To understand why victims of childhood trauma pose a higher risk of being placed in detention, researchers point to a phenomenon commonly referred to as the sexual abuse-to-prison pipeline.

Girls go behind bars for status offenses like skipping school, drinking alcohol and violating curfew. Studies say these actions are often driven by adverse childhood experiences, including sexual abuse, neglect, family dysfunction and mental illness, leaving many girls –– disproportionately girls of color –– susceptible to arrest and imprisonment.

“Sexual abuse is a primary predictor of criminalization in girls,” said Yasmin Vafa, the executive director of Rights4Girls in Washington, D.C., a nonprofit that advocates for the rights of at-risk youth, particularly girls and gender-expansive youth.

In 2015, 81% of girls in South Carolina’s youth detentions said they’d experienced severe and repeated sexual abuse, according to “The Girls’ Story,” a report by Rights4Girls and The Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality.

In the 26 years since the founding of the Young Women’s Freedom Center, executive director Jessica Nowlan said that of the 38,000 young people the center worked with, the overwhelming majority have suffered physical and sexual violence. 

The San Francisco nonprofit provides jobs, education, healing and a voice for system-impacted youth, even visiting facilities to assist kids prior to their release.   

“We are talking about young people who have very little power in terms of our society,” Nowlan said. “These are young people that have been pushed to the margins.”

Now 41, Nowlan spent much of her childhood at the mercy of systems she now works to reform. Addiction and abuse were among the adverse experiences Nowlan often witnessed in her childhood home, though she said the child welfare system was riddled with trauma of its own.    

By age 13, Nowlan was homeless in the Tenderloin of San Francisco.  

Shoplifting and parole violations fueled the 17 incarcerations in Nowlan’s past before she found the Young Women’s Freedom Center. Through the center’s work and healing programs, Nowlan broke away from the systemic cycle. 

A sense of belonging, a safe place to go or a person to confide in can be pivotal factors in a child’s life, forces that are strong enough to even deter them away from the sexual-abuse-to-prison pipeline, Nolan said.  

“The pipeline part, it’s complicated. It’s not just ‘You get sexually assaulted at 16, you’re going to go to prison,’” said Danielle Arlanda Harris, a professor at the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Griffith University in Australia. “It’s being exposed to situations that make the likelihood of prison more possible.” 

Harris said the wide net cast by the sexual-abuse-to-prison pipeline over multiple vulnerable populations is what makes the phenomenon’s classification as a “pipeline” somewhat problematic. 

Difficult to recognize, escape or heal from, Harris said the pipeline is better represented as a colander. While not all youth impacted by sexual abuse will end up incarcerated, the chance at-risk kids receive the help they need to before passing through the strainer and falling into the system is unlikely, she said. 

The psychological impact of repeated sexual trauma during pivotal developmental years is what makes the abuse to prison pipeline sometimes hard to recognize and can occur in tandem with other adverse childhood experiences. 

Francine Sherman, a clinical professor of law at Boston College Law School and co-author of study “Gender Injustice,” said girls with histories of abuse are often dually-involved with the welfare and juvenile justice systems.

According to the 2015 report, 47% of girls involved with child-welfare were referred to court for status offense charges.

 “It’s a whole lot less about the girl’s initial behavior, than it is a colossal failure of our response,” Sherman said.  

Sherman noted that systems like welfare and education are in place to provide solutions for at-risk youth, but often fail to address the root of their trauma and behavior. This lack of understanding can push children further down the path of arrest or incarceration.

“Girls’ trauma is different. Girls’ responses are different,” said Rebecca Epstein, executive director of the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality, an advocacy group that addresses disparities of race and class nationwide. 

Advocates like Epstein push for a more gender-responsive justice reform that addresses the needs and driving risk factors for girls who’ve been led into the system, especially policy that supports low-income girls and girls of color.

“It’s important to recognize the dual effects of girls, race and gender in examining how she’s perceived and treated and responded to in our public systems,” Epstein said.

While the driving forces behind the sexual abuse to prison pipeline tends to target girls, gender expansive, transgender and gender-nonconforming youth, experts and advocates notice and acknowledge that race heightens these risks even further.

“White girls and girls of color share certain challenges, but they’re also very unique. Girls of color and low-income girls are the voices that are most consistently absent from the conversation,” Epstein said.

Minority girls are at an increasingly high risk of sex trafficking and arrest, due to racial disparities in socioeconomic status. Even more, black youth overrepresented in the justice system, accounting for 53% percent of all prostitution arrests, according to a 2017 data report by The U.S. Department of Justice. 

