New report, Youth Confinement: The Whole Pie 2025, shows racial disparities in youth confinement worsening as total numbers go down

New report explains how many system-involved youth are confined, where they are held, under what conditions, and for what offenses.

A new Prison Policy Initiative report provides the most up-to-date picture of how many youth are detained and committed in the U.S., highlighting the persistent overincarceration of Black and Indigenous youth in a system that, in recent decades, has made great strides in reducing youth confinement overall. Youth Confinement: The Whole Pie 2025 explores the conditions facing 31,900 kids today — most of whom are held in youth prisons and jails — and offers data on youth confinement by offense type in all 50 states.

Over the past 25 years, the number of youth in confinement in the U.S. has fallen by more than 70 percent — impressive progress compared to the adult criminal legal system, whose populations have changed very little overall in that same period. Nevertheless, the U.S. still confines youth at a rate more than twice the global average, and its juvenile legal system mirrors the adult system in many alarming ways:

• Severe racial disparities. 47% of boys and 39% of girls in juvenile facilities are Black — a level of disparity that has actually worsened in recent years. And even excluding youth held in Indian country facilities, Indigenous children make up 3% of girls and 2% of boys in juvenile facilities, despite comprising less than 1% of all youth nationally.
• Large numbers of youth held pretrial or for minor offenses. Nearly 9,000 youth today are locked up before they’ve had a trial, and thousands are in detention for minor, low-level offenses. Select states — such as Indiana, which accounts for almost one-quarter of kids locked up for running away; and Texas and California, which hold 26% of kids confined for technical violations of parole — contribute heavily to this problem.
• Prison-like conditions. While the number of kids in large facilities (holding 100 youth or more) has fallen steeply in the last few years, nearly 4 out of every 5 confined kids are held in youth or adult prisons and jails — an increase since 2017, when 65% of confined youth were held in such places.

“States have made astonishing progress in the last 25 years in reducing youth incarceration, but the fact remains that prisons and jails are not places for kids,” said report author Brian Nam-Sonenstein. “Confinement is still a traumatizing experience for youth — most of whom already have histories of trauma — and one that leaves them worse off than before their incarceration.”

Youth Confinement: The Whole Pie 2025 includes a first-of-its-kind, 50-state table showing the number of youth confined for various types of offenses, shining particular light on “status offenses” (behaviors that are not law violations for adults). Other key features of the report include:

• Sidebars breaking down the different types of youth confinement facilities, and terminology around youth incarceration that differs from the adult system;
• Infographics “zooming in” on certain slices of the pie, such as youth held for low-level offenses and youth in highly restrictive facilities;
• A section highlighting some of the reforms that have led to a more than 70% drop in confined youth populations, and noting how these same reforms could be applied to the adult criminal legal system.

“Disturbingly, some states today are threatening to double down on failed policies that created the youth confinement crisis in the first place,” Nam-Sonenstein said. “Seeing the full picture of this system should remove any doubt that it casts far too wide a net, one that disproportionately ensnares Black and brown youth. State policymakers would do well to emulate the reforms that have shrunk this system and apply these lessons to adult prisons and jails.”

The full report is available here: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/youth2025.html