the Oak Hill Youth Center — with a small, rehabilitative facility based on the Missouri model, 

coupled with a continuum of community-based programs for youth in lieu of confinement.1 In 2004, after years of activism 

by philanthropies and the Justice for DC Youth coalition, the Council of the District of Columbia passed the Omnibus Juvenile 

Justice Act, which included provisions to close Oak Hill and redirect resources to community-based programs. That year, to 

fulfill the mission laid out in the Blue Ribbon Commission report and the Omnibus bill, the council and the mayor also created 

a new, cabinet-level juvenile justice agency, the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services (DYRS), hiring Vincent Schiraldi 

as its first director in 2005. 

Over the next 2.5 years, the population of more than 250 youth at Oak Hill was reduced, and Youth Link, a robust neighborhoodbased and community-driven continuum of community services, supports, and opportunities, was created. The department’s 

mission changed from a correctional approach to one based on the tenets of positive youth development, endeavoring to build 

on young people’s strengths rather than merely extinguishing their deficits. The department consulted with the architects of 

the Missouri model to help dramatically improve the culture of its secure facility. The facility’s failing school was replaced with 

the vibrant, nonprofit Maya Angelou School. 

In May 2009, DYRS replaced the notorious Oak Hill Youth Center with New Beginnings, a state-of-the-art, 60-bed facility (Ryan 

and Schindler, 2011). The lead plaintiff’s counsel in Jerry M., Alan Pemberton, stated “We have seen more progress toward 

compliance in the last two years than we saw in the previous 20 years” (Mendel, 2008). The department’s reforms were named 

a semifinalist in the prestigious Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center Innovations Awards (losing to the Missouri Division of 

Youth Services). As of June 29, 2016, there are only 26 youth confined in New Beginnings. 

1 By 2001, Washington, D.C.’s other two facilities — Receiving Home for Children and Cedar Knoll — had already been closed, 

one by order of the district’s presiding judge and the other by an act of Congress. 

change also includes ensuring that staff are both 8. Larger constituency and increased buy-in from 

highly qualified and highly trained. stakeholders. 

To deliver such programming effectively, the physical 7. Highly effective treatment strategies and 

plant must also reflect the commitment to youth approaches and ensuring that the program 

development and success. The best place for this consistently reflects on, improves on, and discards 

to occur is small units with normalized conditions any ineffective initiatives. 
 

The Future of Youth Justice: A Community-Based Alternative to the Youth Prison Model | 27 

Ohio — Reduce, Reform, Reinvest 

At its core, RECLAIM1 Ohio (Ohio Department of Youth Services, n.d.) has effectively changed the fiscal incentives of juvenile 

justice toward community-based innovation and away from youth corrections. Under RECLAIM, several policy and practice 

innovations have been implemented to reduce the number of youth sent to state-run youth prisons. RECLAIM began in the early 

1990s, a period when being tough on crime was the prevailing policy stance. Between 1992 and today, annual admissions to 

the Ohio Department of Youth Services declined by 80 percent, from 2,500 to 500. The core of RECLAIM is to shift funding of 

youth corrections from the state to counties using a population-based formula. As continuing experience with RECLAIM has 

identified areas where further adjustments were needed, new elements have been added to fine-tune and expand the program. 

For instance, the Behavioral Health and Juvenile Justice Initiative supports evidence-based community programs for youth who 

have mental health and/or substance abuse issues. Targeted RECLAIM delivers evidence-based programs in the community to 

youth with felony convictions, has reduced correctional facility admissions by 68 percent, and decreased the likelihood of youth 

being locked up in the future. The ongoing refinement of the program to continue to reduce youth in confinement anywhere in 

the state demonstrates the benefit of the state’s continued engagement, data collection, and oversight. 

1 RECLAIM stands for Reasonable and Equitable Community and Local Alternatives to the Incarceration of Minors. 

Source: Juvenile Justice Coalition, 2015. 

such as family-style meals, personal clothing or 

school uniforms, sleeping quarters that are more 

like bedrooms than cells, and homelike furnishings. 

Large, institutional-style prisons cannot be retrofitted 

to provide such an environment. Moreover, most 

youth prisons are located far from home, making 

it much more difficult to maintain family ties or 

facilitate gradual transitions into community-based 

programming, both of which are critical to long-term 

success. The only viable option is to replace large 

youth prisons with smaller, more home-like facilities 

close to youth’s communities. 

Reinvest 

Implementing all three strategies simultaneously — 

reduce, reform, replace — makes a fourth “r” possible: 

reinvest. As systems start to shift their practice to keep 

more youth at home and to use more effective but less 

costly approaches to supervision and services, the 

dollars saved can be used to further expand the array 

of options available. The American public supports 

this kind of reinvestment. A recent poll by the Pew 

Charitable Trusts found that 79 percent of respondents 

strongly supported “diverting lower-level juvenile 

offenders from corrections facilities and investing 

the savings into probation and other alternatives” 

(Pew Charitable Trusts, 2014). Likewise, in a national 

poll commissioned by Youth First, 83 percent of 

respondents supported “provid[ing] financial 

incentives for states and municipalities to invest in 

alternatives to youth incarceration, such as intensive 

rehabilitation; rehabilitative programming such as 

education, job training, [and] community services; 

and programs that provide youth the opportunity 

to repair harm to victims and communities” (Youth 

First, 2016). 

