This is part 2 of the series, Before the Record: The Pipelines, which examines the policies and practices that criminalize girls
Look at her.
Caramel-colored, brown-skinned, with minuscule dimples that only show up when she lets herself smile—and lately, she has been giving herself more reasons to.
She is 16 years old, a junior, and she is close. She knows it. Her coach knows it. The scouts who have been showing up to watch her play this season—sitting in the third row with clipboards and quiet conversations—they know it too.
But this year, with the scouts, the targets she carries have gotten heavier.
Not that you would know that heaviness if you saw her. She’s wearing baggy jeans, a hoodie, and the latest Pumas because her favorite player is Flau’jae Johnson — LSU’s own, the one who plays like the game was invented specifically for her.
Jada doesn’t just dream of playing for Kim Mulkey anymore. She is building the case for it, game by game, grade by grade, in the only language that college programs speak: production. She makes good grades. Not performed grades, real ones—the kind that come from a mind working harder than anyone in the school building knows.
No one knows, because her mind works quietly, the way you do things when the institution has taught you that visible excellence is dangerous. It’s one of the targets she carries.
It’s why she will end up in Room 101 this week, a place where she could be needlessly derailed from her future, like so many Black girls are.
Targets
Jada is beautiful in a world that reads her beauty as provocation before she opens her mouth. That can be seen as a target too. Plus, she hangs with other Black girls who take up space without apology. They don’t want trouble. But it’s another target.
She’s still working out the identity thing — she likes dudes, but finds herself more drawn to girls, and that question mark becomes one more strike in a system that was never designed to see her whole.
Her mother works two jobs to make ends meet, kissing her sleeping daughter on the forehead in the morning before she leaves for her first shift. Jada’s father is an absence she carries everywhere—the kind that makes her wonder, in the quiet moments, if things would look different if he had stayed. Would she navigate these streets differently? Would the teachers see her differently? Would she see herself differently?
Maybe. Maybe not. But she doesn’t get to know. And that not-knowing is its own wound, the school never once thinks to ask about even as teachers sign up boys without dads for local mentoring programs targeted at them.
Basketball is Jada’s cathedral — the place where she doesn’t have to perform small, doesn’t have to code-switch, doesn’t have to make herself invisible so someone else can be comfortable. On the court, her Blackness, brilliance, and body are not problems to be managed. They are the whole point. She is good. Not I-might-be-good-one-day good. Right now, this season, the-scouts-are-here good.
When every legitimate pathway to recognition is structurally blocked, people adapt, wrote sociologist Robert Merton, who called it “strain theory” and used it to explain people who rebel, break rules, or innovate in response to societal barriers. Jada built the pathway herself—grade by grade, game by game, free throw by free throw. She did what the institution asked. She did more than the institution asked. She is now nearly a graduate, standing at the threshold of the dream, her credentials in hand.
But she still holds her targets.
Which is why a teacher called her out in front of the class. Put her on blast — public, loud, in front of everyone — because she asked a question. Not the wrong question. Just a question.
Now she’s in Room 101—missing practice. A scout drove in from Baton Rouge this afternoon.
This is often how it goes for Black girls. Teachers are much more likely to view their tone of voice and their curiosity as contemptuous.
Room 101
Room 101 at Weequahic High School in Newark’s South Ward is a real room. I know because, as a schoolteacher, I had duty there on more than one occasion. I sat in that room and watched it fill with girls like Jada—brown skin of different shades, Nikes fresh, notebooks hidden, dreams intact but quietly losing footing.
These were my students. My girls. I taught them, mentored them, was a mother-figure and big sister to some of them across nine years in classrooms where brilliant young Black women navigated obstacle courses that nobody in power dared to name out loud.
George Orwell named his most terrifying room the same number. In his book, 1984, Room 101 is where the state breaks you—not generically, but with surgical precision, by confronting you with your deepest, most personal fear—the thing most uniquely yours to lose.
Orwell never visited Weequahic High. But whoever designed in-school suspension understood his architecture perfectly.
