Sacramento County, which has California’s fifth-highest number of girls behind bars, is taking part in a new statewide initiative to eradicate the incarceration of girls.

The California Office of Youth and Community Restoration announced this week that Sacramento County was chosen to receive grant funding to analyze its practices around locking up girls and gender-expansive youth — a term used to describe those who identify as transgender, nonbinary and gender-fluid.

Working with the New York-based nonprofit Vera Institute of Justice, the county will be tasked with identifying systemic gaps and developing new programs and policies to quickly reduce the number of girls it incarcerates on a daily basis. It will also be asked to craft a multi-year plan to reach zero female juveniles within its youth detention facility.

Marlon Yarber, Sacramento County’s chief probation officer, said he’s excited about the opportunity and “committed to implementing equitable policies and gender-responsive programming to immediately reduce girls’ incarceration.”

Sacramento was one of four counties selected to launch the initiative. The other counties are Imperial, Los Angeles and San Diego.

The initiative is part of a growing movement in juvenile justice reform to reach zero girls in long-term correctional facilities — an achievement reached by Hawaii last year.

In 2022, Sacramento County incarcerated an average of 14 girls on a daily basis — tying for 5th out of 58 counties for the number of girls it locked up. And between October 2021 and September 2022, the county saw the number of girls behind bars spike from 11 to 18, according to data released by the Vera Institute.

Elise Vondrak, a spokeswoman for the Sacramento County Probation Department, said Tuesday that county officials would know more about the details of their strategy to lower those numbers following a kickoff meeting for the initiative next month.

Finding a different approach than incarceration for girls

Lindsay Rosenthal, director of the Initiative to End Girls’ Incarceration at the Vera Institute, called the grant program “an important step towards realizing justice and freedom for girls and gender-expansive youth of color.”

“These four counties demonstrated a strong commitment towards ending girls’ incarceration and addressing the race and gender disparities in their youth legal systems, and we look forward to partnering with them in this critical effort,” Rosenthal said in a statement. “We are excited to see the momentum build among youth legal system leadership in California — a state that has always played an important role in youth legal reform.”

Almost half of the girls’ detention admissions in California are for low-level offenses such as vandalism, theft and trespassing. And girls of color are disproportionately affected. Black youth, for instance, account for 25% of all girls’ detention admissions in California despite only making up about 8% of the state’s youth population, according to the Vera Institute.

Criminal justice reform advocates and organizations like the Vera Institute argue that such offenses can and should be addressed in the community through local supportive services rather than inside locked facilities that can cause new trauma.

They hope that initiatives like this will help officials make determinations around whether a girl actually poses a threat to public safety threat — or if they could be better treated outside of a juvenile detention hall.

California reduces the number of incarcerated youth

Former juvenile court Judge Katherine Lucero, who now leads the Office of Youth and Community Restoration, said in a statement that the initiative builds off on ongoing work to transform California’s youth justice system.

Over the past two decades, California has seen a dramatic drop in its incarcerated youth population.

Between 2012 and 2021, the number of annual girls’ admissions to California detention facilities dropped by 71%, according to the Vera Institute. If detentions continued to fall at that same rate, the institute forecasts that the state could eliminate girls’ detentions by as soon as 2027.

California is currently in the process of phasing out all of its state-run juvenile facilities and shifting funding and responsibility for young offenders to the state’s 58 counties. The complete closure of the state’s remaining three Department of Juvenile Justice facilities is slated for July 1.

“We have been thrilled to see the interest that this opportunity has generated across the state and believe that with targeted support, these four counties have the potential to become leaders for their peers in California and nationally,” Lucero said in the statement.

The Vera Institute is hoping to build off of the success seen in Santa Clara County, which experienced a 60% decline in girls’ detention center admissions since Vera started working with it in 2019.

During the first year in the program, Sacramento County will receive $125,000 to analyze its data and develop plans to eliminate girls’ incarceration at its youth detention facility. If the county successfully develops a “bold and effective” plan, the county and local community organizations can receive up to $750,000 in additional two-year grants to continue putting the plan into motion.