2025/5/22 CRETA Seminar - Brief Juvenile Detentions: Effects on Recidivism among Low-Risk Youths

Title：

2025/5/22 CRETA Seminar - Brief Juvenile Detentions: Effects on Recidivism among Low-Risk Youths

Introduction：

Many youths accused of delinquent conduct are detained as their cases progress through juvenile courts. In principle, detention should be reserved for youths who are at risk of endangering themselves or others. Nevertheless, low-risk youths are often detained for brief periods of time at law enforcement officers’ discretion following their arrests. To study the effect of these detentions, we use a decade of detailed administrative data for all initial detention decisions made in one of the largest counties in the US. Using a matching design with double/debiased machine learning, we find that detentions of low-risk youths lead to a sizeable increase in the likelihood of rearrest. The effects are concentrated on youths arrested for non-violent, less serious offenses, and are unrelated to the amount of time spent in detention. We quantify the sensitivity of our results to violations of the unconfoundedness assumption using the partial identification method of Masten et al. (2023), and results show that our estimates are robust to plausible levels of violations of unconfoundedness

About speaker：

https://kuan-chen.github.io/