SIX

BABY PRISON

I went into the system when my mom had caught a case of child neglect. Once you get into the system, the next step is going to juvenile, and then the next step is going to prison. Everybody knows that, it’s almost common sense. You never hear it being any other way.

—SERENA LOCKHART

I’m back at Homegirl, and the café is buzzing with excitement. Two tables away, Jim Carrey is eating lunch with Father Greg. Carrey is a delight, submitting to endless selfies with the homies, joking, and asking Greg thoughtful questions. The waitresses, all homegirls, ask Carrey to pose with them, and as I watch the joyful antics, their stories keep running through my mind. Probably because I’m getting ready for my monthly lunch with the woman who funds my research at Homegirl. Dr. Beatriz Solis, one of the leading lights at the California Endowment, is committed to creating pathways for women in leadership, lifting up their intelligence and resilience. Because she’s a leader herself as well as the sister of the then secretary of labor, Hilda Solis, Bea is focused on how women overcome the trauma they experience to survive and ultimately thrive.

Once she joins me—after taking her own selfie with Jim Carrey—we immediately start talking about what my research is revealing. Most important, the trap young women find themselves in—experiencing trauma, turning to men, and then, all too often, finding themselves enmeshed in the juvenile justice system. When our waitress finally arrives, she listens to our conversation for a moment, puts her hands on her hips, then blurts out, “You wanna help women? I’ll tell you what you’ve gotta do. Help the girls, before they get in more trouble. And that means, you gotta do something about the camps. I couldn’t believe it when I was in there. It really was prison. I got locked up and no one was there to help me. They treated us like we were boys—they even gave us boys’ clothes to wear. The girls got nothing we needed, not even Tampax! And there weren’t any programs for us. We really need people to help the girls.” Bea and I both instinctively reach out to comfort her, but she shakes her head. “I’m okay. But you gotta do something!”

For a long time, little attention was paid to young women involved in the juvenile justice system. It was the identical twin of the situation with adult women: in the juvenile system as well, boys were front and center in studies of delinquency, youth gangs, and criminal behavior. Girls were pretty much an afterthought, and only a handful of researchers, mainly women, looked at female delinquency and gangs. Trauma wasn’t even on the radar. Male concerns dominated juvenile justice, and its facilities were designed for and populated primarily by boys. These juvenile facilities mirrored their adult counterparts: similar to jails, the halls, like the camps, were for temporary “detention” with youth held in these settings for a limited number of days, until juvenile court judges decided whether they should go on to probation camp or back into the community. In the network of camps—prisons for juveniles—youth served long-term sentences ranging from six months to two years in low- to high-security settings. Once again, girls weren’t treated any differently than boys—it was the one-size-fits-all approach all over again—only this time it involved the system of incarceration reaching down into the lives of preteens and adolescents.¹ And beyond that, what happened to young women after involvement in the juvenile justice system also, tragically, mimicked the hopeless responses of the adult criminal justice system. Very few reentry programs or community-based supports addressed the specific needs of young women. Once they were released from the halls or from longer stays in camp, traumatized young women went right back to the situations—men, gangs, violence—that had led them into the system in the first place.

The shadow of the juvenile justice system was everywhere I looked. Rosa had been in the system, Denise had been in the system, Ivy and Janeth had been in the system—for God’s sake, Susan Burton had been in the system. Over and over again, I heard women talk about going to the halls, going to camp. Almost every woman’s pathway into the criminal justice system actually began when they were girls—long before their eighteenth birthday. And because they’d been part of the system from such an early age, their involvement felt almost predetermined. Much of this could be chalked up to a nonsensical gender-based double standard that had devastating consequences.

Research shows that both boys and girls involved with the juvenile justice system are most often charged with “status offenses,” legal violations involving youth under eighteen that include such crimes as “running away” and “incorrigibility.” However, when it comes to the legal consequences for status offenses, there is a dramatic split: more young women than young men are actually locked up for such offenses with the glib justification that it is “for their own protection.” It’s anything but protection. Instead, it is punishment disguised as placement. These girls don’t need detention so much as counseling and an honest assessment of their living situations. It’s also apparent that controlling budding sexuality is the subtext in these and many other offenses. Still, instead of examining whether a girl is running around because she is being abused or is sexually acting out because of a deeper underlying issue, she may instead be characterized as “immoral” or “deviant” and requiring the intervention of law enforcement to control her behavior.² It’s the juvenile justice equivalent of “Lock up your daughters,” with the added unspoken admonition “And stop them from sexually acting out.” No one with any power is connecting the dots to see how trauma may have led to acting out that took the form of sexual activity and gang involvement.

