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American Morning

Study Suggests Different Treatment for Boy, Girl Juvenile Offenders

Aired May 01, 2001 - 09:41   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
DARYN KAGAN, CNN ANCHOR: A disturbing new report says that more girls are going to jail. The study by the American and National bar associations points to statistics that show that more than 670,000 girls under age 18 were arrested in 1999. That accounted for 27 percent of the total juvenile arrests made that year. According to the report, the delinquency cases involving girls jumped 83 percent between 1988 and 1997.

The American Bar Association is holding a news conference this hour to discuss the findings.

CNN's Jeanne Meserve joins us live, from Washington, with the latest.

Jeanne, good morning.

JEANNE MESERVE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Daryn.

One of the things that makes this report so disturbing is that while arrests of juvenile girls are going up, the overall juvenile crime rate has been going down.

At their press conference this morning, the president of the American Bar Association said that many of the girls being detained were being held for nonviolent, so-called status crimes.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MARTHA BARNETT, AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION: Runaways, encourageable kids, or property or drug offenses -- even girls that have been charged with assault, which is the fastest growing segment of offenses -- are often inappropriately labeled as violent, based on conduct that really arises out of domestic disputes.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MESERVE: CNN's national correspondent Eileen O'Connor is covering this story for us today.

Eileen, has girls behavior changed, or is it just being treated differently?

EILEEN O'CONNOR, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, that's exactly it: It's being treated differently. Basically, what the experts have said in this and other reports -- as well as some experts that I spoke to at Northwestern University -- is that it is society and some judges' way of protecting girls. This has also been a traditional way that women have been dealt with by the American penal system.

You see this in the fact that 25 percent of all female arrests for juvenile delinquency are for these kind of status defenses: runaways, curfew violations, and things like that. That's only about 10 percent for boys, which is a big difference, and they are treated differently once they get into the system. A girl, if she has a parole violation, will end up incarcerated afterwards 54 percent of the time; that's only 19 percent for boys.

MESERVE: Now, when it comes to treatment facilities, I understand that there are fewer of them for girls, and that those that exist really are tailored to boys, rather than girls.

O'CONNOR: Well, absolutely. And this also goes to a problem that we basically have, which is that research into women's issues and women's health -- specifically, anything dealing with women, like counselling, emotional problems, or whatever -- has always lagged behind the money spent on men.

Now some of it's starting to catch up, but this is one of the things that the American Bar Association and the National Bar Association said is sorely needed -- not just the more research, but specific facilities that are designed to the treat the very specific things that girls go through in adolescence, things that are contributing to this kind of behavior.

MESERVE: You have even visited some of these treatment facilities and have seen firsthand how the girls are treated.

O'CONNOR: Absolutely. I actually went to what's been praised as a very highly successful afterschool program to prevent delinquency in places like Boston. Predominantly, you will see a lot more programs for boys, like sports and computer training. Girls don't like to compete with boys in math and science, especially in certain areas. So that's one of the things that they're also saying these programs need to be sensitive of. They have to have training for girls that's just for girls.

MESERVE: OK, Eileen O'Connor, thanks so much.

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