["Working with queer and trans/gender-non-conforming youth in the Deep South, I hear stories of state and personal violence from a wide range of people. There was the 16-year-old, black self-identified “stud” in detention after her mom referred her to family court for bringing girls to the house. Then there was the incarcerated white 16-year-old trans youth from a rural town of 642, whose access to transgender healthcare resided in the hands of one juvenile judge. I was told of a black trans-feminine youth in New Orleans who was threatened with contempt for wearing feminine clothing to her court hearing. There was also the 12-year-old boy, perceived to be gay by his mother, who was brought into judge’s chambers without his attorney and questioned about being gay before he was sentenced for contempt after being found “ungovernable.” There was the public defender who refused to represent his gay client because the lawyer believed him to be “sick” and in need of the “services” offered by prison. And there was the black lesbian arrested over and over again for any crime where witnesses described the perpetrator as an African American “boyish-looking” girl.
Nowhere is the literal regulation and policing of gender and sexuality, particularly of low-income queer and trans youth of color, so apparent than in juvenile courts and in the juvenile justice system in the South. Understanding how the juvenile justice system operates and impacts queer and trans/gender-non-conforming youth requires a critical look at the history of youth rights and the inception of juvenile court. During the Industrial Revolution (1800–1840s), poor youth worked in factories, received no public education and were often arrested for the crime of poverty.[1] These youth, some as young as 7 years old, were incarcerated with adults and placed in prisons until they were 21. Inspired by the belief that young people who committed crimes could be rehabilitated and shocked by the horrific treatment of white children in adult prisons, the juvenile justice system was developed. This new system was based on parens patriae, the idea that the role of the system was to place youth in the state’s custody when their parents were unable to care for them. Later, in 1899, the first juvenile court was established, designed to “cure” children and provide treatments for them rather than sentences. Still rooted in a Puritan ideology, white young women were often sent to institutions “to protect them from sexual immorality.”
Black children, however, who were viewed as incapable of rehabilitation, continued to be sent to adult prisons or were sent to racially segregated institutions. In Louisiana, black youth were sent to work the fields at Angola State Penitentiary, a former slave plantation, until 1948 when the State Industrial School for Colored Youth opened. The facilities were not desegregated until the United States District Court ordered desegregation of juvenile facilities in 1969. More recently, the goal of juvenile justice reform has been to keep youth in their homes and in their communities whenever possible while providing appropriate treatment services to youth and their families. However, with the juvenile justice system’s intent to provide “treatment” to young people, many queer/trans youth inherit the ideology that they are “wrong” or in need of “curing,” as evidenced by their stories.
As sexual and gender transgressions have been deemed both illegal and pathological, queer and trans youth, who are some of the most vulnerable to “treatments,” are not only subjected to incarceration but also to harassment by staff, conversion therapy, and physical violence. Moreover, with the juvenile justice system often housed under the direct authority of state correctional systems and composed of youth referred directly from state police departments, it should not be surprising that young people locked up in the state juvenile system, 80 percent of whom are black in Louisiana, are often actually destroyed by the very system that was created to intervene. Worse than just providing damaging outcomes for youth once they are incarcerated, this rehabilitative system funnels queer and trans/gender-non-conforming youth into the front doors of the system. Non-accepting parents and guardians can refer their children to family court for arbitrary and subjective behaviors, such as being “ungovernable.” Police can bring youth in for status offenses, offenses for which adults cannot be charged, which often become contributing factors to the criminalization of youth. Charges can range from truancy to curfew violations to running away from home. Like in the adult criminal justice system, queer and trans youth can be profiled by the police and brought in for survival crimes like prostitution or theft. Youth may be referred for self-defense arising from conflict with hostile family members or public displays of affection in schools that selectively enforce policies only against queer and trans youth."]
Wesley Ware, from Rounding Up The Homosexuals: The Impact of Juvenile Court on Queer and Trans/Gender-Non-Conforming Youth, from Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, edited by Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith, AK Press, 2011