This was very much the case with Rosa, although to simply say she was acting out is like saying the hydrogen bomb might have caused some property damage. Her gang involvement, delinquent behavior, and substance abuse expanded as the emotional impact of her untreated trauma grew. By the time she turned fifteen, Rosa had already lived through enough for three lifetimes, including giving up her first child, Arturo, to the Department of Children and Family Services. It was when she was arrested for gang activity and carrying a firearm that she first entered the juvenile justice system, courtesy of the Los Angeles County Probation Department. A juvenile court judge decided that Rosa should be sent to a probation camp. This euphemism, “camp,” conjuring up visions of cabins and pine trees, was about as far from the truth as the actual location of the camp itself, forty miles from the streets Rosa knew.

I was already familiar with what went on in probation facilities: their camps and halls had been part of my work for the past ten years, and I was heavily invested, both personally and professionally, in juvenile justice reform. One of my best friends, Carol Biondi, had an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the system and its offenses—and she didn’t hesitate to share these with me whenever I needed some information. I’d also heard plenty of horror stories from youth who’d been detained in the probation system; tales of solitary confinement, use of pepper spray to control boys and girls, even “fight clubs” spurred on by abusive corrections officers. All these tortuous practices and more figured in the narratives of young men and women who described the trauma they endured in facilities that were more punitive than rehabilitative. One gang member told me, “The halls were where I learned about pain.”

But not for Rosa. Paradoxically, for her, camp was “paradise.” It was the first place she found peace in her life. She had her own bed, her own room, and time to herself. The fact that probation camp represented nirvana speaks volumes about her earlier experiences. Rosa loved probation camp. She didn’t want to leave. She finally felt safe. Unlike most system-involved youth, initially she felt at home while she was incarcerated—or, as the courts euphemistically referred to it “detained”—in juvenile probation facilities. However, while the local halls and camps may have given her a bed of her own, they made no effort to address her psychological or practical needs. She was released after six months with nothing awaiting her but the gangs and violence she’d left behind. As her illegal activities on the streets accelerated, Rosa was repeatedly arrested and eventually labeled too serious a criminal for local detention. Instead, she was remanded to the state juvenile justice system, which meant she was “detained” by the California Youth Authority, YA. This was when everything changed.

YA—commonly known at that time as “baby prison”—was a brutal place, full of violence, with youth allowed to freely intimidate and attack one another. As one former detainee, a woman, told me, “It was fight club, 24–7. We all slept with knives or forks so we’d be ready to stab someone if they came at us while we were sleeping.” YA mirrored everything Rosa had experienced on the street. She emerged broken from her year-long detention there. Her mental health issues grew more pronounced, her rage more extreme, and her despair more intense, until her physical and mental survival were at stake. And she was only sixteen years old.

After a few weeks back on the street, Rosa was arrested again. Then, her luck changed. Instead of YA, the judge sent her to Dorothy Kirby Residential Treatment and Placement Center. It was still juvenile detention, but this time was different. At Dorothy Kirby, four separate Los Angeles County agencies worked together to provide a therapeutic environment for the boys and girls “in the system” who needed help. There were psychological assessments, medical tests and treatment, counseling, and group therapy. Mental health practitioners worked with probation officers to address the problems these youth had suffered in their homes and in their communities. Finally, Rosa felt she was in the right place.

It was here that she met Tommie Baines.

To this day, Tommie is known as one of the most gifted professionals in LA County Probation, intelligent and deeply compassionate. Those traits along with the warmth of his personality combine to invite the trust of the children—and make no mistake, these are children—he has responsibility for helping. Eighteen years later Rosa remembers him vividly and is overjoyed to learn that I know him. Her voice rises an octave.

“Tommie Baines! You know him! Tommie Baines knew I was different. He affected my life. You know, if you ever hear human-trafficking survivors, they say there’s this one person that plants that seed of hope in you. He was that seed for me.”

