The Biographical and Psychic Consequences of ‘Welfare Inaction’ for Young Women in Trouble with the Law

The Study

This work is based upon 58 qualitative interviews with 36 young women in the Valley County Juvenile Justice System, ¹ which was located in the Western United States. The data collection occurred in two waves. The first wave of interviews was collected from April 2009 to January 2010. During the first wave, 45 interviews were completed with 27 different girls, and all of them took place at the Valley County Juvenile Hall. The second wave of interviews took place between July 2010 and January 2011, during which time 13 more interviews were completed and nine new participants were recruited. Eight of the second wave interviews took place at a public substance abuse treatment facility for youth, the Public Teen Treatment Center, which was also operated by the Valley County Juvenile Justice System.

Though both of these sites were a part of the Valley County Juvenile Justice System, and linked to each other, important differences remained between the two facilities. Valley County Juvenile Hall was a locked facility where young women were detained (i.e. incarcerated), while the Public Teen Treatment Center was an unlocked facility where young women in the juvenile justice system who were deemed to have a drug problem were ‘enrolled’ as a condition of their probation. The Public Teen Treatment Center was technically unlocked, though it was surrounded by fencing. And young women faced consequences if they decided to leave before completing the program since completion was a condition of their juvenile probation. The populations at the two facilities overlapped considerably. All of the participants who were interviewed at the Public Teen Treatment Center had been to the Valley County Juvenile Hall, and many of the participants who were interviewed at the Valley County Juvenile Hall had been to the Public Teen Treatment Center. In addition to their experiences with these public ‘care’ and ‘control’ facilities, many of the young women at both sites had been to private substance abuse treatment facilities that partnered with Valley County Juvenile Probation.

Interviews were unstructured in nature at the beginning of the study. After themes important to young women began to reveal themselves through unstructured interviews, semi-structured interviews focusing on what school, secure detention, substance abuse treatment and probation supervision meant to young women were conducted. Most interviews were audio recorded and each lasted, on average, a little over 80 minutes. In addition to audio recording most interviews, notes were taken during the interviews, and more formal field notes were written at the conclusion of each day of interviewing. The field notes were often used as a space to explore a particular theme by connecting or contrasting bits of different accounts, or thinking about how newly collected data fit with past scholarship.

More than half of the participants were interviewed only once, while 15 girls were interviewed at least twice and six girls three times. Although less than half of the participants were interviewed more than once, these follow-up interviews were extremely valuable. When sitting down with a young woman for the second or third time I heard parts of stories that I did not hear the first time through; therefore, it was my sense that follow-up interviews were crucial in building rapport. Follow-up interviews with young women who had re-entered the juvenile justice system after being on the outside were particularly valuable for exploring the themes that are presented in this article. It was in these interviews with returning girls that the disjuncture between their notions of self-reliance and their lived-reality was most stark, as their hopes for the future often met a grim reality. It is also in these interviews that their anger at a system that often ‘works against them’ shines through most clearly. Because these were young women, often on their last stay in the juvenile justice system, such follow-up interviews were difficult to come by; had more follow-up interviews been possible, their inclusion would have strengthened the already rich data that this study produced.

Because a standardized survey was not employed and girls’ official records were not accessed, the demographics of the participants can only be talked about generally. Of the 36 participants that were recruited, 34 were 18 or 19 years-old. In terms of racial and class composition, about half of the participants were Caucasian, three were African American and the rest were Latina. From their descriptions of their neighborhoods and the employment status of their parents, most young women could be categorized as ‘low’ in socio-economic status, although a few were solidly middle-class. In line with previous studies with similar populations, the participants in this study faced a constellation of life problems, with poverty, troubled families, and substance abuse serving as principle pathways into the justice system (Chesney-Lind and Shelden, 2004; Sharpe, 2012). Some young women revealed that they were in the USA without documentation, while several others talked about parents who had cycled through the justice system for many years. Three mentioned that they had children, while three others were visibly pregnant.

