Juvenile Incarceration Declined by 77%. Did Public Policy Do Something Right?
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Support for KQED Podcasts comes from Landmark College, offering a fully online graduate-level Certificate in Learning Differences and Neurodiversity program. Visit landmark.edu slash certificate to learn more. From KQED. From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal. In roughly the last two decades, there has been a remarkable change in the number of young people who are incarcerated.

Across the nation, there are about a quarter as many youth sitting in juvie, as we used to call it, as there were in 2000. At the same time, over most of that period and in most places, crime, measured in different ways, fell. What can we learn from this? What problems still remain in the juvenile justice system? And where do we go from here? We'll talk with people with deep knowledge of the system locally and national experts. It's all coming up next, right after this news.

Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. It's easy to point out where public policy has gone awry. You know, a program that was instituted has unanticipated problems or did not quite live up to its billing, or a new set of underlying problems was revealed. This is kind of the bread and butter of a lot of journalism.

But it's actually more difficult to talk about a public policy that seems to have gone largely right, especially if, as in the case of juvenile justice reform, we're still talking about young people in desperately bad situations and systems that still do harm and cities coping with substantial disorder in the streets.

But to twist the saying, perhaps we should not let the idea of the perfect prevent us from looking squarely at the good. Far fewer kids are locked up in juvenile detention centers, and this appears not only good for them, but good for society as they become less likely to commit future offenses.

Here to talk about the long sweep of juvenile justice reform, we're joined by James Forman Jr., professor of law at Yale Law School. Forman's scholarship focuses on schools, police, and prison, and he won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for his book, Locking Up Our Own Crime and Punishment in Black America. His most recent piece in the New York Times Magazine is What Happened When America Emptied Its Youth Prisons. Welcome. Thank you. Good to be here.

We're also joined by David Muhammad, executive director of the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform. He's the former chief probation officer for Alameda County. Welcome, David. Thank you.

James, let's start with your article. I mean, you worked as a public defender. You've written about incarceration. And there's probably not a lot about criminal justice that surprises you. But the numbers about juvenile incarceration did. So tell us a little bit about those numbers and what you think they represent.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, I became a public defender in the 90s at a time when really the only conversation was about how to lock up more children, how to try more of them as an adult, as adults. Some kids were being sent to death row.

And so I come into it with that background. And starting in the 2000s, somewhere, I can't remember the first time I saw it, but the Sentencing Project issues a, you know, annual kind of an email blast, Youth Justice by the Numbers. And I started to notice something that was surprising to me, which was that the

trend of rising youth incarceration, which started in 1975 or earlier, it really peaked in 2000. And then starting in 2000,

there was this steady decline. So I would get these emails from the sentencing project, you know, in 2008, there was a decline, and then 2010 was lower than 2008. 2015 was lower than 2010. So finally, by 2020, we had had a 77% drop in youth incarceration from the peak in 2000. And I thought, wow, that

somebody needs to write about how that happened, why it happened and what the implications are for for other aspects of our justice system. So that's what I did. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about kind of the structure of that decline. I mean, was it consistent across, you know, all or most states? Were there any differences between red and blue states? Anything notable about California in particular? I mean, California is notable in the sense that

You know, it was a leader in the rise in juvenile incarceration, and then it was very much a leader in the decline. So, you know, there's, you know, David and others are more expert on California than I am. But I think that in some ways, California is.

represents what was happening in the country, but it's sort of at the leading edge, if you will. So it's not that different, but it's sort of at the vanguard. I mean, given that this was a change that happened pretty much across the board, how do we get at least a partial attribution of sort of the cause of this decline?

Yeah, I mean, the first thing that everybody I spoke to in the field pointed to was declining crime rates. So one thing about juvenile incarceration is that because sentences are relatively short, and I say relative because even

you know, a night or two in a juvenile facility can be quite traumatic for a young person. But relative to the adult system, the sentences are short. What that means is if you have fewer kids coming in the front door, if crime is going down, if arrests are going down, then you will relatively quickly also see a drop

in incarceration rates. So that was the first part of the story that I heard from people. But there are two things to say about that. One is that it's not the whole story because we can find for particular offenses, and drug offenses really stand out here, for particular offenses that

the risk of a young person being incarcerated who comes in the front door, who is arrested for a drug charge, has really dropped through the floor. So for particular offenses, there's been a change in how the system responds to young people who are arrested. And the other thing, and this is, I think to me, really the main part of my article, is that in my opinion, and I try to argue this in the piece,

Part of why juvenile crime declined is that juvenile incarceration declined. So normally, right, people say, oh, well, if you lock up fewer young people, crime's going to go up.

