While the JJPDA celebrates 45 years of achievement for juvenile justice reform, serious questions and challenges remain.
Wendy Sawyer (2018) of the Prison Policy Initiative reports that
On any given day, nearly 53,000 youth are held in facilities away from home as a result of juvenile or criminal justice involvement. Nearly one in ten is held in an adult jail or prison. . Thousands of youths are held before they’ve been found delinquent, many for non-violent, low-level offenses — even for behaviors that aren’t criminal violations.
Black and American Indian youth continue to be overrepresented in juvenile facilities, while white youth are underrepresented. While just 14% of all youth under 18 in the U.S. are Black, 43% of boys and 34% of girls in juvenile facilities are Black.
More than 9,000 youths in juvenile facilities — or 1 in 5 — haven’t even been found guilty or delinquent, and are locked up awaiting trial (that is, a hearing). Another 6,500 are detained awaiting disposition (sentencing) or placement. nearly 900 youths are locked in long-term secure facilities — essentially prisons — without even having been committed. Of those, only a third are accused of violent offenses.
over 4,000 youths are detained for technical violations of probation conditions or for status offenses, which are “behaviors that are not law violations for adults.”
Youth that are transferred to the adult system, meanwhile, can be subject to pretrial detention if their family or friends cannot afford bail. As a result, they may be jailed in adult facilities for weeks ,months or longer without even being convicted.
Like so many adults who are unnecessarily detained in jails, thousands of justice-involved children and adolescents languish in detention centers without even being found delinquent. They, too, are locked up in large numbers for low-level, non-violent offenses. And many youth face similarly dehumanizing conditions when they are locked up in juvenile facilities that look and feel like adult jails and prisons. For advocates and policymakers working to find alternatives to incarceration, ending youth confinement should be a top priority.
Recommendations include:
Ending the prosecution of youth as adults;
Removing all youth from adult jails and prisons;
Investing in non-residential community-based programs;
Limiting pretrial detention and youth confinement to the very few who, if released, would pose a clear risk to public safety;
Eliminating detention or residential placement for technical violations of probation and
Diverting status offenses away from the juvenile justice system;
Choices Interlinking 
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