http://www.jacksonville.com/tu-online/s ... 6193.shtmlTroubled girls are being pushed into institutions
By TONYAA WEATHERSBEE, The Times-Union
After 12 years of enduring sexual abuse at the hands of a family member, the juvenile girl finally tried to speak out.
Unfortunately, the system kept hearing her wrong.
When she hit her abuser, the girl, then 16, wound up being arrested for battery. That same year, when a police officer tried to intervene in another confrontation, she wound up hitting the officer.
That led to another arrest. The arrest generated more anger, more acting out, and the beginning of a series of confinements to a girls' residential facility in the Florida Panhandle.
But it didn't lead to mental health therapy, said LaWanda Ravoira, past president of PACE Center for Girls Inc. Because of that, she joined the ranks of girls from Duval County and the state who wind up in the juvenile justice system because it only judges their actions, not the traumatic history that often leads to it.
This girl, because of the failure of the Department of Children and Families and the Department of Juvenile Justice, was fast-tracked into the state prison system, Revoira told members of the Women's Giving Alliance last week.
"She is so wounded it would break your heart."
The plight of abused girls has Ravoira pushing for change in a system in which minor offenses such as shoplifting and joy-riding often land them in residential facilities.
There are few community-based programs geared to deal with untreated mental and emotional issues that often lead girls to commit crimes, as well as zero-tolerance policies that treat girls who commit minor, angst-ridden transgressions as menaces to society.
"We do not tolerate any behaviors by girls that are too far out of the box," Ravoira told me.
There's something to that - because Florida incarcerates around 1,000 girls a day - the highest rate in the country.
And of the girls imprisoned in Jacksonville, 43 percent are incarcerated for misdemeanors.
The state average is 29 percent, Ravoira said.
On top of that, nearly 80 percent of the girls who are confined suffer from untreated mental and emotional problems. And the ones who Jacksonville confines don't even get to stay in the area because there are no residential facilities in North Florida.
"Our girls are sent as far away as Milton, Fla., and Miami," Ravoira said. "These are facilities with razor wire ... You do not see males locked up in razor wire facilities for misdemeanors."
Of course, there's a cheaper, more effective and more sensitive way to stop the explosion of girls in the system, said Ravoira, who co-authored a study on the subject titled, "A Rallying Cry for Change: Charting a New Direction in the State of Florida's Response to Girls in the Juvenile Justice System."
That way is by creating more community-based programs and efforts to target girls who struggle with the issues that get them entangled in the system.
A program patterned after the Guardian Ad Litem Program, for example, for girls in the juvenile justice system would be one place to start, Ravoira said. Another would be a series of small, respite group homes, she said.
"The guardian ad litem could be the person who speaks out and says, 'Wait, she shoplifted,' " she said.
Such reforms ought to be given a chance.
The numbers, as well as the sad tales of girls, tell me that something is severely out of whack. Among other things, it tells me that this race to incarcerate - which now has the United States as the world's top jailer - has now reached down into the bottom rungs. Punishment is the priority while rehabilitation has become a four-letter word.
No matter that punishment is more expensive.
But what's worse is that the system sends an ominous message about how it values girls.
For most girls who start doing dumb things like shoplifting, or who slap someone in anger, it makes more sense to help them without sending them away.
According to the study, there are clear answers why most of the girls in the juvenile justice system commit their offenses. It makes no sense to continue on a costly route that ignores those answers.
Most of all, it makes no sense to acclimate girls to a life of institutionalization. Especially when there's a way out.