You put Jada in Room 101, and you don’t just remove her from class. You remove her from the gym on an afternoon that a scout is watching. You remove her from the coach, who is starting to put her name in conversations that matter. You remove her from the one place in her life where her differences—the identity still figuring itself out, the crew the teachers keep misreading, the Black vernacular that makes some adults flinch—are not liabilities.
That is not accidental discipline. That is the state confronting her with exactly what she has most to lose—at the exact moment she has the most to lose it.
I am writing this from New Orleans now. The accents are different. The heat sits differently on your skin. The second lines move through the streets with a defiant joy that Newark doesn’t have. But I know Jada. I have always known Jada.
The moment I arrived in this city, I started seeing her again. Same dimples. Same Nikes. Same exhaustion behind the eyes. Same distance to the dream—within the same system that doesn’t even think to build a bridge.
To my Newark girls: I have not forgotten you. Not one of you. I carry you into every room I enter, every piece I write, every classroom I stand in. What happened to you in the South Ward was not your fault.
The afternoons you spent in detention because a teacher viewed you as sassy, not inquisitive. The majorette team that kicked you off because your grandma couldn’t keep up with your extracurricular budget. The FAFSA student aid application that you couldn’t complete without a guardian. The hard copy of your Social Security card that the early-college nursing class advisor demanded but couldn’t get because your aunt didn’t trust anyone with it.
None of it was your failure. It was infrastructure—and I am going to spend the rest of my professional life making sure somebody in power finally has to say that out loud.
Jada in Newark, in Louisiana, and across the nation
When I see Jada here in Louisiana, I understand something no dataset can tell you: this is not a Newark problem. This is not a New Orleans problem. This is a national blueprint—identical logic, different zip code. It’s why most public schools in America pay more attention to their versions of Room 101 than to their counselors’ offices.
To understand the young teen in Pumas walking down the school hallway and why she is misunderstood, we need to think bigger, to pull in the thinking of the world’s best thinkers.
French historian Michel Foucault called the school a disciplinary machine, built on surveillance, normalization, and examination. It follows the psychological floor plan of the panopticon—the infamous circular-shaped jail whose occupants are constantly on display for the guard in a central watchtower.
For Black girls in Louisiana schools, it is not just a metaphor. The school resource officer in the hallway. The zero-tolerance policy on the wall. The dress-code violation for a line of color at the edge of the sole of all-white shoes or for a streak of pink hair along the side of your face, which becomes a delinquency charge by the time it reaches the principal’s desk.
Here is what nine years in those buildings taught me: Foucault’s machine has human operators. And some of those operators decided long ago that their paycheck mattered more than the child in front of them.
They look disapprovingly at Jada’s differences — the way she carries herself, who she loves, how she questions, who she walks the hallways with.
So they put her on blast to cover their own shortcomings. And when she responds — when she pushes back, when she asks again, when she refuses to absorb the humiliation quietly — they refuse to consider the logic behind her defiance and send her to Room 101, again.
The mindset of Jada’s teachers makes sense if you know the work of Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator who pushed the world to think about education as student-centered. Freire called the traditional model of education as the banking model: the student as an empty account, the teacher as the depositor, knowledge as a transaction that flows in one direction only.
Teachers who insist on being the source of knowledge instead of agents for student learning cannot accept a student who refuses that passivity—who asks, who challenges, who insists on being a subject rather than an object of education. The questioning that Freire called the foundation of liberation, is called a behavioral problem in Louisiana schools. What he called critical consciousness, they call attitude.
Jada has a 3.5 GPA and scouts in her gym. But the system is still finding a reason to see her invisible excellence as an empty account.
Seeing Jada’s innocence and her as a total person
Georgetown Law’s research on adultification bias named the operating system underneath all of this: adults consistently perceive Black girls as older, less innocent, and less in need of protection than white peers of the same age.
Even her ostensible advocates cannot see her in totality.
The racial justice movement sees Jada’s race. The feminist movement sees her gender. Neither one movement can truly understand who she is at 16, this close to the door, being pushed back by a system that cannot tolerate how specifically, irreducibly herself she insists on being.
