The 12-year, 53 percent drop in juvenile incarceration is sustainable and a model for reform of the adult criminal justice system, experts tell the Christian Science Monitor. “I think once you have a 12-year trend, it sort of feels like it's not just a blip,” says Jake Horowitz of the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Public Safety Performance Project,which issued the analysis of data from the U.S. Justice Department's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Pew said the incarceration rate dropped by 50 percent or more in 26 states. The rate increased only in North Dakota and the District of Columbia.
Horowitz cited two principal reasons behind the steep decline: For one, the drop in juvenile violent crime arrests almost matches the drop in juvenile commitments. Secondly, state policymakers are increasingly interested in reforming the juvenile justice system to prioritize alternative forms of punishment over incarceration or commitment to residential facilities. The success of juvenile justice reform could provide a blueprint to reduce mass incarceration, says Jason Ziedenberg of the Justice Policy Institute. “Our challenge is going to be if crime rates were to go back up again, if we were to see nationalized some of what's happened in a couple of cities,” he says, citing crime spikes in cities like Baltimore, Milwaukee, and Chicago. “In the past what's happened is political will has shifted,” he adds. “We've seen people go to a more tough-on-crime space.”