The opposite happened. Crime went down. And what I really explore in the piece is how using prison less might actually have contributed to the crime decline because you are exposing fewer young people to the harm and the toxicity and the brutality that is juvenile incarceration.

David Muhammad, I want to bring you in on the local front here. You saw a lot of these changes up close in your different roles through time. Is this a story that James is telling track with your experience locally in the field?

Well, absolutely. When I started working with and in the juvenile system, I started going into the state system then called the California Youth Authority in the later part of the 90s. And at that time, there were 10,000 youth incarcerated in the state system. That doesn't include all the young people detained in the numerous county systems throughout the state.

You know, today, that number is zero. The state system doesn't exist anymore. You know, as as we talk about in James, James's wonderful piece in The New York Times magazine. Had you told me that was going to happen when I started out, I either told you were crazy or that our job was done. Let's go home. So do you still feel that way?

You know, I still think that it is incredible. And but, you know, we still have work to do nationally. I do think in the Bay Area that, you know, we have done, I think, a pretty remarkable job nationally.

both in terms of the quality still needs to improve, but the numbers are nearly there. You know, we're right at the point kind of where we need to do it in the Bay Area. That's not true nationally. We've got a lot of work to do. And then, of course, the challenge is we have seen some retrenchment, right? We've seen an increase since COVID in many of these numbers, nowhere near where it was, but an increase nonetheless. Yeah. Yeah.

We're talking about the dramatic decrease in juvenile incarceration across the country and in the Bay Area. Joined by David Muhammad, who's executive director of the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform, former chief probation officer in Alameda County, too. We're also joined by James Foreman, Jr., professor of law at Yale Law School, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for his book, Locking Up Our Own Crime and Punishment.

in black America. We'd love to hear from you. I mean, what are your questions or concerns about the juvenile justice system? You know, locally, you can give us a call. The number is 866-733-6786. Maybe you have a personal experience with the juvenile justice system and some, some part of it,

Love to hear your stories. The number is 866-733-6786. The email is forum at kqed.org. You can find us on all of the different social media things. We're kqedforum.

So one of the questions that we have, David, on the local level is kind of the situation in San Francisco, right? I mean, my understanding of it is, you know, voters voted to close down the San Francisco juvenile detention facility. It's still open. And in fact, a lot of the action at the state level seems to have complicated the situation there.

Yeah, I think you used a good word, complicated. So I'll try to describe it as best as possible. So I think voter sentiment was there. The actual vote was the Board of Supervisors voted to close the juvenile detention center in San Francisco. San Francisco, obviously, is a unique jurisdiction. Many people in San Francisco don't realize this, but it's the only county in the state of California that's both a county city together.

And the Board of Supervisors, which obviously served both as a County Board and a City Council,

voted to close the juvenile detention center called Juvenile Hall. My organization was one of the two organizations that were brought on to help that process. Complicated by COVID hit and all the meetings became virtual, but still had to follow the state sunshine laws, the Brown Act. Second, at the same time, the state system shut down. And so the counties had to serve as the place where youth adjudicated, the juvenile word for convicted, of juvenile

serious offenses would stay. And so it's certainly complicated things. That being said, San Francisco today has about 27 young people as of I think two days ago, 27 young people in its juvenile detention center. That place holds a little bit more than 100 people. So the numbers are still way down. Now, that was in the single digits shortly after COVID when we were trying to reduce facilities for health purposes as much as possible.

And so there was a really good plan developed by a number of community stakeholders, government agencies that was developed over a year. And that plan has not yet been implemented for a number of reasons. But, you know, nobody...

during that process was saying zero youth need to be in some form of custody. It was about the current building does not fulfill the purpose of rehabilitation and treatment and education. It was about smaller facilities that can serve young people in a better way and actually improve public safety. Uh, but that also costs money. Uh,

I felt like a real estate developer during some of the time of this committee going around looking for places where we are. I toured many a building in San Francisco trying to figure out where could we have a better, smaller, more therapeutic place and a lot of good plans, but they have not, as you said, been implemented.

