Kids get into trouble. Some kids get into a lot of major trouble. They know right from wrong, but commit crimes anyway. So what to do with them? We want to be fair to these children by giving them the best shot at succeeding. Their success is ours, too. Stopping their crime will make all of us safer.
But as it is, our juvenile-justice system operates like a bike that can’t get out of first gear. That gear being incarceration. But is that right answer?
You may be wondering just how bad the situation is. So a few kids get sent away, big deal. But take a step back. Without question, incarcerating youth costs too much and makes them more likely to commit future crimes. Wouldn’t it make more sense to switch gears.
Provide drug treatment, mental-health services, job training. And very importantly, give parents and caregivers the tools to change their children’s behavior. 
Take a look at this infographic that shows the costs of youth incarceration. Sometimes seeing makes it easier to believe. Going state by state, it’s pretty staggering how many juveniles end up in facilities and the price tag associated with putting them there.
The number of adolescents locked up runs from 9,810 in California to 1,254 in Colorado. And the cost? That parses out to $88,000 per offender. The U.S. spends on average $10,259 a year to educate our children and $6 billion on juvenile corrections. There is something definitely wrong with this picture.
Our incarceration rate looks pretty dismal when compared with other industrialized countries. For every 100,000 youths, 336 end up in jail. Compare that with South Africa’s 69, the Netherlands’ 51, England and Wales’ 47. Are American adolescents really that more prone to crime or is there something amiss with our system?
Want another eye-opening stat? Pick a day, any day and more than likely, 60,000 youths would have been incarcerated. Every year, 1,470,000 adolescents are arrested in the U.S. Eighty-nine percent are sent to jail for non-violent offenses. Sometimes it will be for repeated truancy or breaking curfew.
Putting kids in jail does not address the root causes of crime. Indeed, putting them in with other offenders can lead to learning new ways to break the law.
Multisystemic Therapy (MST) is an alternative to youth incareration.It has been proven to break the cycle of criminal behavior by keeping youths at home, in their schools and communities—and out of trouble. All this while saving money. A study found that using MST reduced the cost of crime by $35,582 per juvenile offender.
To learn more about how MST improves outcomes and saves taxpayer money, download this white paper.