Most young women had been in the juvenile justice system for several years, though for a few girls this was only their first or second stay in a juvenile justice facility. The legal reason why young women were in ‘the system’ was not always easy to pinpoint in the interview. Although girls usually knew the charge or infraction for which they were being held, some did not have a firm grasp for how exactly they came to be detained in juvenile hall or enrolled in the public treatment facility (or how long they might be at the facility). For those who had committed their infractions or crimes after the age of 18, why they were being processed through the juvenile rather than the criminal justice system was not often apparent to them. Still, some general remarks can be made about ‘why’ they were there. While several of the young women were being detained for committing serious crimes, including robbery and assault, the vast majority were detained on probation violations involving substance abuse.

While most of the girls might be safely categorized as ‘poly-drug’ users, methamphetamine was the most common ‘hard’ drug that young women cited as a problem for them – a problem ‘personally’ and also because it kept them in the justice system. And many of the arguments in this work rest on the notion that substance abuse and addiction, especially involving methamphetamine, was a ‘real’ problem for many of the young women who participated in the study. That is to say, there were specific and deleterious consequences of such abuse and addiction. As Carlen states, when responding to an accusation that her descriptions of the pain of addiction for the ‘criminal women’ she interviewed were ‘judgmental’ in tone (See Carlen, 1988):

Women with drink or drug addictions often choke to death on their own vomit, commit suicide or die of a drug overdose. Others have AIDS as a result of either sharing needles or engaging in prostitution to fund their habits. Sleeping rough, nursing bleeding sores and suffering withdrawal symptoms are not particularly life-enhancing processes either…. An academic squeamishness concerning the real problems of women in crime and on drugs is a return to one of the less acceptable faces of 1960s romanticism and idealism. It certainly is not helpful to the development of progressive policies aimed at reducing the further suffering incurred by women in trouble who turn to drugs or drink to relieve their pain and misery. (Carlen, 1992: 63)

‘You Just Have to Believe in Yourself’: Gendered Treatment and Self-Reliance

There is a substantial body of work – with much of it from critical feminist scholars working in the sociology of punishment – linking the substance of ‘gender-sensitive’ or ‘gender-responsive’ programming to neo-liberal trends and self-governing subjects (Haney, 2004, 2010). While gender-specific ‘risk factors’ can be ‘personal issues’ or ‘social’ in nature (Bloom et al., 2003), it is the ‘personal issues’ that are targeted in penal policy, while ‘social’ risk factors are largely ignored (Carlen, 2002). One consistent trait of such ‘gender-specific’ treatment programs in neo-liberal times ‘is their emphasis on personal, individual trauma as opposed to social, structural inequality’ (Haney, 2010: 211). This makes for an acute disjuncture between the individualized focus of gender-specific treatments and criminalized females’ material needs and marginal position in the social structure (Hannah-Moffat, 2000). Such programs and their supporting policies encourage ‘clients’ to make ‘pro-social’ choices that align with neo-liberal ideals of self-sufficiency and self-governance (Haney, 2004, 2010; Hannah-Moffat, 2002; McKim, 2008).

Young women in the current study had experience with ‘cognitive behavioral programs’ that stressed the importance of self-governance for staying crime free. For instance, Aggression Replacement Training was introduced during the data collection period at one of the sites in this study. In their review of the efficacy of this approach, which is based on cognitive therapies and behaviorist psychology, Kaunitz et al. (2010: 6) describe the ‘anger control’ component of this ‘evidence-based’ program in the following way:

Anger control training is a multistep sequence in which trainees are first helped to understand how they typically perceive and interpret the behaviour of others in ways that arouse anger. Therefore, in the first lesson, attention is given to identify the external and internal triggers that initiate the anger. The self-control sessions identify triggers and likely consequences of anger and aggression. The self-awareness of triggers and arousing feelings of anger is then used to develop alternative prosocial strategies.