Other women talked about the one probation officer who stood out in their lives, who encouraged them to grow, told them they could succeed. Denise had similar memories, telling me, “My PO is one of the big reasons I wanted to become a social worker—he really helped me. I saw what a person could do to change your life. I want to be that person for the girls today who are like I was then. I want to go back and help them.” Denise’s goals weren’t unusual. Most women I’ve met who’ve been detained in the probation camps and halls express a wish to help girls currently in the system. But not every woman found someone who planted that seed of hope. Denise was one of the lucky ones. So was Rosa, who recalled her days at Dorothy Kirby with genuine affection. “I thought I was in the right place. I thought the system was gonna work for me.”

For the first time, Rosa felt trust and began opening up to Tommie Baines. “I told him about the men and what had happened to me.” He became her champion. He helped her obtain the counseling she needed. He encouraged her efforts to obtain a high school diploma or a GED. When she was slated for release, Tommie accompanied Rosa to her disposition hearing, telling the judge she should remain at Dorothy Kirby. He pleaded her case, explaining that she was protected there, that she was flourishing in school and needed the structure of the treatment center to recover from the experiences of trafficking and living on the street. The judge denied his request, instead releasing Rosa to her mother’s custody. “That broke him. He was so upset. I think he wanted to choke the judge. Can you imagine? They released me to her. They released me to her.”

Being sent home to her mother—who had trafficked her—was the final breaking point for Rosa. “It all changed when they sent me home to my mother. My life was never the same after that. I think of it—even nowadays—I think of it as ‘before and after.’”

This decision destroyed what was left of Rosa’s trust in life and faith in the system. She immediately ran away from her mother, back to the gang, and took up where she left off, with a vengeance. Only now she was getting arrested on more serious charges—attempted murders, DUIs, batteries—all signs of her boundless rage that had nowhere to go but out, into behavior that was criminalized. Rosa’s response was not unusual. I was finding that in the lives of formerly incarcerated women, rage looms large, and research confirms this.³

In Kimberly Flemke’s work on women’s trauma, she explains how “triggers of past abuse and violation, whether physical and/or emotional, create an intergenerational legacy of not only violence but also rage.”⁴ In a qualitative study of thirty-six incarcerated women, 90 percent cited at least one childhood experience that triggered them to feel rage as adults—including physical abuse, sexual abuse, and observing domestic violence. Most significantly, these triggered feelings end up causing women to feel “helpless and vulnerable all over again.”⁵ When I talked with her about what happened after Dorothy Kirby, Rosa told me that all she felt was “the rage, the rage, the incredible rage.”

“I’ve picked up so many charges throughout the years because I was enraged. I was enraged at my mother; I was enraged at the system. And I wanted people to feel the rage I had in me. It was like I was thinking, ‘I need you to feel this pain that I was feeling.’ And I took it out on the wrong people. I was in this rage where I just wanted something to relieve me. Send me away, out of this world—just take all this pain away. I didn’t want to feel it anymore. And if I have to feel it, I’ma let you feel it.”

Rosa’s words show how rage can play a significant role in women’s journey from trauma to relationships with violent men and criminal activity to detention and incarceration. It is crucial to see that rage merges with gender in different ways. Plenty of young men are enraged as well, but the roots of their rage and the consequences of that rage differ vastly from those of young women. What so many people—including young women—don’t realize is that their gender as well as their rage aren’t just part of their criminal activities; they also affect their reaction to being powerless. Denise once asked me, “Why didn’t they give me therapy? Why did they put me in a probation camp? It didn’t help with what I’d gone through at home.”

It’s also clear that anger management classes aren’t going to do the job. Rage was, and is, distinct from anger in profound ways. While anger is in fact manageable and doesn’t cloud a woman’s judgment, rage as a force overtakes judgment and causes women to feel they cannot control their feelings. For girls, trauma and rage interact, often leading to what is labeled criminal behavior and its consequence: involvement in the juvenile justice system. But the problem is, these young women aren’t criminals; they are most often adolescents acting out against a troubled or even abusive environment.

Researchers have been interested in how the connection between a violent childhood at home and later criminal behavior play out in different ways depending on gender. Meda Chesney-Lind was among those who pointed out that childhood victimization ultimately leads to the criminal justice system, and for girls, this usually starts with the status offense of running away. In declaring this a juvenile “crime,” what the system fails to recognize is that girls often run away to survive, fleeing a violent home and child abuse.⁶ So why is a survival mechanism labeled a crime? And how does such labeling affect young women who are actually looking for some sort of protection? Do they turn to men because the system only offers punishment, not support? These are key questions. Researchers haven’t been the only ones trying to answer them and understand the relationship between young women’s trauma and criminal behavior. As other voices have weighed in, the issue has grown much more complicated and, worse yet, confused.

