Connecticut's Juvenile Justice Care for Girls Has Faltered

Connecticut has spent two decades positioning itself as a national leader on juvenile justice reform for girls. That standing, researchers say, is slipping.

The warning came at a Juvenile Justice Policy and Oversight Committee session last Friday, where a panel of advocates and researchers laid out a straightforward argument: Connecticut has quietly retreated from gender-responsive care, and the data don’t lie.

The numbers are stark. In 2022, Connecticut’s juvenile justice system involved 1,370 girls. By 2024, that figure had jumped to 2,510, according to the Tow Youth Justice Institute’s latest report. Girls still enter the system at lower rates than boys overall, but the trajectory is going the wrong way, and fast.

The cut that opened the gap

Connecticut’s gender-responsive programming didn’t appear overnight. The state built it up over roughly 25 years, developing specialized probation models and targeted interventions designed around the specific pressures young women face. For a while, it was considered a blueprint for other states.

Then 2007 arrived. The General Assembly voted to decriminalize certain “status offenses,” truancy among them. That was, by most accounts, the right call. But the state also stripped funding from the programs that had been catching girls before they fell deeper into the system. Erika Nowakowski, executive director of the Tow Youth Justice Institute, told the committee that’s where the whole thing unraveled.

“What we needed to do is, instead of eliminating them, we probably needed to keep them and open up a different access door to them,” Nowakowski said at the Friday committee meeting.

The result was predictable, even if it took years to show up fully in the statistics. Girls who’d previously been routed into support services through juvenile system contacts lost that on-ramp entirely. No comparable alternative was built. The access point vanished, and nothing replaced it.

Mental health. Trauma. A system designed for someone else.

Of the roughly 700 girls who were detained or placed under juvenile probation supervision in 2024, more than half showed significant Mental health needs, according to the Tow Youth Justice Institute report. About a third were contending with substance abuse, family distress, or issues around anger and aggression.

That’s not a general population. That’s a high-needs group being filtered through infrastructure that wasn’t built with them in mind, and it’s a problem that won’t fix itself.

Stephanie Covington, a researcher who has worked with Connecticut on trauma-informed and gender-responsive programming, told committee members that any intervention for girls has to start with a clear-eyed look at trauma. But she kept returning to something more foundational than program design. It’s about connection.

“Relationships are key. How do we provide girls with relationships, pure relationships and adult relationships that they can count on?” Covington said.

That’s not a rhetorical flourish. It’s a gap the current system hasn’t closed.

Tracie Bernardi Guzman, who founded Reentry Solutions CT and was herself incarcerated as a young adult, put it from a different vantage point entirely. She told the committee that trust doesn’t arrive through paperwork or court mandates. It has to be earned early, and it has to feel real.

“We should give girls an opportunity to open up, because when they feel safe and relieved and not judged, that’s when they are more willing to talk,” Bernardi Guzman said.

That’s the theory behind gender-responsive work, and it’s what Connecticut built in the years before 2007. The state’s programming was good enough that other jurisdictions were studying it. Then the funding dried up, and the institutional knowledge with it.

What’s left now, researchers told the committee Friday, is a patchwork. Some providers are doing strong work. The coordination isn’t there. And the 2026 data, when it comes in, will likely show the trend continuing unless something changes in how the state approaches the problem.

The General Assembly hasn’t yet taken up any legislation tied directly to the committee’s findings. That could change. Connecticut’s 13-member committee includes legislators, and the Tow Youth Justice Institute report was released specifically to put the issue in front of them during this session.