Through cognitive therapies such as these, social-level problems are redefined at the psychological level: chronic unemployment is attributed to a lack of initiative; addiction becomes an inability to effectively spot your ‘triggers’; and, entanglement in a dangerous relationship becomes the result of poor relationship skills (Kendall, 2002; Pollack, 2007). Exposure to interventions that address these ‘criminogenic needs’ or ‘dynamic risk factors’ are said to shape participants’ subjectivities in such a way that they come to see their problems as rooted in their own individual failings rather than as the product of larger social forces (Pollack, 2005, 2007). Pollack (2007: 164) found in her interviews with women re-entering society after prison that ‘women’s descriptions of themselves mirrored correctional discourses that decontexualize their responses to abuse and instead frame their actions as a result of bad relationship skills’. ²

While scholars often critique ‘cognitive therapies’, others find fault in ‘empowerment’ sessions that stress ‘self-esteem’ and ‘choice’ (often through commercialized variants of feminism that stress White, middle-class values) to girls in the juvenile justice system who face structural barriers to decent lives (Goodkind, 2005, 2009). Such programs suggest to young women that they can achieve their dreams if they simply believe in themselves, leaving aside hard truths about how race and class interact with gender to shape life chances (Massey, 2007). And, again, we can see variants of ‘empowering’ life-skills programming in the experiences of the participants in this study. Both of the sites where interviews were collected had weekly programs that were focused on ‘empowering’ young women. One young woman, Jordan, described an aspect of an empowerment-focused detention center program like this:

She teaches us how to respect ourselves, and how we can get respected. And, like, you know, and then she did like, I remember one time she did this one thing and she brought in a poster of women that had made a difference and it had like Hillary Clinton on there, and Angelina Jolie, and like women that do things in the world, and like how you can be a woman that’s like that, you know?

Though the analysis presented in this article does not envision such programs as a significant tool in the process of offloading responsibility onto girls (for reasons that will be discussed below), self-help vocabularies seeped into young women’s understandings of the world and their place in it. When asked what will allow her to succeed when she is released from drug treatment, Heather’s response draws upon such language:

You just have to be motivated, and have the right state of mind…

What kind of state of mind do you need to have?

A positive state of mind. Not letting the negative into it, and just like whatever you put your mind to, like you could, you could do it, you know? You just have to believe in yourself.

All this is to say that many of the young women in this study had experience with gendered programs that stressed self-sufficiency and an individualized variant of empowerment: the Valley County Juvenile Hall had two regular group programs that aimed to ‘empower’ young women, and substance abuse therapies that drew upon cognitive behavioral therapy were present at the Public Teen Treatment Center. Some of these programs were ‘gender specific’ and some of the lessons, one might argue, were based on White middle-class notions of ‘empowerment’ that left aside (and perhaps masked) the structural problems facing young women. Through one lens, programs like the one Jordan described tried to arm girls with the personal skills needed to negotiate structural barriers by making better choices or through the exertion of sheer will. While much might be gained from studying what such programs mean to young women, to only or mainly focus on such ‘responsibilizing’ actions leaves obscured the most important generator of self-reliance for young women: the failure of youth justice and public policy to meet girls’ material and personal needs through social welfare in any consistent or sustained manner. And it is this phenomenon to which we now turn.

Welfare Inaction, Responsibility, and the Risk of Social Death

While the on the ground reality of treatment and detention was filled with responsibilizing and gendered ‘actions’, for explaining girls’ seemingly ‘responsibilized’ world views, it was what was not offered to them that seemed most consequential. Whether they were entwined with treatment or detention facilities, whether the substance of services was caring, brutal or something else, the social process of intervention remained remarkably similar in that it was separated from real world lives filled with the sort of social deficits that face female prisoners the world over, generation after generation (Carlen and Tombs, 2006). And it was the isolation of intervention from such real world deficits that most profoundly shaped the meanings that young women assigned to intervention, including their individualist outlooks. That their ‘life-skill’ programs, ‘empowerment’ sessions and drug treatments often compelled them to turn inward when their troubles clearly had social roots was ironic and somewhat important in shaping their understandings of the world; however, their notions of self-reliance were due in large part to the social abandonment that they experienced during or directly following intervention. Hillary’s words illustrate this sort of predicament, which is at the root of why girls feel responsible for their own lives.

