This article is part of “The Darkest Part of the Tunnel,” a series on the dismantling of youth prisons in California. See the entire series here.
California’s three remaining youth prisons closed their reinforced steel doors for good today, marking the demise of what was once the nation’s largest network of youth prisons.
The closure of the state’s youth prison system, resulting from decades of activism, lawsuits, rising costs and a steep drop in youth crime, makes California the fourth state — and by far the largest — to abandon the model. Connecticut, South Dakota and Vermont have also closed their state-run youth prison systems in recent years.
Last week, there were just 10 young people in facilities run by the California Division of Juvenile Justice. Nine left Monday and one was sent closer to home on Wednesday, officials said, emptying out a network of prisons that decades ago held as many as 10,000 youth.
The demise of California’s youth prison system stands out in scale. But it reflects a national trend that is striking, if mostly unacknowledged.
According to the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, over a recent 20-year period, the number of youth behind bars nationwide dropped 77%, from 108,802 in 2000 to just 25,014 in 2020. The number of juvenile detention facilities dropped by nearly two-thirds during that same period.
“Legal advocates, grassroots advocates, youth advocates” all have been successful in making the case that the old youth prison model doesn’t work and needs to be done away with, said Carrie Rae Boatman, interim executive director of Youth First, a national nonprofit helping states close youth prisons.
According to Youth First, more than 20 states have closed one or more youth correctional facilities in the past five years alone. Fifteen states are down to just one large state-run facility, while another 18 have facilities running significantly under capacity.
While many factors have contributed to the drop in youth incarceration, the clearest driver has been a parallel drop in juvenile offending. Federal data show that nationwide, arrests involving those aged 17 and younger fell 84% between 1996 and 2020. In California, youth arrests fell even more steeply, dropping by 93% between 2007 and 2021, according to the Burns Institute, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization.
This downward trend holds true for serious and violent offenses as well as petty crime. In 2020, the number of youth arrested for violent offenses nationwide was a third of what it was in 2005.
Evolving public opinion
Dedicated reformers and an evolving understanding of the adolescent brain have helped shift public opinion as well.
A 2022 Harris Poll commissioned by the Annie E. Casey Foundation found that most Americans believe the current juvenile justice system serves as “a pipeline” to the adult system, and they would prefer to see young people supported by community resources.
Eighty-six percent of respondents said youth should be connected to positive alternatives such as sports, counseling and mentorship programs. A similar number believe that young people will naturally outgrow the tendency toward risk-taking that gets many into trouble in the first place.
As is often the case, politicians’ stance on juvenile crime has evolved alongside public opinion.
Throughout the 1990s, elected officials scrambled to outdo one another in enacting ever-harsher penalties. Then-Sen. Joe Biden, stumping for the notorious Crime Bill of 1994, warned of a “cadre of young people” who were “so violent that we really have no choice but to get them behind bars and keep them there, for a long time.”
“Too often, youth confinement succeeds only in damaging young people and diminishing their chances for a healthy, productive future.”
— Liz Ryan, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention
Today, Democratic President Biden actively promotes the closure of youth prisons. Last year, he appointed Liz Ryan, one of the nation’s foremost advocates fighting youth incarceration, to head the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.
In a blog post marking Youth Justice Action Month in May 2022, Ryan made clear how dramatically the federal government’s priorities had shifted.
“Young people who break the law must be held accountable for their wrongs, but incarceration is seldom the answer,” the nation’s top juvenile justice official proclaimed. “Too often, youth confinement succeeds only in damaging young people and diminishing their chances for a healthy, productive future. Serving justice-involved youth in their communities is far more effective than locking them up — and it’s the right thing to do.”
President Biden’s latest budget proposal echoes Ryan’s sentiments, identifying three priorities on the juvenile justice front: “treating children as children;” “serving children at home with their families and in their communities;” and “opening up opportunities for young people who come into contact with the justice system.”
No mention is made of incarcerating youth. Instead, Biden’s budget includes $50 million for the express purpose of closing youth prisons and expanding community-based alternatives.
Close to Home in NYC
Today, efforts to transition from youth prisons to community-based support span the country. New York City was an early adapter.
In 2000, New York City had 1,600 youth in state custody, most in notoriously abusive, far-off state facilities. By 2020, that number had dropped to 60, according to Vincent Schiraldi, who worked on the development of the Close to Home Initiative during his tenure as the city’s probation commissioner. Under Close to Home, youth who’ve committed even the most serious crimes are housed in small, local facilities, or live at home under community supervision. In 2020, only 12 young people were housed in buildings with a lock on the door.
California began closing its youth prisons rather abruptly, amidst a budget crisis. The state is now sending the last of its youth from state facilities to county juvenile halls, many of which are poorly equipped to house people for lengthy periods of time, and suffer from their own institutional crises.
In contrast, New York officials spent years creating alternative settings before closing upstate prisons and bringing young people back to New York City.
“My position was, ‘We’re not going to cause more harm to kids.’ I wanted to make sure that there were community programs, that the families were supported,” said Gladys Carrión, who spearheaded the closure of more than a dozen state facilities during her time as commissioner of New York’s Office of Children and Family Services. “We weren’t releasing kids from the state so they could be incarcerated in the city.”