“Incarceration and detention [are] never appropriate for children, particularly girls, because of their unique pathways into the system, because an overwhelming majority of girls behind bars are survivors of sexual abuse,” Vafa said.

Often the needs of incarcerated victims of rape and abuse go untreated and ignored while in detention, leaving kids at a heightened risk of revictimization. 

Girls tend to lash out in response to retriggering events while incarcerated, pushed further into the justice system through a process that Vafa refers to as “bootstrapping.”

“It is retraumatizing to incarcerate them,” Vafa said. “Things like being forced to strip and cavity searches…constantly having your movements controlled by others…being subjected to really harmful techniques like isolation and solitary confinement.”

Girls disproportionately represent 76% of all “prostitution” charges, despite being younger than the legal age of consent, according to a 2015 report by the U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

Survivor advocate Withelma “T” Ortiz Pettigrew said harmful conditions inside of many juvenile detentions often mirror the environment that sex traffickers subject their victims to.

“Many times when they’re put in a detention facility, it’s almost like a dog in a kennel,” Pettigrew said.  

Pettigrew, along with Rights4Girls, launched the “No Such Thing as a Child Prostitute” campaign in 2016 that successfully eradicated the terminology “child prostitute” in the media. For youth justice advocates and survivors, the change is big step towards understanding young victims of sex trafficking.

“It changed the idea that these are willing participants, it changed the idea that they were complicit in and in agreement,” Pettigrew said. “It allowed people to understand that this is something that’s happening to them, not something that they’re willingly participating in.”

In doing this, Vafa said these systems would have to acknowledge and address the intersectionality of girls who are impacted by the sexual-abuse-to-prison pipeline. 

“It’s really a matter of getting systems to understand the connection between childhood trauma, abuse and incarceration,” Vafa said.

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One San Francisco area nonprofit helps incarcerated girls find the connection between their mind and body through an activity viewed by some as exclusive, privileged and lacking in diversity — yoga.    

Former nurse practitioner and founder of The Art of Yoga Project, Mary Lynn Fitton, saw a pattern of young female patients seeking help for conditions like substance abuse, anxiety and depression.  Issues she knew through her own practice, could be remedied by yoga.   

“I really felt that there was this gap,” Fitton said. “We had talk therapy, we had pharmaceuticals, and I felt like it needed to be so much more. It needs to be in the body.”

With the juvenile justice system at its focal point, The Art of Yoga Project brings movement and art to the underserved population of girls Fitton once helped in her healthcare career.  The group encourages youth to look inward, teaching self awareness, understanding and respect through an activity that may otherwise be out of reach due to race and socioeconomics.

“I wanted all the young women that I saw to have that same sense of coming home to their body to learn to have a positive self dialectic,” Fitton said, “to improve their relationship with themselves.”

The 15-year-old organization has grown into a team of 50 art, writing and yoga teachers, visiting 26 sites one to three times a week in the San Francisco Bay Area, including five juvenile facilities in three counties. 

Fitton said the project prides itself on sourcing teachers from within, creating pathways to jobs for formerly underserved youth through yoga teacher training scholarships.  It also provides workshops and programs to educate staff on how to work with at-risk youth. 

“We realized the importance of having teachers that represent the population that we serve,”  Fitton said. “Because of mass incarceration and because of social injustice, we have primarily Black and brown girls. So we strive to help our teachers match that population and body, body identity, body size, gender identity.”

Despite a body of research proving the universal mental and physical health benefits of the Southeast Asian tradition, yoga’s role in American society has become a phenomenon of racial exclusivity, largely reserved for the white, rich and privileged. 

“Seeing [The Art of Yoga Project] come to the shelter was one of the first times I saw a yoga teacher of color, so that was very affirming for me,” said Sadie D., now a teacher with the nonprofit. “I’m a Black woman and at the time, I felt very insecure about my interest in yoga because the spaces that are meant for it are predominantly white and [cost] a lot of money.  There’s a lot of class disparity there.”

Sadie, who asked that her last name not be used, was homeless in the Bay Area since about the second grade, before she was aware of what being homeless really meant, she said. The now 24-year-old was introduced to The Art of Yoga Project in 2013 when she attended a yoga class at one of its partner studios in Redwood City for her birthday. 

She later received a scholarship from the project to complete her yoga teacher training, and has been an instructor for the past five years. She said the opportunity came full circle for her when she taught her first class at the shelter she once lived in. 

