Youth incarceration in the United States
Open-knowledge reference entry
The United States incarcerates more of its youth than any other country in the world, through the juvenile courts and the adult criminal justice system, which reflects the larger trends in incarceration practices in the United States. In 2010, approximately 70,800 juveniles were incarcerated in youth detention facilities alone. As of 2006, approximately 500,000 youth were brought to detention centers in a given year. This data does not reflect juveniles tried as adults. As of 2013, around 40% were incarcerated in privatized, for-profit facilities.
The Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act
The system that is currently operational in the United States was created under the 1974 Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act.
The Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act called for a "deinstitutionalization" of juvenile delinquents. The act required that states holding youth within adult prisons for status offenses remove them within a span of two years (this timeframe was adjusted over time). The act also provided program grants to states, based on their youth populations, and created the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP).
Through reauthorization amendments, additional programs have been added to the original Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q8059312. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2010, 2006, 2013 and 1974.
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