Carrión avoided this outcome by working with multiple agencies to develop Close to Home. Launched in 2012, the program provides a continuum of options for justice-involved youth, from support in the community to small, home-like facilities, only a fraction of which are locked.
Felipe Franco worked with Carrión in New York as deputy commissioner at the state’s Division of Juvenile Justice and Opportunities for Youth. He credits the success to partnerships Carrión built with multiple city agencies — including the probation department and local child welfare agency, the state Department of Labor and the Office of Developmental Disabilities.
“There was plenty of conflict between agencies in those days,” he said, but the working relationship developed over years laid a foundation of shared values around bringing youth back from the upstate facilities.
“There was a moment,” said Franco, “when everyone agreed that young people would be better off elsewhere.”
Today, Carrión is a senior fellow with the Columbia Justice Lab, where she works with states and jurisdictions that are trying to close youth prisons. She grows concerned, she said, when cost savings appear to be the driving force.
“That’s the wrong thing to start with,” she said, pointing out that developing Close to Home was expensive. “I try to be diplomatic, but the question is, what are you trying to achieve for the kids? What do they need? Don’t think about the money — design the system around the youth and the rest will flow from that.”
Close to Home is widely viewed as a model program. But despite progress on other fronts, the majority of court-involved youth in New York continue to be Black and brown. As long as these racial disparities persist, “any gains are tenuous,” Carrión said. “Until this country deals with the race issue, Black and brown kids are always at risk. We have to remember that and double down to create these reforms in a way that they self-sustain.”
New Beginnings in Washington, D.C.
One of the first youth prisons to close its doors in the 21st century was the Oak Hill Youth Center in Washington, D.C., an overcrowded 200-bed facility so plagued by violence and abuse that it spent 20 years under court supervision.
In 2005, Mayor Anthony Williams appointed longtime criminal justice reform advocate Schiraldi to head the District’s Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services. When Schiraldi began talking with youth inside Oak Hill, he said, he heard stories of rampant abuse and horrific conditions. Young people routinely took their shirts off at night, they told the new administrator, so they could stuff them in the cracks in the wall to keep rats and cockroaches from crawling on them as they slept. Needs as fundamental as underwear and soap went unmet while staff maintained control by smuggling in drugs for young people who did their bidding.
“I’d inherited a nightmare,” Schiraldi said. But he also had a vision that extended beyond getting the rats out of the walls. He focused on his core belief: that the vast majority of incarcerated youth belonged in their communities and, with the right support, could remain there safely.
In 2009, Schiraldi closed Oak Hill and replaced it with New Beginnings, a $46 million, 60-bed compound that resembles a university campus. At the same time, he worked with the district to fund an array of community programs aimed at keeping young people from being locked up in the first place. Today, most of the beds at New Beginnings are empty and the great majority of justice-involved youth in D.C. are served in the community.
“what are you trying to achieve for the kids? What do they need? Don’t think about the money — design the system around the youth and the rest will flow from that.”
— Gladys Carrión, who helped develop new York’s Close To Home Initiative
Many other states have embarked on similarly ambitious efforts. Connecticut closed the last of its youth prisons in 2018, after allocating tens of millions of dollars to community-based programs. Ohio closed eight of its 11 youth prisons by rewarding counties that reduced the number of youth they sent to state custody with funding for community programming.
Disparities persist
Advocates applaud the drop in youth incarceration but caution that serious problems remain. The United States still locks up youth at a far higher rate than other nations: The rate here is 11 times higher than Western Europe and Asia, and four times higher than Canada and Mexico, according to a report from the Sentencing Project. Despite efforts to divert low-level offenders from the justice system, only about a third of incarcerated youth in the United States are committed for serious and violent offenses.
And racial disparities, which have long plagued the nation’s juvenile justice system, remain deeply entrenched. According to the Washington D.C-based Sentencing Project, Black youth are almost five times as likely as their white peers to be incarcerated. Native American and Latino youth are also locked up at persistently disproportionate rates.
Even when white youth are arrested, they are far more likely than Black youth to be diverted from formal court involvement, and those who are charged and convicted are more likely to receive probation or informal sanctions.
While the number of youth behind bars has plummeted, inhumane conditions that have plagued youth prisons for decades remain. In the years since 2015, according to a review by The Sentencing Project, a “stream of abuse revelations in youth incarceration facilities has continued, with alarming revelations of pervasive abuse in Florida, New Hampshire, and Texas, among other states.”
The advocacy group reports that “surveys of currently or previously incarcerated youth reveal that many have been abused physically or sexually in their facilities by staff or peers, and that most have witnessed abuses — often repeatedly.”
Veterans of the battle to find a more humane response to youth who break the law see much work still ahead. At the same time, there is a sense of celebration as the practice of incarcerating youth in large, prison-like facilities diminishes.
Schiraldi — who was recently appointed Secretary of the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services, with a mandate to continue the work he began in the nation’s capital — is among those who see reason for hope.
“New York City is down to 12 kids, that’s about as good as it gets,” he said. “Now we jump to California, with Gov. Gavin Newsom zeroing out the Department of Juvenile Justice. Can you imagine where we could go from here?”
The Annie E. Casey Foundation is one of the funders of Fostering Media Connections, The Imprint’s parent nonprofit. Per our editorial independence policy, the organization had no editorial role in tour news coverage.