“I was happy for the opportunity and really humbled, grateful that I could be in a space that I had been in and be a reflection for the youth. I really identify with them,” Sadie said.  “It didn’t feel like it was out of the question for them to want to pursue something like yoga.”

Though never incarcerated herself, Sadie said she knew the struggle to survive from her own childhood experiences, and while teaching in juvenile facilities, was overcome with emotion. 

“It felt a lot more vulnerable being in those spaces with them, in a good way though,” she said. “That was one of the first times I’ve cried from teaching yoga…They make an impact on you.”

At one of the San Mateo facilities partnering with the group in 2012, many youth reported prior abuse, neglect, dysfunctional family dynamics and addiction, said Danielle Arlanda Harris, a professor at the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Griffith University in Australia and former research director for The Art of Yoga Project.

“They’d done some of these things that were horrible, but they hadn’t done them because they wanted to,” Harris said, “…they had done them because they had been so horrifically abused and were so vulnerable and were from such horrific backgrounds that I just couldn’t fathom.”

These occurrences are known as Adverse Childhood Experiences are apparent in an estimated 70-90% of juvenile offenders and if left untreated, can leave traumatic effects on a developing child. 

“Sometimes you don’t even want to be connected to your body,”  Sadie said.  

The Art of Yoga Project considers the perspective of traumatized youth, presenting each class as a set of choices to restore the youth’s sense of power over their body, even during vulnerable yoga postures or when their eyes are closed,  Harris said. 

“Downward dog and puppy pose and even child’s pose, it can be awfully triggering to a body that has experienced sexual trauma,” she said. 

Implementing a set of practices with an understanding for adverse childhood experiences in mind is what qualifies behavioral management and therapy programs as being trauma informed, according to a 2016 report by the National Center for Mental Health and Juvenile Justice.  

“When I got [to the facilities], I really realized it was so much more about social injustice and trauma,” Fitton said. “We quickly had to learn to be trauma informed before that word was even known, before people were using that term, before people even talked about trauma.”

Even with trauma informed practices, the positive impact of yoga on incarcerated girls is hard to quantify,  Harris said. 

“I was constantly being asked to provide evidence that the program was working right,”  Harris said. “The question was always… ‘How many downward dogs does it take to reduce recidivism?’…I wish I could tell you.”

Harris said she did see change in the girls’ demeanor.  On days that The Art of Yoga Project held a class, Harris noted fewer fights in the facilities, girls began to open up more in group settings and privately in written reflections.

“I had taken yoga for years…But these girls, they were in their bodies,”  Harris said. “They would talk about it and they’d write about it in the journals, about being a woman and thinking about it in ways I had totally taken for granted.”

To track the progression of education or a learned skill, Harris said researchers administer tests before and after to measure the difference.  Since yoga is an internalized practice, Harris adjusted her methods to a series of check-ins with youth throughout eight weeks of yoga.  

Instead of a drastic increase in positive internal dialogue or self image responses, Harris said participants were honest, authentic and reflective in their check-ins, as yoga encouraged their own mindfulness.

“We weren’t able to reach statistical significance,”  Harris said. “But that was the moment, I think, that I learned that qualitative research is where we need to be. Because answering all of these questions with numbers doesn’t tell the full story.”

Sadie said the impact of yoga has made on her life can be traced to one moment.

“I got overwhelmed with emotion that I couldn’t really explain, but it didn’t feel chaotic… It felt like I could move in it,”  Sadie said.  “It’s one of those things that feel so personal that it’s hard to even put into words why and how it matters.”

The instructor guided the class into a variation of a wide-legged forward fold — a posture that compresses the body at the hips and changes perspective by redirecting the gaze.  Sadie said in this posture, she felt in control of her life. 

Newly 18 and living in a shelter at the time, Sadie said she felt strength.

“That moment, I remember it,”  Sadie said. “After that I remember feeling my body more.  Feeling powerful in my own skin.  I could walk taller. I felt that connection, it’s like something I hadn’t realized I was missing.” 

On and off her mat, Sadie shares a common mission with The Art of Yoga Project. 

“Right now, my thought is that there is more of a need to provide yoga in the spaces who don’t have it,” she said. “People of color and bigger bodies.”

Source art courtesy of The Art of Yoga Project

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Aaron Kinzel still struggles to process trauma that follows over a decade after his release from imprisonment as a teenager. Now as an adult, he hosts art therapy workshops to help others overcome the effects of youth incarceration. 

