'Lip Service' for Girls: Policy Implementation and the Juvenile Justice System

Girls make up over a quarter of juvenile arrests in the United States (Chesney-Lind and Pasko 2004, 9). Yet the juvenile justice system, for the most part, completely ignores their existence. According to the authors of The Female Offender: Our stereotype of the juvenile delinquent is so indisputably male that the general public, those experts whose careers in criminology have been built studying ‘delinquency,’ and those practitioners working with delinquent youth, rarely consider girls and their problems (Chesney-Lind and Pasko 2004, 9).There are many disparities between the treatment female juveniles receive and that which male juveniles receive. There has been much discussion among the states regarding the discrimination of females in the juvenile justice system as well as the high levels of minority confinement and overrepresentation in the system. However, there have been few states to attempt to deal with this through the creation of legislation that specifically targets the unique needs of female juveniles and, more specifically, female juveniles of color. There is a need for gender specific and race specific programs. Many of the attempts that have been made have not fully lived up to their potential or the goals set by the lawmakers who created the legislation. The policymaking process, with a main focus on implementation, will be considered within the state of Florida as, in 2004, Florida became only the second state to pass legislation that mandated the creation of gender specific programming for the juvenile justice system. Florida has been attempting implementation of this gender oriented policy since its passage and is still unable to provide the uniform resources required by the legislation across all of its 67 counties. In order to determine why this is the case, the counties will be studied to compare those that have been able to make the necessary changes to their juvenile justice systems with those that have failed to meet the established guidelines. An assessment of each county as well as of the overall legislation will be made to determine how implementation is being completed, where it is failing, where it could be improved, and where it is thriving. It will be important to determine the exact circumstances under which the required services are not properly being provided to female juveniles to enable authorities to rectify this situation.This is particularly true for females of color. While data is not consistent across the country, it has been shown that minority youth are overrepresented in the system. This overrepresentation is disproportionately made up of African American youth (Snyder and Sickmund 1999). It has also been shown that “differences in the offending rates of white and minority youth cannot explain the minority overrepresentation in arrest, conviction, and incarceration counts” (Snyder and Sickmund 1999, 193). Two-thirds of the studies in this area found that the racial and/or ethnic status of the juvenile influenced the decision-making within the judicial system (Snyder and Sickmund 1999). Unfortunately, while Florida has attempted to pass legislation that would deal with racial overrepresentation in a similar manner to its gender specific programming legislation, this has yet to come to fruition as it continues to be stalled in the legislature.Overall, this will be an attempt to determine whether gender specific programming legislation which affects female juveniles has been implemented effectively for all juveniles. A determination will also be made as to whether under these new programs girls of color are being treated more successfully than they were under a male-centric juvenile justice system even though they are not specifically being targeted with programs beyond that which deals with their gender. We must understand these important issues if we are too fully and realistically create policies in the United States that allow for the consideration of girls’ issues in the juvenile justice system and, as a result, improve the administration of justice, not just for these girls, but for all juveniles.