New Report Says Girls in LA County Juvenile Camps Don’t Have Adequate Items for Personal Hygiene – Supes Want to Know Why

THE IMPORTANCE OF DIGNITY—AND WHERE IT IS LACKING FOR LA PROBATION’S GIRLS

At the upcoming January 10 meeting of the Los Angeles County board of supervisors, the board is expected to vote on a motion that is aimed at improving troubling conditions that hamper the girls at the county’s juvenile probation camps from maintaining adequate personal hygiene.

You’d think that, in a county that spends more per day on the kids in its facilities than just about any such agency in the nation (an estimated $247,000 per kid per year), giving kids the wherewithal to adequately clean up and get satisfactorily dressed each morning would not be an issue we need to worry about.

Yet, in a 202-page report delivered to the board near the end of last year (and obtained by WitnessLA) researchers stated that, for many of young men and women placed in LA County’s 12 Probation Camps, maintaining basic personal hygiene was a task that ranged from difficult to nearly impossible.

This was particularly true when it came to the girls in the camps.

Next Tuesday’s motion, authored by Supervisors Mark Ridley-Thomas and Hilda Solis, aims to fix at least some of the problems flagged by the Violence Intervention Program report, a study which resulted from interviews with 104 probation youth, which translated into 122 hours of recordings that when transcribed totaled over 7700 pages of transcription.

“Improving outcomes for incarcerated girls and young women,” the Ridley-Thomas/Solis motion states, “starts with ensuring they maintain a sense of dignity during the time they are held in” LA County’s camps and juvenile halls.

“One of the few things young women can control while in custody is having autonomy over their own bodies and health,” the motion continues. “This is particularly important for young women in the juvenile justice system, many of whom have been victims of physical or sexual abuse.”

Indeed.

As Xin Li and Phillomina Wong reported for WLA last year, nationally, more than one-third of girls in the juvenile justice system have a history of sexual abuse, according to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Similarly, a 2014 study of 64,329 kids involved in the justice system in Florida found that 31 percent of the girls surveyed reported having been sexually abused, and 41 percent reported physical abuse as opposed to 7 percent, 26 percent for boys in those same categories.

Furthermore, when girls come in contact with the juvenile justice system, it is less often for behavior that threatens public safety, and most often for behavior that’s largely a reaction to “abuse, violence and deprivation.”

Yet, while girls are disproportionately pulled into the system for low level offenses, an important report published last year by the National Women’s Law Center and the National Crittenton Foundation pointed to the fact that, although juvenile justice reforms are underway in many parts of the country, California prominently included, few of those reforms focus on the specific needs of the girls in the system, the majority of whom have experienced high levels of childhood trauma, much of it related to physical or sexual abuse.

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FLIMSY PAPER UNDERPANTS AND REALLY BAD SANITARY NAPKINS

For the girls in LA County’s juvenile camps, one of the most troublesome issues was the absence of adequate supplies having to do with their menstrual cycles,

Young women in Los Angeles County’s juvenile camps and halls are only allowed access to sanitary napkins, not tampons. And the quality of the pads, according to the girls, was awful.

According to the report, the girls described the pads as “not good,” “uncomfortable” or worse, a problem that the girls reported led to humiliating circumstances on top of the practical issues. Many, according to the report, said they “felt like they were sitting in their own blood.”

In addition, a lot of the girls felt far more comfortable with tampons, which were forbidden. According to the report, “when one youth at Camp Scudder asked a staff why they don’t get tampons,” the staffer replied, “‘Girl. You’re incarcerated.'”

Matters were made worse, according to the girls, by the fact that they were issued paper underpants rather than cotton, and that the paper was—according to the sample girls questioned–uncomfortable and too flimsy, particularly when young women were having their menstrual periods.

The boys had cotton boxers, said they girls, so why were they relegated to paper undergarments?

And then there were the low quality bras that more often than not failed to fit. According to the girls questioned, the bras “are not sized appropriately (some say too big and others say too tight) and they offer little support.”

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BAD LOTION, WORSE SOAP

Although Tuesday’s proposed motion concerns the girls’ camps, both the girls and the boys in the county’s juvenile camps complained in detail about the personnel hygiene items they were forced to use.

For instance, when it came to the body lotion that the county doled out, according to the report, youth of both genders found it “ineffective or harmful.” It “dried their skin out,” they said, and was “highly watered down.” Several cited allergic reactions.

When it came to soap, the reports were worse. Kids are given one all-purpose soap that is to be used as hand soap, body wash, and shampoo. Significant numbers of kids reported that it made them break out, others said it dried out their skin badly, some had to “seek medication from the nurses,” as a consequence of using the soap, according to the report.

As for the soap’s actual purpose, most did not find it particular effective. Both boys and girls reported using their underpants (in the girls’ cases, the paper ones) as make-shift wash cloths to better get clean.

And there were other issues. The girls reported that they were allowed to shave their legs and underarms only once a month. (Boys can shave more frequently.)

Both boys and girls said that the deodorant “only lasted for a couple of hours and made kids “smell musty.” The abnormally short toothbrushes “made brushing teeth difficult.” Kids described the county toothpaste as “thick, with a poor taste” and a texture that “dries fast enough to be used as tagging paint.”

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AND THERE IS MORE…

The report also points to other issues, like the fact that an estimated 30 percent of the girls in the camps and the halls are either pregnant or already have children on the outside, pointing to an urgent need for access to a range of family planning health resources, and to information for these children having children about post partum care, breast feeding, child bonding and so on.

There will likely be a lot of public discussion about the motion that, if passed, will direct newly sworn in Chief Probation Officer Terri McDonald to report back to the board in writing in 60 days “on updated policies and protocols” in the areas outlined, that can “help young women feel respected and cared for” because “treating girls with dignity better enables them to focus on their education, self- sufficiency, and rehabilitation.”

If passed and if there is real follow through, this motion is a very positive step toward juvenile facilities that emphasize rehabilitation and healing rather than warehousing and punishment.

We should also note that also on Tuesday, Supervisors Ridley-Thomas and Janice Hahn have introduced another promising motion pushing for a county plan for youth diversion to keep kids out of the camps and halls altogether. (More on that later.)

LA County has a new probation chief in Terri McDonald, and a new second in command at juvenile probation in Sheila Mitchell. So perhaps under these two women, with a newly constituted activist board, 2017 can be a real year of reform in LA County’s juvenile justice systems.

Yet, although this motion—and the youth diversion motion—are a welcome steps, there are many, many more steps needed….as we will be detailing in future stories.