Kinzel is now the director for the Youth Justice Fund, a Michigan-based nonprofit that supports former child offenders as they re-adjust to life beyond bars. He strives to help men like himself work through their mental health issues and reacclimate to society in mental health support groups with formerly incarcerated men and art workshops where participants work with their hands to release repressed internal issues. 

“It’s not just art,” said Kinzel. “But to re-enact some traumatic event. To me, it’s really cathartic.”

Kinzel spent the latter half of his teen years in the juvenile justice system and most of his 20s in adult corrections centers in Michigan and Ohio. During his first three years as a teenage prisoner, he cycled in and out of solitary confinement for aggressive behavior and stayed for as long as 10 months at a time, he said.

He said the demons he envisioned in the system now inspire his creations. His most recent project “re-enacts” a hallucination he remembered from solitary confinement when he went three days without water.

For this project, Kinzel poured clay into a piece of bronze metal, creating the image of a skull layered over his face.  

It’s the exact image he visualized as a kid, he said. 

Creating a tangible version of his mental image using clay and bronze helps him overcome trauma in his past and quite literally puts the power back into his own hands, he said. Kinzel’s most recent project required months to complete.

Many of the individuals Kinzel works with failed to receive the mental health and trauma-informed support they needed while they were imprisoned, he said. 

“When I first came home…I was so screwed up mentally from this experience that I couldn’t connect with my wife. She didn’t understand why I was getting these PTSD responses,” Kinzel said. “Trauma is deeply embedded in your psyche.” 

A 2017 literature review by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention showed that many kids in the system faced trauma or violence before they were incarcerated, and observed that difficulties youth faced while entering the system could exacerbate existing conditions while increasing their likelihood of returning.  

Other former child offenders have joined alongside the Youth Justice Fund in embracing art therapy. Lorenzo Harrell, 44, similarly struggled to speak his feelings as a child in an adult prison. 

Growing up in Detroit, Harrell attempted to steal a Michael Jackson jacket with his brothers.  That day, at the age of 9, Harrell was arrested for the first time.

He spent the remainder of his childhood in and out of arrests and alternative placement until he was placed in an adult correctional facility.  In total, Harrell estimates he spent 26 years incarcerated.

Today, Kinzel places a personal emphasis on helping others break through stereotypical expectations of masculinity, he said.

“Men are supposed to be masculine. We’re supposed to run the shot and run the world, which is really a false narrative,” Kinzel said. “Men can be emotional.”

The idea for the mental health support groups, also known as Wednesday Wellness, originated with Harrell. 

“That’s when you normally see a lot of guys similarly situated to myself, guys who spent decades in prison come out and really talk about what they’re going through,” Harrell said. “All of us are going through things.”

Harrell also participated in the art workshops, he said, presenting his creation as a gift to his mother on her birthday. 

Shaping clay and metal, Kinzel invites fellow formerly imprisoned kids to share a safe space, working with their hands to confront the injustice and trauma of the past through their artistic expression as adults.

“We’re taking something that’s thrown away –– garbage that’s rusting away –– and we repurpose it,” Kinzel said. “It’s kind of a good analogy of our lives.” 

Source photo courtesy of Aaron Kinzel

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Raised by a teen mother, becoming a teen mother herself, and with a brother in prison, statistically, Charese Jamison narrowly missed the juvenile justice system.  

Instead, she became one of an estimated 10 million girls helped by National Crittenton, an 137-year-old girls-centered nonprofit organization, now based in Portland, Oregon.

Jamison, a resident of Utah, was helped by her local Crittenton agency in West Virginia as a teenager.  

Now, Jamison travels across the nation, speaking to members of Congress, donors and at-risk girls navigating the same childhood challenges she did, advocating on behalf of National Crittenton, the group that helped her change course nearly three decades ago. 

Founded in 1883, National Crittenton was the first group to open its doors to young women pushed to the edges of society, providing a safe place to sleep, community and emotional support.  National Crittenton still wrestles against the risk factors — sex trafficking, domestic violence and poverty — that drove girls into the juvenile justice system more than a century ago, and still do today, but now without federal funding to fuel its cause. 

“I thought we’d be further along in terms of social justice, but we’re really not,” said Jeannette Pai-Espinosa, the organization’s president.  

Girls account for nearly 30% of youth in the juvenile justice system, the majority of whom are arrested for nonviolent crimes  – theft, simple assault and disorderly conduct, according to a 2015 study by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. 

