The United States’ juvenile incarceration woes are well-documented: More than 1.3 million adolescents and children are arrested every year, and roughly 80 percent of juveniles who spend time incarcerated wind up back behind bars as adults. There are major public-health implications from this high juvenile incarceration rate, and academics and policymakers alike are both scrambling to understand how, exactly, juvenile incarceration affects young people’s health.

Though previous studies have shown that adolescents and adults with a history of incarceration tend to have poorer health, researchers have not been able to deduce whether incarceration actually causes those health declines. (That’s because many of the same factors that lead to poor health outcomes — poverty, minority status, mental illness — also increase the risk of incarceration.) And, in the U.S., where a greater proportion of American adolescents and children are behind bars than any other developed nation, that’s an important question.

[For more of this story, written by Kate Wheeling, go to https://psmag.com/why-juvenile...ba52e1c68#.n7otf1v4t]