Analysis shows youth justice policies are not primarily responsible for increasing violent crime among adults.
Are recent crime trends for under-18 youth different from those of adults in ways that point to a failure of youth justice systems? Is it accurate to say our crime problems are increasingly due to the behavior of youth under age 18? Recent data from New York City and the nation suggest the answer to these questions would be "no." Politicians blaming youth justice policies and practices for much of the nation's violent crime problem may be simply mistaken, or they may be drawing on rhetoric from the 1990s.
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Butts et al. (2025) studied this question.
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