So, I’m gonna be leaving these doors without a place to go, without money, without a job, without, you know, school set up, or if I want to join some kind of program − I can’t do any of that. And, there’s no, there’s no way I can figure that out before I leave.

Analysis of girls’ reflections on the social process of intervention suggests that rather than focusing so much on the subjectivity-altering powers of individual programs or institutions, in connecting ‘responsibilized’ world views to social policy trends we need to put our analytic attention on how what is not provided shapes self- and social understandings. While sketches of the neo-liberal state based on policy reports, official rhetoric or brief field visits may shed light on punishing, responsibilizing or paternalistic ‘actions’, they are not all that useful for sketching what is not on offer and analyzing why that matters. However, when young people reflect on the most meaningful aspects of intervention, it is oftentimes what is not offered that is most meaningful to them – and at the root of their beliefs that they are responsible for their own lives. Phoenix and Kelly (2013: 420) capture this phenomenon of responsibilization by way of state inaction.

… it is not relationships or services, but their absence that most promotes the exercise of ‘responsible’ self-governance (that is to say, the knowledge that no one else is responsible for the young people’s circumstances)… youth justice may be most ‘effective’ in terms of realizing the goals of neo-liberal governance when it does not address the social, welfare and personal difficulties of a group of people who are, legally, still children.

‘Welfare inaction’ comes in various forms and degrees. Much of the limited space in this article is focused on the failure to meet material and personal needs following detention and residential treatment; however, welfare inaction also occurs when core services fail to be provided within a facility. For young women with drug problems, a lack of drug treatment while in juvenile detention was a particularly meaningful – and common – instance of ‘welfare inaction’. For Lisa, an 18 year-old who had been hospitalized for drug overdose several times in the past, it was the drug treatment that she did not receive which seemed most important in shaping what her stay in detention meant to her.

I just spent like Christmas here, and like my birthday here. Like, I know it’s for my own good. I’m glad I’m here ‘cause I don’t want to like keep living that way. But, I don’t know.

Has anybody asked you about your drug problem while you’re here?

No. I talked about it to like my roommate. That’s pretty much it.

No programs?

No programs.

What do you think about that?

It sucks. ‘Cause, we all need like help as far as drugs, ‘cause (laughter) it’s hard. ‘Cause, that’s what I’m afraid of, honestly, like I know I’ve been here for eight months, and as soon as I step out, it’s a whole different story.

These sorts of failures to act are not just ‘additive’ in nature; rather, they make up a backdrop that conditions the social process of intervention, often trumping the more positive moments that one might take away from an intervention (Currie, 2003). A broader social ecology defined by ‘welfare inactions’ can transform the meaning that young women assign to a facility: it makes the work that one puts into personal change fuel for resentment and frustration. Cycling between institutions and unworkable lives on the outside soured young women on the idea of change, in that when personal change never translated into change in the real world, they tired of the social process of ‘intervention’ – even when the substance of intervention was deemed reasonably positive.

