Revising Programming for Girls in Louisiana

Louisiana’s Office of Juvenile Justice will reduce risk factors and promote protective factors for girls by: (1) Hiring a girls’ services coordinator to invigorate and redesign programming in the rural region where our girls are most concentrated; (2) Conducting a training and pilot to add Trust-based Relational Intervention (TBRI®) to programming in the same rural region; and (3) Supporting the TBRI® with Juvenile Justice Anger Management, Voices, Body Project, and Prison Yoga Project. 
 

The plan is to create an in-house gender-specific treatment program for girls that has a robust range of interventions designed to combat several traumatic problems and criminogenic needs.  Girls with mental-health problems, trauma, anger and other difficulties that hastened their interaction with the juvenile justice system will benefit from a set of gender-responsive and evidence-based interventions. The program will do so by targeting precisely, not generally, statistically derived needs.  The program, therefore, should be able to improve girls’ wellbeing and reduce recidivism.    

The service area is the rural town of Coushatta, Louisiana, 45 miles south of Shreveport.  Approximately 85 adjudicated girls with significant trauma and their families will benefit.  More adjudicated girls from Louisiana will benefit following the grant period because the project is designed to be copied.  Its multifaceted intervention system is designed to treat girls’ trauma, heal them, and prevent them from recidivating.