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Juvenile justice reform nationwide has led to a decline in the number of youths being held in detention systems and in many states, even the closure of the largest and most troubled facilities. But juvenile reform doesn’t appear to be an equal opportunity provider, according to a Boston College Law School researcher.
A new study by Francine Sherman, a clinical associate professor and director of BC Law’s Juvenile Rights Advocacy Project, shows girls aged 13-18 years old are now making up a larger share of the juvenile justice population at every stage of the process.
“Girls are being sidelined,” says Sherman, lead author of Gender Injustice: System-Level Juvenile Justice Reforms for Girls. “They’re not benefitting from national juvenile justice reforms in the same way boys are.”
The report [at www.nationalcrittenton.org/gender-injustice], co-authored with Annie Balck – a former BC Law School student of Sherman’s – and released in partnership with The National Crittenton Foundation, found sizeable increases in girls’ representation throughout the juvenile justice system over the past two decades.
For example, girls made up 20 percent of arrests in 1992, yet in 2012, they represented 29 percent, an increase of almost 50 percent. In addition, among girls 13-18 court caseloads and detentions both grew by 40 percent, while post-adjudication placement rose by 42 percent.
The daunting numbers raise the obvious question, says Sherman: How can juvenile justice reforms be modified to better address the needs of girls and their pathways into, and through, the system?
“It’s kind of an old story in a way,” says Sherman, a nationally recognized expert on girls in the juvenile justice system. “Juvenile justice has always been a ‘boys’ thing’ – delinquency has always been primarily boys, and all the discussion and reforms have been based on the male population. The systems are just not modifying reforms to address the needs of girls, even though they have a better understanding of those needs than ever before.”
The report pointed to two related problems: Girls find themselves experiencing concentrated trauma and adversity, which affects how they enter the juvenile justice system, and reforms are failing to directly address what girls need once they are in the system.
“Natural responses to trauma become pathways into the juvenile justice system,” say Sherman. “You respond to trauma by running away, and you get picked up for that. You respond to trauma by fighting defensively at home, and you get arrested for that. That’s how they are entering and moving through the system.
“The fact is the vast, vast majority of girls in the system are no threat to the public safety. Most are arrested for misdemeanors and misbehavior.”
Strict codes of conduct are often the main reason why girls sink deeper and deeper into a system that has little flexibility or tolerance for transgressions, says Sherman.
“A girl may be arrested for trespassing or shoplifting, for example. She is then given probation with conditions such as a curfew, a prohibition against drugs, and attending school without incident. But because the girl is living in a difficult environment – perhaps facing violence at home or deprivation in her community — and has few social supports, she doesn’t have the kind of support she needs to comply with rules. That’s why she’s in the system to begin with.
“So she’s likely to violate those rules, and violating probation results in her detention. When she continues to violate rules or reacts to the trauma of detention she now finds herself in, it creates a cycle: ‘We told you to do this, you didn’t do it, and we’re locking you up.’ It’s an escalating process.”
The juvenile system also lacks the tools to handle girls appropriately, the report finds, and the reforms being implemented are generic, rather than tailored to the issues that are driving girls into the system.
“What you want is to promote a healthy, productive, positive adulthood, and that’s not going to happen through incarceration or a criminal justice response,” says Sherman. “The system really needs to focus on shoring up girls’ home and community environments. Help girls identify and build relationships with social support in their communities – supports that are going to be different than the social supports for boys. That’s the kind of thing that’s missing.”
Among the study’s recommendations: Stop criminalizing behaviors related to damaging environments that are out of a young girl’s control; limit secure confinement of girls, which is costly, leads to poor outcomes, and re-traumatizes vulnerable girls; and engage girls’ families throughout the juvenile justice process.
“Juvenile prisons and secure detention are expensive, they do not work, and they make things worse,” says Sherman. “The bottom line is, we do not want kids dependent on courts and juvenile justices. We want them integrated into their communities.”