The power of ‘welfare inaction’ to generate self-reliance and shape what an instance of intervention means to young women comes through most clearly in the experiences of Tracey, who was interviewed multiple times in this study. Her reflections on juvenile drug treatment and the social circumstances that surround it provide us with a case study of how ‘welfare inaction’ constructs self-reliant, responsibilized subjects. Having interviewed her six months prior, as I waited for her to walk in for a second interview, I was expecting to talk to someone who had been on ‘the outs’ for several months and violated the terms of her probation. That was not the case. As she put it, ‘I actually haven’t been out’. I learn that shortly after our first interview in the detention center several months back, Tracey had been sent to the Public Teen Treatment Center for her substance abuse problems. She was back at juvenile detention for just a couple of days before going home. She described her addiction – principally to methamphetamine – in colorful language:

I’m like a freight train with no brakes. Once I start using, there’s no way that I can possibly, realistically think that I can put it down and not use…. The only way to avoid being addicted is not picking it up the first time…. But, it’s got so bad to the point, like, I’ve been using for, since I was 12. So, it’s like, and I’m almost 19…. I’ve, like, gotten so deep in my addiction that it’s like I did more than just speed to like, I, I mean, it’s like not enough for me anymore, like Xanax, like everything, like, just mixed together. You know? And, like, that’s also like kind of dangerous, you know, ‘cause when you’re mixing pills and alcohol, and this and that, it all just becomes like a big blur.

Tracey had tried drug treatment at a private facility when she was younger, but it did not work for her. This time at the Public Teen Treatment Center, however, she had a more positive experience.

I think it pushed me in the right direction. And, like uh, I think from being there, I grew up a lot, because before like I needed like to fit in with like the girls and like fit in with whoever…. And, now it’s like I’m like comfortable like being alone and like doing my own thing. And I respect myself a lot more, and so other people are respecting me more.

It was clear that the Public Teen Treatment Center was a meaningful experience for Tracey. Its supportive actions provided her with the sense she could accomplish things in life. In addition to partaking in the various life-skills and drug treatment sessions, she was able to earn her high school diploma while in the public treatment facility. And it is this fact that she was most proud of, as her normally reserved demeanor switched to a more animated one in the following exchange.

I got all the credits that I needed. I graduated last Friday.

Congratulations.

It was really cool. It was really cool. I graduated with like ten other graduates. There’s like 15 GED graduates. They had like at least a hundred and something people there. My judge was there. The coordinator was there. Like, the director, everyone, like uh, the principal. I don’t know – it was cool. And, I got, even the diploma, like it doesn’t say anything about being incarcerated, or being in a County Alternative School or anything like that. They’re like really beautiful. Like, I got to wear a cap and gown. Like give a whole speech or like presentation or whatever. And, like, I don’t know, it was really, it was really cool.

Upon leaving the Public Teen Treatment Center soon after graduation, as evidenced by the next exchange, her ‘mindset’ was different: she was sober and at a point where she saw the world clearly; most importantly of all, she was beginning to care about what happened to her life.

You think it’s gonna be tough not to use?

Mmm, no. I don’t think so. I don’t know. I think that it’s better like this. Like, I wouldn’t change, like, this mindset for anything, you know? Like, I’d never seen this clearly in a long time, you know.

Explain that mindset for me.

… I know I don’t feel like destroying my life anymore. I think that I’m at a point where I want to start building it instead of taking it down.

Had I not interviewed Tracey again, the ‘welfare inactions’ which permeated the social process of intervention and release would have been left out of sight. But it was these failures to act –specifically, the failure to find her a stable long term place to live and something to do with her time following release – that transforms what intervention means to her. And it is these failures to act, as we will see below, that give her a bone-deep sense that she is responsible for meeting these needs and managing any risks she might encounter. Although Tracey left the treatment facility feeling like she wanted to ‘start building’ her life, she was released into an environment –her parent’s house – where any gains made in treatment would be nearly impossible to sustain. She was sent back to juvenile detention a few days after being released.

What was it like being out?

Uh, it was actually really horrible. It was really sad, and like really depressing. Like, I almost wanted to like tell [my Probation Officer] to take me that day…. My house wasn’t my house anymore. Like, it’s really hard being there. Like, my parents aren’t my parents anymore…. I know that they’re both using and stuff. But, it was just really horrible. It was really like, ‘What the hell’s going on?’ you know? I really didn’t feel comfortable being there. Within the first two hours, like, there’s like one of my dad’s friends or whatever, like, he was just sitting on the couch with like a pipe in his hand, and I was sitting there, like, I was actually like really quietly revolted, you know what I mean? Like, how frickin’ sick. Like, ‘You know that I just got out. Why in the hell would you even, like, you’re just sitting in my living room’.

