The population of juveniles in custody was down 3 percent to 92,093 between 2004 and 2006, a trend that may be explained by the decline in juvenile arrests, the U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention reported today. Sixty-nine percent of juveniles in custody were in publicly-operated facilities. Crowding remains a problem in many units,but improvements continue, the agency says.
The proportion of residents held in facilities that were at or above the limit of their standard bed capacity dropped from 40 percent in 2000 to 31 percent in 2006. In 2006, 4 percent of facilities (holding 11 percent of juvenile offenders in custody) exceeded their standard bed capacity or had juveniles sleeping in makeshift beds.