It all began in the mid-1990s, with the mythology surrounding the youth “super-predator” and the political scientist John Dilulio Jr.’s now-discredited predictions of an explosion of young men committing violent crimes.⁷ At the time, reports also warned that young women, too, were becoming more violent. This histrionic prediction didn’t come close to portraying what was really going on, which had less to do with violence and more to do with labels. Between 1989 and 1993, the juvenile arrest rate escalated, but the relative rate of juvenile arrests for girls went up more than it did for boys—in fact it was more than double the number. Girls’ arrest rates rose 23 percent compared with boys’ arrest rates, which went up 11 percent.⁸ Beginning in the 2000s, boys’ arrest rates began to drop while girls’ arrest rates continued to rise. This was the era when Rosa, Denise, and so many other teenage girls were locked up.

Researchers in the Girls Study Group, a project of the US Department of Justice’s Office for Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, set out to understand the increase in girls’ arrests.⁹ No single factor emerged to explain what was happening. Instead, these researchers pointed to several issues, including how parental or caretaker behavioral expectations and standards for obedience differed according to gender; they also zeroed in on girls’ tendency to act out at home rather than at school or in other public settings. Chesney-Lind argued that changes in public policy, particularly the redefinition of domestic violence to include issues beyond partner violence, ultimately led to an increase in girls’ arrests.¹⁰ This was traced to a strange bend in logic that occurred when police responded to reports of parents and daughters physically fighting. Rather than settling the situation or questioning the parent, who often was caring for multiple children, police wound up arresting the daughter, claiming this was done to protect her. But that wasn’t the only thing going on, because police perceived that if the parent were to be questioned and eventually detained, there might not be anyone at home to take care of the other children. So, they came down hard on the daughter. All of this pointed to the larger issue of how law enforcement was brought into situations they were not properly trained or even qualified to assess, creating a situation that just didn’t make sense: girls were criminalized because of stress and conflict within their homes, including conflict that was due to family violence.

To make matters even more confusing, young women were more likely to be arrested in these situations because, as the Girls Study Group had found, girls acted out at home while boys acted out at school. At school, neither policies nor arrest rates had changed over time. But all kinds of things had changed in the home, or in the way events in the home were interpreted and acted on. This was the fallout from new domestic violence laws first passed by Congress in 1994, then reauthorized in 2000. These laws had unintended consequences, which experts, including the national juvenile justice expert Barry Krisberg, called “upcriming.” In general, upcriming occurs when a new law or policy ends up “widening the net,” ultimately embroiling more individuals—in this case, girls—in the justice system. Suddenly, the acting out of girls, often due to trauma and abuse, was criminalized. Additionally, as more schools adopted “zero-tolerance” policies, law enforcement started being called in for any and every type of misbehavior, no matter how minor (including, once again, incidents that would have been handled informally in the past). Ironically, zero-tolerance policies did not drastically increase the number of boys in the system—they were already being criminalized for acting out at school—but they affected girls. On top of this, researchers tallied up the most serious crimes that led to youth being detained in the juvenile justice system.¹¹ Overall, girls were locked up for much less serious charges than boys. Together, these factors went a long way to explain the rising arrest rates of girls compared with those of boys.

I was now seeing women who as girls had been part of “upcriming” and “zero tolerance” and had ended up wrongfully detained in the juvenile justice system. The impact of this detention was mixed, with women describing very different experiences in the probation system. A handful of these women were like Rosa, who actually reported flourishing at a probation facility. Along with building a relationship with Tommie Baines, for the first time she began to feel a sense of comradeship with other young women who had, she said, “been through bad experiences. Maybe they hadn’t been trafficked, but they’d been abused, and they knew what it felt like to be afraid.” Rosa also felt relieved that she didn’t have to rely on a man or suffer abuse because she was afraid to be without a boyfriend. “I felt protected for the first time in my life, really protected,” she told me. “I thought that everyone in the system cared for me and about me. No one was abusing me, no one was hurting me. I could go to sleep and not worry someone was going to wake me up and beat me up.” But Rosa’s experience wasn’t the norm. What many girls, among them Denise, encountered was not so positive.

