Bad Girls

Doing time in the Rhode Island Training School is punishment for young women who break the law. What’s surprising is how many would rather be in the big house than out.

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While she’s here,  Diamond Jordan-Brown looks per-petually as if she just rolled out of bed: blue sweats, hair standing up in all directions. At eight this morning, she actually has just rolled out of bed. Diamond is sixteen and has the spunk and wit of a teenager but the poise and smarts of someone much older. Even now, as she shuffles across the white, linoleum-tiled hall into the day room and plops down on a vinyl-upholstered chair to wait for breakfast, it’s with the weary resignation of someone who’s seen it all.

If she were awaiting sentencing, or if the judge had sent her here for a few days to try to scare some sense into her—as he has before—she’d be wearing orange, walking around like a human traffic cone. But since she’s been sentenced—she’s more than halfway through a six-month “bid,” as the girls call it—she’s wearing “state blues”: state-issued blue sweatshirt, blue sweatpants, white sneakers.

On any given day, the Rhode Island Training School houses some 200 children. Administered by the Department of Children, Youth and Families (DCYF), yet populated by those remanded here by the criminal justice system, the Training School exists at a crossroads between prison and foster care. It’s a juvenile correctional facility, make no mistake about it—double fences topped with razor wire surround the complex, and residents leave locked buildings only with handcuffs on—but it’s also a public high school and a place where children receive counseling and guidance. DCYF refers to it euphemistically as “a highly structured, secure residential facility,” and the children are called “residents” rather than inmates. The boys are divided into seven different residential “cottages” based on age, offense, treatment needs and behavior, but the girls (in 2006, 16 percent of the total population) are all housed here, in the Mathias building, a facility that feels more like a tidy, bright hospital wing than a prison. The unit consists entirely of one hallway, off of which are classrooms on one end and bedrooms on the other, and a dayroom, where the girls spend their downtime and eat their meals.

Diamond’s friend Jessica* is on kitchen duty this morning. While the rest of the girls filter in, she unwraps several loaves of white bread and pops slices into the industrial-grade toaster, six at a time; she tosses mini cartons of milk out of a crate and into the refrigerator, mixes bright green “juice” from syrup in a jug and distributes piles of paper napkins onto each table. A trolley has already arrived from the central kitchen with a giant steel tray of aluminum-foil-covered scrambled eggs, and she puts this tray out alongside mini plastic tubs of cereal and a bowl of fruit.

The count today is thirteen. At breakfast, the blues sit together at two tables, and the oranges sit together at a third.

Beyond this obvious self-segregation is a more subtle grouping organized roughly according to the Training School’s level system. There are four levels, each with a corresponding set of privileges (number of visits, visitors and phone calls allowed, bedtime). Training School residents enter at Level 2 and work their way up (or down) the levels by earning (or losing) points for things like working hard in school, attending groups and meetings, keeping their room clean, following instructions and volunteering to help out around the unit.

Because it takes up to six weeks to gain a level, girls at Level 3 or 4 have usually been here for longer than girls at Level 1 or 2; what’s more, only girls with good behavior and a positive attitude tend to earn enough points to move up. All of which contributes to the fact that girls in the various levels tend to stick together. “Our clique is basically Level 3s,” says Jessica. “When you’re down there, at Level 2, Level 1, you have nothing better to do [than pick fights]. Elbowing in the hallway, pushing in the bathroom, swearing across the tables. We have to just ignore them. It’s kinda like we just brush them off our shoulder.”

One of the girls in her clique is Diamond, who is serving a six-month sentence for assault, intimidating a witness and disorderly conduct—all charges related to a fight with another girl that got out of hand. Later, I visit Diamond at home after her release (she ended up serving four months), and she couldn’t look more different than she did when we first met: She cuts a dashing figure with long, braided extensions in her hair, tight jeans, knee-high zip-up boots.

Diamond and her mother, Auretha, are very close. In the months leading up to Diamond’s incarceration, Auretha tells me she was becoming increasingly frustrated. Diamond loved to party and stay out late. She’d be home only for as long as it took to dump off her bag after school and leave again. What’s more, she’d get into so many fights that eventually girls started arriving at their family’s house and telling Auretha to get Diamond so they could fight her.

“I wasn’t the type of person, before I went in there, to just let little petty stuff go,” recalls Diamond. “You could roll your eyes and I was on you. Anything could trigger me. You could walk by me and almost brush my shoulder. You was going down.” She laughs when she says it, but she has an iron will; she must have been scary. The judge sent her to the Training School for a night two years ago after a fight, but it didn’t stick. Diamond had seven cousins there at the time, so it seemed like a sort of rite of passage. Sure enough, a few months later, she was back, this time for real.

The first few months of her sentence were marked by her typical behavior. On her very first day, she shoved a staff member who was bothering her. “It took her two to three months to realize what was really happening,” says Auretha. “Before, she was really angry when I’d go visit her. She didn’t like this staff, she didn’t like that staff. Then she just did a three-sixty. She knew, what I’m doing right now is not going to get me out of here.”

After breakfast, the girls spend a quiet half-hour in the dayroom, watching television, chatting or flipping through magazines before heading off to class. The boys’ school, because it has so many more students, operates much the same way as other Rhode Island public schools. The girls’ school, on the other hand, has only two classrooms, one for special education students and one for everyone else, where the girls, with wildly varying grade levels and skills, work more or less independent of each other, with guidance from a teacher.

During class, minor tiffs erupt about who’s sitting in whose chair, and who graffitied on the chalkboard.

“Stories on the outside are you’re going to get beat up [in here],” says Jessica. But this is no vigilante jailhouse. Physical fights like those that Diamond used to get into are rare here, Jessica says. The Training School “doesn’t test you like that,” she says. “It doesn’t test your strength. It tests you emotionally. It tests you mentally. The stress of when you have court. The stress of having to sit in a holding cell all day, just to know you’re coming back here. The stress of knowing that your visit may not come this weekend. The staff might not let you make a phone call. You might not be able to talk to your parents all week. You might not get your deodorant, and you might have to smell. Go a week without getting letters and see how it feels. If you don’t get your mind right, if you don’t have that emotional breakdown here, you’re going to come back. If people walk out and say, ‘My time was easy,’ they’re going to come back. If I’m like, ‘My time was hard, I almost went crazy in there, I was sick in there, it killed me emotionally, I’m so happy to be out now,’ I’m less likely to come back.”

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