She is 16 years old and already fluent in a language most adults never bother to learn—the language of invisibility.
She walks to the bus stop every morning in her school uniform, eyes down, backpack pulled close, moving through a city that keeps reading her body instead of her mind.
Grown men at the corner store hold eye contact two seconds too long. Her own mother looks at her sometimes and says, “Girl, you fast.” She has never even been kissed. Under her mattress is a notebook full of self-made equations—bridges she builds in the dark between what she knows and what she is trying to become. She tells nobody.
In her world, wanting something that big is not called ambition. It is called acting like you something.
I know this girl. Not from a distance. I taught her. I mentored her. I was a mother-figure to her in the blood gang-infested South Ward of Newark, New Jersey, where I spent nine years in classrooms watching brilliant young Black girls navigate obstacle courses that nobody in power had the courage to name out loud.
I am writing this piece from New Orleans now, where the backdrop is different — the accents, the heat, the second lines — but girls here are treated the same.
Over and over, I run across a girl and recognize her.
Same exhaustion behind the eyes. Same hidden notebook. Same mother calling her fast. Same system waiting at the end of the block with a different kind of uniform.
This month, Louisiana’s legislature is celebrating HB 168—a new transitional reentry bill for adult women leaving prison—as a breakthrough for “vulnerable” populations. There has long been a need for helping newly released women deal with specialized needs, including support for their high levels of victimization and abuse, stable housing and employment that provides distance from former abusers and legal help to reconnect children.
So HB 168 is a start.
But while we applaud a door being built for women leaving incarceration, we have said almost nothing about the teenage girls being fed into that same system before they are old enough to vote.
That silence is not an oversight. It is a policy decision.
A System That Was Never Built to Protect Them
The concept of childhood innocence—the child deserving protection, nurturing, benefit of the doubt—was constructed in the 19th century around a very specific image: white, middle-class, and female. Black girls were written out of that blueprint before the ink dried.
Georgetown Law’s landmark research on “adultification bias” confirmed what Black mothers have known for generations: adults consistently perceive Black girls as older, less innocent, and less in need of protection than white peers of the same age. This helps to explain why Black girls are treated more harshly in schools and in the courts system when compared with white girls who behave the same way.
The sharpest perception gap for Black girls occurs between ages 10 and 14.
This is not a footnote. It is the operating system of every institution our daughters walk into—school, family court, detention facility—before they are old enough to understand what is happening to them.
The Data Names What the Policy Ignores
The numbers tell a story that policy has refused to hear.
For my thesis, I analyzed the interview data for Loyola University’s Modern Slavery Research Project, which focuses on human trafficking. The project’s dataset shows that failures that led to trafficking went far beyond individual failures such as poor parenting or wrong choices. Instead, victims often experienced institutional failures at school, foster-care and community levels, compounding traumas.
Of the 53 Black girls identifying as transgender and cisgender (whose gender identity matches the sex registered for them at birth), 88.7% experienced systemic neglect and institutional failure.
Nearly 80% experienced “polyvictimization”—multiple, overlapping victimizations, such as s a combination of factors such as bullying, physical abuse at home, and community violence.
And in the most clarifying finding of my entire analysis: 100% of participants who engaged in survival behaviors — sex work, drug trafficking, theft — had prior histories of victimization. Every single one.
What the justice system calls criminal behavior, my analysis calls a rational response to abandonment.
These girls were not making choices in a vacuum. They were making choices inside a system that had already made its choice about them.
School is where the pipeline begins. Black girls — who represent 15% of female students nationally — receive 45% of out-of-school suspensions and 43% of expulsions among girls, according to a 2024 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office..
They are disciplined for subjective infractions: attitude, defiance, disruption—the very behaviors that emerge from unaddressed trauma. In Louisiana, more than 80,000 disciplinary actions in a single school year were issued for “willful disobedience.”
Once a girl is out of school, the next institution waiting is not a counselor. It is a courtroom.
The Bill That Cannot Reach Her
HB 168 creates a transitional reentry program for adult female parolees under the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections. It is a meaningful step. But it is architecturally incapable of reaching the girls it most needs to serve.
A teenager who ages out of Louisiana’s Office of Juvenile Justice at 18 is not a “parolee.” She is a young woman discharged from juvenile jurisdiction with no bridge to adult services, no gender-responsive programming, and no structured support—because none was ever designed for her. The state built a door for women leaving prison and offered no threshold for girls leaving childhood detention.
Right now, approximately 20 girls sit in Louisiana’s juvenile secure facilities — a number small enough to know each by name.
Many of them are held at Ware Youth Center in Coushatta, 280 miles from New Orleans, a facility with a documented history of staff sexual abuse spanning 25 years. Before Ware, girls were housed in a converted adult jail described by a state senator as “concrete block and steel bar.”
Louisiana is projected to spend $93 million expanding four youth facilities. The investment in incarceration is measurable. The investment in the girls inside those facilities is not.
Name Her Before the System Does
The girl I know and the girls on her block — Monique, Tasha, Shayla with the baby — did not choose the street. They chose the only thing the street offered that looked like safety. They survived because someone saw their bodies as valuable and abused or trafficked them.
My research bears this out: 64% of justice-involved Black girls in my study had prior contact with the juvenile justice system, and 90% of those experiencing homelessness engaged in survival behaviors during that period.
These are not failure stories. They are infrastructure stories. They tell us exactly what we failed to build.
Louisiana’s advocacy organizations—Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children, the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights, and Black Girls Rising—have been naming this crisis for years. They are not waiting on legislation to see these girls. The question is whether the legislature is willing to look.
HB 168 asks the right question about women leaving prison. Louisiana now needs to ask an earlier question: Why are our girls arriving there in the first place?
The notebook under her mattress is full of equations. She is trying to solve for a variable the system has never once treated as worth saving.
Until we build policy that sees her — not her body, not her attitude, not her zip code, but her — we are not talking about reentry. We are talking about a pipeline with better lighting.
Hagan, a faculty member at the Loyola University New Orleans in its Department of Criminology and Justice, , spent nine years teaching and mentoring young Black girls in the South Ward of Newark, New Jersey, and holds three master’s degrees, including concentrations in urban education and social justice.
The qualitative findings cited in this piece are drawn from the author’s thesis, “From Victimization to Incarceration: Understanding the Abuse-to-Prison Pipeline for Black Girls” (Loyola University New Orleans, 2025), which analyzed interview data originally collected by Loyola University’s Modern Slavery Research Project across six U.S. cities. Additional data is drawn from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (2024) and the Louisiana Office of Juvenile Justice Quarterly Indicators (Quarter 4 2024).