In addition to capturing the savings from reducing 

youth prisons for services, supports, and opportunities 

for youth in the community, systems already 

established to help them — including child welfare 

and mental health systems — need to step up when 

it comes to addressing the needs of delinquent youth. 
28 | New Thinking in Community Corrections 

There is also a need to assess the processes and 

outcomes of these alternative services. Many kids are 

sent into placement because the alternatives in the 

community do not seem up to the task and, far too 

often, programs resist serving youth who have more 

challenging and complex problems. Attention must 

be paid to ensuring that youth actually receive the 

services, supports, and opportunities they need and 

that those services work. 

Wraparound Milwaukee was established in 1995 

to provide a system of care for children who were 

involved in Milwaukee’s mental health, child welfare, 

and youth justice systems with coordinated, crosssystem services in lieu of confinement or residential 

placement outside the home. 

Since the creation of Wraparound, the average daily 

residential treatment population in Milwaukee 

has dropped by 71 percent, from 375 youth to 110 

youth, while the average length of stay in residential 

treatment has dropped from 14 months to four 

months (Kamradt, 2014). Research shows that the 

recidivism rate for youth enrolled in Wraparound 

Milwaukee remains both constant and low (Kamradt 

and Goldfarb, 2015). 

Conclusion 

The leadership, commitment, and courage that are 

beginning to be seen in efforts taking place across 

the country and highlighted here are needed in 

every state to, at long last, close every youth prison 

and replace this failed, harmful approach with one 

that can help youth get back on track. Seldom in 

American policy are incentives and imperatives 

so closely aligned — youth development, fiscal 

prudence, and community safety would be far 

better served by closing every last youth prison and 

replacing these factories of failure with pathways to 

success for all youth. 

Endnotes 

1. We are hardly alone in analogizing 

euphemistically named juvenile facilities to 

prisons. In 1967, for example, Justice Hugo Black, 

writing a concurring opinion in In re Gault, 387 

U.S. 1, 87 S.Ct. 1428 (1967), wrote “It is, in all 

but name, a penitentiary.” In 1980, eminent 

correctional historian David Rothman wrote, “It 

was no easy matter to distinguish a training school 

from a prison” (Conscience and Convenience, Little 

Brown and Co., 1980). Writing for the minority in 

the 1984 case Schall v. Martin, 467 U.S. 253, 104 S.Ct. 

2403, Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote, “[F]airly 

viewed, pretrial detention of a juvenile gives rise 

to injuries comparable to those associated with the 

imprisonment of an adult.” In the petition filed in 

Schall v. Martin, New York City Deputy Mayor and 

co-founder of the Vera Institute of Justice Herbert 

Sturz stated more succinctly that the detention 

center was “in many ways, indistinguishable 

from a prison.” Although Marshall and Sturz 

were referring to a youth detention facility, their 

observations easily apply to training schools. 

2. Statement at American Association for the 

Advancement of Science, 1995. Reported by United 

Press International and Newsday. 

3. For a discussion of the special developmental 

needs of court-involved emerging adults older than 

age 18, see Schiraldi, Western, and Bradner (2015). 
 

The Future of Youth Justice: A Community-Based Alternative to the Youth Prison Model | 29 

4. Roper v. Simmons (03-633) 543 U.S. 551 (2005) 112 

S.W.3d 397, affirmed, and Miller v. Alabama 132 S.Ct. 

2455 (2012). 

5. This does not mean that, for short periods of 

time and through great effort, large facilities 

have been unable to be run in a manner that is 

less institutional and abusive than is described 

in this paper. Still, large, locked facilities for 

youth degenerate into destructive environments 

with sufficient regularity to warrant a call for the 

abolition of the youth prison model. 

6. See, for example, Holman and Ziedenberg (2011). 

7. Schiraldi (2001) quotes DiIulio’s warning against 

a “rising tide of juvenile superpredators” who 

are “fatherless, godless, and without conscience,” 

further stating, “all that’s left of the black 

community in some pockets of urban America 

is deviant, delinquent and criminal adults 

surrounded by severely abused and neglected 

children, virtually all of whom were born out of 

wedlock.” 

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Author Note 

Patrick McCarthy is President of the Annie E. Casey 

Foundation. He previously served as Director of 

the Division of Youth Rehabilitation Services in 

Delaware. 

Vincent Schiraldi is a Senior Research Fellow at the 

Harvard Kennedy School, Program in Criminal 

Justice Policy and Management. He previously 

served as Commissioner of the New York City 

Department of Probation and as Director of the 

Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services in 

Washington, DC. 

Miriam Shark is an Independent Consultant in 

Portland, Maine. She previously served as Associate 

Director of the Annie E. Casey Foundation. 

The authors would like to acknowledge the 

assistance and thoughtful leadership provided by 

Nate Balis, Director, and the entire Juvenile Justice 

Strategy Group of the Annie E. Casey Foundation. 

The authors would also like to acknowledge 

Anamika Dwivedi and Jasper Frank for their 

excellent research assistance. 

Findings and conclusions in this publication are those of the authors and do not 

necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. 
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