Not to mention cheaper, too. Just remarkably expensive facility to run on a per-person basis. We're talking about the dramatic decrease in juvenile incarceration across the country and in the Bay Area. Joined by David Muhammad, executive director of the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform, and James Forman, professor of law at Yale Law School. We'll be back with more right after the break.

Turing with Tia is the quirky YouTube talk show where Tia Creighton is the host and all her guests are talking AI chatbots. Whether it's health and beauty, science and technology, pop culture, or current events, Turing with Tia delivers answers about everything. That's T-U-R-I-N-G, Turing with Tia, a funny and fascinating way to experience artificial intelligence. Only on YouTube at Turing with Tia.

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Welcome back to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. We're talking about the dramatic decrease in juvenile incarceration across the country and in the Bay Area. Joined by Yale Law School's James Forman, the Executive Director of the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform, David Muhammad. I'm going to ask you a question.

I'm going to add in a couple of other voices now as well. We also have Professor of Social Welfare at the Luskin School of Public Affairs at UCLA, Laura Abrams. She studies the social impacts of youth incarceration. Welcome, Laura.

Thank you so much. Happy to be here. And we're joined by Judge Catherine Lucero, who's director of the Office of Youth and Community Restoration, previously served as the supervising judge in juvenile court in Santa Clara County Superior Court. Welcome, Judge Catherine. Thank you. Good to be here.

So I want to get a little bit at some questions that are coming in from our listeners. And I think, Catherine Lucero, the first one should go to you. A listener writes on Blue Sky, seems like the closing of state juvenile institutions would have something to do with the drop in incarceration rates. How do the smaller counties cope? Do they all have juvenile facilities or do multiple counties share a facility? Kind of seems like a good entree into the work that you're doing there.

Yes, thank you. Good question. Not all counties have a juvenile hall as they're called, nor do all counties have a longer term facility that are now called secure youth treatment facilities.

37 secure youth treatment facilities have been stood up and do exist in the state of California, but we have 58 counties. So smaller counties are looking towards regional agreements, working with counties that are adjacent, trying to keep kids as close to home as possible, but not all counties have their own facilities. Got it.

And how are the counties coping? I know that there have been some sort of well-documented problems in Los Angeles. How do you feel like this pretty massive change in the way that we deal with youth who are locked up, how do you feel it's gone?

Well, I think it was a massive change, but I think overall it has been navigated well. Our office was stood up at the same time as the closure was occurring of the statewide youth carceral system.

And specifically, we were stood up to provide technical assistance. We were on the ground with the transition of the youth that had to transition from the state facility in 2023 to the local facility. So we were assisting with that management.

It hasn't been flawless. There's some hot button issues around certain populations. But overall, from where I stand, three years later, just started my fourth year here as the director.

I would say that we have managed it and the counties are doing well with the transition. Not to say that everybody has everything they need, but there's good communication, there's good collaboration. And we're also working in the behavioral health systems, the education systems.

Making sure that county probation departments aren't trying to wield everything on their own because they shouldn't be. Juvenile justice, I always say there's many parents that end up stepping in if a youth is in the youth justice system. And so it's not just one parent.

The one parent stepping in probation, it's County Office of Education. It's the behavioral health system. Sometimes it's the social welfare system. So I, again, would say that we're, it's, I would say we're doing well. Yeah.

Do you think the actual bureaucratic arrangement is sufficient? Like, does your office have all the powers that it needs to make sure that things are going well at the county level or not? I think this is an evolving area. And I think we're learning a lot about

what's needed versus what can be navigated easily at the local level. I think the main thing is the relationship building. The state office that I run, building those county relationships is important. I have a team of staff. I have about 40 staff right now and I have a team of staff that does attend all the Juvenile Justice Commission meetings,

all the local public meetings related to juvenile justice. We're building relationships. We do site visits. We did over 100 site visits to counties in 2024. We will continue to do those site visits. We also have an ombuds department division. We're receiving ombuds calls on a regular basis.

There's a lot of light being shed on the different layers that could be addressed as far as for improvement.