In 2013, National Crittenton worked alongside various states to address the needs of incarcerated girls with the hope of keeping them out of the juvenile justice system altogether. The nonprofit introduced trauma programs, conducted research and provided facility recommendations to keep girls out of the juvenile justice system, until its government funding was suddenly cut off under the new administration in 2017. 

National Crittenton now operates on private grants to maintain its progress, Pai-Espinosa said.  While the nonprofit once advised facilities directly, it now helps other nonprofits with similar philosophies on how to continue what it started.  In its advocacy, National Crittenton looks to its 31 independently-run  local agencies across the country, encouraging young women in their own communities to share stories and spur widespread change for girls.  

“There was a growing recognition that the girls [states saw] in the juvenile justice system, by and large, pose little risk to public safety and really are victims as much as anything else,” Pai-Espinosa said.

Sexually abused at a young age, Jamison, now 43, said she was severely depressed by age 10, attempted suicide at age 13, pregnant at 16, and a few months later, was homeless.  This was the moment a music teacher at her high school showed her love, kindness and pointed her to the Crittenton agency in West Virginia. 

“I could have been one of those kids that went to juvenile detention.”

Charese Jamison, now an advocate for at-risk girls. (Photo courtesy of Charese Jamison)

“If Crittenton had not come into my life, I could have been one of those kids that went to juvenile detention for minor crimes,” Jamison said.  “And if I would have wound up in detention, my kid would have probably wound up in the foster care system, and you can just paint the picture of what would have been.”

Though the number of adolescents in the juvenile justice system has decreased in the past two decades, the percentage of incarcerated girls has been steadily rising, according to Girls in the Juvenile Justice System, a 2015 report from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.  The findings indicate that young women in the system often experience multiple forms of childhood trauma including exploitation and abuse prior to their arrest, which Pai-Espinosa said has increased among girls and at a younger age. 

A 2015 survey conducted within 18 of its agencies found that Crittenton’s young women were similarly impacted by repeated exposure to childhood trauma including emotional and physical abuse, neglect, family dysfunction and trafficking — the same experiences that make youth, particularly young women, vulnerable to the juvenile justice system, and are nearly identical to the top risk factors identified in data by National Crittenton in 1900. 

Six months into her pregnancy, Jamison was welcomed into a Crittenton home on Christmas Day where she stayed for 18 months.  She learned how to care for herself, her child, and years later, how to use her voice to empower others, too. 

At 31, Jamison was invited to Washington, D.C., by Pai-Espinosa to speak in front of an audience of 300 people.  Young girls, donors, National Crittenton advocates and members of Congress listened as Jamison told her story.

“I was raised to believe in God,” Jamison said. “I remember praying, ‘Someday I’m going to tell my story and help other little girls.’ When I got up there to speak, it was that moment I prayed for at 9 years old.”

Jamison traveled for nearly 10 years, advocating for teen mothers and children in the foster care system, finding new depths to her own healing process through sharing her past. 

Knowing what drives girls into the juvenile justice system in each state is the only way to stop the multitude of pipelines that target girls, and disproportionately, girls of color, Pai-Espinosa said.  Now, without additional funding, “there’s simply no money to do that,”  Pai-Espinosa said.

The number of regions National Crittenton once advised has since dropped from over 12 to four. 

Though it is commonly known for supporting young mothers, National Crittenton’s reach extends much further, serving survivors of abuse, neglect, trafficking, addiction and more.  

Less than 40 years after the women’s suffrage movement and before the 19th Amendment passed, National Crittenton was founded in 1883 by two friends and advocates, Dr. Kate Waller Barrett and Charles Crittenton. Barrett, a women’s physician, and Crittenton, a self-made millionaire influenced by missionary work and his daughter’s untimely death, defied social norms to acknowledge disadvantaged women who were otherwise forgotten.  

Today, Dr. Kate Waller Barrett and Charles Crittenton’s great-great-grandchildren, Charles Baldwin and Kate Rademacher, continue their namesakes’ work as board members of National Crittenton.   

“Her legacy is very much alive,” Rademacher said of her great-great-grandmother. “But I’m sure she would be deeply saddened and troubled by how much more we have to do and how in some ways, a lot of the same problems are just as pronounced as they were then.” 

Pai-Espinosa said the organization is emboldened by the current social climate, which is asking for more focus on the underserved and those who have endured trauma and injustice.

“For a long time, we operated in silence,” Pai-Espinosa said. “That’s changed in the last 10 years, but it’s really changing now.”

Lead source photo courtesy of National Crittenton

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