How many kids are being arrested these days, anyway?

Radley Balko writes in the Huffington Post on student arrests in the United States. It's more interesting than you might think:

A headline-generating study, published in the journalPediatrics this week, suggests that approximately one in three Americans is arrested before age 23. That's up from about one in five in 1965, the last time a similar study was conducted. The study used data from surveys given to the 7,335 people who enrolled in the federal government's National Longitudinal Survey of Youth in 1996. 

This study, a recent joint initiative between the Departments of Justice and Education and a spate of anecdotal stories in the news all suggest a surge in the arrests of minors, and particularly in arrests that originate in schools. But the federal government is both fighting the "school-to-prison" pipeline while continuing to fund the same programs that critics say are causing it. Moreover, because the government hasn't been collecting data on school-based arrests, and the little available data shows overall arrests of juveniles are down, it's difficult to determine if a problem exists, much less whether federal initiatives are solving it -- or contributing to it.

Balko explains some of the background to his piece here:

But while researching the piece, I looked up juvenile arrest data for the U.S. It turns out, juvenile arrests are down over the last 20 years, and pretty significantly. That didn’t make sense. So I went back and looked at those school-to-prison pipeline articles. Yep. Lots of anecdotes, but most all of them lack hard data about school arrests. National statistics for school-based arrests just don’t exist, though there have been some localized studies that suggest there could be a problem.

 Regular readers might have noticed that I link to Radley Balko's work - and the links that he recommends on his own site - quite a lot. The fact that he would put out a piece like this one, with the methodology that he used, is exactly why I do.