TURNING THE TIDE

How Hawaii stopped locking girls up by starting to listen to them

- By Samantha Michaels

Last fall, retired Judge Karen Radius leaned on her cane as she walked me toward the girls’ housing unit at Hawaii's only youth prison, remembering the moment three years ago when she'd learned no more girls were living there.

For Radius, a disarmingly matter-of-fact 76-year-old who'd spent much of her career trying to keep teens out of detention, the empty housing unit came as the best kind of news. “These aren't fucking evil kids who commit bad crimes,” she said as we passed a couple of incarcerated boys studying in classrooms.

The absence of girls at the prison was the rare positive criminal justice story to get national attention. Politicians and activists mused whether Hawaii—a pioneer for women’s and girls’ rights as the first state to legalize abortion and ratify the Equal Rights Amendment—might also have found a way to stop locking them up. “Another world is possible,” New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted after learning of the news. “Now do the boys,” one of her followers added.

Ending prison for teens might seem like a pipe dream in the age of Donald Trump. But when it comes to girls, who are less likely than boys to commit violence, this fantasy could be closer to reality than you'd think. Maine, Vermont, New York City, and parts of the San Francisco Bay Area also have seen long stretches without a single girl in long-term incarceration. In California, stopping girls’ imprisonment altogether is now “well within reach for the state,” according to the nonprofit Vera Institute of Justice, which works with jurisdictions across the country to get kids out of detention. “It’s hard for a lot of communities, let alone government leaders, to imagine that zero is achievable. We know that it is,” says Hannah Green, who helped lead Vera's Ending Girls’ Incarceration Initiative until last year.