‘This is not a good trajectory': Juvenile detention reaches highest level since 2018, prompting warning from youth advocates

Boston Globe

27-04-2025

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'This is not a good trajectory,' said Leon Smith, executive director of the Boston-based advocacy group Citizens for Juvenile Justice. 'I remember growing up [at a time] when every fight on the playground was not considered a police matter.'
The harsh approach of the 1990s had a profound effect on area youth and their families, according to advocates, researchers, and personal accounts. Worcester native Jinazean Ball was in fourth grade the first time he was locked up, his mother, Alice Ball, said in an interview. Jinazean Ball, now 37 years old, spent hours in a holding cell after a scuffle with a classmate, until his mom could leave work to pick up him.
'That's something he never got over,' she told the Globe. 'It really messed up his head.'
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The Balls told their story in a
Ball was found guilty of simple assault on his classmate and ordered to complete weekly drug tests — from ages 10 to 15.
'That was a rough moment in our life right there,' Alice Ball said.
Jinazean Ball got a hug from his mother, Alice Ball, in their home in Worcester.
Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff
'The effects are life altering,' said chris bijoux, a deputy director at Georgetown University's Center for Juvenile Justice Reform who helped produce the film.
The increase in recent years brought detention referrals to their highest level since 2018, according to the report, despite efforts by state agencies, child advocates, and prosecutors to divert juveniles away from the criminal justice system. In 2018, the state passed a criminal justice bill barring prosecution for kids under 12 years old, decriminalized nonviolent disturbances at schools, and authorized judges to divert juvenile cases before arraignment.
The state's Department of Youth Services said in a statement that the 2018 law led to a major drop in the number of youths held for low-level offenses, and it is too early to draw conclusions from post-pandemic data showing an increase in detentions. The agency also highlighted its ongoing expansion of diversion programs.
'DYS recognizes that evidence-based, data-driven diversion programming is a proven strategy for intervention in and prevention of further justice system involvement and is committed to ensuring that all young people across the Commonwealth have equitable opportunities for access,' said DYS Commissioner Cecely Reardon.
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Jay Blitzman, the former first justice of the Massachusetts Juvenile Court in Middlesex County, described the findings as 'disconcerting' and 'surprising.'
'If we are detaining young people, they're being disconnected from their community and the socially connective tissue they need for positive youth development,' Blitzman said.
State Senator Brendan Crighton, who co-chairs the Senate's committee on juvenile justice, said
'I was taken aback a bit that despite some really strong efforts by a lot of major stakeholders, we are still seeing these pretrial detentions,' Crighton said.
The report's findings are dispiriting and tough to understand, said Migdalia Iris Nalls, head of the Suffolk district attorney's juvenile division.
'What I've been trying to do is essentially the opposite,' Nalls said. 'Within Suffolk, we've been working to reduce the number of kids in pretrial [detention.]'
The COVID-19 pandemic sent shockwaves through the Massachusetts' juvenile justice system. Case numbers first plummeted during lockdowns, then skyrocketed as schools, courts, and other public spaces reopened throughout 2021 and 2022.
Nalls, a former juvenile public defender, joined the DA's office that year, with a mandate to stem the tide.
Yet as the office has assigned more juveniles accused of low-level crimes to diversion programs, many more are often accused of more serious crimes.
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Before the pandemic, Suffolk usually saw around 400 juvenile gun cases per year, Nalls said. Since then, case numbers have roughly doubled and the kids involved have gotten younger, she said.
'More and more young children have access to firearms in the city,' Nalls said.
Essex County held the highest number of juvenile dangerousness hearings last year, where prosecutors ask a judge to detain defendants who are alleged threats to public safety. Essex District Attorney Paul F. Tucker attributed those numbers to a spike in young people committing serious, gang-related crimes. But he said his office does not try to lock up kids accused of minor offenses, and has embraced diversion programs for those cases.
'We try to do it outside of the system, because we know the longer we can keep somebody out of the system age-wise, the better chance of success we have,' he said.
The number of kids in detention continued to increase even as overall case numbers plateaued last year, according to data from the Juvenile Justice Policy and Data Board. Pretrial detentions jumped 17 percent last year, driven largely by misdemeanor charges — many of which were later dismissed, according to the data. Just 14 percent of pretrial detentions occurred because a child was found too dangerous to release. In a quarter of detentions, juveniles were held because they could not pay their cash bail.
And that burden is not equally distributed. Cases and arrests increased for Black and Hispanic minors last year, while decreasing for white juveniles. That trend has worsened existing disparities in the system, according to the board. Black youth were more than five times likelier to be arrested than white youth — a disparity Smith described as 'absolutely jarring.'
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Studies have found that youth detained pretrial are less likely to graduate high school and more likely to be arrested again in the future, even when accounting for demographic differences.
Kids in detention are isolated from the people they love and the support systems they rely on, said Duci Goncalves, director of the Youth Advocacy Division at the Committee for Public Counsel Services.
'Having those supports ripped from you and being put in a detention center where they don't know anyone — that is very traumatizing for a young person," Goncalves said.
Dan Glaun can be reached at