Most of the researchers, advocates and administrators I spoke to were hesitant to embrace this claim. The researchers were cautious because they’ve been trained to guard against making causal claims based on a correlation. As for the advocates, some worried about pinning their prison-closing agenda on something as unpredictable as crime rates. Others believe that locking up youth is wrong, full stop, so whether it reduces crime is simply irrelevant.
Fair enough. But I think that opponents of youth prisons — and I’m one — should take up the crime-fighting mantle. After all, some causal theories are more plausible than others. If, as Aizer and others have shown, even a short stint in juvenile prison increases a person’s risk of dropping out of high school and being arrested, wouldn’t not putting them in prison necessarily reduce those bad outcomes? If that’s correct, maybe we should think of this century’s first two decades as a virtuous cycle: Less crime meant fewer prisons, and fewer prisons meant less crime.
David Muhammad was one of the few reformers who volunteered the argument that closing youth prisons cuts crime. His reasons were a mix of logic (“Doing less of a harmful thing has to help”) and personal experience. What Muhammad most remembers about his own involvement in the juvenile system is how lucky he was. None of his three arrests led to more than five days of detention. “Most kids with my charges would have been sent to camp,” he recalls, referring to California’s county-run prisons. “If I had, I’m not sure we’d be having this conversation. I saw what happened to my friends who got sent to camp. Same charges as me, just not as lucky. To a person, they ended up in the adult system. I flourished because I wasn’t touched.”
Can doing nothing really be enough? For some teenagers, the University of Miami criminologist Alex Piquero says, the answer is yes. Piquero ran the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2022 and 2023; before that, he was an author of the landmark Pathways to Desistance study, which tracked over 1,300 teenagers who went through juvenile systems in Philadelphia and Phoenix into young adulthood. “One of the things that people don’t understand is how many young people who commit delinquent acts will simply grow out of that phase on their own,” Piquero says. “They mature, their brains develop, and they learn to make better decisions.”
But others need help, and in the past three decades there has been a remarkable, if largely unacknowledged, explosion of initiatives designed to provide it. Some, like MST Services, with its awkwardly named Multisystemic Therapy program, provide counseling and mental health services to young people and their families, with the goal of helping them address the factors that have led them to break the law. Others, like the national Youth Advocate Program and Boston’s Roca Inc., pair young people with histories of violence or delinquency with mentors and advocates who offer therapy and connect them to education and employment services.