Denise was part of the fallout from upcriming. She ultimately got sent to camp for fighting with her aunt while staying at her home. But this wasn’t just a simple domestic violence case. Her aunt was a county sheriff, so Denise was charged with assault on a state peace officer. To this day, Denise believes that her aunt didn’t want to press charges, explaining that “she probably felt me being off the street was the best thing for me.” In court, Denise was offered the option of detention or returning to her mother’s supervision. She chose detention.

“I did not want to go to my mom. She was an alcoholic and she just let things happen to my sister and me. It wasn’t on purpose; it still happened. So, I was, like, ‘Just give me the time and I’ll just go to camp.’ To this day, I don’t regret that decision. It wasn’t that camp was so great; it was terrible, but it was better than my mother.”

Denise felt she’d been part of the system “my whole life—it was always there. It was like going to school. You saw your PO and you spent time at camp and you met up with people from the halls. It was just what we did. We never thought about whether it did us any good.” She cycled in and out of the juvenile justice system through her adolescence. Unlike Rosa, Denise didn’t go to Dorothy Kirby. Instead, she was detained at Challenger Memorial Youth Center in the 1990s, when young women were still placed there. This facility honored the ill-fated space shuttle, with each of its six different camps named for an astronaut along with a high school named for “NASA Teacher-in-Space” Christa McAuliffe. It was the closest to secular heresy that I could imagine; from the day it was opened, Challenger was a hellhole. It was located next to a state prison, and if a visitor missed that subtle hint, once inside its walls, it was clear that punishment, not rehabilitation, formed the culture of Challenger. The “dorms”—if they could be called that—had floors and walls of concrete; all that was missing to make this a prison were bars. Toilets and showers were open to public view at all times. Wild birds bearing germs flew in and out of the windows day and night. There was no kitchen at Challenger. “Food” sent in on steam tables was stomach-turning in its appearance. And this was what passed for a detention facility to “rehabilitate young men and young women” under the age of eighteen. My distress over this wasn’t personal. In 2010, the ACLU sued Los Angeles County over the conditions at Challenger, which it described as a “broken” system. The lawsuit was settled in 2011 and led to a series of reforms in the facility’s educational system.¹²

None of these reforms arrived in time for Denise. She’d gone to camp when she was fifteen years old and stayed for nine months. Her detention often felt unbearable, and she made it through in a state of numb denial. When she marked her sixteenth birthday at Challenger, “I didn’t even know how I felt. I was blank. All the time.”

She wasn’t like Rosa. Having her own bed wasn’t enough to make Denise happy. She had to adjust to sleeping in a dorm with four rows of twelve beds each watched over by probation officers 24–7. Over two decades later, Denise recalled it all vividly: “There was this teacher, her name was Ms. Lacey—she was a little bitty Black lady. Instead of school, we were forced to sit in a classroom sewing and listening to oldies.” Along with learning to sew, a skill she never used again, Denise tried out to be a cheerleader for the Mustangs football team at Camp Kilpatrick (immortalized in the movie Gridiron Gang). “I wanted it to be like a normal high school,” she recalled. Instead, the twenty-four-foot-high fence topped with concertina wire was always there to remind her that this wasn’t a normal high school. And to drive home that point, Denise couldn’t be a cheerleader because her “high risk” classification prohibited her from being transported to away games. There were other problems, mainly because she kept getting in trouble for her rage. But instead of receiving therapy or any mental health intervention, Denise was sent to solitary confinement several times after acting out. “They kept saying it was rehabilitation. In my mind, it felt like punishment. I was only in solitary for a day or two. One time it was a week. It was scary.”¹³

These painful recollections are leavened with Denise’s memories of friendships that grew among the young women. On the streets, girls were rivals, both for men and for protection. In camp, however, there was no danger of abuse or violence. For so many girls, these were the first “safe” relationships with women they’d ever experienced. But the temporary nature of their friendships and the fear of losing these attachments drove many to act out. One of her friends grew upset when she learned that Denise was scheduled to leave camp in two weeks. “She thought if we got in a fight I would get more time and have to stay. I wouldn’t fight her. Then, she tried to hang herself. After that, she ended up going to YA. That was one place I didn’t want to end up: YA. It was bad.”

