Empirical evidence shows that pre-trial juvenile detention is common and is strongly counterproductive.
Roughly one in four juveniles arrested in the U.S. spend time in a detention center prior to their court date. To study the consequences of this practice for youth, we link the universe of individual public school records in Michigan to juvenile and adult criminal justice records. Using a combination of exact matching and inverse probability weighting, we estimate that juvenile detention leads to a 31% decline in the likelihood of graduating high school and a 25% increase in the likelihood of being arrested as an adult. Falsification tests suggest the results are not driven by unobserved heterogeneity.
E. Jason Baron, Brian Jacob & Joseph P. Ryan, "Pretrial Juvenile Detention" NBER WORKING PAPER 29861 (March 2022) DOI 10.3386/w29861
Ah... really?
ReplyDeleteHow do they control for the social workers and police getting together and saying "this punk is a sociopath, get him off the street". Which would correlate quite nicely with the other results.
@Guy
ReplyDeleteKeep in mind that this is pre-trial detention, not sentences served. In a large share of those cases, there will be no actual sentences of incarceration or the incarceration sentence itself will be short and for a relatively low grade crime. The methodology used, at a statistical level, should screen pretty well for that.
A bigger confound would be that a lot of the differences in rates of pre-trial juvenile incarceration are going to be due to differences in county level policies of law enforcement, prosecutors and judges. If one county has an overall environmental of lack of hope for the future, and also high rates of pre-trial incarceration, and another does not, otherwise comparable juvenile arrestees may have had different prospects anyway.