‘Drop by Drop’

Our premise is pretty much that all girls are at risk in our society.

--Paula Schaefer, state planner for juvenile females in the Minnesota Department of Corrections

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Chinese water torture is the only way we’re going to make any changes. Drop by drop by drop.

--Judy Mayer, chair of the Maryland Department of Juvenile Justice’s Female Population Task Force

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Talking to the sprinkling of specialists around the country who are trying to develop policy for girls in the juvenile justice system, you are struck by the homespun nature of these endeavors. They are small and experimental, cooked up in someone’s bureaucratic kitchen. It’s easy to imagine a group of juvenile justice professionals standing over a giant caldron. Oh, why not? chorus the well-intentioned, mostly female and underbudgeted policy technicians. Throw in some mentoring. Add a dash of attitude realignment. Serve up some healthy,non-abusive authority figures. Then stand back and hope the pot doesn’t explode right in your face.

In the meantime, lawmakers in Washington and state capitals have some ingredients of their own to toss in: They are on the verge of a wholesale rewriting of juvenile laws, which takes little notice of the special needs of girls that experts are just beginning to identify and understand.

The problem for policymakers is that until very recently, little attention was paid to girls who run astray of the law. The 23% increase in the number of young women arrested between 1990 and 1994 caused some in the field to sit up--only to realize that on the policy slate, juvenile female criminals were one giant question mark.

“The phenomenon is so new that we really don’t know about the careers of adolescent females who take part in crime,” said Brian Wilcox, director of the Center on Children, Families and the Law at the University of Nebraska. “We know a lot about criminal males. We don’t know a thing about the girls. We don’t know who’s going to pass through the system and who’s going to stay. We are ignorant about the causal sequence of adolescent criminal behavior in girls. And policymakers--they have no clue whatsoever. We’re all operating out of ignorance right now.”

Yet legislators must confront public opinion polls that continue to rank juvenile crime as one of this country’s major threats. In many sectors, regulations are seen as overly indulgent of delinquents. Juvenile laws that purport to rehabilitate young offenders are “out of date,” according to Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), sponsor of a stern new juvenile crime bill that Congress will take up in the fall. “We’ve got to quit coddling these violent kids like nothing is going on.”

That same compulsion to crack down was clear last month in the final days of the California legislative session, when a blizzard of nearly five dozen pieces of legislation aimed at toughening sanctions against young criminals crowded the calendar. None passed, but fervid rhetoric made it clear that patience with juveniles who break the law is fast running thin.

“It tears your heart out. These are kids. They come from homes where they might have a mother or father living alone, or on drugs,” said Rep. Jan Goldsmith (R-Poway), who sponsored some of the legislation. “You wish you could just cut them off. And that’s what we ought to be doing, so we can save the next generation.”

Goldsmith admitted, however, that most of the legislative anxiety was directed at the so-called super-predator juvenile criminals--young, homicidal males who make big headlines by committing horrifying crimes at seemingly younger and younger ages. In the feverish cry for stiffer juvenile laws, the needs of girls are largely overlooked--and advocates worry that wholesale changes now being proposed will make it even harder to rehabilitate nonviolent delinquent girls.

Policymakers, said David Steinhart, director of the Commonweal Juvenile Justice Program in Bolinas, Calif., seem oblivious to the notion that “when it comes to young women, the system may be the biggest mismatch of all. It’s a system designed to impose control on criminals who are by and large men or boys. The system just can’t do it right when it comes to the problems of young women.”

Unlike boys, girls generally enter the juvenile justice system for nonviolent offenses such as shoplifting or running away. A large proportion of girls are victims of sexual abuse. Once in the system, girls tend to respond to very different treatment methods than boys. But the cry for stiffer juvenile justice regulations is genderless. In an era of alarm over juvenile crime, the ideal policy seems for them not to be seen at all--that is, sentenced to longer, less comfortable periods of incarceration, possibly even in adult facilities.

Against this backdrop, only a few modest attempts at restructuring policy to accommodate girls are in place around the country. The problem of girls in juvenile justice is systemic, said Leslie Acoca, senior researcher at the National Council on Crime and Delinquency in San Francisco, and yet, “There is no national, systemic effort to address and identify the characteristics of these girls.”

Piecemeal efforts to improve the status of incarcerated girls should be applauded and encouraged, Acoca said; they’re certainly better than nothing. But even the few girl-focused policies and programs that do exist, Acoca said, “are very hidden. The good ones, the very best ones, tend to be the most hidden. There isn’t a national network. There’s no strong constituency.”

In Maryland, Judy Mayer, chairwoman of the Female Population Task Force, is congenitally optimistic. But she is also realistic enough to recognize that policy reform aimed at girls is doomed to be small and slow in the making. After four years of research, Mayer’s committee has developed a gender-specific case management manual that posits the non-revolutionary premise that female juveniles respond to different modes of treatment and intervention than their male counterparts.