I wouldn't, you know, I don't know that anybody would ever say they have enough of, you know, quote unquote power, Alexis, but I think that we are an evolving state entity and that we're moving towards a beneficial relationship with our counties.

I want to bring you in, Laura Abrams, professor of social welfare at the Luskin School of Public Affairs, UCLA. As we talk about these big structural changes in California and we think about all these counties who are essentially coming up with new systems, you've done research on the long-term effects of prison on youth offenders. I mean, what have you found works best or works worst?

Thank you. Yeah, that's a great question. Well, I want to start by saying that there's never any one solution. I know people like to look for the magic trick.

the magic solution or the panacea. Does treatment always work? No. Does punishment work? Not usually and on its own. So that's true in any behavioral health intervention or any intervention that we think about, that things are more likely to work if they're well done, if they're researched, and if they're really considering the needs of the individual.

And that's kind of the model that OICR and counties are working toward is to do better. And the bar was low in the older system. So in terms of the long-term effects of incarceration, we know that people who are incarcerated at young ages for longer periods of time are less likely to

to do well as adults, both in terms of, or in terms of many factors, education, employment, health, mental health.

Suicidal ideation. We've looked at this from various angles using national data sets. And so the goal here is to reduce the harmful effects and still promote accountability and have a system rooted in care and

and compassion for the young people in the system to help mitigate some of the detrimental effects of incarceration on young people. I want to get to the phones, but just one quick follow-up there.

Is there a sort of like dose response curve in terms of how long people are incarcerated? That is to say, like if someone is incarcerated for a week, it has a certain effect. If someone's incarcerated for longer, it's just the effects get worse and worse and worse. Do we know what that really looks like? And if there's sort of a... Is there any amount of incarceration that essentially doesn't decrease someone's future possibilities? That's a really good question. So...

not myself, but other researchers have tried to model that question and there isn't one answer. So for example, for folks with very low level offenses or first time young people, any amount of incarceration is not deemed a solid solution for recidivism or for any other measure.

When you get into young people who are more serious charges, the research is more mixed. And there's not one article or one piece of research that could say this is the right amount of time or six months or nine months or whatever it is. So a lot of folks around the country are really looking at individual assessment and

and treatment planning, taking some of the better aspects of case management, reentry, involving the community in really providing services that are more culturally responsive and closer to home. And we know that those elements, a lot of those elements have better outcomes than simply punishment or simply confinement.

James, you try to get at this in your article in New York Times Magazine, too, that this actually is a fairly counterintuitive idea because I do think in our culture, a lot of people have this idea that if you were to put a kid in juvenile hall for a little while, it might, quote, like scare them straight. But it seems like the research doesn't really bear that out.

Yeah, that's one of the things that I write about. The mentality you're describing a little bit, you know, will help is certainly something I saw as a public defender when I was representing young people that judges that I was in front of for the most part, for most cases, let's put the most serious to one side, but for most cases, for 90% of the cases that

they imagine themselves as helping the young person. Like they imagine themselves as doing something to benefit my client who is in front of them. And I was always asking for something other than incarceration because my clients didn't want to be locked up. And the judges would say, look, you know, counselor, I know you're telling me about the harms of incarceration, but I'm not talking about five years. I'm not talking about life. I'm talking about a month or two.

And my instinct was that they were wrong, that a month or two, I thought, was going to be harmful. But I didn't have the evidence to back it up. And so one of the things that I was curious to learn when I was doing this research is what the evidence says. And, you know, one of the studies that I talk about is a professor at Brown named Anna Azar and another professor named Joseph Doyle.

And they studied this question looking at some kids in Chicago courts. And they were trying to figure out exactly this thing. In that instance, it was about a month that kids were locked up for. And what they found with their study is that if you took the same individual in front of a judge who was going to lock kids up,

that kid would end up being more likely to be arrested as an adult and less likely to graduate from high school than the same child with the same background, the same demographic characteristics who went before a judge that didn't lock them up.

And so that idea that a short stint of incarceration would help a young person, I think, really has been challenged in the literature. And part of the work, I think, of the last 20 years is getting that research out there.

out into the hands of juvenile justice administrators and judges to change their mentality and to change their thinking and to pressure them and to force them to be more creative, to not just default to prison, to not just default to even a short time in prison, but instead say, wait, what else could we do? Let's exhaust every single other opportunity before we return to something like that.

