Pretrial Juvenile Detention
Roughly one in four juveniles arrested in the U.S. spend time in a detention center prior to their court date. To study the consequences of this practice for youth, we link the universe of individual public school records in Michigan to juvenile and adult criminal justice records. Using a combination of exact matching and inverse probability weighting, we estimate that juvenile detention leads to a 31% decline in the likelihood of graduating high school and a 25% increase in the likelihood of being arrested as an adult. Falsification tests suggest the results are not driven by unobserved heterogeneity.
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