Bad Girls

By Beth Schwartzapfel, May 9, 2008

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Doing time in the Rhode Island Training School is punishment for young women who break the law. What's surprising is how many would rather be in the big house than out.

(photo: Dana Smith)

While she's here, Diamond Jordan-Brown looks per-petually as if she just rolled out of bed: blue sweats, hair standing up in all directions. At eight this morning, she actually has just rolled out of bed. Diamond is sixteen and has the spunk and wit of a teenager but the poise and smarts of someone much older. Even now, as she shuffles across the white, linoleum-tiled hall into the day room and plops down on a vinyl-upholstered chair to wait for breakfast, it's with the weary resignation of someone who's seen it all.

If she were awaiting sentencing, or if the judge had sent her here for a few days to try to scare some sense into her — as he has before — she'd be wearing orange, walking around like a human traffic cone. But since she's been sentenced — she's more than halfway through a six-month "bid," as the girls call it — she's wearing "state blues": state-issued blue sweatshirt, blue sweatpants, white sneakers.

On any given day, the Rhode Island Training School houses some 200 children. Administered by the Department of Children, Youth and Families (DCYF), yet populated by those remanded here by the criminal justice system, the Training School exists at a crossroads between prison and foster care. It's a juvenile correctional facility, make no mistake about it — double fences topped with razor wire surround the complex, and residents leave locked buildings only with handcuffs on — but it's also a public high school and a place where children receive counseling and guidance. DCYF refers to it euphemistically as "a highly structured, secure residential facility," and the children are called "residents" rather than inmates. The boys are divided into seven different residential "cottages" based on age, offense, treatment needs and behavior, but the girls (in 2006, 16 percent of the total population) are all housed here, in the Mathias building, a facility that feels more like a tidy, bright hospital wing than a prison. The unit consists entirely of one hallway, off of which are classrooms on one end and bedrooms on the other, and a dayroom, where the girls spend their downtime and eat their meals.

Levels And Cliques

Diamond's friend Jessica is on kitchen duty this morning. While the rest of the girls filter in, she unwraps several loaves of white bread and pops slices into the industrial-grade toaster, six at a time; she tosses mini cartons of milk out of a crate and into the refrigerator, mixes bright green "juice" from syrup in a jug and distributes piles of paper napkins onto each table. A trolley has already arrived from the central kitchen with a giant steel tray of aluminum-foil-covered scrambled eggs, and she puts this tray out alongside mini plastic tubs of cereal and a bowl of fruit.

The count today is thirteen. At breakfast, the blues sit together at two tables, and the oranges sit together at a third.

Beyond this obvious self-segregation is a more subtle grouping organized roughly according to the Training School's level system. There are four levels, each with a corresponding set of privileges (number of visits, visitors and phone calls allowed, bedtime). Training School residents enter at Level 2 and work their way up (or down) the levels by earning (or losing) points for things like working hard in school, attending groups and meetings, keeping their room clean, following instructions and volunteering to help out around the unit.

Because it takes up to six weeks to gain a level, girls at Level 3 or 4 have usually been here for longer than girls at Level 1 or 2; what's more, only girls with good behavior and a positive attitude tend to earn enough points to move up. All of which contributes to the fact that girls in the various levels tend to stick together. "Our clique is basically Level 3s," says Jessica. "When you're down there, at Level 2, Level 1, you have nothing better to do [than pick fights]. Elbowing in the hallway, pushing in the bathroom, swearing across the tables. We have to just ignore them. It's kinda like we just brush them off our shoulder."

One of the girls in her clique is Diamond, who is serving a six-month sentence for assault, intimidating a witness and disorderly conduct — all charges related to a fight with another girl that got out of hand. Later, I visit Diamond at home after her release (she ended up serving four months), and she couldn't look more different than she did when we first met: She cuts a dashing figure with long, braided extensions in her hair, tight jeans, knee-high zip-up boots.

Diamond and her mother, Auretha, are very close. In the months leading up to Diamond's incarceration, Auretha tells me she was becoming increasingly frustrated. Diamond loved to party and stay out late. She'd be home only for as long as it took to dump off her bag after school and leave again. What's more, she'd get into so many fights that eventually girls started arriving at their family's house and telling Auretha to get Diamond so they could fight her.

