Troop 1500: Girl Scouts Beyond Bars
Review by
At its founding in 1912, the Girl Scouts of America was designed to
inculcate the norms of white, middle-class womanhood, including
nationalism, patriotism, proper domesticity, and frugality, in girls of
various class and ethnic backgrounds. Yet from its conception the Girl
Scouts challenged the values of the time by extending the idea of
self-making to young women. More recently it has provided a sphere for
challenging the bourgeois, individualist, heteronormative, and
nationalist values it was created to promote.[1]
Ellen Spiro's recent documentary about six members of a Girl Scout
troop in Texas, Troop 1500 (Mobilius Media 2004), was originally
screened for the PBS series Independent Lens. Spiro focuses on
the poignant stories of six[2] lively, resilient, young girls—four
African-American (Zybra, Jasmine, Caitlyn and Mikaela) and two white
(Jessica and Naomi)—and how they are able, through the program "Girl
Scouts Beyond Bars," to forge increasingly intimate relationships with
their incarcerated mothers, who live in the Hilltop Unit in Gatesville
Prison, Texas. In so doing, the documentary perhaps unwittingly
demonstrates the double-edged quality of the Girl Scouts' influence.
Although Troop 1500 provides the five individual girls with crucial
support and love, traditional aspects of the Girl Scouts—the uniforms,
the strict code of behavior, and the emphasis on the group—often eerily
mirror the disciplinary philosophy of the criminal justice system and
the practices of the contemporary prison. Nonetheless, Spiro celebrates
the influence the Girl Scouts have on both mothers and daughters, and,
by giving the daughters cameras, allows them an alternative, empowering
means of telling and reviewing their stories.
Troop 1500 is not unique in working with girls who have mothers in
prison. In 2003 there were 30 such troops in the United States, and the
Girl Scouts have received grants from the Department of Justice, among
others, to fund their work not only with girls whose mothers are
incarcerated, but also with girls who are themselves in the juvenile
justice system. A spokeswoman for the Girl Scouts explains, "We do not
believe that residing in a detention center or having a mother who is
incarcerated should stand in the way of these girls becoming all they
can be. Our goal is to help all involved develop a strong sense of
self-esteem and a positive outlook for the future."[3] Such a
declaration matches the underlying liberal feminist ideology of the
contemporary Girl Scout movement, which stresses the building of a
strong sense of self. The ideal of the Girl Scouts is that such an
attitude can in itself produce success. Scouting emphasizes changing the
individual rather than making larger social or political changes, an
ideology that is certainly acceptable to the general public and may
account for the Girl Scouts' continued national success.
In many ways, Troop 1500 echoes these sentiments. An early
sequence in the film epitomizes the stark contrast we are supposed to
note between the cultural ideals and norms of the Girl Scout program and
the crimes the incarcerated women have committed. Every Girl Scout
meeting traditionally ends with the recitation of the Girl Scout
promise, which reads: "On my honor, I will try to serve God and my
country, to help people at all times, and to live by the Girl Scout
law."[4] The film
crosscuts between the girls and their mothers reciting
this pledge and the women reciting their crimes, crimes that for the
most part are representative of the majority of those committed by
incarcerated women[5]: Alberta (African-American)
"engaging in organized
crime" (in part motivated by a drug habit); Ida (white) "possession of
heroin and a DWI"; Kenya (African-American) "possession with intent to
deliver"; Melissa (white) "aggravated assault with a deadly weapon"
(also linked to drug use)[6]; and the
one oddly incongruent prisoner,
Susan (white), who explains that she was a "nurse for 18 years and then
I euthanized one of my patients,"[7] for
which she has been sentenced to
life (50 years) in prison, which means that she is not eligible for
parole for at least 25 years. As she confides, "It seemed like the
kindest thing to do at the time, but of course it was against the law."
Here the crosscutting may lead viewers to consider how far these women
are from the Girl Scouts' ideals, and how much they, and consequently
their daughters, need the influence the program might provide.
