When David Muhammad was 15, his mother moved from Oakland, Calif., to Philadelphia with her boyfriend, leaving Muhammad in the care of his brothers, ages 20 and 21, both of whom were involved in the drug scene. Over the next two years, Muhammad was arrested three times — for selling drugs, attempted murder and illegal gun possession.For Muhammad, life turned around. He wound up graduating from Howard University, running a nonprofit in Oakland called the Mentoring Center and serving in the leadership of the District of Columbia’s Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services. Then he returned to Oakland for a two-year stint as chief probation officer for Alameda County, in the same system that once supervised him.Muhammad’s unlikely elevation came during a remarkable, if largely overlooked, era in the history of America’s juvenile justice system. Between 2000 and 2020, the number of young people incarcerated in the United States declined by an astonishing 77 percent. Can that progress be sustained — or is America about to reverse course and embark on another juvenile incarceration binge? Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: What is the history of youth incarceration in America?
An American story that we all know and that I've lived for a lot of my life is the story of rising incarceration. The United States prides itself on being a nation of freedom and liberty. And yet, we have the biggest prison system in the history of the world. And for many decades, that system was just growing and growing, including when it came to young people.
But what if there was a disruption in that narrative? What if the story changed? My name is James Forman, Jr. I'm a law professor at Yale University and a contributor to the New York Times Magazine. I became a public defender in the middle of this hyper-punitive era. For six years, I represented young people in the juvenile and adult court systems.
This was Washington DC in the 1990s, when people were talking about locking up more of everybody. More young people were being charged as adults and even being sent to death row. The mantra of the day was, if you're old enough to do the crime, you're old enough to do the time. As a defense lawyer, I was in the courtroom every day arguing for alternatives to prison for my clients.
I would point to job training programs and mentoring programs, afterschool tutoring and mental health treatment. And the judge sitting across from me would often say things like, well, counselor, I understand that your client has had a challenging life, but part of what I have to do is send your client a message. So I'm gonna give him a month or two months behind bars.
I could see that these judges were telling themselves a story, which was that a relatively short amount of time behind bars would be a wake-up call. In their mind, they were helping these kids. And even though I was sure they were wrong, I didn't really have the evidence to prove it. But then this astonishing pattern started to emerge.
I remember getting an email two years ago from a nonprofit called The Sentencing Project, which publishes data on youth incarceration. And the graph I saw in their email was so stunning that I printed it out. And literally, I wrote on the top, there's a story here right about this.
This graph showed that we're locking up fewer young people than we did even in the 1970s, when the era that we call mass incarceration really began. And what's so wild is that from 2000 to 2020, the number of young people behind bars dropped by 77%. Picture a room, there's a hundred people in the room, And then imagine that we take 77 of them out. So there's just 23 people left.
That's the decline. And it's a massive change on its own. But if you say to someone, wow, we stopped blocking up so many young people, their first reaction might be, well, didn't crime go up? And the reality is that crime actually declined during this period just as rapidly as the incarceration rate. So I called up my editor at the magazine and I said, how is this possible?
And how is it possible that everyone is not talking about it? I went on a quest to find the answers. And you'll hear about them in this week's Sunday Read. It's an article I wrote for the magazine. And what really stood out to me is this. We know that even a month or two behind bars has terrible consequences for teenagers.
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Chapter 2: Who is James Forman, Jr. and what did he discover?
The situation began to change in the early 2000s as lawyers and journalists exposed horrific abuses in the system. In 2003, the California-based prison law office sued the state over conditions in its juvenile facilities. In early 2004, a series of expert reports documented rampant violence and cruelty. One item in particular caught the attention of local and national media.
Custom-built individual cages where youth deemed violent received their school lessons. An attorney for California's Youth Law Center told the Los Angeles Times that the cages made her think of Barnum and Bailey tiger cages and dog kennels. A clergyman at one of the facilities called them demonic.
Two months after pictures of the cages came to light, video footage from a facility in Stockton showed counselors kneeling on the backs and necks of prisoners, beating and kicking the motionless young people. Six months later, the San Jose Mercury News published a multi-part exposé revealing that youth were regularly tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, and forced into solitary confinement.
While conditions in California's juvenile facilities were especially egregious, that state wasn't the only one to mistreat incarcerated youth. Texas's juvenile justice system was rocked by scandal in 2007 as revelations of sexual abuse and cover-ups led to the resignation of the board of directors of the Texas Youth Commission.
In New York in 2009, a federal investigation revealed that excessive force by guards had left youth with concussions, broken teeth, and fractured bones. By 2011, an influential Annie E. Casey Foundation report, No Place for Kids, revealed that violence and abuse had been documented in the juvenile facilities of 39 states.
As David Muhammad recalls those years, expose after expose piled up to prove to the public what many insiders already knew. The biggest recidivists in the system were the institutions. Alongside revelations of abuse came evidence of just how much money was being spent on juvenile prisons.
In 2008, the American Correctional Association estimated that it cost, on average, $88,000 a year to incarcerate a young person. Some states spent much more than that. Costs in California, for example, exceeded $250,000 a year. State funding for K-12 education, by contrast, was roughly $11,000 per student.
States might have been willing to tolerate such outlays when coffers were flush, but these figures came to light during the Great Recession of the late 2000s, causing more states to doubt the merits of lavishly funding abusive prisons. Proving that juvenile prisons were violent and expensive won some allies to the cause of closing them. But by itself, it wouldn't have been enough.
After all, adult prisons are also violent and expensive, yet it has been extraordinarily difficult to close them. During the same period in which the juvenile prison system shrank by 75%, the adult prison population fell by only 12%. Prison is deeply rooted in the American consciousness. As Angela Y. Davis has written, we treat it as an inevitable fact of life, like birth and death.
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