"I wasn't the type of person, before I went in there, to just let little petty stuff go," recalls Diamond. "You could roll your eyes and I was on you. Anything could trigger me. You could walk by me and almost brush my shoulder. You was going down." She laughs when she says it, but she has an iron will; she must have been scary. The judge sent her to the Training School for a night two years ago after a fight, but it didn't stick. Diamond had seven cousins there at the time, so it seemed like a sort of rite of passage. Sure enough, a few months later, she was back, this time for real.

Emotions Run High

The first few months of her sentence were marked by her typical behavior. On her very first day, she shoved a staff member who was bothering her. "It took her two to three months to realize what was really happening," says Auretha. "Before, she was really angry when I'd go visit her. She didn't like this staff, she didn't like that staff. Then she just did a three-sixty. She knew, what I'm doing right now is not going to get me out of here."

After breakfast, the girls spend a quiet half-hour in the dayroom, watching television, chatting or flipping through magazines before heading off to class. The boys' school, because it has so many more students, operates much the same way as other Rhode Island public schools. The girls' school, on the other hand, has only two classrooms, one for special education students and one for everyone else, where the girls, with wildly varying grade levels and skills, work more or less independent of each other, with guidance from a teacher.

During class, minor tiffs erupt about who's sitting in whose chair, and who graffitied on the chalkboard.

"Stories on the outside are you're going to get beat up [in here]," says Jessica. But this is no vigilante jailhouse. Physical fights like those that Diamond used to get into are rare here, Jessica says. The Training School "doesn't test you like that," she says. "It doesn't test your strength. It tests you emotionally. It tests you mentally. The stress of when you have court. The stress of having to sit in a holding cell all day, just to know you're coming back here. The stress of knowing that your visit may not come this weekend. The staff might not let you make a phone call. You might not be able to talk to your parents all week. You might not get your deodorant, and you might have to smell. Go a week without getting letters and see how it feels. If you don't get your mind right, if you don't have that emotional breakdown here, you're going to come back. If people walk out and say, 'My time was easy,' they're going to come back. If I'm like, 'My time was hard, I almost went crazy in there, I was sick in there, it killed me emotionally, I'm so happy to be out now,' I'm less likely to come back."

Emotions run high. Social worker Sirinath Seneth is the female unit manager; before this summer, when she began the top job here, she was a clinical social worker in two of the boys' units: the maximum security facility (known as the Youth Correctional Center) and the substance abuse unit. More often the victims of trauma and abuse, she says, "the girls are more needy. With the boys, forty or fifty kids? I can cover it. Here, with only ten or fifteen girls, it's difficult. They get nervous, they get anxious about what it's going to be like when they get home. They get jealous, they get mad, they talk about each other." With the boys, Seneth said, she had to ask them to come see her. "Don't you have issues at all?" she would joke. Whereas, with the girls, "if you don't see them for one day, two days, they want to know why they haven't seen you." Juvenile Program Worker Dawn Nunez agrees. "The girls are too needy," she says. "They're much more emotional" than the boys.

Learning How To Redirect

Mandated both to enforce the rules and to provide emotional support and encouragement, Juvenile Program Workers, or JPWs, are something of a cross between correctional officers and Big Brothers/Big Sisters mentors. Residents call them by their first name, with an honorific tacked on: Miss Jackie, Miss Michelle. To be hired, they must have a minimum of an associate's degree and some work experience with adolescents; many have worked previously in group homes or residential programs. Before being hired, JPWs attend a six-week academy where they learn everything from fire safety to restraint techniques. One of the key things taught at the academy is the virtue of a "redirect."

If a child talks back or disobeys an order, explains Joe Cardin, deputy superintendent of programs at the Training School, "you don't make a big investment in it. And you certainly don't go back to that schoolyard thing: escalation. The next thing you know you want to kill each other," he says. This is, philosophically speaking, a huge departure from the classic correctional model, where if an inmate challenges the staff's authority, the staff must reassert who's in charge at all costs. Cardin recalls a recent incident where a pregnant resident refused to go to her room when instructed. The wrong response, according to Cardin, would have been, "'Well, you'd better go to your room.' [Because] then you get, 'Well, put me in my room.' Then you're at a point as a staff member where you've just been called out. So what do you do? Do you people really want to drag a nine-month-pregnant female to her room? Does that make a lot of sense to you? Just walk out of that. There's no direct threat to anyone. Except your ego." Instead, staff members told the resident, "Fine, sit there if you want. We'll come back in ten minutes." She did, and they did, and then she went to her room.

