Juvenile Incarceration and the Pains of Imprisonment

The nationwide trend to criminalize juvenile delinquency in the 1980s and 1990s resulted in the placement of large numbers of adolescent criminal offenders in adult correctional facilities. Prior research has assessed the consequences of this practice through comparisons of youth in juvenile corrections with youths placed in adult prisons and jails. These studies minimized the pains of imprisonment for youth who continue to be placed in juvenile correctional facilities by comparing their conditions to the more violent and toxic conditions of confinement in adult institutions. In this article, we more carefully assess the conditions of confinement within a broader range of juvenile and adult correctional settings where juvenile courts place youths. We analyze data from interviews with matched samples of 188 young men ages 16-18 incarcerated in juvenile and adult facilities across two states. Our results show that although inmates in adult facilities (surprisingly) give better reports than youth in juvenile facilities on several domains of institutional climate including criminal activity and victimization, they also fare much worse on measures of social and psychological well-being. Importantly, the inmates in adult facilities report substantially and significantly greater rates of PTSD and mental illness symptoms, and are much more likely to fear for their safety, compared to those in juvenile facilities. Overall, conditions in adult facilities are harsher than conditions in juvenile facilities, but juvenile correctional facilities pose their own hazards. We argue that incarceration should be used only as a last resort for juveniles, regardless of institutional auspice, but that when it is deemed necessary, juvenile correctional facilities represent the lesser of two evils

Frequent use of school suspension may be curtailing young people’s future political participation.

In recent decades, there has been increasing concern over declining political participation and what many see as the thinning of American democracy. Increasing involvement in certain politically important groups and activities for children at school has been touted as one way to address this decline. But what if other school policies are also having negative effects on democratic participation? In new research which uses longitudinal data from young people, parents, and school administrators, Thomas J. Catlaw and Aaron Kupchik find that students who are suspended from school have a lower chance of civic and political participation, an effect which can last all the way into adulthood. They argue that researchers and policy workers alike would do well to take school disciplinary practices into account when considering how to deepen democracy

Be Careful What You Wish For: Legal Sanctions and Public Safety Among Adolescent Offenders in Juvenile and Criminal Court

Three decades of legislative activism have resulted in a broad expansion of states\u27 authority to transfer adolescent offenders from juvenile to criminal (adult) courts. At the same time that legislatures have broadened the range of statutes and lowered the age thresholds for eligibility for transfer, states also have reallocated discretion away from judges and instituted simplified procedures that permit prosecutors to elect whether adolescents are prosecuted and sentenced in juvenile or criminal court. These developments reflect popular and political concerns that relatively lenient or attenuated punishment in juvenile court violates proportionality principles for serious crimes committed by adolescents, and is ineffective at deterring or controlling future crimes. This legislative activism has reshaped the boundaries of the juvenile court, and animated calls for its elimination. Yet these developments have taken place in a near vacuum of empirical analysis of the efficacy of these measures to increase punishment or reduce crime. Jurisprudential analyses of the fit between the traditional doctrines of immaturity and reduced culpability of juveniles also has lagged far behind the pace of legislative change. The redrawing of the boundaries of the juvenile court also has not reflected new knowledge on adolescent development, the legal socialization of adolescents, and their responsiveness to criminal sanctions. The new boundaries of the juvenile court also threaten to reify and intensify social and racial dimensions of criminal punishment. To address these questions, we conducted a natural experiment to assess whether prosecuting and sentencing adolescent felony offenders in the criminal court leads to harsher punishment, and whether that harsher punishment translates into improved public safety. We show that serious adolescent offenders prosecuted in the criminal court are likely to be rearrested more quickly and more often for violent, property and weapons offenses, and they are more often and more quickly returned to incarceration. Adolescents prosecuted and punished in the juvenile court are more likely to be rearrested for drug offenses. These results suggest that law and policy facilitating wholesale waiver or categorical exclusion of certain groups of adolescents based solely on offense and age, are ineffective at both specific deterrence of serious crime, despite political rhetoric insisting the opposite. Such laws may increase the risk of serious crimes by adolescents and young adults, by heavily mortgaging their possibilities to deflect their criminal behavioral trajectory and enter a path of prosocial human development. Returning to a discretionary, judge-centered transfer policy, rather than wholesale waiver or surgical exclusion of entire categories of adolescent offenders, would limit the number of youth subjected to criminal court prosecution and harsh punishment conditions in adult corrections. A policy of discretionary transfer of only the most serious offenders, whose eligibility for transfer would be transparently assessed with full access to evidence and expertise, would ensure proportional punishment for the few adolescents whose severe crimes demand greater punishment than is available in the juvenile court, and whose punishment as juveniles might corrode the legitimacy of the juvenile court

