Practitioner’s Brief: Youth Experience of Being Locked Up and Confinement Records

Summary

Facilities that recorded more confinement actions also had a larger share of youth who said they had been locked up because of misbehavior. This pattern appeared in both April and October 2025 and points to confinement as a useful topic for facility review.

Background

Confinement is part of the PbS Safety domain because it affects young people’s daily experience of care, fairness, and safety. This brief looks at whether youth feedback about being locked up matches what facilities recorded in their incident reports.

The analysis uses CIYJ Youth Climate Survey and Incident Report data from 85 facilities during two collection periods: April 2025 and October 2025. The Youth Climate Survey asks youth, “Since you have been in this facility, have you ever been locked down because of misbehavior?” The incident-report data record confinement actions that occurred during each collection period.

These two sources offer different but useful information. Youth surveys describe what young people remember and experience. Incident reports document actions that staff recorded. Looking at both can help a director see whether youth experience and facility records point to the same area for attention.

Methods

For each facility in each collection period, I calculated the percentage of youth survey respondents who answered “Yes” when asked whether they had been locked up because of misbehavior. I did not include responses of “Don’t know” or “Refuse to answer” in this percentage.

I then counted the confinement actions that the facility recorded in its Incident Reports during the same period. I compared facilities with no recorded confinement actions, 1–10 actions, 11–50 actions, and 51 or more actions. This made it possible to see whether youth reports differed across facilities with different amounts of recorded confinement.

This comparison cannot tell us why the pattern exists. It also does not account for facility size, the number of youth served, or how long surveyed youth had been at the facility. A larger facility, for example, may record more confinement actions simply because it serves more youth.

Finding

Youth reports were higher at facilities with more recorded confinement actions.

At facilities with no recorded confinement actions, an average of 31% of surveyed youth said they had been locked up because of misbehavior. At facilities with 1–10 recorded actions, the average was 54%. At facilities with 11–50 actions, it was 55%. At facilities with 51 or more actions, the average was 66%.

In plain terms, youth were more likely to say they had been locked up at facilities where staff recorded confinement more often. This same overall pattern appeared in both April and October 2025. The pattern was not identical in every region or type of facility, but it was present across the data as a whole.

The finding does not mean that every recorded confinement action leads directly to a youth reporting that they were locked up. The survey question asks about a youth’s experience since arriving at the facility, while the incident records cover only the current collection period. Still, the two sources point in the same direction: facilities with more recorded confinement also tended to have more youth reporting that experience.

Implications

For CIYJ coaches, this finding may provide a starting point for a facility conversation. When both the incident records and youth survey results indicate frequent confinement, a coach might consider asking how staff decide when confinement is used, what alternatives are available, and whether young people understand the reason for the decision.

Facility directors may want to look beyond the total number of recorded actions. It may be useful to review which living units have the most confinement, the reasons staff recorded, how long youth remained confined, and whether the same youth appear more than once. Directors might also compare these records with youth feedback to identify where young people’s experience differs from what the facility expects.

Facilities with higher levels of both recorded confinement and youth reports of being locked up may want to examine whether staff have enough support to respond to misbehavior without confinement when it is safe to do so. This could include reviewing behavior-management practices, staff coaching, de-escalation options, and opportunities for youth to return to regular programming.

The finding does not prove that changing confinement practices will change youth survey responses. It does suggest that frequent confinement is a worthwhile area to examine when a facility is working to improve safety and youth experience.