Public Safety and Youth Offenders
Policymakers have long explored how best to achieve the objectives of avoiding unnecessary youth involvement in the criminal justice system, ensuring public safety and reducing recidivism. This effort has included an ongoing debate on the necessary and appropriate number of youth detention beds to detain youth offenders while they are awaiting trial. Conflicting opinions on this number has arisen in part due to the “mixed messages” of the data. The number of crimes committed by youth has decreased in Colorado while the severity of those offenses has increased.
At the Institute of Evidence-based Policymaking, we have examined this difficult and complex issue to look at the most effective, evidence-based approaches to juvenile detention.
Colorado has taken several actions to reduce the number of juvenile detentions, including updating detention screening and admissions criteria to be more evidence-based. Another measure Colorado has taken, which is unique among states, is setting a numeric cap on how many juvenile offenders can be detained at any given time in the state. From 2003 to 2021, Colorado lowered the juvenile detention bed cap in incremental steps from 479 to 215. Beds for youth detainees are managed by region and excessive capacity is one region is typically not available to another region.
Despite these efforts, Colorado has seen an increase in demand for detention beds. This has been driven by a number of factors, including an increase in the severity of crimes committed by youth under 18, higher occurrences of mental and substance abuse disorders among offenders, and limited number of spots for residential treatment facilities.
Over the past decade in Colorado, the total juvenile crime rate has decreased by 24% while juvenile violent crime has increased by 30%. Community-based programs to combat youth violence combined with the increasing use of diversion programs to keep youth out of the justice system have contributed to the overall decline. Still, violent crime among the under 18 population is on the rise.
Of the juveniles committed to detention in state fiscal year 2023-2024, 41% were arrested for a violent crime, an increase from 29% from 2019. Many of these violent crimes now involve guns. In Colorado, 8.7% of crimes committed by juveniles involved the use of a firearm in 2024, up from 5.1% in 2019. The increase in the use of guns has coincided with almost a doubling in the murder rate among the under 18 population over that same period.
It is predominantly this severity of crime that has led to Colorado’s youth detention centers hitting their bed caps in recent years. Juveniles can be detained when they are deemed to be a threat to public safety or if there is a potential they will fail to appear in court. Over the last three years, an estimated two-thirds of all detainees were arrested on felony charges.
Data in one judicial district, as an example, show that 44% of the current youth detainees are being held on murder charges and 89% for violent crimes. While not every district or detention facility may resemble this one, this provides a glimpse of the broader data on increased severity of crimes by youth.
Instead of setting a fixed bed cap for youth detention centers, a better approach would be a flexible cap that can be set through a formula. A floating cap could be set at 85% capacity to ensure safe staffing levels are available each year. The formula can be based on an evaluation of juvenile crime data and detention bed use, strain, and maximum counts that is completed annually to determine what percentage capacity each judicial district and the state are operating at and how that compares to arrests and the severity of crimes committed. This formula can be applied to determine the number of beds needed in each region, and that those numbers can be summed up to determine the total number statewide.
Deploying a flexible, data-driven rather than rigid approach to the maximum number of youth that law enforcement can detain, combined with improving the capacity at residential treatment facilities, can serve the interests of public safety and the future potential for Colorado’s youth.
Meredith Moon and Shepard Nevel are Research Director and CEO, respectively, of the Institute of Evidence-based Policymaking. For a more detailed examination of this issue, see the Institute’s report, Youth Detention Bed Caps.
