It's about quality

• Date: 01 May 2019
• Published date: 01 May 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12435
• Author: John Pfaff,Jeffrey A. Butts

DOI: 10.1111/1745-9133.12435

RESEARCH ARTICLE

IT’S ABOUT QUALITY

It’s about quality

Private confinement facilities in juvenile justice

Jeffrey A. Butts1John Pfaff2

1John Jay College (CUNY)

2Fordham University

Correspondence

JeffreyA. Butts, Research and Evaluation

Center,John Jay College (CUNY), 524 W.58th

Street,Suite BMW605, New York, NY 10019.

Email:jbutts@jjay.cuny.edu

Research Summary: The youth justice system in the

United States has always depended on nongovernmental

organizations to provide some of the services, supports,

and sanctions for youth after juvenile court adjudication.

As the use of state-operated youth confinement declined in

recent years, primarily as a result of falling rates of seri-

ous juvenile crime, the relative importance of private facil-

ities increased. The number of juveniles held in privately

operated secure confinement facilities is now larger than

the number confined in state institutions.

Policy Implications: Should policy makers be concerned

about a gradual shift from public to private secure facili-

ties? Certainly, some private facilities are poorly managed,

neglectful, and even abusive, but the same has always been

true for some public facilities. Effective policy and prac-

tice should be focused on the quality of interventions rather

than on their financial auspices. Quality youth justice sys-

tems (a) limit the use of confinement to cases where it is

objectively necessary, (b) ensure the health and safetyof all

confined youth, (c) provide effective treatments and devel-

opmentally appropriate programming, and (d) continually

monitor and evaluate their effectiveness. These goals apply

to all forms of secure confinement regardless of financing

or organizational configuration.

KEYWORDS

incarceration, juvenile, privatization, youth corrections

Criminology & Public Policy. 2019;18:361–378. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/capp © 2019 American Society of Criminology 361

362 BUTTS AND PFAFF

1INTRODUCTION

Reformers and justice advocates see privately operated adult prisons as income generators for a self-

interested network of carceral entrepreneurs who pursue private gain while wrongly usurping the pun-

ishment power of the government. Some advocates aim these same criticisms at the juvenile justice

system. Is it appropriate for critics of private prisons to use the same arguments against the use of juve-

nile facilities and residential placements for court-ordered youth? If privately operated youth facilities

are inherently problematic, some important changes are needed in youth justice policy.As youth crime

rates began to fall across the country, many states reduced or even closed their large publicly operated

secure facilities. As a result, private facilities now make up a larger share of youth confinement space

in the United States.

According to the federal Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement (Sickmund,Sladky, Kang, &

Puzzanchera, 2017), the number of adjudicated youths held in long-term secure facilities dropped 58%

between 1997 and 2015. National philanthropies and advocacy organizations characterize the trend

as evidence of “reform,” suggesting that cities and states across the country chose to limit their use

of confinement in the 1990s and to handle more youth in community-based programs. Advocates use

active verbs such as “cut,” “reduce,” and “slash” to describe the changes in youth confinement. A com-

mon observation is that states “reduced” their reliance on confinement, yet crime did not increase (e.g.,

Howell, Wilson, Sickmund, Hodges, & Howell, 2017, p. 28). The declining use of juvenile confine-

ment, however, was not simply the product of intentional reform. More likely, falling rates of serious

youth crime suppressed the demand for secure confinement in states that once made heavy use of such

facilities.

In 1993, a peak year for violent crime, police agencies nationwide reported ∼13 murder arrests

involving youth youngert han 18 years of age for every 100,000 youth ages 10 to 17 in the population.

The murder arrest rate among youth then dropped 79% between 1993 and 2017 (Butts, 2018). Similarly,

youth arrests for robbery and aggravated assault fell 70% since their peak yearin t he mid-1990s. Other

offenses experienced similar decreases. Arrest rates for serious property crime plummeted 76%. The

youth arrest rate for weapon possession dropped 73%, whereas the drug offense arrest rate among

young people was 57% lower in 2017 than it was at the 1990s peak. States did not “decide” to use less

confinement. They just did not need as much confinement.

The notion that falling youth incarceration is a result of changes in crime rates rather than of inten-

tional reforms in policy and practice is also supported by trends in juvenile court dispositions.1Juvenile

courts began committing fewer youth to confinement facilities because fewer youth were involved in

the types of court cases that expose them to confinement. As a percentage of juvenile court caseloads,

the use of residential placement has not changed much since the 1990s, whether one considers all delin-

quency cases or only those cases involving formal charges and adjudication. The use of out-of-home

placement, in fact, has been stable for two decades (Figure 1). In 1996, approximately 28% of adju-

dicated juvenile court cases ended with placement dispositions. Between 1996 and 2016, the use of

placement dipped slightly to 25% for several years and then rebounded to 27%.

In other words, juveniles adjudicated in delinquency proceedings are about as likely to be ordered

into confinement today as they were at the height of the juvenile crime scare of the mid-1990s. Juvenile

confinement numbers fell during the past two decades because the overall volume of cases referred to

juvenile courts changed, not because of changes in the handling of cases or as a result of reductions in

the use of confinement as a court disposition.

Not surprisingly, conventional wisdom about the juvenile justice system is often wrong. Another

example of conventional wisdom that could be wrong is the belief that private correctional facilities

are morally objectionable and possibly harmful for youth, their families, and communities. Among