This report is the product of a two-year, multidisciplinary, mixed-methods study by Young Women’s Freedom Center (YWFC) and the Vera Institute of Justice (Vera). The work leading to this report was a community-based research project, including outreach, quantitative data collection, collaborative analysis, and original qualitative data collection in the form of interviews with 50 system-involved women, girls, and gender-expansive young people across the state. YWFC also convened a Community Expert Advisory Council and a Youth Community Expert Advisory Council to guide analyses of quantitative and qualitative data and policy recommendations.

For the full report, including a complete methodology, visit https://www.vera.org/downloads/Vera-YWFC-Freedom-and-Justice.pdf.

Vera collected data from the Juvenile Court and Probation Statistical System (JCPSS), Juvenile Detention Profile Survey (JDPS), and Monthly Arrest and Citation (MACR) databases to provide a detailed picture of girls’ incarceration across California. YWFC collected original data via interviews with 50 people who have been directly impacted by the criminalization of girls and gender-expansive young people. Reflecting the experiences of incarcerated women and girls, and centering the voices of those most directly impacted in California, this qualitative data illustrates the complexity of experiences women and girls have as they interact with a multitude of systems. Interviewees described:

• multiple pathways into the system and experiences with criminalization, including punitive responses to low-level offenses, family conflict, abuse, housing instability, school pushout, and probation;
• the harms of the system, including detention’s failure to meet their basic needs; experiences of verbal, physical, and sexual violence; violence during arrest and in detention; and
• lasting trauma and mental health impacts.

Interviewees also described community solutions needed to end girls’ incarceration. Young people involved in the system desire healing, therapy, and mentorship; housing, material, and economic support; and empowerment though advocacy and giving back.

Anonymous quotes from these young people describing their experiences and their recommended solutions to end incarceration are included throughout this report.

Statewide in 2022, 69 percent of girls’ arrests, 71 percent of girls’ probation referrals, and 44 percent of girls’ detention admissions are for misdemeanors and status offenses. These lower-level offenses—which often include charges such as vandalism, simple assault, petty theft, and trespassing—do not pose a significant risk to public safety. Research shows that these types of charges can and should be addressed through community-based services.^[]Patrick McCarthy, Vincent Schiraldi, and Miriam Shark, “The Future of Youth Justice: A Community-Based Alternative to the Youth Prison Model,” New Thinking in Community Corrections 2 (2016); National Research Council, Reforming Juvenile Justice: A Developmental Approach, edited by Richard J. Bonnie, Robert L. Johnson, Betty M. Chemers, et al. (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2013); Kyle Ernest, “Is Restorative Justice Effective in the U.S.? Evaluating Program Methods and Findings Using Meta-analysis” (PhD diss., Arizona State University, 2019), 101; and Richard A. Mendel, No Place for Kids (Baltimore, MD: The Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2011). But a person’s charges do not offer a full picture of their needs and potential, and most girls charged with felonies can also be successfully supported in the community. For example, Vera found that many girls charged with felonies in Santa Clara County received risk assessment scores recommending against detention. In fact, in 2018, more than 150 girls entered Santa Clara County’s Juvenile Hall despite receiving risk assessment scores indicating detention was unnecessary; two-thirds of these girls had underlying felony charges.

Girls’ arrests by charge level, 2022

^{Source: MACR 2022.}

Girls’ referrals and detentions by charge level, 2022

^{Source: JCPSS 2022.}

The majority of interviewees described how they first came into contact with law enforcement at home, in school, or at retail stores for minor infractions, including petty theft or parental conflict. These initial interactions were often the catalyst for ongoing involvement with the youth legal system. Lack of social support, such as affordable and safe housing and educational spaces, intersected and overlapped with getting pulled into and stuck in criminal-legal systems.

The girls and gender-expansive youth entering California’s youth legal facilities are overwhelmingly youth of color. This is an inequity rooted in a long history of criminalization and harm of girls of color in California—particularly Black, Latina/x, and Indigenous youth—and highlights the systemic failures that continue to impact girls of color across the state. Latina/x youth make up the majority of girls’ detention admissions statewide, and together, Black and Latina/x girls account for more than three-quarters of girls’ detention admissions.^[]There have long been challenges in accurately collecting ethnicity data, and recent research has highlighted the lack of consistent methodology for counting Latina/x youth, many of whom are inaccurately labelled as white. The lack of accurate data collection results in a systematic undercounting of Chicano, Indigenous, and Latinax people. Sonja Diaz, Adriana Bernal, Julie Aguilar, et al., The Latinx Data Gap in the Youth Justice System (Los Angeles: UCLA, 2021).

Girls of color are more likely to be detained than their white peers and disparities are particularly stark for Black girls. Black girls make up 24 percent of all girls’ detention admissions despite accounting for only 6 percent of all girls in California.

Over the past decade, California has taken significant strides to reform its juvenile legal system, working to reduce the prevalence of arrest and detention while simultaneously increasing community-based diversion programming.

From 2012 to 2022, the number of girls’ arrests dropped by 81 percent, slightly outpacing declines in overall juvenile arrests, which declined by 79 percent. In 2022, law enforcement made 26,000 juvenile arrests, including 6,426 arrests of young people who were categorized as girls in the data. Consistent with national trends, arrests of girls make up about 25 percent of overall juvenile arrests.

Over the same period, the number of annual girls’ admissions to detention also declined substantially—falling by 72 percent. In 2022, there were only 1,364 girls’ detention admissions across the state, down from 4,924 in 2012. And, as noted, nearly half of those detention admissions were on low-level charges that system stakeholders generally agree pose no serious threat to community safety and should be diverted.

As a result of successful reform efforts, the end of girls’ incarceration in California is well within reach in the near-term for every county in the state. If detentions continue to decline at the same rate, California could hit zero girls’ detentions by 2027.

In June 2023, 30 of the state’s 58 counties had an average daily population (ADP) of five or fewer girls in custody—low numbers that had held constant since December of 2022. Not surprisingly, the counties with the greatest number of girls in custody are the most populous in the state. Together, the 10 counties with the highest ADPs accounted for 60 percent of the statewide ADP in December 2023. This means that continued efforts in just a few counties puts ending girls’ detention closer to reality in California.

Of the 43 counties with reported ADP, 39 counties (all but four) had a 12-month average of fewer than 20 girls in 2022. Thirty-seven had an average of fewer than 10. Thirty counties had an average of fewer than five, and four counties had an average of zero for 2022. Twenty counties had at least one day during the year when they had zero girls in any facility.

When tracking the end of girls’ incarceration, it’s important to consider how incarceration is measured. The “daily population” is the number of girls in custody on a given day, and “detention admissions” are the number of individual admissions to a detention facility during a given period (the number of individual girls incarcerated is often fewer because some are detained more than once in a given period). The number of detention admissions is the preferred measure of girls’ incarceration because it better depicts the scale of the issue.

Unfortunately, in California, county-level data for ADP is more current and more routinely updated than annual detention admissions. But despite the important differences in these two types of data, they share one thing in common: ending girls’ incarceration means reducing both numbers to zero.