From Governing:
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. Continue reading >>>
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