If I can jump in here just quickly, I would say I think this is a very good point. I think the evidence is actually pretty clear. Obviously, the Azar and Doyle study was a landmark study. The evidence is pretty clear that juvenile incarceration has a harmful effect on young people, kind of period, in addition to being excessively expensive.

And so then I think we have to say, okay, therefore, when are we willing to say we understand this as a harmful effect, but because of this other thing, public safety, for instance, we need to do it. And I try to liken juvenile incarceration in particular to like chemotherapy, right? We're very clear that chemotherapy has really harmful effects, but for an extremely small number of people who get sick in America,

They're so far advanced in their sickness that we say we have to use this really harmful thing. And that's how we should view juvenile incarceration, right? What if we gave everybody who got sick chemotherapy? Obviously, that would be ridiculous. And so it's not just even everybody who has cancer. It's so advanced.

And so if we see juvenile incarceration like that, so it doesn't mean we never use it, right? There are some young people who need to be out of the community for some time. Now, the other thing is we need to make that time a lot better than we have historically in America. But the other thing James said is be more creative, right?

Part of the challenge with, I think, just everyday resident of America is our default is incarceration for when somebody does something bad. We need to be more creative. And just briefly, in the city of Oakland, and we're replicating this in other cities, we have a program with the city called the Neighborhood Opportunity and Accountability Board, NOAAB.

and, you know, funded by the Zellerbach Foundation in San Francisco and the city of Oakland itself, the Department of Violence Prevention. And we work with the police department. These are young people arrested for felonies, often not serious or violent felonies, but car theft, burglary,

And instead of going, and this is often their first felony, they might have a previous misdemeanor. And instead of going into the system, they're diverted and they're sent to a community system where they come before a board of community leaders, business owners, pastors, former victims of crime, formerly incarcerated individuals.

And a plan is developed where they're connected to intensive community-based services, and they're assigned a life coach who sees them multiple times a week, ongoing for nearly – for a year. Of course, then we need that whole system to exist, right? Exactly. If we were able to replicate that, which is cheaper yet better than the system, then we could have a real even smaller number of young people who need to actually be held in custody. Yeah.

You know, Catherine Lucera, I wanted to bring you in on this because you were a supervising judge in juvenile court in Santa Clara County. And, you know, let's say that you had access to all this research. You kind of know in the abstract that, you know, incarceration is harmful for young people. But then you've also got a particular thing that has happened in the community, particular crimes that have committed people who've been harmed by that.

How do you try and balance these various factors in coming to individual determination? Well, you're right. I had all this information sitting in court day in and day out. Saw thousands of kids who had offended. How do I balance it? So obviously, with the information I had, I was very reluctant to incarcerate any youth who did not commit a violent felony.

And I want to let you know there's a whole National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges who train judges like me to be judicial leaders and to create alternatives to incarceration and to create problem-solving courts versus punitive courts. So that was what I did. I had a very highly collaborative court setting with the district attorney, the defenders,

behavioral health team, the county office of education, and we dug into cases that looked serious and that looked like we might need to separate that youth for a time from their family and their community. I think that because of the smaller numbers, we have that opportunity now that we never had before. But I do also have to let you know that I also had victims in court and people that had lost their lives

to homicide and folks who had lost the children that they knew to grave assaults that created brain damage. So I did have to consider all factors. We have to think

figure out how to make sure we are holding youth accountable at the same time that we're creating a system that allows youth to be held accountable and to then safely reenter into society. So that was really the balancing act. Yeah.

that sometimes daily I had to measure, especially when I was dealing with maybe the transfer hearing request from the DA or a request to send the youth to DJJ. So all of that is being...

navigated every day by judges in the state of California on these cases. We're talking about the dramatic decrease in juvenile incarceration across the country and the Bay Area. That was Catherine Lucero, director of the Office of Youth and Community Restoration, also joined by an all-star panel in youth criminal justice reform. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for more right after the break.

Turing with Tia is the quirky YouTube talk show where Tia Creighton is the host and all her guests are talking AI chatbots. Whether it's health and beauty, science and technology, pop culture, or current events, Turing with Tia delivers answers about everything.

