Girls in the Juvenile Justice System: Perspectives on Services and Conditions of Confinement is the first of three reports exploring justice system practices and programs and their impact on girls. The second report will explore the impact of the
lack of cross-system and community collaboration on girls in the justice and related systems, and the third will examine the impact of juvenile court processing on girls. In this publication we discuss gaps in services for system involved girls, as well as
failures in conditions of confinement for girls who are detained or in out of home placements. Finally, we devote a chapter in this report to differences in the perceptions of juvenile court judges and juvenile defense counsel responding to our surveys and the significance of these different perspectives for policy development.
The conclusions and recommendations in this report are based on surveys of juvenile defense counsel and juvenile court judges, as well as site visits and interviews with incarcerated girls in five jurisdictions. In many places our interviews withgirls
identified issues that we were either unaware of or that we previously considered minor. We organized the report to reflect these issues. Fundamentally, our findings are driven by our conversations with girls in the system.
Francine T Sherman
We are writing this series of reports to highlight some key limitations and inequities for girls in the juvenile justice and related systems. We hope to promote awareness of the particular needs of system involved girls and foster gender responsive practices and policies. Finally, we hope that by identifying ways in which judges’ and defense counsel’s perspectives differ, each group will better understand the other and be motivated to work together to promote gender equity.
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