Throughout the film Spiro includes archival footage of Girl Scout
promotional movies from the thirties and forties, a formal technique she
employs to great effect. In one such excerpt we see two white
middle-class girls knocking at the door of a huge house. A beautiful,
well-coiffed white woman answers the door with a welcoming and cultured
hello. The girls ask if she might know of anyone who could lead their
troop and without any hesitation the woman responds that she does,
implying that she herself will take on the task. That she is at home in
the middle of the day also signals that she has the leisure time to
devote to civic activity, time and resources that the incarcerated
mothers have presumably never had in their lives. In stark contrast to
this idealized vision of the Girl Scout leader we are introduced to
Julia Cuba, the leader of Troop 1500, a young white social worker who
declares that the "major goal of [this troop] is to strengthen the bond
between mother and daughter in order to break the cycle of crime."
Despite these differences, we also see the girls of Troop 1500
participating in traditional Girl Scout activities. Cuba, however,
contextualizes these activities in terms of the specific plight of these
girls. For example, she explains, "In the beginning of Girl Scouts, life
skills was, How do you survive in the wilderness? Now, it's how do you
survive in the wilderness, in the wilderness of the culture?" We witness
the troop participating in a "trust hike," a familiar Scouting activity
in which girls partner off and one of them is blindfolded while the
other leads her safely through a wilderness area by warning her of
obstacles and dangers. Cuba tells us that for these girls, presumably
because they have been betrayed by their mothers, this game carries
extra weight, "because trust has been broken and we're trying to rebuild
it."
The film emphasizes the mothers' wrongdoing in a number of ways. It
begins with footage of one of the girls, Jessica, returning home to an
empty house to find a letter from her mother in prison. After climbing a
chain-link fence bearing a "Beware of Dog" sign, she enters the
cluttered, even squalid interior of her rundown house and haltingly
reads her mother's note. The implication is that, while the letters from
her mother are an attempt to maintain their relationship, Jessica
suffers from the lack of a mother both emotionally and materially, as if
the presence of a mother might mean someone was waiting at home for her
in a cleaner house, and/or might provide additional economic resources
to improve her standard of living. On many levels this is undeniably
true, but examining the images more closely reveals one of the troubling
aspects of the film: the tendency to reinforce subtle stereotypes of how
"good mothers" behave without making any attempt to contextualize the
incarcerated women's situations within a larger social, political, or
economic structure. Certainly Cuba is critical when she describes the
mothers in prison as having "had these kids and then they . . . did their
selfish things that they did." The film does make a point of showing us
the familial support the girls do possess; for example, we see Jasmine
getting her hair braided by her father and interviewing herself with a
video camera about how her father is "like a mom and a dad," but the
persistent emphasis is on the difficulties the girls endure.
Cuba consistently shares her impression that the girls are at risk,
and in particular her fear that, without intervention, these girls
themselves will end up incarcerated. "The moms grew up the same way the
girls are growing up. The girls are going to be the same people without
some kind of intervention. Troop 1500 is the intervention for the
girls." Statistics bear out her fear: Children of prisoners are six
times more likely to end up in the criminal justice system themselves.
Because of this notion of the cycle of crime, the benevolent arm of the
Girl Scouts has been extended to these girls in order to try to support
them and to inculcate in them "mainstream" American values. Dr. Darlene
Grant, a professor of social work at the University of Texas in Austin
who works with the program, describes how the girls learn "social
skills, like not yelling at potential Girl Scout cookie customers!"[8]
Selling Girl Scout cookies also instructs the girls in the capitalist
values of the dominant U.S. culture—and in the prevailing myth that
through working hard one can achieve anything. In another artful use of
archival footage, we see Eleanor Roosevelt, surrounded by Girl Scouts in
uniform, proclaiming, "It's easy for us to slip into the habit of
letting other people be responsible for us. The experience which is the
most valuable is the experience of doing things for yourself."
