Juvenile Incarceration Declined by 77%. Did Public Policy Do Something Right?

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KQED

News Commentary, News, Politics

4.2 • 727 Ratings

🗓️ 11 February 2025

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Between 2000 and 2020, the number of young people incarcerated in the United States declined by an astonishing 77 percent. Red states and blue states alike lock up fewer kids than in 2000 — and in most, the drops have been precipitous: more than half of states have experienced declines of 75 percent or more. In his New York Times Magazine piece, Yale Law professor James Forman examines the reasons for the drop in incarceration and how states are responding. We talk to Forman and California experts about what the statistics can tell us about our shifting juvenile justice system and what we’ve learned about addressing youth crime. Guests: James Forman Jr., professor of law, Yale Law School; won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for his book, "Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America;" his most recent piece in the New York Times Magazine is titled, "What Happened When America Emptied Its Youth Prisons" David Muhammad, executive director, National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform; former Chief Probation Officer for Alameda County Laura Abrams, professor of social welfare, UCLA's Luskin School of Public Affairs; author of "Compassionate Confinement: A Year in the Life of Unit C" and "Everyday Desistance: The Transition to Adulthood Among Formerly Incarcerated Youth" Katherine Lucero, director, Office of Youth and Community Restoration; former supervising judge in juvenile court, Santa Clara County Superior Court Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:44.6	From KQED.
1:01.0	From Kikwede in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal.
1:07.8	In roughly the last two decades, there has been a remarkable change in the number of young people who are incarcerated.
1:12.9	Across the nation, there are about a quarter as many youth sitting in juvie,
1:19.2	as we used to call it, as there were in 2000. At the same time, over most of that period,
1:26.3	and in most places, crime measured in different ways, fell. What can we learn from this? What problems still remain in the juvenile justice system?
1:28.3	And where do we go from here?
1:30.3	We'll talk with people with deep knowledge of the system locally and national experts.
1:34.3	It's all coming up next where public policy has gone awry. A program that was instituted has unanticipated problems or did not quite live up to its billing or a new set of underlying problems was revealed.
2:06.6	This is kind of the bread and butter of a lot of journalism.
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