Juvenile justice faces growing crisis: What can we do about the girls?

Tuesday, July 17, 2001

By Steve Twedt, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

PHILADELPHIA -- On a sunny summer day, the windowless blue hallways of the juvenile detention center here seem particularly dark and narrow. The only full light falls on a courtyard outside the gym, where a field has been laid out for playing softball. For obvious reasons, the outfield fences rival the Green Monster at Boston's Fenway Park in height.

Only those teens most difficult to place in programs are housed at the Youth Study Center, located on Pennsylvania Avenue near City Center. The boys and girls live on separate floors, and the census this day proportionately reflects the juvenile corrections world in America -- 90 boys, 13 girls.

A closer look also reveals a troubling but lesser known national trend: While girls comprise a smaller percentage of juvenile offenders, they are far more likely than boys to enter the system with serious mental health problems.

This day, explains a center official, 15 of the 103 residents have their names on a suicide watch list, either because they've threatened suicide or have made a serious attempt.

Of the 15, seven are girls.

"Girls are different. Not worse, just different," said Joyce Burrell, the deputy commissioner who oversees juvenile justice youths in Philadelphia.

"Girls require a lot of individual attention. Girls need relationships. Girls' lives depend on relationships, whether they are sick or not, and we try to fit them into institutions where that doesn't happen," often because the emphasis is more on security and regimentation than therapy.

Here's another way girls are different from boys, at least in Philadelphia: Girls, on average, spend two weeks in detention before they're placed in a program. The boys stay about eight days.

"People have decided that girls are hard to work with," Burrell said.

Growing violence

Teen girls entering the juvenile justice system are more likely than boys to have been sexually and physically assaulted, and are more likely to carry deep anger and emotional trauma because of it. Often, even as they're victimizing someone else, they're victimizing themselves, through drugs, or prostitution, or self-mutilation.

At Allencrest Detention Center in Beaver County, there are usually 20 boys and 4 or 5 girls, said Dawn Thibodeau, director of medical services -- yet the girls generate eight times as many reportable incidents because of fights or other rule infractions.

One teen girl at Allencrest last year assaulted four different staff members before she was finally sent to the Danville Center for Adolescent Females in Montour County. Her psychiatric diagnoses ranged from depression to bipolar disorder to schizophrenia.

"Unless that girl changes, through medication or something else, she's going to kill somebody. It wouldn't take any provocation at all," said Royal Hart, assistant director at Allencrest.

Cases like that are bound to increase, if only because there are more girls entering detention and other secure facilities.

In the past year, for the first time, Allegheny County's Shuman Juvenile Detention Center had to convert a third unit to house girls for several weeks. In all of 1999, Shuman had 30 or more girls on 27 days, and never had more than 37 at one time. In the first four months of 2000, Shuman had 30 or more girls on 76 days, and up to 50 at one time.

The number of girls at Shuman has dropped since then, but mostly because the county's juvenile courts have expanded their hearing schedule, reducing the overall number of teens in detention.

One reason Shuman and Philadelphia's Youth Study Center have begun to experience more problems is that girls are getting arrested more often. While juvenile arrests for violent crimes in Pennsylvania have decreased overall the past five years, one category has increased: girls arrested for aggravated assault.

Detention centers nationwide are seeing more girls, too. According to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, female delinquency cases increased 65 percent between 1988 and 1997, compared with 30 percent for males. The largest single increase for girls -- a 155 percent jump -- involved crimes against people, such as assault or terroristic threa