Denise knew YA—the California Youth Authority—was baby prison, the point of no return. Despite abuse from POs, the tedium of sewing class, and problems with bedbugs in their sheets, probation camp, even Challenger, was a lark compared to YA. Denise was luckier than Rosa and so many others; she avoided being sent to YA because she was never charged with a major violent crime. Although she was on community-based probation until she was nineteen years old, once she left Challenger, Denise didn’t clock another long-term stay in probation camp. After that, “I only had to go to one of the halls,” she recounted. “I got caught at school with some weed and I’d have a nice vacation. I never went to camp again. But I was still in the system.”

The system. It’s important to understand that juvenile justice is a system beyond camps and halls. It is a complicated labyrinth of suitable placements and probation. Community-based probation officers follow juveniles once they leave the camps and halls, making sure that they are attending “probation schools” and staying out of trouble. Just like staff in the camps and halls, there is no consistency among community-based POs: some are caring and some are abusive.

This was where Denise lucked out: at a probation school in Watts, she was assigned to Chester Leonard, a combination teacher, probation officer, and academic counselor. “He was an older Black man, down to earth but stern, and he let you know that he didn’t play.” Len, as the kids called him, was flexible, possessing a realistic view of adolescent development. Denise recalled how she “breezed through school, doing everyone’s homework for them.” Len recognized both her activities and her intelligence, naming her valedictorian of her probation class. More than that, she says, “he kept telling me I was smart.” After graduation, she worked full-time at a state college cafeteria. Still, Denise didn’t want to just work at a college—she wanted to go to college. Her wish fit with what the research shows: girls detained in the juvenile justice system have a much greater desire to obtain advanced education than boys.¹⁴ She knew college was a long shot; still she tucked the idea away in her mind, determined to fulfill her plans for the future.

There was another positive outcome to Denise’s involvement with the juvenile probation system: in camp she made a true friend, Clara Vasquez. Their attachment and love for one another remains strong to this day. Despite the fact that as a Latina, Clara might be Denise’s enemy on the street, their stories were eerily parallel—she too had landed in the juvenile justice system after running away from a foster home. Here was the experience of the young women who research studies showed weren’t super-predators. Instead, Denise, Rosa, and Clara were and are typical of girls who enter the juvenile justice system because they’d been abandoned or abused by parents and had become part of the child welfare and foster-care system.¹⁵ They were all part of a group often labeled as “crossover youth,” boys and girls who moved between the child welfare and juvenile justice systems. And that was only the start of their similarities.

Girls like Clara, Denise, and Rosa, who’d been detained in juvenile justice facilities for various lengths of time, all struggled with the same problems that women experienced in the adult jail and prison system: growing mental health issues, the beginnings of substance abuse, twice as many reports of physical abuse as boys, four times as many reports of sexual abuse as boys, and twice as many suicide attempts. And that’s just what’s reported.

Their experience mirrors that of women in another way: for most of these girls, there were no services in the community. “You go to a school and that’s it,” Denise ruefully observed. “You got a probation officer out in the community. I don’t remember even interacting with my last PO. I was assigned one—I don’t remember anything else about him. Not the way I remember Len. There was no one like Len. After school, there was no one helping me. I wish someone or something had been there to help me.”

Denise’s words are emblematic of what so many young women encounter once they are released from the juvenile justice system. There is nothing awaiting them when they return to the homes and streets that have been a source of violence and pain. After detention in the camps and halls, most young women try to create relationships, they try to find supports—but they are completely on their own. Often there is no one to turn to except the men who have led them into criminal activity in the first place.

“Why do they go back to their boyfriends, why do they go back to the streets? Why don’t they change?” an elected official in Washington, DC, asked me after I appeared before a House of Representatives subcommittee. I couldn’t get the words out fast enough. Because there is nothing else for them. It was hard for me to believe he didn’t understand, that he couldn’t see what was so obvious. He wasn’t alone in this. In the end, the public systems that are supposed to support girls are hamstrung by gendered public policies. There is no sustained understanding of trauma and no community-based support to meet these young women’s needs. Still, the juvenile justice system is not alone in failing these young women and pushing them further down the path of incarceration and despair. There is one other system that touches so many of these women’s lives, an institution they fear and find themselves enmeshed with from the time they are girls. And while the juvenile justice system ultimately betrays the young women it is supposed to help rehabilitate, its failures are overshadowed by what happens within the structure that is established to shield them from harm: the child welfare system.