By Logan Seacrest

R Street Policy Study No. 331 July 2025 A zero-tolerance approach requires that juvenile justice policies mitigate abuse, hold abusers accountable, and demand responsibility from leadership. Executive Summary On any given day, about 27,000 children and teens are held in juvenile detention centers across the United States. Despite decades of reform, these facilities continue to be plagued by reports of sexual abuse. This trauma, particularly when inflicted by those in positions of authority, compounds the baseline harm that comes with youth incarceration. This policy paper explores systemic sexual abuse in America’s juvenile detention system and discusses new developments suggesting that it is more pervasive than previously believed. Specifically, recent changes in the law have allowed thousands of former detainees to come forward with credible allegations of staff misconduct, triggering a wave of litigation and multi billion dollar settlements that threaten to overwhelm public budgets. Drawing on these legal developments, recent data, and concerning reports, we find that juvenile detention facilities have failed to uphold their dual mandate of rehabilitation and public safety. In fact, many facilities have become threats  in and of themselves, perpetuating cycles of abuse and criminality among already vulnerable youth. The persistence of abuse in state-run youth facilities undermines both the rehabilitative mission of juvenile justice and the public’s trust in government. It also creates long-term public safety concerns by perpetuating cycles of trauma, recidivism, and system involvement. To address these failures, we offer an evidence-based policy roadmap to strengthen the Prison Rape Elimination Act, expand reporting mechanisms, raise hiring standards, update infrastructure, and bolster oversight. These recommendations should be combined with a strategic reduction in the footprint of secure detention overall, as the most effective safeguard against institutional abuse is to reduce unnecessary incarceration in the first place.

 R Street Policy Study No. 331 Washington, DC: R Street, 2025. 10p.  

By The Justice Policy Institute

In 2014, when the Justice Policy Institute first analyzed the cost of secure youth confinement, 33 states and the District of Columbia reported an annual cost per youth that eclipsed $100,000. In 2020, despite more than a half-decade of falling youth arrests and declining rates of youth incarceration since 2014, 40 states and Washington, D.C. report spending at least $100,000 annually per confined child, with some states spending more than $500,000 per youth per year. The average state cost for the secure confinement of a young person is now $588 per day, or $214,620 per year, a 44 percent increase from 2014. These cost figures over a six-year period represent the growing economic impact of incarcerating youth. However, the long-term impact of these policies extends well beyond the fiscal cost.

Washington, DC: Justice Policy Institute, 2020. 15p.

By Richard Mendel

Well designed alternative-to-incarceration programs, such as those highlighted in Effective Alternatives to Youth Incarceration: What Works With Youth Who Pose Serious Risks to Public Safety,1 are critically important for reducing overreliance on incarceration. But support for good programs is not the only or even the most important ingredient for minimizing youth incarceration. To reduce overreliance on youth incarceration, alternative-to-incarceration programs must be supported by youth justice systems that heed adolescent development research, make timely and evidence-informed decisions about how delinquency cases are handled, and institutionalize youth only as a last resort when they pose an immediate threat to public safety. In addition, systems must make concerted, determined efforts to re duce the long standing biases which have perpetuated the American youth justice system’s glaring racial and ethnic disparities in confinement. This report will highlight state and local laws, policies and practices that have maximized the effective use of alternative-to-incarceration programs and minimized the unnecessary incarceration of youth who can be safely supervised and supported at home.   

Washington, DC: The Sentencing Project, 2023. 25p.