“It’s boring, dry stuff,” Mayer admitted, “but it’s the stuff that if you don’t do, you can forget everything.” Mayer’s group also advocates mentoring, community outreach and training sessions to explore the social pathology of girls who commit crimes. It’s a low-budget, small-scale approach, she agreed, “but it’s a start, and you have to have this kind of groundwork in place to build on.”

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Lawmakers are debating much more sweeping ideas. On Capitol Hill, a pair of tough bills that challenge the notion of separate jail facilities for juveniles will be debated this fall. The House bill, championed by Rep. Bill McCollum (R-Fla.), would release states from federal rules requiring separation of youthful criminals and adult offenders. That bill and Hatch’s Senate measure would eliminate the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, a Justice Department agency that focuses on averting crime among young people.

California is only one of many states that have considered potent new legislation to waive young criminals into adult penal and court systems.

All the while, girls are all but ignored, said retired Florida Juvenile Court Judge Frank A. Orlando, head of the Center for the Study of Youth Policy in Fort Lauderdale. At an American Bar Assn. meeting on violent kids that he attended just last week, Orlando marveled that there was “never any reference whatsoever” to girls.

Testifying in the frenzied final hours of California’s legislative session, with a raft of juvenile justice bills under consideration, Loren Warboys, managing director of the Youth Law Center in San Francisco, also said he heard not one word about girls. Even in offering a plea to examine the needs of young women as she reluctantly voted to pass the state budget, Sen. Diane Watson (D-L.A.) offered no specific policy recommendations for dealing with girls who break the law.

The atmosphere of oversight makes for a mood of frustration and beleaguerement among some of the very people who are spearheading efforts to reform policy aimed at girls. At the Coalition for Juvenile Justice in Washington, D.C., special projects director Pam Allen said girls “are not even on the radar screen.”

Female juvenile arrests are increasing at a higher rate than those of male juveniles, Allen said, and yet “not enough people are really paying attention. Clearly there are an increasing number of young women in the system. Some of the reasons they are there and the ways to work with them while they are there are enough different from the young men that we feel that particular attention needs to be paid to them.”

The new gender-specific “how-to” manual that will target Maryland’s juvenile justice staff stresses that distinct issues must be incorporated into any policy that deals with delinquent girls. It points out that at least 70% of girls entering the juvenile justice system have been sexually abused--as opposed to about 20% of boys.

“People don’t always equate this with the delinquency piece, but we do,” Mayer said. “We say this is one of the reasons they are in the system.”

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Around the country, very few jails, prisons or other incarcerative settings are designed to house girls only. Instead, girls are frequently assigned to a portion of a facility intended for boys. Just as often, the division is crude, making the girls all too aware that they are living in a carved-out area of a boys’ jail. In most sites, the girls and boys are kept separate--sort of--but occasionally delinquent girls and boys may be assigned to joint work forces. The Maryland task force found that girls consistently fare more poorly in coed residential treatment facilities than boys.

For girls, “feeling safe is essential,” Mayer said. This means separating them from elements in the community that they find threatening--namely, in many cases, their own families or males who have abused them. As a consequence, the Maryland report emphasizes that girls need to be exposed to male caseworkers, probation officers or others “who present a model of a man who will respect them for themselves and not just use them.”

Again following the theory that any small policy change is better than no change, regional training programs for Colorado state workers who deal with female delinquents are expected to begin early next year, said Pat Cervera, a juvenile justice specialist. A similar effort early this year for the state’s juvenile court judges was enthusiastically received, Cervera said.

Cervera’s office has also hired a youth advocate, a paid staffer who is available 24 hours a day to girls placed in 30-day residential treatment programs. “We think it’s kind of a model policy,” she said, as well as an important step toward institutional recognition of girls’ special needs.

In Minnesota, the idea of adapting policy to accommodate adolescent girls arose six years ago when an advisory panel began looking into problems peculiar to women in detention. It soon became clear that “you can’t talk about adult women without talking about girls,” said Paula Schaefer, state planner for juvenile females in the department of corrections. Schaefer said she has yet to hear of a similar position elsewhere in the country.

Schaefer said her office functions on the assumption that “pretty much all girls are at risk in our society.” But the current political mood makes that idea a hard sell. “Everywhere you look there are counter-reforms and backlash,” Schaefer said. “You see what happened to affirmative action, the fact that the federal government eliminated funding for the gender-equity piece of the Civil Rights Act, and so forth. The worst part of all this is that these systems are sending a collective message that any gains that we’ve made in the area of addressing the needs of women and girls--that we’re taking those advances away.”