New research suggests that juvenile incarceration may be doing more harm than good for teenage offenders.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that teens who are incarcerated tend to have substantially worse outcomes later in life than those who avoid serving time for similar offenses.

"We find that kids who go into juvenile detention are much less likely to graduate from high school and much more likely to end up in prison as adults," Joseph Doyle, co-author of the study and an economist at the MIT Sloan School of Management, said in a statement.

For the study, researchers examined cases involving 35,000 juvenile offenders over a 10-year period in Chicago. They found that other things being equal, juvenile incarceration lowers high-school graduation rates by 13 percentage points and increases adult incarceration by 23 percentage points.

"We think this is some of the first real causal evidence on the effects of juvenile detention on kids' outcomes," Doyle added.

The teens involved in the study had all been committed of offenses that provided presiding judges "with latitude in determining sentencing levels," according to the study. The random assignment of judges with different sentencing tendencies to those cases allowed the researchers to conduct a "natural experiment," examining the implications of the varying sentences.

"Some judges are more likely to have children placed in juvenile detention than others, but it's effectively random which judge you get," Doyle explained. "Some kids get a judge who will place them in juvenile detention, other ones get a judge who will be less likely to do so, and comparing the outcomes of the kids across the judges, we can actually say what the causal outcome is of placing the kids in juvenile detention."

Researchers found a correlation between those periods of jail time and the probability of children returning to school at all, especially if they are around the age of 16 years old when incarcerated.

"The kids who go to juvenile detention are very unlikely to go back to school at all," Doyle said.

Doyle said it may be difficult for teens who have been incarcerated to reenter school. For other students, "getting to know other kids in trouble may create social networks that might not be desirable. There could be a stigma attached to it, maybe you think you're particularly problematic, so that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy."

The findings are detailed in the latest issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics.