I’m
grateful for a powerful new book, Girls
In Justice by artist Richard Ross, a follow up to his moving earlier Juvenile In Justice, which combines
Ross’s photographs of girls in the juvenile justice system with interviews he
gathered from over 250 detention facilities across the United States. If a
picture is worth a thousand words, the deeply disturbing photographs speak volumes. Ross uses the power of photography
to make visible the hidden and harsh world of girls in detention. These
heartwrenching images coupled with the girls’ ages and life stories should move
us to confront the cruel and unjust juvenile justice system in our nation.
These girls are ours: our neighbors, our children’s classmates, our daughters
and granddaughters, sisters, cousins, and nieces — and, for some young
children, our mothers. Girls In Justice begs the questions—why
are so many girls, especially girls of color, confined in our nation’s
detention facilities, and what are we as a society going to do about it?
We
must all work tirelessly to give hope and a fair chance to these girls and all
children by promoting policies, programs, and supports that help them
and their families, especially those most at risk. We must combat systemic problems
that contribute to family and community dysfunction and wreak havoc on
developing children including girls; we must dig beneath the surface and
examine the root cause of girls’ “offenses” and why injustice saps the hopes of
so many young lives on our watch.
In 2013, one in five girls in the United
States was poor, and girls of color were disproportionately poor. From birth to
young adulthood, children — especially poor children and children of color — encounter
multiple and cumulative risk factors that often result in their being funneled
into the prison pipeline through the juvenile and criminal justice systems and
locked up behind bars. Such massive
incarceration is sentencing millions of children to social and economic death. The
pipeline to prison is lodged at the intersection of poverty and race and
is intolerable in a professed society of opportunity. In 2007, the Children’s
Defense Fund launched the Cradle to
Prison Pipeline® crusade to confront youth incarceration and the
factors driving it and propose solutions to replace it with a pipeline to
college and career. While twice as many boys as girls are arrested,
girls are the fastest growing segment of the juvenile justice system. As girls
rock the cradle they rock the future, and we must pay attention to both girls
and boys to ensure the development of healthy families.
Girls of color and poor girls face special
challenges before they enter the juvenile justice system, during their
confinement, and when they return to their communities after release. At the
front end, racial disparities and the lack of appropriate treatment and support
that run through every major child-serving system negatively impact their life
chances by pushing more children into juvenile detention and adult prison. These
include limited health and mental health care; lack of quality early childhood
support experiences (including home visiting, Early Head Start and Head Start,
child care, preschool, and kindergarten); children languishing in foster care
waiting for permanent families and shunted through multiple placements; and
failing schools with harsh zero tolerance discipline policies, mostly for
nonviolent offenses, that suspend, expel, and discourage children who then too
often drop out and do not graduate. Too little effort is made to divert girls
from the juvenile justice system despite the existence of successful evidence-based
programs.
Girls in the system often encounter a
unique set of challenges. Almost three quarters of them have been sexually or
physically abused. Most are arrested for nonviolent offenses such as truancy,
running away, or alcohol and substance use which can often be linked to severe
abuse or neglect. These nonviolent offenses, or status
offenses, would not be considered offenses for an adult. Poverty has an impact:
although the trauma of sexual violence and abuse affects many girls,
poor girls often lack adequate supports to keep them from juvenile detention.
Victimized girls often
face more trauma and stigmatization by being held in juvenile detention
facilities instead of diverted to appropriate community-based alternatives. Whether
confinement is temporary or longer term, programs and personnel are often not
equipped to deal with their unique needs and sometimes exacerbate the trauma.
Reports are rampant of confined girls being emotionally, physically, and
sexually abused, isolated,
separated from their babies, unable to visit their family members regularly,
and humiliated through common practices like pat downs. Detention centers need
more comprehensive, gender-responsive, trauma-informed, culturally-relevant
services for girls.
After release, girls,
many of whom may already have been disconnected from their families and
communities, need help through education, employment, and family and community
support including programs to strengthen their families and assure them access
to health and mental health services. Effective reentry plans should include
school reenrollment, housing, job training, case management, and mentoring. All
help reduce recidivism. We should all feel ashamed as the girls in this book
talk about reentering detention multiple times and how these are generational
patterns. This revolving door of individual and family confinement must end — now.
It is way past time for
every adult to take responsibility for reducing the number of girls and boys
behind bars through prevention and diversion programs and community supports
both before and after detention. And it is way past time for
adults of every race and income group to break our silence about the pervasive
breakdown of moral, family, community and national values, to place our
children first in our lives, to rebuild family and community, to model the
behavior we want our children to learn, and to never give up on any child. We do
not have a “child and youth problem” in America, but we have a profound adult
problem. It is time for adults to address it and to give all of our children
true justice: hope, opportunity, and love.
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Marian Wright Edelman is President of the Children's Defense Fund whose Leave No Child Behind® mission is to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities. For more information go to www.childrensdefense.org.
Mrs. Edelman's Child Watch Column also appears each week on The Huffington Post.
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