Cuba also describes her fears about how the incarcerated mothers will
behave once they are released: "When the moms get out, it's always
terrifying to wait and see what's going to happen next. We've had moms
immediately start doing crack within an hour . . . of getting out. And we've
had moms work hard and go directly home and really fight the difficult
pressures they face there, and they make it." Such seemingly
matter-of-fact statements uncomfortably resemble the normative values
the Girl Scouts seek to enforce, especially the stress placed on
individual willpower, responsibility, and blame. There is virtually no
discussion of the huge obstacles facing poor women with criminal records
and histories of substance abuse in finding housing, jobs, and social
support.
Even if the intention of the film is not to overwhelm the viewers
with abstract facts but to provide us with a glimpse into the
devastating effects of mass incarceration on the children left behind,
as well as local attempts to alleviate these problems, there is no
effort made to contextualize the families' plights in light of the
neoliberal move to privatize social services, including decimating the
welfare system and demonizing its recipients. No mention is made of the
decay of urban neighborhoods because of a lack of jobs that pay a living
wage, in part because of trade agreements that allow U.S. companies to
export jobs to countries where they can exploit the local workforce. The
film fails to examine the larger transnational prison-industrial system
whose profits are reliant upon the mass incarceration of men and women
whose "crimes," as defined by the draconian sentencing laws of the "war
on drugs," could be better addressed through publicly funded
drug-rehabilitation programs, mental health programs, and/or the
economic development of poor communities, social services that have been
virtually eliminated in the last 15 years.[9]
It seems unrealistic and unfair to expect Julia Cuba to dismantle
this system or even to try to explain it to second graders: She and many
others on the front lines clearly offer these girls and their mothers an
incredible amount of resources and love. Cuba and Grant also provide a
crucial support system for the girls, including group therapy and
individual mentoring, efforts that seem to be succeeding.[10]
They both
work hard to support the mothers both during and after their
incarceration. Unfortunately, these efforts alone may not ensure that
these girls will possess the resources to survive in the "wilderness of
the culture."
While at many moments Troop 1500 ends up endorsing Scouting's
individualist rhetoric, when the film follows the girls to summer camp,
it most deeply reveals the limits of the Girl Scout ideology. We see
images of well-dressed girls being kissed goodbye by their mothers while
the girls of Troop 1500 experience no such farewells. They are greeted
by peppy counselors who insist that the girls sign a card promising,
among other things, that they will abide by the Girl Scout promise and
rules while they are at camp. I was struck by the degree to
which this scene of intake bears some connection to the ways in which a
woman enters prison. Furthermore, the girls' bunks resemble their
mothers' own cubicles (unlike traditional visions of prison life, in the
Hilltop Unit the women are not in cells, but in what seems to be one
large room divided up into small compartments, with only half walls so
that anyone walking by or viewing from above can see in). Unconsciously,
at least, the similarities here between the daughters' bunks and the
mothers' cubicles suggest an overlap between incarceration and the
ideological limits of the Girl Scout program. Each location emphasizes
the lack of privacy available to them. Shots of the girls in their camp
shirts raise the issue of uniforms (as do moments elsewhere in the film
where the girls are thrilled to wear their uniforms to the prison).
Again, one might note the similarities between this emphasis on
uniformity (and thus the attempt to destroy any unruly individuality the
girls might possess, an individuality that does not match the model of
the ideal middle-class citizen that the Scouts espouse) and the white
prison garb the mothers wear.[11]
One sequence portrays Jessica grabbing a toy from another white girl
in her bunk and ignoring the girl's pleas for her to return it. The girl
announces, "I bought that with my own money," emphasizing that Jessica
may not have the funds to purchase even these small trifles and, more
ominously, that she is already headed down the road to a life of crime.
Another sequence portrays Mikaela trying to teach two white girls in her
bunk the card game "Mafia," which includes "police" and "killings last
night." While one girl expresses enthusiasm and tries to catch on, the
other seems ill at ease, presumably with the setting and language of the
game, marking a contrast between her sheltered existence and Mikaela's
worldview. Here we get a less hopeful vision of the ways in which the
girls are already entrenched in difference.
