Leading With Race to Reimagine Youth Justice

This report explores the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Deep-End Initiative, which is helping juvenile justice jurisdictions safely and significantly reduce youth confinement — especially for young people of color.

In America today, youth of color are consistently overrepresented in courtrooms and detention centers, youth prisons and other residential institutions. This disparity is most extreme for youth in court-ordered institutions — often called the “deep end” of the system — and for youth transferred from juvenile to adult criminal courts.

Casey’s deep-end effort spans 12 demonstration sites across the United States. It employs intentional, data-driven strategies that move systems toward equity and specifically focus on youth of color. As part of this work, sites engage community organizations and community members to increase opportunities for young people of color in their own neighborhoods.

This document shares the initiative’s early results — and they’re encouraging. From their baseline years to 2018, participating sites collectively reduced out-of-home placements by 50% for all youth and 51% for African-American youth. During this same time frame, juvenile crime rates improved.