State-Level Variation in Juvenile Decarceration: An Exploratory Analysis

In 1999, 107,493 juveniles were in residential placements; by 2023 this number declined to 29,314, a decrease of 73%. This extraordinary decline in juvenile incarceration—which we refer to as juvenile decarceration—has been reported primarily by justice advocacy groups without rigorous explanation or exploration. In this paper, we provide a state-level exploration in which we consider how relevant characteristics of states relate to their levels of decarceration. We analyze data from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention and several publicly available sources and find correlations between the extent of a state’s rate of decarceration and that state’s poverty rate, high school dropout rate, adult incarceration rate, and voting results in the 2020 presidential election. Most striking, however, is the relative consistency of decarceration across states, and the absence of more robust patterns.