She cannot be analyzed or named through one factor. A compound of factors—race, gender, class, and emerging sexual identity—converge in Jada’s specific body and produce a certain vulnerability, according to an intersectionality framework developed by American civil-rights advocate Kimberlé Crenshaw. Yale political-science professor James Scott viewed power dynamics through what he called “the hidden transcript”—the codes, knowledges, and practices that oppressed groups maintain outside the dominant gaze. Jada’s emerging sexual identity is a hidden transcript. Her attraction to girls, the safety she finds with them, the way she navigates her own becoming—these are things she has not shown her dominant institution, the school, because the institution has not earned that information.
A person like Jada who stands inside institutions not built for her often have critical insight: she can often see the institution more clearly than those it was designed to serve, wrote sociologist Patricia Hill Collins, who called this “the outsider-within.” Yet clarity without power takes a chronic, psychological toll every day.
‘Their humanity was the curriculum’
The teachers at Weequahic High, who kept our girls on the court, understood what no spreadsheet could measure. We showed up whole, with school supplies, prom dresses, and open doors before and after the bell. We let them mourn when the street took somebody they cared about. We tied their grief into the lesson because their humanity was the curriculum. We rose with them. That is not soft pedagogy. It is the only pedagogy that works. And Louisiana is systematically destroying the conditions that make it possible.
Often, a Black girl’s first step into the delinquency pipelines is in the classroom—through the referral slip. They may already be navigating homelessness, trafficking risk and institutional failure. For my thesis analysis, I looked through interviews with human trafficking victims in Loyola University’s Modern Slavery Research Project and found that 64% of Black girls had prior contact with the juvenile justice system. You would think that school would be a safe space from all of those challenges. Instead, schools often give Black girls the first push into pipelines toward delinquency—taking them off their paths toward lifelong dreams.
How do we keep the Jada(s) of the world on the court instead of sitting in court? That is not a rhetorical question. It is a policy demand with a Louisiana address.
Louisiana invests more in putting children inside systems than in keeping them out. Research shows that the documented effect of school resource officers is increased likelihood of arrest, not safety for Black girls. We process them, not protect them.
Louisiana legislators also created a “willful disobedience” statute —La. R.S. 17:416—that’s so subjective it functions as a racially coded charge, giving administrators unchecked authority to remove Black girls from classrooms for behaviors that white girls are rarely disciplined for.
Once Black girls in Louisiana are deemed “delinquent” and cycled through the front door of the state Office of Juvenile Justice, there is no gender-responsive programming waiting, though OJJ has long been advised to implement programming for girls.
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 translating Jada’s hidden transcript into policy language for years. They know what works in OJJ and in our schools: restorative practices instead of zero-tolerance punishment, trauma-informed educators instead of school resource officers, counselors instead of courtrooms, and the basic legislative decency of repealing a “willful disobedience” statute so vague it criminalizes Black girl consciousness itself. It creates a school-to-prison pipeline for Black girls.
Jada is in Room 101 now because we did not build schools that could see Jada. We built rooms that could contain her and called it education.
Do you want to keep building the rooms that contain her? Or do you finally want to build the ones that can hold her—all of her, the baggy jeans and the braids and the questions and the good grades and the scouts already watching and the identity still figuring itself out and the father-shaped absence and her basketball-court cathedral where she doesn’t have to make herself invisible so someone else can be comfortable.
Because Jada is not waiting on your answer. She is in Room 101 right now. A scout is in the third row of her gym with a clipboard.
At a desk in Room 101, Jada is looking at a wall, hoping for a door back to her pathway, to the dream she’s worked so hard for.
Build the door. Before the scouts stop coming. Before 16 becomes 17 becomes 18 becomes the girl who looked back at the place where the door should have been and found nothing there. Build it now. Build that door with critical supports and understanding and pair it with humanitarian curricula for the Jada I see in New Jersey, New Orleans, and across the United States.
Hagan, a faculty member at 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).
Senya Aisola, The Lens’ model for these images, is an honor student at Xavier University of Louisiana.