Tracey knew that if she wanted to stay sober, she would have to move out of her parents’ house and construct a life without their involvement. She also knew that when she left juvenile detention in a couple of weeks, she would be off juvenile probation for good. With little in the way of financial resources, she devised a survival plan on her own: she was going to move in with her friend – a young male friend in a neighboring county – who didn’t ‘use dope’ and didn’t ‘expect anything’ from her:

I’m gonna have my own room and stuff [at my friend’s house]…. And then, uh, I’m gonna have ‘em like drive me around the, the area or whatever, show me like all the bus routes, like all the whatever, you know. I wanted to have a car, but I mean, it, like nothing’s more important, like, than getting out of there [my parents’ house]. Like, maybe like look for a place to work. I probably won’t start college until like spring semester. And, I’ll have a job until then. Just, you know, figure out everything and go, take it from there. Kind of like, not depend on anyone no more [my emphasis].

A couple of weeks later, Tracey and I talked for a final time. At this point, she was three days from release and her plans had changed again. She was no longer going to be moving in with her male friend because he no longer had the space to accommodate her. With that plan abandoned, she had decided to move in with her parents: ‘I’m gonna go back to my house for a little bit. I’m just gonna kind of like tough it out’. While you saw glimpses of a self-reliant outlook in that second interview – where she’d come to the conclusion that she was going to ‘not depend on anyone no more’ – in this final interview, as she sat three days from release, her self-reliance was right at the surface. The first words caught by the recorder were: ‘Uh, I feel better ‘cause I worked out a few things. And, like uh, just everything, everything will work if I want it to, you know?’ When asked what she meant by this statement, Tracey says:

There’s no reason for me to feel that I can’t do it by myself. Or, that I can’t do this. Or, I’m restricted by this. Or, like I’m held back by this. That, now that I’m 18 and everything, like I kind of like have the power to like really do everything that I need to do.

What makes you come to that conclusion?

Uh, just like okay, I was making up all these excuses for like why I couldn’t do it by myself. Why I needed help with this or why I needed help with that. But, like, really, if I think about it, like if I do want it bad enough, like I’ll do it, you know?

Oh, and by want it bad enough, what are you goin’ after?

To be sober and to actually have a life and all that good stuff.

Although there is a body of literature that would connect Tracey’s self-reliant outlook to the individualized form of treatment she received, its roots are clearly planted in a more basic, more pervasive sense of social abandonment. Her decision to ‘not depend on anyone’ and her sense that she must ‘do it by [her]self’ were not the result of any treatment or intervention; rather, it was what was not provided to her that gave her a clear-eyed understanding that she was on her own in this world. If she wanted to survive, she needed to adapt to this reality, turn inward and navigate it − in this case ‘tough it out’ by trying to stay sober in a house full of the drug she had come to see as a profound problem for her, methamphetamine. Although she experienced a changed self-concept through the reasonably supportive actions of the Public Teen Treatment Center, in the real world there is no such support. She now knows that if her personal and material needs are to be met that it will be she who meets them – and not because she has been told this, but because this is a reality she knows intimately.

While addressing material needs ought to be a part of a principled youth justice policy for young men and women (Goldson and Muncie, 2006), there are gendered consequences to this sort of ‘welfare inaction’. Not meeting material needs puts young women at risk of entwinement in male-dominated criminal subcultures and relationships with exploitative men more of a possibility. Tracey’s insistence that her male friend did not ‘expect anything’ from her – whether true or not – is indicative of how common such relationships are for young women in the justice system. The gendered consequences of ‘welfare inaction’ can be seen most dramatically in the accounts of girls who, having completed a stint in juvenile detention or residential treatment, are placed back into the same social ecology that is at the root of their drug use. Jordan recounts below her last relapse experience, which captures one aspect of the gendered consequences of ‘welfare inaction’ for girls in crime and on drugs.

