Pushout

by Monique W. Morris

  The popular perception of Black children as unruly, incorrigible, or inherently ungovernable has affected society’s conscious and unconscious responses to Black girls who get in trouble with the law. Black girls are at once female and Black, and their presence in correctional facilities has always been informed by their status as both. All of the traits that were previously described as being a core part of social expectations for “good” girls found a particularly nebulous existence among “bad” girls. Black women and girls were subject to a masculinization of their behaviors if they challenged authority, asserted independence, or attempted to mitigate their impoverished and sometimes violent physical environment by striking back (or, in some cases, first). In 1910, Black girls were four times more likely to be incarcerated than foreign-born White girls, and five times more likely than native-born White girls.25 Black girls were also more likely than White girls to be found delinquent for person, property, and status offenses—a trend that was particularly prevalent in the southern states.

  According to criminologist Vernetta Young, “Black women in American society have been victimized by their double status as blacks and as women. . . . Information about black females has been based on their position relative to black males and white females. . . . Knowledge about [Black] women is based on images that are distorted and falsified. In turn these images have influenced the way in which black female victims and offenders have been treated by the criminal justice system.”26

  Essentially, the criminal legal system never developed clear educational pathways to success for Black girls in confinement—and this has now come back to threaten the legitimacy of a juvenile justice system that is supposed to prevent future involvement with the criminal legal system. Black girls are confronted with the usual hurdles to educational success in a correctional setting: the highly punitive nature of the facility and trouble reconciling school credits. Yet their Black girl identities subject them to a brand of systemic discipline and victimization that mirrors, and in some cases surpasses, the mundane and everyday ways that the full humanity and potential of Black girls is confined.

  Criminalized Education

  Today Black girls in juvenile correctional facilities have continued to endure hypersegregated and inferior learning conditions that prevent their full rehabilitation and fail to support their healthy development. In 2013, the latest year for which data on youth in residential placement are available, more than 6,000 girls were detained or committed on any given day in U.S. secure juvenile correctional facilities, group homes, boot camps, and long-term secure facilities.27 Among these girls, 35 percent were Black girls, 40 percent were White, 21 percent were Latina, 3.6 percent were Native American, and less than 1 percent were Asian or Pacific Islander.28 It is worth remembering that Black girls are less than 14 percent of all girls in the United States; given that 35 percent of those confined on any given day are Black, the term “disproportionate” is putting matters mildly.

  The racial disparities described here are a function of multiple factors: socioeconomic (unemployment, poverty), educational (poor performance, truancy), juvenile justice (differential handling, lack of gender-responsive treatment and alternatives to detention), and family and community (an incarcerated parent, living in high-crime areas), among others. Between 1997 and 2011, Black girls experienced assignment to residential placement at a rate of 123 per 100,000 youth, one of the highest in the nation. This racial isolation, coupled with an increase in the number of girls being placed into these facilities, has had a tremendous impact on the development of an effective, culturally competent learning continuum for these girls—and the way they enhance their own self-esteem and academic performance.

  The juvenile hall in which I based the majority of my discussions with detained girls was home to about thirty girls on average each month. In the juvenile court school where the detained girls were educated, classrooms were organized into two units, with the size fluctuating according to the number of girls confined in juvenile hall each day. The girls rotated between history, language arts, math, and science classes each day, and attended library or physical education (PE) courses throughout the week.

  From my conversations with the young women detained in this facility, it was apparent they understood the importance of their participation in school. Many were seeking credit recovery after having missed significant periods of school in the community. However, their desire to learn was quickly quashed by an emphasis on discipline, uninspired teaching, and a curriculum that was often driven by simple worksheet packets that each student was required to complete every day. There was little opportunity for them to collaborate with each other, learn from each other, or interrogate the material through inquiry and discussion.

  “I don’t like school,” Portia, an eleventh-grader, declared with conviction. “It’s not because I just want to do what I want to do. It’s because I feel like it’s way too easy for me. Like, the math in here is like I already know it. . . . Like, I could get easily 4.0s and stuff. It’s just that I don’t do the work because I feel that it’s unnecessary for me to learn the same thing that I already know. . . . It seems like a waste of my time to just sit there and do stuff I already know. . . . I think I’m very advanced in school. I passed my [test] on the first try. So if I take a high school exit exam, I could easily be done with high school.”

  Portia was very confident about her ability to perform well academically, even while she admitted that her performance may not have reflected as much. Her response to me signaled that she just wasn’t motivated to complete school while in juvenile hall. The simple nature of the work, by her own account, was leading her to disengage even though she knew that school was an important part of the journey toward reaching her career objectives.

  “Honestly, for the career that I want, I would say that [education] is very important,” she said. “My career is a veterinarian . . . that’s where I want to go with my life, so I have to go to school.” It’s hard to see how the lack of nurturing, inspiration, and available resources would conspire to set Portia on a path to graduate studies in veterinary medicine. So what, exactly, are these schools designed to accomplish?

