Approximately 500,000 youth per year come into contact with the legal system, with approximately 5-10% of those youth experiencing confinement each year. This is a substantive proportion of the youth population experiencing juvenile legal system contact before 18, which has collateral consequences for the remainder of the life-course and for the community more broadly. Nonetheless, the juvenile legal system is an understudied social determinant of community health. The documentation of these effects is limited and, in turn, the theoretical understanding of the juvenile legal system as a social determinant of health remains underdeveloped. Additionally, this gap in the research hinders our ability to develop, implement, and evaluate the effectiveness of policies designed to reduce the collateral health consequences of juvenile legal system contact on the community. The Juvenile Legal System and Community Health (JLSCH) project is an effort to address this gap, as well as evaluate the direct and indirect effects of policy on health outcomes and juvenile legal system processing.
The JLSCH project is designed to produce research that can help guide the development of policies, practices, and legislation by developing an understanding the correspondence between the youth legal system and community health outcomes. This project will employ causal inference techniques to evaluate the influence of the juvenile legal system on community health outcomes (Primary Objective), as this information is imperative for designing prevention and reentry strategies. In addition to our primary focus, the JLSCH project is dedicated to examining how the implementation of local or statewide juvenile legal system and community health policies (legislative policies or system specific policies) influences community health outcomes and the processing of youth through the juvenile legal system (Secondary Objective). The local and statewide implementation evaluations can provide insights into the effectiveness of these policies while also guiding the refinement of legislative policies or system specific policies over time. The focal community health outcomes include Medicaid enrollment, natality, mortality, substance use, and indicators of county health.
The data for the JLSCH project will come from various sources (conditional upon the state), but will rely on merging state and federal data at the county level. For example, the JLSCH-North Carolina (JLSCH-NC) relies on data from the North Carolina Division of Health and Human Services (NCDHHS), North Carolina Department of Public Safety (NCDPS), North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI), the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and U.S. Census Bureau, at the county level (N=100). Additional data sources are being considered for integration into the JLSCH-NC dataset if they provide an enhanced ability to answer primary or secondary research questions. Materials related to JLSCH-NC are provided below, while the data sources for subsequent JLSCH datasets will be provided as the data collection concludes. It is our goal to update the JLSCH datasets yearly.
Products Associated with the JLSCH Project:
Silver, Ian A., Bechtel, Kristin and Dawes, Debbie. 2025 “Reducing School Crime Events and Status Offense Complaints: Additional Evidence for School Justice Partnerships” Journal of Experimental Criminology. Online First. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11292-025-09680-x
Silver, Ian A., Krebs, Christopher P., and Dawes, Debbie. 2024 “Can we Break the School to Prison Pipeline Through Partnerships?: A Quasi-Experimental Evaluation of the Effects of School Justice Partnerships” Journal of Experimental Criminology. Online First. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11292-024-09628-7
Juvenile Legal System and Community Health-North Carolina (Last Updated August 2026)
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