Unless you’re really gonna get out and do good, or unless you have a support team or some kind of stability, you can’t do it by yourself, you really can’t. You could do it if you want to, but you need people to be there.

You didn’t have that?

No, I was just getting out to go back to the same, you know what I mean, the same exact shit…. So I was going back to [live at my friend’s house] where there was weed, so I had sat there watching them all smoking weed ‘cause I needed to test clean next week, and didn’t smoke any weed. But it was like fuck dude (exasperated), you know what I mean? So for like two weeks when I got out I didn’t get high, but after I tested for my PO [Probation Officer] and she told me I had two weeks till I come back, and I know that meth is in your system like two days or three days, I was like man I’m gonna go get high.

While Jordan had planned on stopping her use of methamphetamine a couple of days before her next visit with her Probation Officer (so that she could test clean) she could not stop and continued to use. With the violation now assured, and a trip to juvenile detention a real possibility, she skipped her scheduled meeting with her PO. Now, because she had absconded from probation, she had to leave the ‘stoner house,’ as she called it, and find another place to live. Using crystal methamphetamine heavily at this point, she was bouncing between the streets and the home of an older guy, a man she met at court while her boyfriend was being sentenced to prison.

So I call him one time and he takes me shopping, he gets me a pack of cigarettes, he gives me money to buy weed, he give me money to buy drugs, like you don’t even know, and he’s just giving me money.

What was your living situation like at the time?

I was living by myself, like living on the streets. You know, so I didn’t care. This guy’s just giving me all this money…. Oh well. I had to do what I had to do. I had to do what I had to do to survive…. And if you could do it without having to do things that you don’t wanna do, like putting out and being sexual and stuff, I was gonna do it.

In this relationship she must subordinate herself, in spirit if not physically, so that she can avoid the dangers of the streets, have her most basic material needs met, and keep her re-sparked addiction fed.

While the substance of programming in residential treatment and detention –through one lens – was a gendered version of responsibilization, the most consequential elements for constructing self-reliant subjects was that the stuff of intervention was disconnected from other life-building services. This meant that the most socially vulnerable girls – girls who had usually been through numerous interventions in the past – knew that they would need to negotiate the dangerous outside world on their own. There is a visceral quality to the expression of such a predicament, which often comes out in a way that is at once plain-spoken and charged with feeling. As Jordan said:

Probation, they don’t, they don’t help us. They don’t help us at all.

Earlier you said they helped though….

It helps you be like me, where I’m like: I accept that I have nobody – this is what I got to do.

Jordan had not been cajoled or duped into seeing herself as an island by some cognitive therapy. She did not come to this conclusion after participating in the empowerment program she described earlier. This is the sentiment of a young woman who, sitting a few days from release, does not know where she will live in the long term, how she will provide for herself, or how she will stay away from illicit substances that she knows will likely entwine her in the adult justice system and perhaps end her life. While exposure to psychologized interventions may give girls a vocabulary that plays-up the notion that their failings are their own, such responsibilizing tropes are not the main source of self-reliance. To understand the deep-seated feelings of isolation many young women expressed, it is more useful to place the analytic weight on the more general predicament that spurs this sort of world view: such self-reliance is the cumulative consequence of a life spent at the margins of a punitive and neglectful society (Carlton and Seagrave, 2011). It is often sparked early in life by mistreatment and abandonment, and furthered by exposure to social networks that put girls at risk for physical and psychic subordination. It is also fostered in meaningful ways by years of experience with systems of care and control whose default response is structured in a way that means they are incapable of penetrating real world lives in ways that matter.