  Schools in juvenile detention facilities are often punitive. Though many operate with the intention or stated mission to be rehabilitative, the approach is often one that punishes children who have made mistakes. Many institutions nationwide offer only a few programs and services that adequately respond to the risk factors associated with the delinquency of girls, particularly girls of color. Facilities are designed to increase surveillance, and programs and approaches often subject children to emotional and physical abuse that produce immediate and long-term harmful effects. According to the Center for Children’s Law and Policy, more than one-third of detained youth nationwide report that staff have used unnecessary force in their interactions with them, and half reported that they were punished by staff “without cause.”29 For girls—the majority of whom are being held for status offenses and other nonviolent offenses and among whom 74 percent have a diagnosed psychiatric illness—we have to ask, is this how we facilitate their ability to access a better life?30

  Portia and many girls like her who attend these schools, despite their bad choices and the equally bad ones made for them along the way, still have hopes, aspirations, and goals for their future selves. But these are children in trouble with the law, and the monitoring and surveillance that go hand in hand with systems of punishment extend well beyond their cell walls. The supervising staff that work alongside the teacher—a preemptive measure in the event that there are disciplinary problems among the students—are ever present. This emphasis on discipline does not go unnoticed by the girls.

  More Discipline, More Problems

  Over the course of three years, nearly every girl in confinement that I spoke with (more than forty detained girls) at some point had been removed from her juvenile court school classroom. In a study that I conducted in 2013, I found that one-third of detai
ned Black girls—like Faith—believed that it was because they simply asked the teacher a question.31 Even when girls were “talking back,” they often felt that they were responding to an unprompted, negative comment made by their teacher.

  Discipline and surveillance are important conditions impacting the learning of girls in confinement. They were on lockdown, and learning there was difficult. Their narratives reveal that learning in the juvenile court school is not perceived as an extension of quality learning from district or community schools. Instead, many of the girls I spoke with expressed that the material was not only repetitive but also unrelated to their future goals or interests. For these girls, the juvenile court school increased the counterproductive exclusion to which they were already exposed in their district schools.

  “You can’t learn,” Mia shared. “Like . . . it’s even more of a struggle than regular schools, ’cause everybody in here for a certain thing. Either somebody come back from court and they hella mad . . . you say something to them, they have a bad attitude, so you like, ‘Hold on.’ And then it’s like, a fight. Or, you know, I don’t know, like . . . sometimes, like this teacher, she don’t know. . . . Like when I say this, I’m so serious. If you sat in her class, you’d be like, ‘Oh my gosh. She don’t know how to teach.’ Like, why did they hire this lady? She know how to teach science. That’s what she knows. She don’t know how to teach math. They put her for science and math, so when she does math, it’s like, she ask the kids up in our class, ‘Do you know this?’ And we’re like, ‘Aren’t you the teacher? Aren’t you supposed to know this kind of stuff?’ And [the teacher] was like, ‘No, you guys are.’ . . . You’re supposed to be teaching us, not just thinking out of nowhere. She . . . a lot of times she kicks us out because we don’t know stuff.”

  “What has gotten you kicked out of class in here?” I asked.

  “One time I was in class . . . I was telling her that I was done, because I get done with my work fast if I know how to do it. So I was like, I’m done. She was like, ‘Okay, you’re always done before the class, what does that mean?’ So, I’m like, ‘Well, I have an hour to go before I go back to the unit.’ So I’m telling her like, ‘What, you want me to just sit here for an hour?’ She was like, ‘Yes, put your head down.’ So I’m just like, ‘All right.’ So I just sit there, you know, like . . . then I’m like, ‘Can I write or draw? Something? I mean, it’s a whole hour to go.’ She was like, ‘No, you can’t do anything. You’re always getting done before the whole class. You know what, get out. Give me your pencil and get out.’ I’m like, ‘Because I do my work, I’m actually trying to do my work now, and now you want me to get out?’ Hella shit. She blame hella shit on us, like . . . some of the class is badder than the others. So like, some of the class will take off the erasers and throw it at her, and the whole class gets in trouble because of it. ‘Oh, I’m going to let your staff know that you guys have been taking off the erasers, and whoop-tee-whoop.’ She act like we want to steal a fucking eraser. What’s an eraser?”

  When girls were “kicked out” of class, they were relegated to sitting out in the hallway until they were invited back to the classroom or the class period was over.

  “And sometimes she gives us suspension for that,” Mia continued.

  “What does suspension look like in here?” I asked.

  “You just got no free rec. Free rec is when you, like, come out at nighttime . . . you don’t got none of that. You don’t . . . really, you don’t get to do nothing. You got to eat all your meals in your room.”