That's T-U-R-I-N-G, Turing with Tia, a funny and fascinating way to experience artificial intelligence. Only on YouTube at Turing with Tia. Support for KQED Podcasts comes from Star One Credit Union, now offering real-time money movement with instant pay. Make transfers and payments instantly between financial institutions, online or through Star One's mobile app. Star One Credit Union, in your best interest.

Welcome back to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. We're talking about the dramatic decrease in juvenile incarceration across the country and in the Bay Area, the reasons for it, how we're thinking about rehabilitation and incarceration today. We're joined by James Forman Jr., a professor of law at Yale Law School. If you want to read more about this, he's got a piece in New York Times Magazine titled, What Happened When America Emptied Its Youth Prisons?,

We're also joined by David Muhammad, Executive Director of the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform and former Chief Probation Officer for Alameda County. Laura Abrams, a professor of social welfare at UCLA, the author of Compassionate Confinement: A Year in the Life of Unit C. We're also joined by Catherine Lucero, who's Director of the Office of Youth and Community Restoration, previously served as a supervising judge in juvenile court for Santa Clara County Superior Court.

And of course, we want to hear from you. We're going to get to a bunch more of your calls and questions in this part of the show. The number is 866-733-6786. Maybe you have a personal experience with some part of the juvenile justice system. Number is 866-733-6786. The email is forum at kqed.org. And let's take a caller here. Let's go to Brian in San Ramon. Welcome.

Good morning. Thank you for having me. What a wonderful conversation and what a wonderful thing to point out, these wonderful numbers. And I was just wondering, I'm a former juvenile public defender in Alameda County, spent 10 years there. I actually did work with Chief Probation Officer Muhammad when he was there. But

But I think there's a possibility to do more here. We now have science that explains to us that the human brain doesn't stop growing until 25 years old. And yet we're treating 19, 18, 20-year-olds as if they were adults. We tell them you can't smoke, you can't drink alcohol until you're 21. And so there's

such a wonderful thought process in saying, well, juvenile justice should extend to the age of 21 and the benefits that would come from that and the harm reduction we would do to our society and our community if we recognized that 18-year-olds, 19-year-olds are children as well. Brian, appreciate that perspective. What do you think, Laura Abrams? Yeah, this is actually a really interesting point. And I've studied...

the issue of age and how age bans are used to formulate different child welfare, youth justice, adult justice policies around the globe.

And 18, well, that's kind of our common dividing line in the U.S. That's not necessarily true in other countries, both with the lower age of when we can actually consider a youth culpable for a crime or for a juvenile offense, as well as when we consider them an adult.

There's two strands of thought around expanding the juvenile court up to age 21 or later. One strain of thought is that it's being tested, and there's been models being tested in Vermont and Connecticut and other states as

Vera Institute's been studying this, so I'm looking forward to finding more about what their studies show. Another idea or another strain of thought is that extending the age also could widen the net of youth justice, whereas people are thinking that we really should be shrinking the system all around.

So there's definitely considerations either way, but that thought about when is someone considered a young person, when do they deserve these considerations, is all on the table right now in terms of the reform movement and advocacy. Yeah.

David, got a couple of comments coming your way, some pushback on some of the numbers. Libby writes, "I worked in retail from the early aughts to 2016. In the beginning, we would try to deter shoplifters, detain them, call the police to file a report. By 2016, that completely stopped, but shoplifting increased dramatically. We would log the loss but not report it because they didn't want employees wasting their time filling out reports that led to nowhere.

The police told us straight up they would not investigate or arrest juveniles. Has juvenile crime really gone down? Because out here in Oakland, where robbing bans of juveniles are stealing cars, ribbing old people, etc., it really doesn't seem like it. Margaret writes, maybe the rest of the Bay Area is improving, but Oakland has had an increase in property crimes and specifically with juveniles. The revolving door of arrest gives folks the impression the focus is on the person committing the crime.

Yeah.

- Yeah, so the short version is this is complicated. So I'm gonna try to make this quick because it's a very complicated answer. This is no question that there is a feeling in, I'm coming to you right now from downtown Oakland. There's a feeling in Oakland that things have been bad,

that young people in particular are off the hook. I completely acknowledge that feeling and Oakland historically has particularly had a car break-in problem, right? Which with young people called bipping.

