No Friends Allowed

“We don’t want them to have friends. We don’t want them getting attached to the other girls or to staff members.”

This baffled me. How do you keep girls from making friends? And why wouldn’t you want them to get attached to staff? Wouldn’t that be a good thing? But it wasn’t my job to argue with the woman who ran the state’s juvenile correctional facility for girls, essentially the teenage girl prison. My job was to try to figure out why so many girls sentenced to juvenile corrections had apparently jumped the tracks from the child welfare system.

“They need to learn how to be their own best friend before they have other friends. In here, a girl needs to rely on herself. That’s all she’s got. Is herself.”

I recalled myself as a fifteen-year old and thought, damn, if all I’d had was myself to rely on, I would have been a complete mess. Even John McCain when he was in a P.O.W. camp in Hanoi kept in touch with his comrades by tapping a code on the wall. He actually did only have himself to rely on in a physical sense but emotionally he needed the friendship and empathy of others.

So did these girls.

“When we see a friendship forming, we break it up. And we discourage any one-on-one talking with staff unless it’s part of their therapy or they’re meeting with a case manager.”

I met with a group of six girls gathered around a grey metal table, a staff person sitting next to the wall, reading through files so as to appear unobtrusive. I right away wished I’d brought them something to eat, something nice, something to soften the metal table, make our meeting less harsh. I asked them to tell me why most girls ended up in the facility. This worked better than asking them to tell me their individual stories; the setting wasn’t right for that and, anyway, I already knew their stories from reading their files, their many inches-thick files full of foster care and residential treatment placement orders, dispositions, and documentation of discipline administered while in the facility.

What I’d read in their files the day before made me sit down with my head in my hands and wonder how a system charged with protecting these girls could have pushed them behind bars. It is sometimes sickening to learn what we are paying taxes to support.

So the girls told me what they thought, the back of their heads alert to the staff person sitting next to the wall. Everything was hypothetical, you know, the stories about girls being physically abused or neglected by their moms or their mom’s boyfriend and then sent to foster care and not being able to get along with the other foster children and then being sent to a new foster home and another and another and when that didn’t work out or they were showing symptoms such as anger or aggression being sent to residential treatment where they either landed a punch on a staff person who pushed them too far or met a boyfriend at night in the parking lot and took off to Chicago where they maybe used drugs and could have turned tricks, convincing a judge that the only safe place for them long-term was behind bars. And their moms being gone, absent, not coming back to get them.

“The girls never get visitors. Well, rarely. One of them had a visit from the judge who sent her here. That was nice.”

On the way out, walking down the hall, waiting for the door behind me to lock before the door in front of me would open, I saw other girls, walking in line, not talking. Relying on themselves.

No friends allowed. I’ve never forgotten that. No friends allowed.