  No recreation, eating in isolation—“suspension” seemed akin to a form of solitary confinement.

  For Malaika, who struggled with managing her triggers to fight, school in the punitive environment of juvenile hall was particularly challenging.

  “Well, I don’t like [this teacher],” she said. “She don’t need to be here because it seem like she don’t want to be here. And it seem like she miserable and don’t got no life, and just come here to, you know, torture us . . . Like you could just sit in the hallway . . . She don’t even know the work. She teach [the subject], but she don’t know how to do it. Like, she’ll teach one student one way, and then teach the other student this way. Then we all just be confused. Then she don’t even be knowing the answer. Some of the kids be correcting her. Like, ‘Why did you get the job and why did you volunteer to do that subject if you don’t even know how to do it?’ And then, for [the other subject], it’s like basically, she don’t teach. All she do is give us a packet in the book. The packet goes with the book, so it’s like, the packet comes out of the workbook, you know? So, all you got to do is just look in there, it’s going to tell you the answer . . . we’re not really learning anything. She’s not even going over it with us. We’re just doing the work and put it in our folder. She don’t even check the work. Like, she shouldn’t be no teacher. . . . If you ask her a question, she’s going to get mad ’cause she don’t know [the answer]! ’Cause she don’t know it, she’s going to get mad and take it out on us. I be getting hecka irritated. One time she sent me out of class because I didn’t know the answer. And she was going to send me out of class! I’m like, how is you going to send me out of class ’cause I don’t know the answer? That’s stupid.”

  Teachers in juvenile hall face the tall order of managing girls with significant histories of school absence and failure, which are compounded by their histories of trauma and abuse. I have never met a teacher who actually “didn’t care” about the education of girls in juvenile hall, but many teachers that I have encountered over the years have admitted to feeling overwhelmed and often emotionally unprepared or insufficiently trained to deal with the myriad issues that prevent them from forming meaningful relationships—even if temporary—with the girls they educate in juvenile hall.

  Where Credit Is Due

  “I mean, I know they still want us to get our credits and stuff while we’re in here,” Portia said. “But I think it’s just, like, a waste because somebody do something, the whole group got to suffer for it, which means we all got to go to our rooms. . . . It’s structured. Like military structured. . . . It feels like it’s a waste of my time for me to be here and try to get my credits, if I’m not going to get them correctly. I feel like if you’re going to go to school here, then you should get the same amount of credits you get in a regular school. ’Cause these little one, two, five credits . . . I mean, it’s helpful, but it don’t really do nothing.”

  For Portia, credit recovery was an important motivator for her attendance and participation in the juvenile court school. However, she was aware of the mismatch between what she was doing in the classrooms, and what might actually prove to be useful in the long-run. The No Child Left Behind Act (2001) required all schools, including juvenile court schools, to report “adequate yearly progress” (AYP). The aim was to monitor and evaluate student progress with respect to achievement, accrual of school credits, readiness to transfer to a “regular program or other education program,” completion of secondary school or employment, and, as appropriate, postsecondary education or job training efforts.32 One study by the Juvenile Justice Enhancement Program found that as many as nineteen states were not including juvenile court schools in their AYP reports.33 This is an issue that many educators understand as problematic, yet feel powerless to address.

  I asked a school district official about the credit alignment process and how to facilitate a more seamless process for children in detention. I was specifically interested in how system leaders might better respond to the nature of educating youth in detention—the short stays versus the long stays, reconciling the student’s ability versus the design of the curriculum, and other considerations. Other professionals in the department had observed the problem and devised unofficial strategies, such as using smaller increments for the credit accrual process that prevent youth from losing credits if they stayed less than a week in custody. I offered these suggestions and other ideas to engage school board members
in a conversation on this topic.

  After listening to me talk for several moments, the administrator smugly looked at me and said, “If you can figure that out, then you’ll get a major award.”

  I’m certain he meant it as a joke, but credit recovery is a serious concern for girls who have a history of particularly contentious relationships with school. The uncertainty with which a number of the young women I spoke to approached the topic of credit accrual and recovery left little question that the inconsistent manner for earning and tracking student credits undermines their trust in the juvenile court educational system.

  Additionally, the transient nature of the population in confinement, combined with local (district) variances in the credit accrual processes, was confusing for the majority of girls. As Stacy shared, “My mama tried to get . . . credits, but she couldn’t do it. . . . I’m going to have my mama come up here, try again and see if she can switch my credits back to my school. I have some credits . . . I think.”

  Stacy was uncertain. Of this I was sure.

  Well Enough to Learn

  When I met Portia, she was struggling to maintain her sanity among other girls who were also impacted by mental illness. Nationwide, 81 percent of girls in the juvenile justice system suffer from a mental health disorder.34 In California, the percentage of youth with a mental health disorder ranges between 40 and 70 percent.35