Girls in Juvenile Detention Facilities

Author(s):  
Kendra R. Brewster ◽  
Kathleen M. Cumiskey

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.

2021 ◽  
pp. 001112872110226
Author(s):  
April N. Terry ◽  
Ashley Lockwood ◽  
Morgan Steele ◽  
Megan Milner

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, girls and women represented one of the fastest growing populations within the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Since the spread of COVID-19, suggestions were provided to juvenile justice bodies, encouraging a reduction of youth arrests, detainments, and quicker court processing. Yet, the research comparing peri-COVID-19 changes for girls and boys is lacking, with an oversight to gender trends and rural and urban differences. This study used Juvenile Intake and Assessment Center (JIAC) data from a rural Midwestern state to look at rural and urban location trends for both boys and girls. Results suggest rural communities are responding differently to girls’ behaviors, revealing a slower decline in intakes compared to boys and youth in urban areas.


2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (13) ◽  
pp. 4046-4066 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maud Hickey

The purpose of this long-term qualitative study was to uncover evidence that might support components of positive youth development (PYD) in a music composition program at an urban youth detention center. The constructs of PYD come from self-determination theory—competence, autonomy, and relatedness—and formed the theoretical lens from which the data were analyzed. Over a period of 5 years, more than 700 youth participated in the program and created primarily rap music compositions. Comments from their feedback, as well as interviews, were analyzed using qualitative content analysis. Findings point to the emergence of two main categories as reasons for enjoying the program: competence and positive feelings. Creativity also emerged as linked to competence and autonomy as well as the “Good Lives Model” of detainee development. Further research on using culturally relevant and creative music programming as a tool in PYD is discussed.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1978 ◽  
Vol 62 (5) ◽  
pp. 697-697
Author(s):  
L. Harris

Today, when some critics of our juvenile-justice system are complaining that the system is incompetent in dealing with violent young criminals, other critics are complaining that it is showing amazing efficiency in locking up—often for long periods—troubled young people who have not been charged with committing any crime, violent or otherwise. Such young people, they point out, represent approximately forty per cent of the hundred thousand-odd children who will be sent to jail this year for at least twenty-four hours and of the twelve thousand who will be placed in juvenile-detention centers every day. These children, who are variously labelled Persons in Need of Supervision (PINS), Children in Need of Supervision (CINS), Juveniles in Need of Supervision (JINS), or Wayward Minors, depending on the state they live in, will be guilty of nothing more serious than being a burden or a nuisance. They are not juvenile criminals—they have committed no act for which an adult could be prosecuted. Mainly, they are children who are truant from school, who have run away from home, or whose parents (the majority of them poor) find them too difficult to manage. Under one name or another, the PINS judicial category is written into the laws of forty-one states, and children who are assigned to it occupy, according to one estimate, as much as forty-one per cent of the case load of juvenile courts.... Underlying all the state statutes [is] the doctrine of parens patriae drawn from English chancery law—that the court could act to resolve the problems of troubled children as if it were a parent.


Author(s):  
Patrick Lopez-Aguado

This chapter describes how punitive facilities structure, socialize, and reinforce the carceral social order within the institution. I argue that in their efforts to prevent institutional violence by separating rival gangs, the prison, the juvenile detention facility, and the continuation high school instead construct a consistent social order that is based in gang rivalries—one in which everyone in the facility is compelled to participate. Within these facilities, staff members construct this social order by using race, home community, and peer networks to categorize entire institutional populations into gang-associated groups. Staff members then routinely maintain these categories as distinct groups by policing the spatial boundaries between them, as keeping rival groups separated is perceived as necessary for ensuring institutional security. The relationships and conflicts that are structured by these sorting and segregation practices ultimately socialize this carceral social order as a dominant, “common sense” logic for both managing and navigating punitive facilities.


2016 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeananne Nichols ◽  
Brian M. Sullivan

Though many pre-service music teachers have received exemplary instruction in their high school music programs, these programs may not be representative of the social, cultural, and economic diversity of their broader communities. This insularity may hinder their perceptions of their community as they step into an increasingly diverse school environment. The Champaign County Juvenile Detention Center (CCJDC) Arts Project was adopted as a critical service-learning course in order to introduce pre-service music teachers to students and ways of teaching that may be different from what they typically encounter through their university field experiences. Participants in the project designed and facilitated music and arts experiences with the incarcerated youth once per week over an entire semester. In this case study we examine the experiences of six pre-service music teachers who participated in the CCJDC Arts Project during 2012, looking for moments of “dissonance,” which Kiely defines as incongruities between participants’ past experiences and the challenging reality they encounter through the project. Entry into the facility, interactions with the youth at the facility, and the musical practices shaped by the needs of the facility all worked in tandem to challenge participants’ latent expectations and beliefs about their community, and to heighten their awareness of the sociocultural systems that shape their future students, their developing teaching practices, and their own privileged positions in school and society.


1997 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 412-437 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurie Schaffner

What are sociolegal, cultural, and emotional premises beneath conceptualizations of parenting skills for parents of juvenile offenders? This study examined court-ordered parenting skills classes taught by juvenile probation department personnel at a Northern California juvenile detention facility. Three conflicting perspectives arose in the classes: the juvenile court's perspective, where delinquency was framed as a result of poor parenting that state intervention could rectify; the parents' perspective, where parenting was seen as part of the feeling world of family life; and an adult solidarity perspective, where probation officials and parents agreed that youths were bad, out of control, disrespectful—a type of demonization of the youths by all the adults.


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