Very few girls are sent to the Training School for violent felonies. Training School data, which reflect the residents in custody on a single day in 2007, indicates that only two girls out of sixteen, or 12.5 percent, were serving time for felony assault. The largest proportion, almost 40 percent, was there for simple assault, a misdemeanor. The remainder were incarcerated for crimes against property, illegal-substance-related crime, and obstruction: resisting arrest or escape. Boys were more likely than girls to be serving time for violent felonies—almost 20 percent were there for felony assault or first- or second-degree sex crimes—but the majority of boys, too, were there for nonviolent crimes, about 40 percent of which were crimes against property.

Jessica's Story

Like many of its residents, Jessica is no stranger to the Training School. (According to an analysis by Rhode Island Kids Count, 25 percent of youth at the Training School in 2006 had been incarcerated previously.) This marks her fifth time here, though her previous visits were for a night or two, a week at most.

At sixteen, her skin is lightly smattered with acne, and her soft face still lacks the sharp angles of adulthood. Her boyfriend's name is inked in dark-lettered script on her shoulder.

"They'd always say, do this program, let us see that you're doing good at home, and you can go home for good," she recalls. "I never got to that point [of changing her ways]. Reality didn't hit." Now that reality has hit, Jessica has the kind of perspective on her life and her behavior that she'd lacked.

Her mother was only fourteen when Jessica was born. Their closeness in age meant that it wasn't always clear who was in charge — at least not to Jessica. "I wanted to be the mom," she says. Shortly after Jessica was born, her father was sentenced to forty years in the ACI for second-degree murder. Her mother met her current husband while he was in the ACI serving time for breaking and entering; they got married while he was still locked up. "Me and my sister felt like she was picking him over us," Jessica recalls. "She would always be at his visits, every other day, put money in his account when she couldn't even buy us something. It was real hectic."

Her stepfather was released about a year ago, and her young-est sister was born shortly after that.

Still, things didn't start to get really out of control until about three years ago, when her father's parole date began to approach. "When it started getting close to him going up for parole, I started acting up to my mom, yelling at my mom, disrespecting my mom," she recalls. "Kinda like, 'I don't need you, I'm going to have dad.'" It only got worse when he was released, though, and all of the promises he'd made to her over the years — trips to the zoo and to the mall, quality time together — were broken one by one. "He was doing his own thing; he didn't want to deal with nobody," she says.

Jessica's fights with her mother escalated to the point that in 2004 her mom filed a Wayward/Disobedient Petition with the local police department, essentially a parent's way of asking law enforcement for help controlling her child. The petition brought Jessica into the orbit of the Family Court, which handles all juvenile justice cases. From there, the judge placed her in one group home after another, and in the group homes, she'd get into fights, she'd skip school, she'd run away.

Girls On The Run

In fact, that word "run" echoes through the girls' unit at the Training School. The girls in orange, the girls in blue, from one DCYF placement to the next: run, run run. "This stuff shouldn't be bringing kids into core corrections," says Joe Cardin. "But they only come here because the courts tried alternatives, like probation, and the kids run. They always run." Violation of probation, truancy, disorderly conduct, violation of probation, vagrant and disorderly conduct, reads one girl's charge sheet, a litany of misdemeanors. Another sheet includes fully nine counts of violation of probation, or VOP, which means, usually, she ran. Wayward/disobedient, violation of probation, escape, simple assault, truancy. "It's kind of like a broken record," says Cardin.

As the chief judge of the Rhode Island Family Court, Judge Jeremiah S. Jeremiah sees a lot of these children in front of his bench. A man of imposing girth who's known to many of the kids in the system as a sympathetic listener — "He feels people," says Diamond — he says he hates to send kids to the Training School, but often he has no choice: "What do you do when you say to a child, 'Here's the deal: I want you to go to school regularly. I want you to respect your teachers. I want you home at eight every night. And if [you meet] those conditions, then I'm going to suspend your sentence.' What do you do when they don't follow those conditions? I don't think you have any choice but to send them. Because otherwise they'd laugh at you."

