Speaker 1: On any given night in America, nearly 50,000 youth under the age of 18 are confined in facilities away from home, two-thirds of which are in correctional-style facilities. According to the non-profit Prison Policy Initiative, this number has decreased over the last 20 years. But the United States still incarcerates the most children in the world. Sarah Hanger is a senior staff attorney with the ACLU's racial justice program.

Speaker 2: The United States far outpaces other countries in detaining and otherwise criminalizing young people. And that has, again, similar to the adult system, a disparate impact on youth of color who are disproportionately represented in contact with the criminal justice system.

Speaker 1: But why is that? And why are so many youths arrested in the first place? Michael Corriero is a former New York State Supreme Court justice.

Speaker 3: At the turn of the 19th century, we created the world's first juvenile justice system. The idea behind that was that as a society, we had a moral obligation to recognize the developmental differences of children as compared to adults.

Speaker 1: But the idea of rehabilitation through the prison system isn't working. In 2012, the Department of Justice began tracking formerly incarcerated people of all ages. The latest report, released in July, found that of individuals arrested at age 17 or younger, 71 percent had been rearrested within three years of their release. That number climbed to 80 percent by year five. The impact on an adolescent's access to education is part of the issue. In 2015, the Council of State Governments found one in three incarcerated youth were either receiving or needed special education services. The report also found more than half of incarcerated youth were behind grade level in reading and math, and around 60 percent had repeated a grade. The educational obstacles after prison begin before the first arrest, says Hanger, when school disciplinarians initially put a child in contact with the justice system.

Speaker 2: The school-to-prison pipeline refers to the process whereby school systems address young people through discipline and criminalization and effectively place them on a pipeline to continuing and more extensive contact with the justice system.

Speaker 1: And that can cause long-term harm.

Speaker 2: It ends up undermining any sort of positive modeling or reinforcement. It further removes the child's attachment to school, alienating them and pushing them forward towards more negative influences.

Speaker 1: And even if an adolescent is innocent when arrested, the length of time required to post bail could lead to a suspension or expulsion from school.

Speaker 3: So if a young person came into the system and bail was set and they were unable to make bail for two weeks or so, or someone was willing to put up their bail, that young person's education would be disrupted to the extent that very often they were not permitted back into the very schools that they were attending while they were arrested.

Speaker 1: Children do attend school while incarcerated, and according to a 2013 Justice Department report, inmates of any age who participate in correctional education programs have 43 percent lower odds of returning to prison than those who do not. But the negative effects of traveling through the justice system and falling behind in school can follow youth well beyond their release. Formerly incarcerated people are twice as likely not to have a high school diploma. Their unemployment rate? 27 percent. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, when children are pushed away from education and into the justice system, it leaves them unable to compete in a job market that needs skilled workers. This is especially true if the individual did not receive youthful offender status. That status, Corriero says, means they could

Speaker 3: come out of this experience without a permanent criminal record, which is so crucial and important for young people in terms of their capacity to eventually enter into the adult world, if you will, with a clear slate in terms of opportunity.

Speaker 1: This is what drove Judge Corriero and his colleagues to set up and preside over the Manhattan Youth Park, a court exclusively designed to deal with the cases of kids between 13 and 15 and their co-defendants to channel youth cases to alternatives to incarceration programs.

Speaker 3: Those who sat in that park were expected to understand the vicissitudes of adolescence. We're expected to develop an interactive relationship, if you will, with the young people that appeared before. And what we tried to do was to develop a process that helped us to channel out of the system those children that we thought we could work with by linking them to alternative to incarceration programs.

Speaker 1: The youth park eventually became a model for mobilizing social services for young people under a judge's watch because, Corriero says,

Speaker 3: The dominant policy behind prosecuting children should be that of rehabilitation and not a punitive one.

Speaker 2: Young people are going through a period of cognitive development, which means not only are they likely to change and mature out of any challenging or problematic behavior, but also that as a product of where they are in life, their reasoning and decision-making skills are different and they need different things. Youth are just not primed to respond as well to punitive consequences and punishments or negative incentives.

Speaker 1: Instead, Hinger argues the key is to hold youth responsible for their behavior outside of the prison system if possible, to stop the negative impacts on education and recidivism before they start.

Speaker 2: When effective interventions are made, there are dramatic reductions in negative consequences and problem behaviors.

Speaker 1: For the PBS NewsHour, I'm Tim McPhillips.