Troop 1500: Girl Scouts Beyond Bars

Review by Kathryn R. Kent

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 six² 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 women⁵: 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.

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. [↩]
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. [↩]
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. [↩]
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/. [↩]
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. [↩]
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). [↩]
7. Later in the film she refers to having euthanized two of her patients, so her story has some unresolved inconsistencies. [↩]
8. http//www.utexas.edu/features/archive/2004/girlscouts.html [↩]
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. [↩]
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. [↩]
11. On the other hand, one could interpret the camp uniforms more charitably as another effort to erase class differences. [↩]
12. Ellen Spiro, interview, “Troop 1500: Salon,” http://www.mobilusmedia.com/press9.html. [↩]
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. [↩]

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).

    [↩]