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A further complication of incarcerating youths is providing adequate academic support. Academic difficulties are often interrelated with delinquency, and study after study consistently shows that juveniles who are delinquent have weaker academic skills than average. This may be because the lack of support in the child's life fosters conditions of delinquency and academic underperformance, although it could also be that learning disabilities create a sense of alienation and hopelessness about the future, and rather than finding social connections in a school setting, the student instead uses delinquency.

However, there is an argument that detaining juveniles in secure facilities removes the juvenile from the environment which triggered the delinquency and creates a fresh environment, enabling him to develop more positive strategies. New approaches to rehabilitation in institutional settings include CBT, which focuses less on punishment and more upon instilling rational coping mechanisms in offenders. CBT is useful for a wide variety of problems spanning from conduct disorders to substance abuse so using CBT as a general approach can be one effective, unifying way to deal with many of the co-morbidities suffered by juveniles without denying them needed treatment (Gagnon & Barber 2010). It is argued that the high rates of recidivism are not due to the fact that youths are confined in secure facilities, but the fact that such institutions rarely evaluate the efficacy of their behavioral and academic programs and do not periodically review the existing research on the topic of what approaches work and do not work. More effective approaches are required that have been proven to reduce the likelihood of re-offending.

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