In March 2026, IHDSC director, Dr. Erin Godfrey, and affiliate, Dr. Shabnam Javdani led a workshop in Sacramento County highlighting the evidence around how girls and gender expansive youth are uniquely and negatively impacted by the juvenile legal system, and how system actors, educators, advocacy groups, and community-based organizations can create systems change to redress these injustices. It represented a rare moment to learn directly from national and state experts and local leaders who are reshaping what sustainable public safety, accountability, restoration, and healing can look like -- for girls and gender expansive youth, and ultimately for all communities affected by mass incarceration.
Drs. Javdani and Godfrey highlighted the racialized disparities that continue to characterize the juvenile legal system. They noted, for example, that Black girls and gender expansive youth make up over 50% of girls in custody in Sacramento County, despite representing only 2% of the county’s youth population. They also described how these disparities are best understood as a problem with the system, not a problem with girls. For example, almost 70% of girls’ arrests in California are for misdemeanor offenses, which are low-level charges for things like petty theft, skipping school, running away, and violating curfew. Not only do they not pose any risk to public safety, but they are largely driven by experiences of trauma, struggles with mental health, and need for food, safe housing, and other material resources. The solution? Drs. Javdani and Godfrey argue that we need to shut down common onramps into the juvenile legal system and resource community-based programs that can respond to girls’ and gender-expansive youth’s experiences and needs outside of it.
This workshop was part of the first in a series of summits to formally launch Sacramento’s Community Action Network to End Girls Incarceration led by the Justice2Jobs Coalition and was an extension of partnerships with the CA Office of Youth and Community Restoration, Vera Institute of Justice and Reimagine Freedom / The Young Women's Freedom Center supported by IHDSC.
This year‑long effort aims to bring communities together, confront the disturbing, and sometimes, hard-to-hear facts of the mass incarceration system and structure and their connection to mental health, community health, race, and poverty, and build the solutions our young people deserve.