Similarly, Spiro emphasizes the lack of support inside and outside
the prison for the mothers: We see shots of the mirrors on the ceilings
that make up the panopticon inside the prison, a shot of the Texan and
American flags interspersed between shots of the mothers and daughters
hugging (as if to indicate the state's role in their separation), and
numerous shots of the barbed wire and guard towers that enforce the
sense of entrapment and enclosure. It seems that the only rhetoric for success that
the prison provides, other than that of personal responsibility, is a
faith-based one. A banner on the wall of the chapel reads, "God is doing
for us what we cannot do for ourselves," and on the day of Melissa's
release, a minister introduces himself as part of a "first contact
ministry."
Troop 1500 suggests alternative possibilities for self- and
collective empowerment. Perhaps the most striking moment in the film is
when the girls, using video cameras and questions they have generated
themselves, interview their mothers in moving and difficult ways about
their feelings about being incarcerated, their lives in prison, their
motivations for their crimes, and their plans after their release. In so
doing, the girls "[are] in the position of total power and control with
the camera, and because of the questions, the mom is on the spot."[12]
One of the main reasons they are able to do this is the two years Spiro
and producer Karen Bernstein spent volunteering with the troop before
beginning filming. During that time they taught the girls various
aspects of media production. Spiro describes the results:
"The girls used the opportunity and the formality of the
interview setup to ask their moms questions they had never asked them
before. The camera became a witness, an ally, and a friend to them,
something to help them get at the truth of their situations. The
girl-mom interviews reveal conflicted emotions of love and abandonment,
and the ultimate realization that the girls will have to create their
own futures, with or without their mothers' guidance and support."[13]
At moments the interviews allow the mothers to express their regret
and their sadness at letting down their daughters, as well as their
worries for them. At other moments the interviews reveal how painfully
unaware of their daughters' lives the mothers are. During Jasmine's
interview, her mother, Melissa, asks her daughter what her favorite
color is. When Jasmine answers, "Blue," Melissa replies, "I thought it
was purple." Jasmine puts her head down on her desk, ending the
interview and indicating her disappointment that her mother doesn't know
such a basic fact about her. Nonetheless, this exchange also
re-establishes the mother's basic knowledge about her daughter.
At the moments when the girls control the cameras, the film invokes
the power of self-representation and provides a kind of antidote, a
Foucaultian "reverse discourse," to the dominant conceptions of girls
whose mothers are incarcerated. Rather than existing as simple
stereotypes or statistics, these girls show us the individuality of
their family situations. A close-up of a sticker on a video camera that
reads, "Girls Cam: No adults allowed," reinforces this sense of
empowerment.[14]
A recurring image emphasizes the power of self-representation: a shot
of the five girls with their mothers and Julia Cuba, standing before a
white curtain as if they were posing for the kind of family portrait one
might have taken at the local mall. The photo captures the hope that
these families will be reunited and find together a measure of dignity
and pride. Significantly, they are arranged as a group rather than in
mother-daughter pairs, emphasizing the power of collectivity. Cuba, in
describing her mission, states, "The meetings out at the prison do
provide the girls with an opportunity to create memories with their
mothers." Putting words to the perspective of the girls, she says, "This
was a snapshot in my life where my mom and I really loved each other and
trusted each other. And it was safe." Such moments illustrate, why,
despite its shortcomings, this film would provide an invaluable,
powerful viewing experience for anyone interested in the contemporary
prison crisis in the U.S., especially in regards to how it affects
incarcerated women and their daughters.
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to Joy James for sharing her
expertise and to Anna Bean and Benjamin Weaver for useful conversations.
And thanks especially to Janet Jakobsen for her persistence.
Endnotes
1. Kathryn R. Kent, Making Girls into Women:
American Women's Writing and the Rise of Lesbian Identity (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2003) and "No Trespassing': Girl Scout Camp and
the Limits of the Counterpublic Sphere," Curiouser: On the Queerness
of Children, eds. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley (University of
Minnesota Press, 2004), 173-89. [Return to text]
2. Zybra disappears from the film after her
mother, Alberta, has her sentence extended for two more years and is
barred from participating in the Girl Scout program. [Return to text]
3. "Girl Scouts of the USA Receives Department of
Justice Grant to Help Build Girl Scouts Beyond Bars and Girl Scouting in
Detention Centers," Press Release, Girl Scouts of the USA, April 2,
2003,
http://www.girlscouts.org/news/ news_releases/2003/doj_national_release.asp.
