Overly punitive policing can undermine a sense of control and belonging in a community, and a criminal conviction can limit future economic opportunities. Increased police visibility increases the fear of crime and decreases confidence that the police can control crime. Concentrated police presence, surveillance, and extensive enforcement of minor violations of the law are common in neighborhoods with higher levels of reported crime, and these in turn result in greater exposure to police contact and arrest for people living in those neighborhoods and a greater resultant possibility of their incarceration. These factors have also been shown to decrease engagement with surveilling institutions (e.g., schools and hospitals) and to lower civic engagement. This type of contact has immediate negative effects for youth. Juvenile arrests and police stops of juveniles are risk factors for criminal behavior and for further and deeper involvement in the justice system. Deeper involvement in the justice system in turn leads to increasingly negative effects on socioeconomic status and is a mechanism for downward mobility. At the community level, incarceration rates are associated with lower income mobility. This is in part because of intergenerational effects: parental incarceration adversely affects the transition to adulthood in several ways. Finally, many residents in heavily policed neighborhoods have low levels of trust in the police, believe that race and ethnicity affect the police’s treatment of people, and do not believe police are responsive to the concerns and most pressing issues facing their communities.
Metric: Rate of juvenile justice arrests
The FBI’s UCR Program provides statistics on the number of arrests of people under age 18. Because individuals can be arrested several times, the data reports the number of arrests rather than the number of individuals arrested. The metric is for arrests of juveniles ages 10 to 17 for any crime, but the data can be broken down by offense type. Arrest rates can be calculated using population data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.
Validity: Although arrest behavior of the total population may be confounded by many factors, arrests among juvenile offenders can be more closely tied to overly punitive policing behavior. Research finds that after controlling for suspect race, gender, seriousness of offense, and amount of evidence, juveniles are more likely to be arrested than adult suspects. Research also finds large and disruptive impacts on adult outcomes: juvenile detention is associated with lower educational attainment, lower rates of employment, and higher rates of criminal offending and incarceration as an adult.
Availability: Arrest data are available in jurisdictions that report to the UCR Program and are available through the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer tool. The data are available for most jurisdictions across the United States (see the exposure to crime metric for more detail).
Frequency: Juvenile arrest data are available annually through the FBI Crime Data Explorer. Arrest data before 2014 can be found on the Bureau of Justice Statistics Arrest Data tool.
Geography: The UCR data are available at the agency level and city level and can be aggregated to the county level, dependent on availability of relevant agency data.
Consistency: The FBI advises caution when using UCR data to rank or compare locales because many factors can cause the nature and type of crime to vary by place. The FBI consistently defines juveniles as under age 18 regardless of a state’s definition. Data may be accumulated and compiled differently at the local level.
Subgroups: This metric necessarily measures people within a particular age group but also provides data on age subgroups (e.g., 10–12, 13–15, and 16–17) as well as by race or ethnicity and gender.
Limitations: Reporting to the UCR Program is not mandatory, and although most jurisdictions do so, the program does not capture the universe of reported index crimes across the United States. These data also do not capture any punitive interactions with school resource officers that do not get elevated to the level of arrest (such as being temporarily detained or being removed or suspended from school). As a place-based metric, reported crime is affected by mobility in and out of the jurisdiction, and because the metric is a rate, large increases or declines in the number of juveniles in an area could also affect it.
