Juvenile incarceration yields less schooling, more crime

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-06/miot-sji060915.php

Public Release: 9-Jun-2015
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Teenagers who are incarcerated tend to have substantially worse outcomes later in life than those who avoid serving time for similar offenses, according to a distinctive new study co-authored by an MIT scholar.

"We find that kids who go into juvenile detention are much less likely to graduate from high school and much more likely to end up in prison as adults," says Joseph Doyle, an economist at the MIT Sloan School of Management and co-author of a new paper detailing the results of the study.

Indeed, the research project, which studied the long-term outcomes of tens of thousands of teenagers in Illinois, shows that, other things being equal, juvenile incarceration lowers high-school graduation rates by 13 percentage points and increases adult incarceration by 23 percentage points.

A key to the study is that it uses the variation in judges' sentencing tendencies to analyze a large pool of otherwise similar teenagers, thus isolating the effects of the sentences on the kids in question.

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"Some judges are more likely to have children placed in juvenile detention than others, but it's effectively random which judge you get," Doyle explains. "Some kids get a judge who will place them in juvenile detention, other ones get a judge who will be less likely to do so, and comparing the outcomes of the kids across the judges, we can actually say what the causal outcome is of placing the kids in juvenile detention."

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"The kids who go to juvenile detention are very unlikely to go back to school at all," Doyle explains. He adds that the later problems people have may also stem from the time spent incarcerated: "Getting to know other kids in trouble may create social networks that might not be desirable. There could be a stigma attached to it, maybe you think you're particularly problematic, so that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy."
[Maybe abusive treatment by guards and other inmates damages these young people, making them angry and/or defeated.]

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