In fact, for some girls, visits to the Training School become as much, or even more, a part of the fabric of life as school and family. I visited the Training School twice over a one-month period, and on my second visit, one girl I'll call Ramirez reminded me that I'd met her a month ago. "I was in orange then. I'm in blue now," she says. "I got sentenced."

"I'm sorry to hear that," I tell her.

"That's okay," she says. "I won't be here long." We are eating a lunch of soggy grilled cheese sandwiches, tomato soup with plastic spoons out of Styrofoam bowls and canned pineapple rings. Most of the girls are complaining about the food, a common refrain in the dayroom, and discussing what their first meal "on the out" would be: Chinese food, homemade lasagna. From there it's a quick jump to how uncomfortable the beds are. Ramirez pipes up to say she doesn't mind the food. Or the beds, for that matter. "I actually kind of like it here," she says. I ask why. "I feel more..." she pauses to find the right word. "Stable. When I'm not here, I'm running."

More Stable Inside?

Data provided by the Training School indicates that Ramirez's experience is not unusual. Of the sixteen girls incarcerated on a single day last spring, only four had been living with a parent or family member immediately prior to incarceration; nine had been living in a group home, residential facility or shelter. Three had been AWOL, which is to say, running. (This data stands in stark contrast to the boys, almost 50 percent of whom had been living with one or both parents prior to incarceration.)

Once they are in the system, many girls rack up enough misdemeanors and violations of parole that it is only a matter of time before they get caught up in something more serious. For Jessica, that something turned out to be possession and delivery of marijuana. Jessica doesn't even do drugs, she says. Her grandmother died of complications from drug addiction, and her father gets abusive when he's drinking, which, these days, is often. "It's in the family, and I don't want that to happen to me," she says. But still, her boyfriend had been shipped to his native Dominican Republic to clean up his act (like Jessica, he entered the system at fifteen or sixteen and had been in and out of group homes and the Training School ever since), and she was trying to make some quick money to bring him back. There was already a warrant out for her because she was on the run from a program, and when the cops found her, they also found the drugs. If she hadn't had the drugs on her, she says, "I would've just had a violation of probation, probably go to another group home. But in a way, I think it was God that did that. If I didn't have the drugs, and I got sentenced to another group home, I would've ran. I would have a warrant out for my arrest right now. On the street, having to watch my back all the time."

It's decidedly unnerving to hear one girl after another say that, ultimately, she's glad she was incarcerated. Diamond feels the same way. Now that she's home, she says, "There's no fun in what I used to do.

Before, my mentality was just like party, party, party hard. Now, I kind of get a head-ache around loud music." Two months before her release, Diamond's social worker held her prerelease meeting at the Training School. In addition to Diamond and the social worker, also present were Seneth (the unit manager), Auretha and outreach workers from two different programs in the community. Together they crafted her release plan: Meet each of the outreach workers plus her parole officer once per week. Other girls' plans are more elaborate, including visits with psychiatrists or social workers, curfews, attendance at school and other such restrictions, but, according to Auretha, the team decided these weren't necessary for Diamond. She'd always done well in school, and her adviser — she goes to the Met School, which stresses individual attention — had been visiting her weekly while she was incarcerated so she would be able to dive right back in when she got out. And so she has, becoming a tour guide for visitors and prospective students at her school and teaming up with some fellow students to plan a volunteer trip to Africa for three weeks this spring.

Caring For Kids

Being away from her family, says Diamond, helped her learn not to take them for granted. By the end of her sentence she was entitled to two visits per week, and if her mother wasn't there every Sunday and every Wednesday, Diamond was heartbroken. ("This girl is spoiled," her mom says.)

"I'm glad I went," Diamond says of her time at the Training School. "I'm not glad I was there for that long. It didn't take me that long to get the picture. But if I didn't [go], I'd probably be in a worse predicament than I was in."

I ask Diamond and her mother if there is an alternative to the Training School that would have had the same effect. They're sitting beside each other on the couch in their tidy Pawtucket living room, and images on the muted television dance silently in the background. Neither of them can think of anything. "She needed that long bid," says Auretha.

