ABSTRACT
For three decades, African American girls have been the fastest-growing group of youth arrested and detained within the juvenile justice system. As the incidence of crime for 10–17-year-old girls rose steadily, from the mid-1980s to mid-1990s, African American girls’ violent crime arrests, simple assaults, and subsequent detention rates doubled and tripled, far outstripping rates for African American boys and White girls (Chesney-Lind and Jones, 2010; Puzzanchera and Adams, 2011). As youth arrests and detentions declined from 1995 to 2009, African American girls’ descent trailed behind their counterparts. In 2010, they sustained the highest residential detention rate (Morris, 2012). These troubling patterns were flagged as indicators of an upsurge in the new phenomenon, “girl violence,” created by a new type of wayward girl.