The new American school: Preparation for post-industrial discipline

In this article we consider how broad shifts in social relations over the past 30 years have given rise to new social control regimes in US public schools. We argue that the contemporary mechanisms of control engendered by mass incarceration and post-industrialization have re-shaped school discipline. To illustrate contemporary discipline in the 'New American School,' we discuss the emergence of police officers and technological surveillance in schools. These two strategies of school social control facilitate the link between courts and schools, and expose students to both the salience of crime control in everyday life and to the demands of workers in a post-industrial world. By incorporating police officers and technological surveillance into the school safety regime, schools shape the experiences of students in ways that reflect modern relationships of dependency, inequality, and instability vis-à-vis the contemporary power dynamics of the post-industrialist labor market and the neoliberal state. Introduction In this article we consider how broad shifts in social relations over the past 30 years have given rise to new social control regimes in contemporary public schools. We focus on two developments that have risen concurrently in the United States-mass incarceration and post-industrialization-and theorize how these developments permeate public schools' disciplinary practices. Specifically, we argue that police officers and technological surveillance in schools articulate larger mechanisms of social control in post-industrial societies. By increasingly relying on police officers and surveillance technologies, schools socialize youth into relationships of dependency, inequality and instability vis-à-vis the contemporary power dynamics of the post-industrialist labor market and the neoliberal state. Our analysis of contemporary trends in school discipline draws upon prior research on the socializing function of schools. Almost a century ago, Joh

Discipline and Participation: The Long-Term Effects of Suspension and School Security on the Political and Civic Engagement of Youth

In this study we use the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health (Add Health) dataset to evaluate the long-term influence of school discipline and security on political and civic participation. We find that young adults with a history of suspension in school are less likely than others to vote and volunteer in civic activities after high school, suggesting that suspension negatively impacts the overall likelihood that youth will engage in future political and civic activities. Though Black and Hispanic students suffer negative long-term effects of school suspension far more frequently than others, the results suggest that the intensity of the effect of suspension is consistent across racial/ethnic groups. Overall, these findings are consistent with prior theory and research highlighting the long-term negative implications of punitive disciplinary policies and the salient role schools play in preparing youth to participate in a democratic polity as adults. We conclude that suspension, in particular, is anti-democratic insofar in that it substitutes the exclusion and physical removal of students for dialogue and collaborative problem-solving. The research lends empirical grounds for recommending the concrete reform of school governance and the implementation of more constructive models of discipline

Discipline and Participation: The Long-Term Effects of Suspension and School Security on the Political and Civic Engagement of Youth

In this study we use the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health (Add Health) dataset to evaluate the long-term influence of school discipline and security on political and civic participation. We find that young adults with a history of suspension in school are less likely than others to vote and volunteer in civic activities after high school, suggesting that suspension negatively impacts the overall likelihood that youth will engage in future political and civic activities. Though Black and Hispanic students suffer negative long-term effects of school suspension far more frequently than others, the results suggest that the intensity of the effect of suspension is consistent across racial/ethnic groups. Overall, these findings are consistent with prior theory and research highlighting the long-term negative implications of punitive disciplinary policies and the salient role schools play in preparing youth to participate in a democratic polity as adults. We conclude that suspension, in particular, is anti-democratic insofar in that it substitutes the exclusion and physical removal of students for dialogue and collaborative problem-solving. The research lends empirical grounds for recommending the concrete reform of school governance and the implementation of more constructive models of discipline