Fifty years ago this month, the landmark Juvenile Justice Delinquency Prevention Act was signed into law. At the time, there were roughly half a million children locked up in adult jails and prisons in this country.
A report by the Children’s Defense Fund laid bare the reality: A 12-year-old girl had been incarcerated for stealing a handful of quarters from a washing machine. A 14-year-old boy spent 41 days behind bars, with no idea when a judge would hear his case. Another teen landed in county jail for arguing with his parents.
On Sept. 7, 1974, the federal government finally began to set standards. For the first time, minors could only be placed in adult facilities under limited circumstances. In those instances, they had to be housed out of sight and earshot of imprisoned adults. What’s more, children could not be locked up for “status offenses” such as failing to attend school, running away or staying out past curfew.
“This is the first piece of legislation to reach my desk for action in the field of prevention and reduction of crime among our youth,” then-President Gerald Ford said in a signing statement. “Its passage by very strong majorities in both bodies of the Congress represents a continuation of our national commitment to reduce juvenile delinquency in the United States, to keep juveniles from entering the treadmill of the criminal process, and to guarantee procedural and Constitutional protection to juveniles under Federal jurisdiction.”
Since then, the law has been reauthorized and revised seven times. There are now far fewer children in adult detention centers — 2,000 today, according to federal data. States are now also required to track and attempt to correct racial disparities that result in harsher penalties for of Black and brown children at all stages of the justice system.
The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention hands out $65 million dollars a year to states to achieve these federal standards. Liz Ryan is the top administrator, heading an organization that serves as the point of contact for hundreds of local juvenile justice systems across U.S. states and territories.
Ryan was not your typical federal justice official when she was appointed to the post by President Joe Biden in 2022. Previously, she spent decades working as a reformer and an advocate, fighting to reduce the number of minors prosecuted as adults and to shut down abusive youth prisons. During that time, she visited prisons nationwide, witnessing first-hand what she considered appalling conditions of confinement.
“I’ve seen the harm it causes to young bodies and minds and the negative impact that detention and incarceration has on families,” Ryan said in a public address earlier this month.
She discussed why the 1974 Juvenile Justice Delinquency Prevention Act still matters, what her future in government might be, and why states should be cautious about youth crime statistics. In recent years, Ryan has pushed back against the perception of a “youth crime wave,” and sought to elevate the recommendations of young people who have personally experienced the youth justice system.
Her current policy platform centers on a pledge to “treat kids as kids,” to serve them at home instead of institutions and to create more career and education opportunities for young people emerging from the justice system.
This conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity and length.
For those who may be unfamiliar with the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974, what would you say is its single greatest impact?
Prior to the act passing, you didn’t have any kind of national standards related to youth justice. When the act first passed, one impetus was an overuse of pretrial detention and a placement of kids in dangerous adult jails, even when they weren’t charged with a crime. Kids were committing suicide. They were being harmed by adults and by staff in those facilities.
One of the many major accomplishments of the act is to dramatically reduce the number of kids placed in adult jails nationwide. We went from roughly half a million kids every year to around 2,000 kids on any given day.
The federal government sent $65 million to states last year under the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act. How was the money used?
The funds are largely used for community-based programs that keep kids out of the system altogether, or keep them from going deeper into the justice system.
In Pierce County, Washington, they utilized our dollars to create a network of youth-serving programs, the Imagine Justice Initiative. That has now expanded to three dozen programs across the county. Another example is in Georgia, which used our funding as seed money to launch an innovative effort to reduce the use of incarceration and expand community-based supports for kids. And in Maine, funding was used to create what we call regional care teams, which provide wraparound services for kids who are justice-involved.
“A one-year uptick should not be used as an excuse to roll back reforms that have been grounded in science and research over many, many decades.”
— Liz Ryan, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention
A lot has changed in the past half-century: Significant developments in brain science have fueled a deeper understanding of adolescent behavior and how the justice system should respond. Youth incarceration has plummeted 75% over the past 20 years, and California, the most populous state, has completely shuttered its once-vast youth prison system. “Restorative justice” is now a widely used term.
Where would you say that states continue to fall short?
We’ve made a lot of progress in the placement of kids in adult jails. But the fact that we still have kids prosecuted in adult criminal court every year — when we know that the data and the research shows us that that doesn’t make communities safer, that it exposes kids to the violence in the criminal justice system and that it increases the likelihood that they’ll reoffend — that’s problematic.
We need to do much more to reduce those numbers.
What types of support do these young people need?
What I hear from young people is their needs are not being met. They have food insecurity issues, they have housing issues. They’re trying to find meaningful employment. They need transportation to get to their employer.They are not able to get back into the school that they went to. They have trouble getting a job with a juvenile record — that can still be a stigma.
We also hear that young people who have an ankle monitor, when they show up at a job, people see it, and so then they suddenly don’t have that job anymore.
Some politicians have seized on very recent data and stoked fears of rising crime to justify rolling back prior juvenile justice reforms. How do you view the data you’re seeing?
When you look at the last 30 years, you see dramatic reductions in youth arrests, and also in victimization of other people by young people. There has been a slight uptick in crime that we saw earlier this year from the National Crime Victimization Survey.
But one year’s worth of data is not a trend, it’s a fluctuation. We need to see several years, probably at least three years worth of data, to see whether or not that’s continuing to bear itself out. And even then, with that uptick, we know that youth crime did not return to pre-pandemic levels.
So, from the perspective of looking at what the data is telling us, a one-year uptick should not be used as an excuse to roll back reforms that have been grounded in science and research over many, many decades.
Your professional journey has been remarkable. For decades you were one of the nation’s most vocal advocates for the closure of youth prisons, and fought to keep kids out of adult prisons and jails. Now that you’ve spent about two years in the federal government, what would you say you’ve learned about working within the system, so to speak?
Probably way too many things than we have time to talk about. But one thing I would want to say is I’ve learned the value of partnerships. The partnerships that we have with the states and territories around the implementation of the Juvenile Justice Delinquency Prevention Act, I see how important that is, even more than I did prior to coming here.
We recently announced a partnership with AmeriCorps. I was an AmeriCorps member 30 years ago, and so I know what AmeriCorps can do for people, in terms of providing a stepping stone into community service.
If Vice President Kamala Harris is elected to the Oval Office this fall and asks you to stay on, would you?
I’m a champion for kids, and I’ll continue to be a champion for kids as long as I can.
