minette223

What is the social dynamic like among the residents? I imagine it is a single gender environment - do you work with males or females? Do you have experience working with both genders? If you do, or if you don't, according to your colleagues, what are the biggest differences in working with males vs females? Does your own gender change how you can relate to them?

Do you know what the longer term outcomes for the residents are? What percentage end up back in the justice system in some way?

Thanks for answering our questions!!!

Oh, thats really interesting. Do you have residents dating? Do you get weird social hierarchies among the residents, like cliques and stuff? What are those groups most based upon? Is it "cool" to be more bad, or are kids trying to get out as fast as possible? Or, is it more like, general solidarity because they are all there together through hard circumstances?

I guess my real question would boil down to: how are residents forming their identities once they are there? Do they form a new identity once they are there? Do they try to remain exactly who they were before? The idea of being forced into a place is a pretty crazy thing to me, and its hard to imagine what a person would go through psychologically, even in an ideal situation.