Public vs. Private: A Demographic Analysis of Juveniles Residential Facilities

Every day, kids across the country find themselves in front of judges facing criminal charges.  These judges make decisions on where to remand kids: oftentimes choosing between public and private correctional facilities.  These decisions have profound impacts on a kid’s life—and they may be the difference between rehabilitation and continued criminal behavior.  The ability to compare the effectiveness of corrections facilities, especially publicly and privately operated facilities, is crucial for understanding the best means of rehabilitation.

However, there is a scarcity of research comparing public and private corrections facilities. We found in our analyses that much of the available criminal justice research fails to account for spurious relationships and misattributes some variables that should have been properly controlled for.  Research indicating that “women are less likely to commit violent crime” or “Black youths recidivate at a higher rate than their white peers” serves to further stereotypes, which is already a key area of concern for justice systems.

Our research aims to provide a starting point for future analyses of public and private juvenile facilities.  We examine why there is a scarcity of research comparing public and private corrections facilities and compare public and private juvenile residential facilities using publicly available time-series data.  Additionally, we use time-series data from 1997-2019 to assess race, gender, and most-severe offense type committed by juveniles held in a variety of facilities.  In our analyses, we find a few key differences in public and private juvenile facility populations.

Primarily, we found that status offenders were the only offense type with more juveniles incarcerated privately than publicly.  Status offenses include truancy, curfew violations, and age-related offenses like buying tobacco or alcohol under the legal age.  Further, youths who were detained for criminal homicide were far more likely to be incarcerated publicly than most other offense types, with overall public incarceration 167.6% percent higher than the privately held rate.  This may indicate that private facilities take easier-to-manage cases, requiring fewer resources.  This might allow facilities to maximize profits due to less-intensive resource demands and perhaps decreased likelihood of juvenile violence within private facilities.

Secondly, we found gender differences in public and privately held youths are minimal, although we do see a slight increase in male populations in public facilities and a similar decrease in private facilities for offenders between 2015 and 2019.  Females made up a much smaller percentage of incarcerated youths, between 4.7 and 5.2% of the total detained population each year.

Our analysis of racial and ethnic demographics in public and private facilities found that the overall demographic makeup of facilities remained relatively consistent from 1997-2019; with a slight overall decline in white populations and an increase in detained Hispanic populations as a percentage of total youth per year.  White and Hispanic percentages spiked in privately housed youths in 2013.  In the same year, the percentage of black publicly held youths dropped but spiked again in 2015.  White public and private percentages moved similarly up until that point.  The percentage of Hispanic incarcerated juveniles spiked similarly in 2013 and declined (at a higher rate in private facilities) every year following.  For white youths, private incarceration continued to decline, although public incarceration increased at a higher rate than the decline.  Black private incarceration declined rapidly after 2015, with public incarceration increasing at a relatively steady rate.

Overall, these differences should raise concerns for any research comparing public and private facilities.  The differences in offense type and race are especially notable; with private facilities more likely to house less resource-intense cases.  This topic demands further research; especially into whatever caused the spike in Hispanic and white juvenile incarceration in 2013.  Further, as long as private facilities are in operation, we should have a means and method of systematically comparing outcomes, not just for policymaking and research purposes, but for the further development of our youth.

Dorothy Reinhard is a graduating senior at Indiana University studying Public Policy Analysis and International Studies with a Certificate of Applied Research and Inquiry.