Locked-up ladies, imprisoned potential

Raised in a working-class neighborhood with an absent mother in jail, she thickened her skin to survive. By seventh grade, her favorite pastimes were fighting and “smoking blunts” with friends. She was not alone. Katie, 13, was from a completely different environment but also thought herself to be just as much of a badass. Her dad was a preacher, her mom a worrier and both parents cried when they found out she had lost her innocence to partying, shoplifting and a boy she barely knew.

I watched these girls on A&E’s “Beyond Scared Straight,” a program aimed at helping at-risk teens stay out of jail by showing them jail. My attention was captured by the inmates of the California facility known as Chowchilla bellowing at a group of adolescent girls, explaining with exaggerated rage who was going to be whose bitch.

The reasons for each young girl’s field trip varied. While some were fighting to survive in their ghetto surroundings, others were acting wild to gain popularity amongst their fascinated bourgeois peers. What they all had in common was a desire for acceptance, even self-confidence.

In A&E’s documentary “Gangsta Girlz,” author Karen Hunt, an English teacher at the LA County Jail, addressed the dichotomy between femininity and toughness that many troubled women feel. One inmate, Silvia, was uncooperative and mouthy to everyone, including her defense attorney during her murder trial (which might explain why she is in jail for twenty-five years to life).

But if Silvia seemed incapable of speaking her mind in a civil manner, on paper she articulated herself in ways nobody had thought possible, including her attorney. Hunt showed off a few pages of Silvia’s writing while explaining that gang life left many inmates feeling torn between acknowledging their “inner girl” and acting tough to survive on the street.

Then there are girls like Katie, who aren’t tough for survival as much as for attention. She would fit feminist writer Ariel Levy’s definition of a “female chauvinist pig,” a girl who acts wild and willing to try anything for social approval. But as Levy points out, this behavior is not something adolescents invented. “Teens are reflecting back our slobbering culture in miniature.” Katie is just one of many young women who sees all eyes on Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan and can’t help but desire the same kind of attention.

Fortunately, Katie ended up becoming a self-proclaimed “good girl.” Her white, middle-class counterpart ended up in jail within a month after the show’s final production; although she had the socio-economic advantage, she struggled with a gaping void where her father never was. As for Cecelia, she was getting straight A’s and had quit smoking weed after seeing her mother dressed in orange, begging her in the jail courtyard to not follow suit.

There are many factors that could lead a teenage girl to low self-esteem and paradoxical messages are high on the list. While the media saturates young brains with limited, half-naked images of femininity, real-life women have to learn how to be taken seriously in this world and trying to imitate those magazine covers is not the way.

According to Hunt, the contradiction is even stronger for girls on the street because they too want to be taken seriously, and their need to fight to survive is nothing if not opposite of the supposed ideal female.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the total number of female inmates in the U.S. has risen by 20,000 women in less than ten years. That number may be high, but between the psychological damage left by absent parents and the conflicting messages sent to young women about femininity, it isn’t hard to believe.