By Tori Marlan
It wasn’t a typical meeting. Traditional scouting is out of the question for these girls. They aren’t allowed to make arts and crafts or garden, because they aren’t trusted not to stab each other with scissors or shears. They can’t go camping or take field trips, and they aren’t allowed to sell cookies or tag along downtown with career mentors. They’re inmates at the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center.
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Every Thursday afternoon troop leader Johnsey Louden passes through the metal detectors at the juvenile court building at 1100 S. Hamilton. After checking in at the front desk of the detention center, she follows a staff member up to the fifth floor and down a series of long corridors with tinted windows that overlook a vast concrete courtyard where boys and girls spend their separate rec hours tossing around a ball. Once inside the girls’ residential quarters, Louden approaches the inmates in the TV room and tries to sell them on “some quality girl time.” Typically, she says, no more than six bother to get up and see what the Girl Scouts meetings are all about.
Louden’s relationship with Girl Scouts goes way back: she was a scout herself on the south side in the 1950s. Today’s scouts participate in some of the same activities, she says, like crafts and community service, but as the world and the girls in it changed, the organization evolved accordingly. “Our biggest decision was whether to wear brown-and-white saddle oxfords or black-and-white saddle oxfords,” says Louden. These days the Girl Scouts handbook addresses the problems of gangs and drugs and teen pregnancy. Louden doesn’t necessarily think the meetings at the detention center will “turn a person around.” But, she says, “If it helps them to make better decisions, it’s worth it.”
One article told the story of four children, aged two to six, who died after accidentally getting locked in a car trunk.
“My son’s two,” Natasha said.
Again Natasha spoke up first, saying it was important to supervise children but adding that Harris “should have also known that she shouldn’t go with strangers.”
