Three Facts for Policymakers and System Leaders to Know, Three Steps to Take
Facts to Know
1. Adolescents are increasingly experiencing mental health, school, and community violence challenges that can impact their well-being, and ultimately, their risk to themselves or others.1
- Over 42 percent of high school students, including 56 percent of girls, reported that they “felt sad or hopeless” in 2021, compared to 26 percent in 2009.
- The proportion of high school students who “seriously considered attempting suicide” has risen steadily from 13.8 percent in 2009 to 22.2 percent in 2021.
- In 2021, 55 percent of high school students “experienced emotional abuse by a parent or other adult in their home,” and over 11 percent experienced physical abuse.
- In 2022, 28 percent of high school students were chronically absent (missed at least 10 percent of the school year), compared to 15 percent in 2018.
- In 2021, 20 percent of high school students “ever saw someone get physically attacked, beaten, stabbed, or shot in their neighborhood,” including 30 percent of Black students.
2. Youth arrests for violent offenses overall remain historically low. However, post-pandemic, youth arrests for homicide and weapons—and resulting youth victimization—surged.2
- Overall youth arrests for violent offenses declined 54 percent from 2000 to 2022.
- In 2022, youth arrests for aggravated assault, rape, and robbery remained near or at historical lows compared to almost any time in the last 25 years.
- In contrast, in 2022, over 1,200 youth were arrested for homicide, a 54 percent increase from 2019 prior to the pandemic and more than at any time in the last 25 years. Arrests for weapons also increased by 44 percent from 2019 to 2022.3
- In 2022, more children and adolescents died due to firearms than any other single cause of death, two-thirds of which were from gun assaults.4
- In 2022, in half of all cases in which a young person under 18 committed a violent crime, the victim was also under 18.
- The rate of firearm homicide deaths among youth aged 15–19 was 27 times higher for Black than White youth.5
3. The juvenile justice system should focus its limited resources on youth who have committed, or who are at high risk of committing, serious and violent offenses. However, most youth who are arrested, referred to court, detained, and incarcerated have committed offenses that don’t involve physical harm to another person.
- Research shows that youth who are arrested and formally processed by the juvenile justice system are more likely to reoffend and engage in violence, and less likely to graduate from high school, than similar youth who are diverted.6 At the same time, jurisdictions can make the largest impact on recidivism and public safety by focusing system supervision and services on the highest-risk youth.7
- The number of youth arrested and referred to court has plunged by 80 percent in the last 25 years. Despite these declines and research on the public safety benefits of diversion, approximately 70 percent of youth who are arrested and referred to court have committed an offense that did not involve physical harm to another person.8
- Further, less than 30 percent of all youth referred to court for delinquent offenses are actually adjudicated, raising questions about the costs, efficiency, and public safety benefits of referring many of these youth to court in the first place.
- Despite low adjudication rates, most youth who are placed under system supervision have also committed offenses that don’t involve physical harm to another person. In 2021, approximately 60 percent of youth placed on probation, detained, and incarcerated had committed non-person offenses as their most serious offense.9
- Disparities in system involvement for Black and American Indian youth have also grown worse at every point in the juvenile justice system. In 2021, Black and American Indian youth were 3 times more likely to be referred to court and up to 5 times more likely to be incarcerated than White youth.10
Steps to Take
- Develop a statewide adolescent prevention service strategy. Policymakers should leverage and coordinate existing funding and initiatives across youth and family service systems to create a statewide structure of adolescent prevention services and supports. This structure could include family resource centers, mobile crisis, community mental health programs, and family therapy programs like Functional Family Therapy.11 In recognition of this need, states are increasingly forming new cabinet-level agencies to take on planning and service delivery for children and adolescents such as the new Ohio Department of Children and Youth, Maryland Governor’s Office for Children, and the Minnesota Department of Children, Youth, and Families.
- Focus law enforcement and juvenile justice systems’ limited resources on the small number of youth who pose a public safety risk, and develop a broader violence prevention and intervention plan based on research and best practices. Policymakers should develop civil citation, school-based diversion, restorative practices, and other pathways to services for youth who commit low-level offenses in lieu of arrest. For higher-risk youth, ample research shows that intensive, community-based cognitive behavioral and family therapy, mental health and substance use treatment, and wraparound case management are cost-effective ways to improve public safety and youth outcomes.12 Jurisdictions should adopt and scale these interventions as part of a broader violence prevention and intervention strategy that includes focused deterrence policing, credible messengers and mentoring, grassroots violence interrupter models such as Operation Ceasefire and Cure Violence, hospital-based violence interventions, and trauma recovery centers for victims.13
- Address gaps in public agency and service provider capacity and workforce. Post-pandemic, many public agencies, schools, and providers are facing unprecedented challenges with hiring and retaining staff, which undermines the delivery of critical services and supports. Policymakers must adopt a range of strategies to address this, including raising provider reimbursement rates and staff pay and providing for ongoing, inflation-adjusted increases; improving staff training and wellness; recruiting a new and more diverse pool of providers and staff; and partnering with colleges, universities, and workforce boards to incentivize and expand the pipeline of people who want to work in this field.
