In Brief:
- Girls who end up in detention are often locked up for behaviors that do not threaten public safety, experts say; sometimes, incarceration happens “for their own good” or because there is no other option available for a girl exhibiting problematic behaviors.
- Because girls are less often arrested for violent offenses, some experts contend they should be treated differently from boys.
- Santa Clara County began rethinking its approach in 2015 and changes have been lasting. A new grant aims to help other counties do the same.
Santa Clara County, Calif., incarcerates very few girls these days. The nearly empty girls units of its juvenile detention centers are the legacy of changes begun years ago, when the county took a hard look at why it was locking up these young people. The revamped strategy has been working — and could soon spread further, with four other Californian counties readying to try similar approaches.
The changes are part of a broader nationwide push to reduce youth incarceration amid a shifting understanding of young people’s brain development. But some experts say girls deserve a specific focus because they tend to be arrested for nonviolent offenses, and in very different circumstances from boys. Girls who have survived abuse or who are homeless are sometimes incarcerated for their own safety or simply because there is nowhere else for them to go, says Lindsay Rosenthal, director of the Ending Girls’ Incarceration Initiative at the Vera Institute of Justice. They might be locked up to keep them away from someone who’s sexually exploiting them, keep them from using drugs or keep them from sleeping on the streets if they’re pregnant and without a safe home.
“What we've learned is, we have to do better at solutions than just automatically thinking, ‘Well, let's just keep her incarcerated, and then she won't use drugs’ or ‘let’s keep her incarcerated, and then she won't be vulnerable to exploitation,’” says Katherine Lucero, a former Santa Clara superior court judge and current director of California’s Office of Youth and Community Restoration.
It was only about a decade ago that advocacy on the issue of girls’ incarceration began gaining traction in Santa Clara, Lucero says. The county later partnered with the Vera Institute on its efforts in 2019.
The results have been dramatic. From 2018 to 2020 the county saw a 58 percent drop in girls being admitted into detention. And they seem to be lasting, with recent numbers showing very few girls held in short-term or long-term detention. The county’s long-term juvenile detainment center, the William F. James Ranch, held an average of zero youth in its girls unit from July 2021-June 2023, the county reported. And there was a monthly average of just zero to two youth incarcerated short term in the girls’ unit at Juvenile Hall from July 2021-January 2022.
How did the county achieve this drop? The new strategy aimed to divert girls and gender-expansive youth into community-based alternatives where possible, provide trauma-informed wraparound services to those involved in the juvenile justice system, and no longer incarcerate girls who are at low risk of recidivism solely for their own personal safety. The county also wanted to stop incarcerating for nonviolent offenses that don’t risk public safety — like graffiti, petty theft and car theft, says Lucero.
These approaches are often championed by people who favor criminal justice reform and believe less strongly in punitive measures. But even some tough-on-crime experts believe in the value of this approach for young girls.
Sending a girl who’s using drugs into a juvenile detention center, where she’ll be among violent offenders, means “all she's going to do is learn how to get better at lying to the authorities and getting more drugs,” says Michael Rushford, president and CEO of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a nonprofit public interest law firm that advocates for “swift and certain punishment” for people who commit crimes. Rehab programs can work, he says, so long as they have strict guidelines.
For higher-level offenders, such as young people with a record of breaking into businesses and carjacking, however, Rushford believes detention can be necessary: “If they're jacking cars with a weapon, they've come too far for you to take them into a group home setting and dry them off from the drugs and then teach them a skill … . They need to be in a more secure setting where you have to bring in a little fear,” he says.
Why Focus on Girls?
While acknowledging it could sound simplistic or stereotyping, several people who’ve been involved in California’s criminal justice system say they’ve seen real differences in how boys and girls come into contact with the criminal justice system, and what happens when they do so.
Girls’ and boys’ brains tend to be at different developmental stages during teenage years, when testosterone pushes boys into greater risk-taking, fighting and shows of toughness, Lucero says. Young male offenders are more likely than young female offenders to be involved in violent crimes, says Greg Totten, CEO of the California District Attorneys Association. Boys are more often influenced by gangs or criminally involved peer groups, while girls who commit violence often are drawn into such activity by a male romantic partner who’s the main perpetrator, says Totten, who, in a previous role, ran the juvenile division of Ventura County’s district attorney’s office.
Meanwhile, strained family relationships are often a factor in teen girls becoming involved in the criminal justice system.
“Mothers and girls, for example — from what I saw in my 22 years on the bench — had very difficult relationships, which often drove girls out of the house,” Lucero says. A judge from a Substance Abuse Treatment and Reentry (STAR) Program in Los Angeles recently told Lucero that the top reason drawing girls into that court was that they were battering their mothers.
Programming catered toward fixing those relationships — like training on building nonviolent communication skills — can therefore be an important piece of resolving underlying issues and getting the youth into a more stable situation.
Even when girls and boys do commit the same behaviors and offenses, families tend to be more supportive of boys, Lucero says. Often, girls would show up in court alone, while boys had mothers and grandmothers turn out to support them, Lucero says.
“Society believes ‘boys will be boys,’ and that sowing your oats is part and parcel of adolescence. For girls, not so much,” Lucero says.
There may be one other reason for focusing on girls and gender-expansive youth: It’s simply an easier target. Typically, this group makes up just 15 percent to 20 percent of those coming into contact with a given jurisdiction’s juvenile justice system, Lucero says.
A New Approach ... and the Hurdles
Jurisdictions who want to follow suit need to take a two-pronged approach. The first is officially deciding that incarceration should be a last-resort measure, reserved for public safety threats, and creating policies that enable this. The second is creating and supporting alternative community programs so there is another option for responding to troubled young people, says Vera’s Rosenthal.
Totten spoke similarly: “It’s not an acceptable response to detain somebody because they’re homeless, but it’s also very troubling to have young people ... where that’s their option: either they’re going to be detained or they’re going to be back on the streets.”
Jurisdictions might connect youth with group homes, create a network of host families who volunteer to temporarily house young people or work to find other family members the child could live with, for example, Rosenthal says. Community programs might provide various supports, like therapy and economic assistance, and they should be trauma-informed, Rosenthal says.
Criminal Justice Legal Foundation’s Rushford says efforts to find effective diversion programs must be careful and thorough. Governments should ensure programs aren’t just good ideas, but are good in practice: If a government funds a private program, they should get independent assessments of the program’s effectiveness and track record.
Communities may also have to change the rules around how police are allowed to interact with the public. In some jurisdictions, police are not permitted to transport someone unless they’ve arrested them first — which effectively blocks police who find a teen sleeping on the street from driving them to a youth shelter, Rosenthal says.
Santa Clara County made changes to now allow probation officers to use their own discretion in deciding whether to arrest a young person for missing a court hearing or school day or leaving a home where they were ordered to remain. If the youth has a good explanation, the officer may waive their arrest. For example, if there’s a problem at home, a young person may run away again, even if the terms of their probation require them to stay there. The county also established a probation officer role focused specifically on girls and gender-expansive youth and built connections between probation officers and community-based organizations, so officers can more easily identify where to send young people.
Santa Clara is far from the only jurisdiction doing this work. Vera and the California Office of Youth and Community Restoration plan to soon issue grant funds to help California’s Imperial, Los Angeles, Sacramento and San Diego counties adopt similar models. Rosenthal says the impact could be significant: Together these counties hold 58 percent of the girls incarcerated in California. Plus, Vera is now preparing to publish a guide to help jurisdictions nationwide learn about adopting these kinds of changes.