Rather than a pathological or naive response – especially for the most socially vulnerable girls – taking responsibility was crucial to their survival, as this world view helped them to navigate the shredded systems of support and the criminalized institutions that inevitably awaited them after all the workbooks for Aggression Replacement Training were filled, the troubling encounter groups and well-meaning empowerment sessions had ended, and they were discharged back to the same social ecology without long term stable housing or concrete plans for material survival or meaning making established (see also Cox, 2011).

Young women expressed notions of self-reliance again and again in interviews, and I began to interrogate this mindset to better understand where it came from and what function it played for girls. Sienna, for example, who was being detained for her use of heroin and methamphetamine when we spoke, clung doggedly to the idea that her life added up to the choices she made. She felt her fate was her own: ‘I did it to myself – it was my decisions that got me here. Yeah, I’ve been through shit you shouldn’t have to go through, but that shouldn’t be an excuse’. She felt that all of the things she had been through were ‘life lessons’ that she should have learned from in some way. I pushed back at this and said that I thought she was being too hard on herself and that things well out of her control had shaped the choices she had been making. Again, though, she disagreed, this time a bit angrily: ‘It’s just reality. I’d rather live in reality than get my hopes up and have them crushed. I don’t wanna live in some fantasy world where I get screwed over’.

Buying into the notion of ‘change’ that mainstream institutions try to enact through various interventions is a risk for young women in that it requires that they turn away from the destructive substances and social networks that they use for material survival, psychic comfort, and biographical meaning. When you are repeatedly ‘screwed over’ by interventions that fail to give you a reasonable chance at translating personal gains into real world changes, you eventually learn that to trust others, especially those in authority, is of little use to your life. Girls hang on to the idea that they and they alone are responsible for their lives – even when the evidence against it is overwhelming – because this world view gives them the best hope of negotiating the ‘asymmetries of citizenship’ that they face (Carlen, 1996). To imagine it could be any way else is to live in a ‘fantasy world’ – and when what is at stake is your very survival, it is essential that you deal with reality as best you can.

‘Welfare inaction’ leaves young women exposed to serious gendered risks; it also leaves them vulnerable to losing their citizenship. That is, this ‘doing nothing’ denies young women the theoretical possibility of full-citizenship: something that they are denied as children and which will be taken away if they acquire an adult felony. This is especially pertinent to those young women whose current trajectory virtually assures them much more harm at the hands of themselves, male intimates, and the state. Therefore, the moment that young women reach the age of majority is an important point to not only change trajectories – to get them ‘on time’ in the language of developmental psychologists (Arnett, 2004) – but to avoid social death by way of a felony drug charge in the US criminal justice system (Lynch, 2012). In this way, the interlude between juvenile justice and criminal justice is a moment between two variants of partial citizenship: child and felon. But at this moment – when the stakes for maintaining citizenship are highest and legal autonomy is a reality for the first time – life-building supports extending into in the real world remained dangerously thin and fragmented, as supportive entities oriented to young women as clients and criminals rather than citizens.

It was the structure of intervention – largely defined by a backdrop of ‘welfare inaction’ – rather than its day-to-day substance that was of most consequence to girls’ self-understandings and biographies. Neo-liberal notions may seep into the gendered language of programs and policies; however, what seemed to be most important in the creation of self-reliant subjects was that interventions – responsibilizing and otherwise – were disconnected from the sort of material services and rights-based social welfare provisions that are needed to meaningfully address deficits to citizenship (Gray, 2011). Moreover, as girls are oriented to as clients rather than citizens this conditions them to turn away from neo-liberalized institutions, which they come to see, rightly, as providing a scattered collection of contingent services rather than rights-based provisions that would meet their real world needs in a sustained manner. And it is through these failures to act that ‘responsibilization’ is most effectively and consistently accomplished. These tendencies are firmly in place, and they come with real world consequences for system-involved young women who turn inward to navigate a precarious social position that put them at risk of self-abuse, gendered violence, and social death.