Obviously, San Francisco has led the country in that historically, but Oakland and San Francisco have that in particular. So there's a couple of things. There's the feelings and then there's the data. Right. And so as it relates to robberies, car break ins, those are pretty significantly down right now in Oakland. And we're down in 2024. Kind of from what baseline though? The next point I was going to say is part one of the reasons that it's down is it was so damn high.

right so I don't want to I don't want to sugarcoat this at all right and so

the complicated answer to both Bay Area statewide and nationally is a couple of things happened. Juvenile delinquency went down, period. And there's a ton of research that says that. But additionally, adult behavior changed, meaning reporting, arresting, prosecution, adjudication. That also changed, right? So we, I mean, one of the easy examples that is great is we stopped

in this country adjudicating young people who did things what we call status offenses just because they're young. They stopped going to school, they ran away from home, right? So we stopped arresting and locking young people up because we did that regularly in this country. And for the most part, we don't do that anymore. And so that's a difference in adult behavior versus juvenile behavior. And so it is complicated. Things are trending downward.

in Oakland and in San Francisco. Just one quick word. I just have to say that the caller didn't say this specifically, but as it relates to violence, shootings, Oakland and San Francisco have had significant reductions. Last year, San Francisco, the lowest in 60 years, pretty incredible. But never in those cities were juveniles a significant part of that ever.

at all. So there's some misnomer. I know the caller didn't say this. They talked about robberies. There's some misnomer that juveniles are involved in shootings. In most cities in the country, they don't peak over 10% of victims or suspects in shootings. They do peak way above that in media reports, and so people think it is. Now, it is different for robberies. Juveniles are a larger portion of the robbery situation. And while things are trending downward, there's no question we have a lot more work to do in Oakland about it.

Yeah, James, one of the things that I think makes this topic very difficult is that people here feel like there's been a shifting baseline in corporations.

crime reporting. And so a lot of the time when you say to someone here, well, the data says X or Y, they say, well, I don't believe the data anymore, at least when it pertains to, say, arrest records or property crime incidents. So what do you say? Like, are there other ways or other lines of data or things that can be assembled to

to kind of shore up the case that you're trying to make here that both crime has dropped as youth offenders have spent less and less time in juvenile hall. Absolutely. And Alexis, you know, as a writer, there's always a paragraph that you wish was in your piece that wasn't.

And the paragraph that I wish had made it into this essay but did not is would address exactly this question, because a lot of people have the reaction that I think your first questioner brought up, which is, well, maybe this is just that that the police aren't taking the reports anymore and crime is just as high or higher. But the arrests are down because police behavior has changed.

But there is another data source, and it's the National Crime Victimization Survey. And what this survey does is it asks a random sample of people nationwide about crimes that they've suffered.

And then it asks them to estimate the age of the offenders. Right. And the and the Justice Department then extrapolates from that and creates national data. So it's not an exact count, but because it's the same question asked over time, over decades, it can be a useful way to follow up and try to figure out, well, is offending down or is it just that arrests are down?

And here, actually, the decline has been even greater than the decline in the arrests. So the estimated youth violent offending rate plummeted from 47 offenses for every 1,000 youth in 1994 to four. So from 47 to four.

offenses per 1,000 youth in 2020. So that's a decline from 1994 to 2020 of 92%. Now, this is the other little small piece, and David touched on it, but that figure then did go up from 2020 to 2022.

So there was a slight rise from 2020 to 2022. And this is also part of what happens with people's feelings about crime. People are like in 2022, they're like crime is higher than it was a year ago. Like that's what they remember. Right. And it's true. It's true.

But still, if you go back to 1994, it's still an 87% decline from 1994. So a lot of it has to do with, well, what are we comparing this to? And so I guess I really would invite anyone who has doubts about the arrest data to go look at the National Crime Victimization Survey. It's on Department of Justice website. Anyone can access it and they can see the numbers for themselves. Yeah.

Let's bring in another caller. Thanks for that. Jeff in Oakland. Welcome. Hi. Thanks for taking my call, Alexis. This conversation is very poignant for me. I have a brother who went to juvenile hall when he was like 14 or so in 2004 and then has pretty much been in and out of juvenile hall and prison since, including right now, so about 20 years.

