There is a quote at the start of the documentary film Kids for Cash from the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989.

This quote reads, The Child by reason of his physical and mental immaturity needs special safeguards and care.

Mankind owes it to the child the best it has to give.

190 member countries of the United Nations ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Three member countries did not.

Those countries are Somalia, South Sudan, and the United States.

Not all states track juvenile recidivism,

and since the states that do track these rates

define recidivism differently,

it's a metric that's hard to measure on a national scale

or compare one state to another.

The Pennsylvania Juvenile Justice System defines recidivism as a delinquent adjudication

or conviction in criminal adult court within two years of their original case being closed.

The state only has rates for the years 2007 through 2010 and claims the juvenile

recidivism rate in Pennsylvania is at a little over 20%.

As a comparison, according to a study in 2015 conducted by researchers at MIT and Brown University,

30,000 cases of juvenile offenders in the state of Illinois were

tracked to determine recidivism rates. About 40% of the kids in this study were

reoffenders and in an adult prison by the time they turned 25.

Most of these kids never returned to high school,

they didn't get a diploma,

and in some cases they didn't even earn their GED.

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