1 Data presented are for high school students between 2005 and 2021, which comes from the Youth Risk and Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS) and the Adolescent Behaviors and Experiences Survey (ABES). Both the YRBSS and the ABES are developed and administered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to monitor health-related behaviors among youth in the United States. The YRBSS is a biennial (conducted every two years) school-based survey that collects data from high school students across the United States. The ABES was a one-time, online survey conducted between January and June of 2021. The aim of the survey was to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the health and well-being of U.S. high school students.
2 Data regarding arrests for youth under the age of 18 between 2000 and 2022 comes from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program. Counts and rates of reported youth arrests are derived from two distinct data sources: the FBI’s historic Summary Reporting System (SRS) and the newly implemented National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS).
3 Data regarding arrests for youth under the age of 18 between 2000 and 2022 comes from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program. We used a sample of 31 states with more complete arrest data to analyze 2022 weapons arrests.
4 Kaiser Family Foundation, “The Impact of Gun Violence on Children and Adolescents” (San Francisco, CA: 2024), https://www.kff.org/mental-health/issue-brief/the-impact-of-gun-violence-on-children-and-adolescents/.
5 Alex Piquero and John Roman, “Firearm Homicide Demographics Before and After the COVID-19 Pandemic,” JAMA Network Open 7, no. 5 (2024), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11112446/.
6 Elizabeth Cauffman et al., “Crossroads in juvenile justice: The impact of initial processing decision on youth 5 years after first arrest,” Development and Psychopathology (2020): 1–14.
7 Gina Vincent, Dara Drawbridge, and Rachael Perrault, “Long-Term Impact and Cost-Effectiveness of Risk-Needs Assessment and Risk-Need-Responsivity (RNR) Reforms in Juvenile Probation: The Long-Term RNR-Impact Study” (University of Massachusetts Medical School, 2021), https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp-nij/grants/303423.pdf.
8 All data reported on youth court case processing between 2005 and 2021 come from the Juvenile Court Statistics series, a comprehensive national data collection effort conducted by the National Center for Juvenile Justice (NCJJ). The NCJJ provides access to the Juvenile Court Statistics data through various platforms, including the Easy Access to Juvenile Court Statistics (EZAJCS) online tool, which served as our primary source for case-level data on delinquency cases in juvenile courts. Analyses on youth in detention and placement come from two primary sources: the EZAJCS and OJJDP’s Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement (CJRP).
9 Ibid.
10 We rely on the FBI’s SRS data to evaluate racial disparities at arrest between 2000 and 2020 and EZAJCS to look at racial and ethnic disparities from referral to adjudication between 2005 and 2021. We measured racial and ethnic disparity using a relative rate index (RRI). The RRI provides a standardized comparison between two different groups on a particular event or outcome. To determine the RRI, we first calculated the rate of an event (e.g., arrest, referral, petition) for each racial and ethnic group by dividing the number of youth in the group who experienced the event by the total population of youth in that group. Population data comes from the U.S. Census Bureau. Then we divided the rate for the group of interest (e.g., Black youth) by the rate for the reference group, which in this tool is always White youth.
11 Crime and Justice Institute, “Behavioral Health Crisis Response Landscape Analysis” (Boston: 2024); Richard J. Bonnie et al., eds., Reforming Juvenile Justice: A Developmental Approach (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2013); Richard Mendel, “Protect and Redirect: America’s Growing Movement to Divert Youth Out of the Justice System” (Washington, DC: The Sentencing Project, 2024).
12 Washington State Institute of Public Policy, “Benefits-Cost Results: Juvenile Justice,” https://www.wsipp.wa.gov/BenefitCost/Pdf/1/WSIPP_BenefitCost_Juvenile-Justice; Elizabeth Seigle, Nastassia Walsh, and Josh Weber, “Core Principles for Reducing Recidivism and Improving Other Outcomes for Youth in the Juvenile Justice System” (New York: The Council of State Governments Justice Center, 2014).
13 Gun Violence and Youth/Young Adults: Literature Review: A Product of the Model Programs Guide,” Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 2024, https://ojjdp.ojp.gov/model-programs-guide/literature-reviews/gun-violence-and-youth-young-adults#6-0; “The Evidence of Effectiveness,” Cure Violence Global, updated 2022, https://cvg.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Cure-Violence-Evidence-Summary.pdf; Anthony Braga et al., “Oakland Ceasefire Evaluation: Final Report to the City of Oakland” (Northeastern University, 2019), https://cao-94612.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/Oakland-Ceasefire-Evaluation-Final-Report-May-2019.pdf; Vera Institute of Justice, “Coordinating Safety: Building and Sustaining Offices of Violence Prevention and Neighborhood Safety” (New York, 2023), https://www.vera.org/downloads/publications/2023-OVPNS-Report.pdf; Urban Institute, “A Research-Based Practice Guide to Reduce Youth Gun and Gang/Group Violence,” (Washington DC: 2022), https://www.urban.org/research/publication/research-based-practice-guide-reduce-youth-gun-and-ganggroup-violence.