Estimating causal relationships among youth justice policies and rates of juvenile confinement

For this project, the research team explored and estimated the relationship between state-level juvenile justice policy environments and trends in the confinement of adjudicated youth from 1997 to 2015.

The study found that states with more rehabilitative juvenile justice policies tended to have lower rates of confined juveniles but the nationwide decline in the population of confined youth over time was not related to how progressive a state’s policy environment was.

Originally funded by a grant from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, the project was supervised by the National Institute of Justice within the Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice (2017-JF-FX-0064).