Girls in Juvenile Detention Facilities
This chapter examines the experiences of incarcerated girls who participated in a service learning course that paired them with college mentors in a juvenile detention facility. The course defined the girls as agents in social contexts of inequality, rather than as poor girls of color, and honored their voices as they discussed the issues that were most important to their lives in the community. It also provided the opportunity to examine the girls’ experiences of detention in light of their life stories, and to understand girls’ involvement with the justice system and incarceration as a form of abandonment by society, institutions, and families. This chapter highlights the paucity of treatment programs specifically designed for incarcerated girls and describes how practitioners can create moments of healing in a system designed to punish and dehumanize.