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25 Crim. Behav. & Mental Health 1 (2015)

handle is hein.journals/cbmh25 and id is 1 raw text is: Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health 25: 1-9 (2015) Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/cbm.1946 The incarceration of seriously traumatised adolescents in the USA: Limited progress and significant harm CHRISTOPHER A. MALLETT, Cleveland State University's School of Social Work, Cleveland, OH, USA The incarceration of young offenders in the USA poses serious problems for the juvenile justice system (Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2012; Mallett, 2013). While recent reforms, state budgetary difficulties and litigation concerning unconstitutional care and dangerous facilities have reduced the number of incarcerations over the past decade, upwards of 70,000 adolescents are still confined each day in juvenile facilities, with an additional 10,000 in adult jails and prisons, many times more per capita than any other country (National Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Coalition, 2013). The most common placement - for up to 40% of these adolescents - is a locked, long-term state or privately contracted prison-like facility that holds hundreds of young offenders at any one time and provides minimal rehabilitative services (Sickmund, 2010; Mendel, 2012). The pace of incarceration reform in the USA remains geographically disparate. While some jurisdictions and states have made significant reductions in their incarceration rates (California, Texas, Ohio, Alabama and Connecticut), many others have not (Hockenberry et al., 2011). Certain groups - including judges, advocates and reformers - deserve substantial credit for moving the juvenile justice paradigm away from punishment and toward rehabilitation, and yet, while the number of young offender incarcerations has been declining over the past decade, the rate of incarceration per arrest has been rising (National Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Coalition, 2013). As a result, some postulate that the fall in incarcerations is more because of falling crime rates among the young than because of system reforms (Butts, 2013). It is unlikely, though, that falling crime rates fully account for the changes. Copyright t 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 25: 1-9 (2015) DOI: 10.1002/cbm