For folks who follow local New York politics there has been a lot of buzz recently around how broken the New York State juvenile justice system is. Reports published in 2009 indicate high levels of re-arrest after release, abuse of young detainees by guards and staff and an over representation of young people of color in detention centers. While in most recent news the New York City Department of Juvenile Justice(DJJ) was merged into the Administration for Children’s Services(ACS).

Disturbing (yet not entirely surprising) information about juvenile detention in NYS started coming to my attention in my professional life. By chance I’ve also been reading Victoria Law’s Resistance Behind Bars which turned out to be key in keeping a radical feminist perspective while researching juvenile justice in the context of a liberal work setting. Law reminds the reader at the beginning of Resistance that she is not advocating for a more humane prison system, but rather to “strive for a better world – one in which prison’s are obsolete.” I would tend to agree that the prison system for adults and juveniles cannot simply be reformed into a slightly better place. I also believe that the struggle for some changes which can prevent the most egregious violations of human rights, such as the shackling of birthing women’s legs and the level of physical restraint which lead to the death of 15 year old Darryl Thompson at Tryon Boys Residential Center in November 2006, are crucial to advocate for.

The merger of the DJJ into ACS, which is the most recent reform to the juvenile justice system and possibly the first of many to come in the near future, is aimed at adding a therapeutic focus for juvenile detainees rather than having a city agency whose central aim is to manage detention. This merger does have some degree of logic considering a disproportionate number of young detainees have had contact with children’s services prior to detention. Thus the merger will streamline agencies and institutions that young people and their families must navigate Further, ACS will be recommending community based alternative programs to judges in an effort to reduce the population of young people in detention. However this merger seems to lack an explicit plan for prevention of conditions that lead young people to court involvement. Thus the question remains, “how can we rehabilitate individual youth?”, rather than “how can we create social change that will support positive youth development while deconstructing the stereotype of young people of color as delinquent?” And back to Law’s question, how can we make prisons obsolete?

The focus of discussions about juvenile justice often focus on the experiences of young men. Although young women represent a smaller amount of the population in juvenile detention centers – in 2008 there were 243 young women admitted to placement out of a population of 1,632 (Citizen’s Committee for Children report, December 2009) – their experiences cannot be assumed to be represented by stories of what their male counterparts are experiencing. Because the stereotype of juvenile delinquents is so centered around young men, visibility of young women in detention is reduced. This is easily seen in coverage of abuses of young people in the media. Despite the nearly equal amount of examples in the DOJ report of abuses that young men and women experience in detention, news articles focus on young men. For instance a recent article in New York magazine was entitled “The Lost Boys of Tryon.” The article does include one example of a young female detainee being sexually abused and becoming pregnant as a result. Yet a story of one young woman experiencing sexual abuse in detention does little to speak to the systemic problem of sexual abuse within prisons. Nor is there representation of the results that imprisonment can have to exacerbate trauma experienced before incarceration. This is of particular importance when considering that young women experience abuse at higher rates than young men. Because sexual abuse takes power away from the victim/survivor, the experience of imprisonment, in which autonomy is taken so completely, may be triggering in ways that have not been widely acknowledged.