High Price

operate than alternatives that are actually more effective. It’s not just my experience—or that of our last three presidents—that suggests that avoiding the justice system produces better outcomes. This is clear from multiple studies.
    This data shows that teens who are either not caught or are given noncustodial sentences for their crimes do much better in terms of employment, education, and reduced recidivism than those who are incarcerated or otherwise removed from the community and grouped with criminals.
    One large American study examined the cases of nearly one hundred thousand teens who had their first contact with the juvenile justice system between 1990 and 2005. Fifty-seven percent of these youths were black; the overwhelming majority were male and their average age was fifteen. Most had been arrested either for drug crimes or for assault; all were studied at the time of their first offense.
    The researchers found that, regardless of the severity of the initial offense, teens who were incarcerated were three times more likely to be reincarcerated as adults 1 compared with those not incarcerated for similar offenses. Being locked up hadn’t deterred them; rather, it had forced them to spend time with criminals, had possibly taught them more about how to commit different types of crime, and ultimately set them up to be reincarcerated.
    Similarly, Canadian researchers conducted a large-scale, carefully controlled study in which 779 low-income youth in Montreal were followed from ages ten to seventeen; they were interviewed as well as their parents and teachers. Years later, researchers examined their criminal records and found that those who had received any kind of custodial sentence as teens were thirty-seven times more likely to be arrested in adulthood than their peers who had committed similar crimes but were not incarcerated during adolescence. 2
    The data from the above studies and others clearly shows that segregating troubled teens together in settings where there are no parents and few peers aiming for athletic or academic success tends to make their criminal behavior worse. 3 Both being labeled as a “bad kid” and hanging out with peers who feel that their only source of manhood and identity is engaging in criminal behavior significantly increase risk for future crime. Social influences like incarceration during youth predict adult crime far more strongly than anything we’ve been able to identify so far related to biological factors like dopamine in the brain.
    Moreover, because black youth are more than twice as likely to be arrested as whites, 4 the negative effects of juvenile prison have a disproportionate effect on our community. (For drug offenses, the inequities are even more glaring: drug cases are filed against black youth at a rate almost five times greater than for white youth, even though more white youth, 17 percent, report having sold drugs than blacks do, 13 percent.) 5 While these facts are discouraging because they show how big the problem is, they also suggest that a clear solution is minimizing juvenile incarceration rates.
    The lives of my friends, neighbors, and relatives showed this contrast clearly. Those who managed to avoid contact with the system, as I was, were much more likely to make it out of the hood and into the mainstream. Meanwhile, many of those who got caught never recovered, even if the first offense was truly minor. That one incident would lead to increased scrutiny and then further arrests—or the exposure to juvenile detention or other incarceration would harden a criminal identity and/or connect people to those involved in more serious crime. It was as though a pebble had set off a rock slide. A small event produced a chain of devastating consequences, forever altering a life course.
    One of the saddest examples of this in my life is the story of my cousin Louie. The math whiz pitcher with whom I’d shared a bed at Big Mama’s had been an honors student when his mother switched him from one high school to another. Once he got there, the small, skinny kid felt that he had to prove he was down with a new set of friends.
    Shortly after his school transfer, Louie was picked up by the police for truancy or some other trivial, nonviolent offense. For that he was sent to juvenile detention at fifteen; the few months he spent inside hardened him and gave him the reputation he’d been seeking, rather than serving as any kind of deterrent. Having