[Return to text]
4. The Girl Scouts of the USA website adds this
footnote to the promise: "The word 'God' can be interpreted in a number
of ways, depending on one's spiritual beliefs. When reciting the Girl
Scout Promise, it is okay to replace the word "God" with whatever word
your spiritual beliefs dictate,"
http://www.girlscouts.org/ program/gs_central/promise_law/.
[Return to text]
5. "Today, 60 percent of all women in the nation's
prisons are serving time either for drug offenses or property offenses,
compared with 41 percent of men in prison. Further, nearly half of
women inmates have never been convicted of a violent offense." Meda
Chesney-Lind, "Imprisoning Women: The Unintended Victims of Mass
Imprisonment," in Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences
of Mass Imprisonment, eds. Marc Mauer and Meda Chesney-Lind, eds.
(New York: New Press, 2002), 84. [Return to text]
6. (Turned in by her boyfriend, with whom she had
a violent relationship that she claims went both ways. Not only have
many incarcerated women been the childhood victims of physical and
sexual abuse, many are imprisoned for fighting back against their
aggressors.) (Chesney-Lind, 83-4). [Return to text]
7. Later in the film she refers to having
euthanized two of her patients, so her story has some unresolved
inconsistencies. [Return to text]
8. http//www.utexas.edu/features/ archive/2004/girlscouts.html
[Return to text]
9. For just a sampling of critical work
illuminating and addressing this problem, see Angela J. Davis,
"Incarceration and the Imbalance of Power," in Invisible
Punishment, 61-78; Julia Sudbury, "Celling Black Bodies: Black
Women in the Global Prison Industrial Complex," feminist review
80: 2005, 162-79; Paula Johnson, Inner Lives: Voices of African
American Women in Prison, (New York: New York University Press,
2003); Angela Y. Davis, "From the Convict Lease System to the Super-Max
Prison," States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and
Prisons, ed. Joy James (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 60-74; Angela
Davis and Gina Dent, "Prison as a Border: A Conversation on Gender,
Globalization, and Punishment," Signs 26.4 (Summer 2001): 1235-41; and
Joy James, ed., The New Abolitionists: (Neo) Slave Narratives and
Contemporary Prison Writings (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2005. [Return to text]
10. "95 percent of the 45 girls [in Troop 1500]
have not been pregnant before the age of 18; 93 percent have not dropped
out of school and 100 percent have not been arrested,"
http://www.utexas.edu/features/ archive/2004/girlscouts.html.
[Return to text]
11. On the other hand, one could interpret the
camp uniforms more charitably as another effort to erase class
differences. [Return to text]
12. Ellen Spiro, interview, "Troop 1500: Salon,"
http://www.mobilusmedia.com/press9.html.
[Return to text]
13. "Emmy Award-Winning PBS Series Independent
Lens to Host Broadcast Premiere of 'Troop 1500,'" Girl Scouts of the USA
press release,
http://www.girlscouts.org/news/ news_releases/2006/troop_1500.asp.
[Return to text]
14. On the other hand, such assumptions can seem
a bit naïve: once again, as Spiro's comments indicate when she states,
". . . the girls will have to create their own futures . . .," this comparison
between temporary filmic power and the power to control one's destiny
indicates a somewhat utopian understanding of the relation of
(self)representation to the larger challenges these girls face. To be
fair to Spiro, she mentions some of these issues in interviews. For
example, when asked, "What impact do you hope this film will have?" she
replies,
"I hope that the public will become aware of how incarceration
punishes children for crimes they did not commit and that moms (and
dads) in prison need rehabilitation services more than they need
incarceration. Most of the mothers are in jail for non-violent
addiction-related crimes. I hope that the public and our leaders will
see that addiction is a mental illness that requires treatment."
Every documentary must struggle with the balance between presenting
"facts" and/or a larger analysis of an issue and focusing on individual
stories (http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/ troop1500/qa.html).
[Return to text]
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