Generation Progress: WriteGirl Road to Success Academy rehabilitates incarcerated youth
/Real-World Rehab: How Reintegration Programs Serve Millennials Better Than Prisons
BY MEGAN COLE | MARCH 21, 2016 | Generation Progress
writegirl road to success academy mentors in santa clarita
To ease the transition of young people from incarceration to parole, and to prevent high rates of unemployment and recidivism, a new niche of rehabilitation programs has appeared in past decades to address Millennial rehabilitation, and to break the cycle of recidivism prevalent in low-income and high-crime communities.
WriteGirl Los Angeles, a program which connects professional writing mentors to young girls enrolled in at-risk Los Angeles schools, expanded their program in 2004 to include the Road to Success Academy, a school in Santa Clarita, CA which brings writing skills to incarcerated teen girls.
The Road to Success Academy expanded to two Santa Clarita juvenile detention camps for girls, Camp Scott and Camp Scudder, in 2011. Each center connects 100 girls to mentors each year; in total, over 600 girls have gone through the WriteGirl program since Road to Success’s inception.
Keren Taylor, WriteGirl’s Executive Director, explains that the program aims to equip incarcerated girls with writing skills, which she argues are hugely important in paving the way to life beyond incarceration.