Judge Jeremiah suggests that an effective foster care environment, like a group home but less institutional, a place where guardians can provide the guidance and support and structure that the kids so badly need, would be a better place to send kids like Jessica and Diamond. "Nobody cares about kids," he says. "They don't vote. So they're hurting." The foster care system and alternatives to the Training School are not allocated the resources they need. "It's about money," Jeremiah says.

Parenting classes and additional resources for families would also help. Many of these kids' parents never learned how to parent because they grew up in similar environments to the ones they're providing for their kids. "Sometimes they don't know how to nurture their babies, even to hug them," Siri Seneth says of the girls' parents. "Because they never got that from their parents."

Jeremiah agrees. "It's a breakdown of the family unit," he says. "I think that's what lands them [at the Training School]. How often does somebody say to a child, 'I love you'? How often do they say to their child when they come home from school — say they had a 70 average, now they have a 78 average — 'Gee, congratulations, you're doing better.'"

However, indifferent or ineffectual parents are better than the alternative. Many of the residents were victims of abuse, whether at their family's home, at a group home, or while on the run. An analysis by Rhode Island Kids Count found that on a given day 48 percent of adjudicated youth at the Training School were victims of documented abuse or neglect. All of this can lead to some serious emotional struggles and mental illness. "For females in particular, comorbidity [having more than one psychiatric diagnosis] is the norm rather than the exception," says Dr. Joseph V. Penn, director of psychiatric services at the Training School. "With all of the physical trauma and abuse, this may be the first place they feel safe. They're like pinballs all over the system. They get here, and they're locked down; they finally realize they're not going anywhere, and they start to make real therapeutic progress."

Since she's been at the Training School, Jessica has been involved with programs about anger management, personal responsibility, safe sex, and loss and grief. She attends the speech and debate classes taught each week by Brown University students. She's involved in Project Peer, a program where residents at Levels 3 or 4 can apply to be a motivational speaker for kids who have gotten into trouble; the judge sends them by the vanload to the Training School for an afternoon to see what's in store for them if they keep it up. She's also earning her GED. "My thing was I could always start something, but I could never finish it," she says. "Now I'm actually getting certificates. I'm actually going up in levels. I chose to finish those groups.

I don't have to. I chose to work up the level system. I'm choosing to use my time wisely here."

When Jessica is released, she plans to enroll in Community College of Rhode Island and take classes towards becoming a dental hygienist. She'll move back in with her mother, but since her boyfriend is back in Providence with his own apartment, Jessica knows she has a pressure valve, someplace she can go to get away from it all rather than fight with her mom. "I'm doing it for my sisters," she says. "Because my sister is going down the same exact path that I did—acting up, talking back to my mom, everything. It's all coming out. I got a feeling that she might come here," and she wants her sister to see that there's another way.

Classes end for the day at 2:30 p.m., and the girls spend an hour and a half in their rooms, doing homework, napping, writing letters. At 4, pairs of girls are handcuffed to one another and loaded into a big silver van in which they're driven to the gym for a surprisingly spirited game of indoor soccer. At 5:30, while everyone else is showering, Jessica starts setting up for tonight's dinner and wonders aloud about what her next job is going to be when kitchen duty ends tonight ("All I can say is it'd better not be bathroom.") At 6, Miss Michelle shouts, "Ladies! To your doors with everything you need for the day- room!"

At 6:30, a JPW named Tay is dishing out dinner, and by 7, Jessica and one of her fellow residents are clearing tables, wiping them down, folding them and wheeling them into the corner. They clean out the fridge while two other girls sweep. And then everyone settles down to play cards until bedtime. These girls, along with the JPWs, are singularly focused, fierce competitors at spades. The bedtime for Level 3s like Jessica and Diamond is 10:30, but Tay lets them and their friend, Julie, who's still at Level 2, stay up until 11, because their game is so heated. The television mounted on the wall plays a baseball game nobody's watching.

Although her time here has been marked by slow emotional progress, Jessica knew coming in that this time would be different. "I knew I had to change," she says. "It's the end of the road. I'll have another year until I'm 18. This is the end of my childhood. I don't want to waste it in another group home. I try to tell girls who run, you cannot run forever."

Postscript: Since this story was reported, Jessica has been released from the Training School and completed her GED. Her mother says the third day Jessica was home she stayed out all night; she still plans to attend CCRI in September.