Data on incarcerated juveniles help to highlight the racial disparities in Louisiana's youth justice system

According to this report, despite a marked decrease in youth crime rates over the past 20 years, Louisiana’s youth justice system is geared toward punishment instead of rehabilitation and has been since the 1990’s when the “super predator” myth was prevalent. The report highlights the disproportionate impact that this stance has on Black youth in Louisiana. A de facto “school-to-prison pipeline” has become entrenched. The increased presence of security officers in schools has led to disproportionate over policing of Black students, with high rates of punitive discipline, diverting them from the educational system into the justice system due to school arrests. The report goes on to describe how once in the justice system, Black youth are less likely to be seen as children in need of rehabilitation, and so are less likely to receive opportunities for restorative justice instead of punishment. The report then details the harms and costs associated with youth incarceration, including solitary confinement, physical and sexual abuse, disrupted education, high recidivism rates, and fiscal waste.

The statistics used to underlie the report were acquired from various sources, including the Louisiana Commission on Law Enforcement, the State of Louisiana Office of Juvenile Justice, and the US Department of Justice. From the US Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), the authors accessed data captured in the Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement (CJRP), which has been conducted every other year since 1997. The CJRP asks juvenile residential custody facilities in the United States to describe all youth assigned a bed in the facility on a specified reference date. Information on each juvenile includes placement (e.g. placing agency), the judicial process (e.g. court adjudication status), and demographics (e.g. age). Each record that provides information about a juvenile also includes information about institutional characteristics (e.g. facility type, use of locked doors or gates), treatment services, and population of the facility in which the juvenile was held. Therefore, CJRP data can be analyzed at the individual or facility level. For this report, the author used CJRP data to describe the racial demographics of Louisiana’s incarcerated youth by offense in the year 2019. (The National Archive of Criminal Justice on Data distributes CJRP studies for the years 1997 to 2017, and will be receiving the 2019 data from OJJDP this year.) Those data show that Black youth are disproportionately confined for status offenses, drug offenses and technical violations–all of which are mostly nonviolent and for which the report advocates that custody should not be an option.

The report closes by presenting policy recommendations for reform, such as raising the minimum age of juvenile incarceration, investing in community-based alternatives, and banning the practice of incarcerating youth in adult facilities. One reason for this report’s urgent call for reform is that last year the state’s governor authorized transferring youth prisoners to the Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola. It is one of the most notorious adult prisons in the country, known for human rights abuses, including the overuse of solitary confinement. According to the evidence provided in this report, extreme policies like this one, in addition to the many others that prop up such a punitive system, do great harm, most often to Black youth.