When Girl Power Goes Gangsta

U.S. prisons are teeming with women, and many of them cut their teeth in girl gangs. Gang experts say these girls are violent and smart -- and insecure and vulnerable.

Shermika Booker is a different person today than she was two years ago. She smiles, talks about how glad she is that she finished high school and says she hopes someday to become a dental assistant. But things were not so rosy in 1998.

Booker, 20, and a group of other girls who also live in the Garfield neighborhood in upper Northwest Washington -- just two miles from the White House -- had a "beef," or fight, with the girls of a nearby housing development called Park Moreton. The Garfield girls dubbed themselves the "Shank `Em Up Honeys"; their enemies at Park Moreton were the "No Limit Honeys." Rivalry escalated to violence and the girls fought with knives, or shanks, and guns.

Teen-age girls trying to kill each other? None who watched the rival Sharks and Jets meet for a "rumble" in West Side Story would recognize gangs today. These days, authorities are learning to keep their eyes open for middle-school girls and their high-school mentors who play as rough -- or rougher -- as the boys. "It's like gender liberation has hit the gangs," John Anderson, deputy district attorney for Orange County, Calif., told the Orange County Register in the early 1990s. "Girl gangsters aren't going to knock you down; they're going to make you hurt and make it last." And that was then. Female gang membership has continued to increase as lawmakers, law-enforcement officials and community groups scramble to resist this bizarre phenomenon.

In 1991 a group of eight men, all friends and native Washingtonians, met in the hair salon of Tyrone Parker, now president of the Alliance of Concerned Men, an organization that brokered the truce that eventually ended the fighting between rival toughs. Concerned that the neighborhoods of the nation's capital had become much more dangerous than when they grew up, they decided to start meeting with the most violent kids in the city. Nine years later, the men have helped establish positive programs for young people all over Washington.

When fighting broke out among individual girls in the rival neighborhoods of Northwest Washington, their parents -- for whatever reason -- were not involved in the lives of their kids, and many of the girls organized for protection, says Mack Also-brooks of the Alliance. "They started dropping out of school and arming themselves. Some of the girls became prisoners in their own homes," he explains.

"If it wasn't for the Alliance, I'd still be on the streets," Booker tells Insight. But most teen-age girls who become involved in neighborhood violence and gang warfare are not so lucky. "We are predisposed to male gang members with our mentoring programs. Everything we do for males we now need to do for females," says Det. Sgt. Scott Lawson of the Polk County Sheriff's Department in Florida. He helped start the gang unit in the Lakeland region in 1995. "They are no longer second-class gangs. We cannot ignore them. They are selling drugs and doing drive-by shootings."

Lawson tells of his surprise at investigating a crime spree by a group in his county called the Gangster Disciples. The 10 gang members had committed armed robbery, assault, burglary and a shooting. "While this may seem run-of-the mill gang crime, what got our attention was that eight of the 10 members were females and a female was calling the shots for this particular outing," he says.

The numbers of incarcerated women have tripled since the late 1980s, according to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports. While violent-crime rates are decreasing nationally, female juvenile crime is on the increase. Total crime arrests of female juveniles increased 118 percent between 1987 and 1996. In 1989, eight males were arrested for every female. At the close of the last decade, that ratio was down to 5-to-1. The percentage of female gang involvement nationally is estimated at 10 to 15 percent; their ages range from 9 to 24.

"They are not doing typical female crimes anymore either, like prostitution," says Sandra Hahn of the Washington County, Minn., Department of Court Services. "They are committing violent as well as white-collar crime, computer-chip theft, phone cloning, ATM cash-card cloning. They are smart. Because they might not be as strong as males they use weapons like knives and razor blades and go for the face in a fight."

Hahn says she is concerned whether officers are properly trained in handling girl gangsters, and she travels nationally to train and educate authorities about how to deal with female offenders. She started monitoring girls in gangs through "ride-alongs" into gang territory with the Los Angeles Police Department when California was almost alone in tracking female gang involvement. She found that there was not a great deal of information on girls in gangs and that many in law enforcement as recently as the mid-1990s never had considered that females could be as violent -- let alone more dangerous -- than males.