Cut Youth Incarceration

State by State

See what different states are doing to cut youth incarceration.
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Support efforts that invest more resources in community-based alternatives to incarceration and positive youth development opportunities.
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Learn more about how the juvenile justice field can embrace practices that will help young people, families and communities.
About

Cut Youth Incarceration is raising awareness, taking action, and motivating everyday people to speak up on behalf of America’s children locked up in the juvenile and adult criminal justice systems.

According to “No Place for Kids”, a new report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, there is a significant national trend towards states and localities reducing their reliance on large youth prisons, and states are beginning to embrace more effective ways to help youth transition to adulthood and curb youth offending. The Annie E. Casey Foundation reported that youth prisons are dangerous, ineffective and waste taxpayer dollars.

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Quotes

“The best way to treat youth, any of the youth, is to keep them close to home. I think all the studies have proven this. I think that many of our youth can become institutionalized if we depend on residential placement for treatment.”

- Arkansas Division of Youth Services Director Ron Angel
"I want a system that gets it that kids are not simply small adults, but largely different creatures, still maturing, less culpable, more amenable to change. Such a system would be loath to prosecute children as adults, to incarcerate kids with adults, to sentence them to life without parole, no matter what they’ve done."

- Bart Lubow, the Annie E. Casey Foundation
"If mass incarceration fails to make us safer, diminishes the life chances of people of color, and wastes precious taxpayer dollars, why do we insist on locking up so many people?”

- Katayoon Majd, the Public Welfare Foundation
“Redeploy Illinois has clearly shown that community-based services for juvenile offenders are generally less costly and more effective than institutional care in correctional facilities. In the six years of providing services Redeploy Illinois has successfully diverted almost 800 youth from commitment to the Department of Juvenile Justice.”

- Michelle R.B. Saddler, IDHS Secretary
“It's in everyone's best interest to make sure that these kids get an education and stop the vicious cycle of going in and out of the criminal justice system."

- New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg
"Recognizing that incarcerating low to medium risk juveniles actually increases the likelihood of future offending, we have turned to newer and more effective methods that…focus on keeping these children closer to home and out of institutions. Therefore, keeping empty facilities open is not only unnecessary, but also unacceptable.”

- New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, State of the State speech 2011

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