And I just wanted to note an observation from just being kind of the brother and the observer of it happening throughout my life. And I would just say there's a piece here that once he went into juvenile hall, it became a part of his formative identity. It's a part of who he is, and he believes that. And I think there's something inside of...

That time period of someone's lives, you know, being the harm that you can experience from going into something like a juvenile hall or a prison is like...

inside of identity. So I'll take my comments offline, but thanks for taking my call. Jeff, I appreciate it. Thank you for sharing that with us and wish the best for your brother and family there too. Laura, I'm going to send this to you, but I'm going to pair it with a comment that also came in. Casey on the Discord writes...

Among the many harms of juvenile incarceration is to take kids out of a context where off-track behaviors are not the norm and into a context where they are. Identities are forged, as we just heard from Jeff, and reinforced in social contexts. I'm encouraged by the decline in using detention as a strategy to reduce youth antisocial behavior. The research on this has been on the side of family and community intervention for decades.

What lessons should youth learn when they make a mistake and or do harm? And what are the most effective ways to impart that lesson? Okay. Thanks, Alexis. So just of note, I wanted to respond to the first caller about the identity work because that was the whole focus of my book, Compassionate Confinement, because you have

two sides of the coin, right? You have this idea that youth should be treated with care and compassion, but the confinement aspect does create an identity for folks that becomes institutionalized. And I think that's a little bit of what the caller was referring to with his brother in the sense that people also

not only become institutionalized, but the violence and trauma of family separation and being removed from the community and the positive things in your life that keep you anchored can erode that more positive sense of self that you want to convey in the outside world.

In addition, that entrenched identity can be hard when you reenter the community and then you're not sure, you know, which way your life direction can go. So I can say on the one hand in interviewing and following young people for many years in my research is

that some are able to overcome that damage and the harm that's been caused and lead very productive and successful and positive lives. And others aren't able to get off the track. And so it's hard to know which way to

which way people will go. And that's not a perfect science. But I agree with the caller. And I also understand that we have a lot more work to do into making any youth who's incarcerated that experience more rehabilitative rather than purely punishment. Yeah.

Another listener asks, and these are some really interesting comments. Another listener asks, if the offending youth isn't charged, as some callers have suggested, is that a lost opportunity? Of course, there is concern that a youth would have a record, but in this new environment of seeking rehabilitation, maybe there is a positive path forward. This sounds weird, but by not arresting youth, are we missing an opportunity to get a child treatment? Catherine Lucero is a former judge. What do you think?

Anytime a youth, and I'm talking many youths start seeing law enforcement very young. The youngest we can arrest, bar very few exceptions, is 12. 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17. That's the universe right now of youth in the juvenile system.

For many youth, the confrontation in the community with being caught violating a law is enough. And what we haven't heard about at all really today is how diversion works. It works. And

So having to talk with a police officer, having to have your parents called, maybe you're at school and you have a disruption at school or you're in a store and there's a disruption. For many kids, that is enough.

And so I don't know that a charge is needed for a majority of the youth. And if we could do a whole show on diversion, I think we would learn that most youth are amenable once they have been called on the carpet and then have to do some sort of restorative justice, apologize, write a letter. These are indelible memories on the...

developing brain. And this is where the identity actually is a positive because a youth wants to be known as turning it around, telling the truth, making an apology, making somebody that was harmed feel whole. So we can take advantage of that moment in a way that's truly rehabilitative instead of punitive. Yeah.

That is a good place to end it. I mean, we've been talking about the dramatic decrease in juvenile incarceration across the country and in the Bay Area. We were joined by Catherine Lucero, director of the Office of Youth and Community Restoration. Thanks for joining us. Also joined by Laura Abrams, professor of social welfare at the Luskin School of Public Affairs at UCLA. Thank you, Laura.

Thank you. David Muhammad, executive director of the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform. Thank you. Thank you, Alex. And this show was inspired by James Foreman's article in The New York Times Magazine titled What Happened When America Emptied Its Youth Prisons? James Foreman, Jr., professor of law at Yale Law School. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Appreciate all the callers and comments. I'm sorry we couldn't get to everyone. Stay tuned for another hour of Forum Ahead with Mina Kim.

Funds for the production of Forum are provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Generosity Foundation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.