C'alra Bradley reads verses from the Bible that have given her strength. MONICA RHOR, USA TODAY

For the first time in a long time, C’alra Bradley felt a glint of hope.

It was an unfamiliar feeling for the then-18-year-old whose life had been disrupted and derailed by one roadblock after another. Once an A and B student who loved to read, she was living out of her white 1997 Toyota Avalon, on her own for three years, scrounging to get by.

But on July 18, 2016, as she attended one of her first classes at a GED and job training program in Houston, C’alra finally believed things were about to change.

She beamed as a career coach outlined the course ahead: the stipend for good attendance, the training on construction builds, the high school diploma at the end. C’alra (whose name is pronounced See-er-uh) could almost clasp the glimmer of a better life.

Then, with the coach’s next words, the vision evaporated: The students needed to wear work pants and closed-toe shoes for job sites.

A shadow flicked across C’alra’s face. The dress and flip-flops she wore were the only clothes she had. She had no money. No idea what to do.

Why young, black girls are often criminalized in schools Black girls don’t misbehave more, but experts say they often receive more severe punishments for the same behavior as white peers. Hannah Gaber, USA TODAY

After class ended, C’alra reached out to friends for help, but they were all strained for cash. She texted the career coach, but she was in Bible study.

C’alra was too afraid to confess why she was calling, worried that she would get booted from the program for being homeless. She was not used to getting sympathy or second chances.

So C’alra went to a nearby Walmart, stuffed a bra, two pairs of jeans, four panties, a pair of socks, foundation and lip gloss into a roomy purse and headed for the door.

As she neared the exit, a voice boomed: “We got you. We got you. Turn around.”

C’alra’s begged the security guard not to call the police. She told him that she needed the clothes for school. She offered to return the items, to find some way to pay.

The store official taunted her: “You are definitely going to jail.”

Unequal punishment

C’alra made a mistake; she readily admits that. But she had also been failed, time and time again, by flawed systems that are weighted against black girls.

She was written off as angry when she was simply trying to learn, hampered by teachers who were swift to punish, but not to listen. She was treated as an adult when she was still a child overwhelmed by the legal system.

In interviews conducted by USA TODAY with more than two dozen researchers, academics, educators, juvenile justice advocates, legal experts and black girls, the same message percolated again and again:

Black girls are being criminalized at alarming rates. They are hobbled by negative societal stereotypes that stretch back to slavery. By educators, counselors, caseworkers and judges who fail to address their trauma and emotional needs. By school discipline policies that push black girls out of school and punish them more often and more harshly than their white peers.

“They’re not allowed just to be and learn and heal and be girls,” said Monique Morris, author of “Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools” and president of National Black Women’s Justice Institute. “We see this criminalization of black girl joy that leads to them feeling as if they are culpable even if they are not.”

African American girls don’t misbehave more or commit more serious infractions, experts say, yet they often receive more severe penalties for the same behavior as white peers. They are nearly six times more likely to get out-of-school suspension than white counterparts, a report from the African American Policy Forum and Columbia Law School’s Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies found, and more likely to be suspended multiple times than any other gender or race of students.

They are “adultified” at a young age, according to research by Georgetown Law's Center on Poverty and Inequality, which found black girls face both racial and gender bias that feeds the misconception that they are more insubordinate and aggressive and less in need of nurturing and protection.

As a result, research from the Council of State Governments Justice Center concluded, black girls are at greater risk of dropping out or being held back, which in turn leads to a three-fold increase in the chances of becoming entangled in the juvenile justice system, and later, in the adult system.

“We celebrate Rosa Parks and talk about all of these women who were part of the construction of democracy,” Morris said. “Yet when black girls speak their truth they're told that they are being disruptive to the learning process.”

The problem extends beyond the prejudice of an individual teacher or the personal bias of a school police officer, emphasized Francine Sherman, director of the Juvenile Rights Advocacy Project at Boston College Law School.

It is, Sherman and others say, the intentional result of institutional structures driven by racist underpinnings.

“Black girls are pushed to the side, not listened to. Qualities that should be seen as leadership qualities are seen as being disruptive or aggressive or assertive in a way that's not respected,” she said. “The systems should know better, do know better.”

C’alra's story reflects the ways society often trips up black girls and overlooks their potential -- and how their sense of self can be buffeted by the pitfalls.

Nory Angel was struck by C'alra's charisma and passion when the young woman first applied for the GED and job training program run by SER, a Houston non-profit.

"She stood out," said Angel, then CEO of the organization, who saw a spark that radiated from C'alra's desire to muscle her way to a better life.

C'alra immediately earned a spot in the program -- one of the rare times in her life that things seemed to fall in place.

More often, people "gave up on me too soon. They didn’t care to help, or to see if I was dedicated to changing,” said C’alra, now 21. “People say the system is here to protect you, but I never felt protected. I always felt it was against me. Always.”

Childhood interrupted

C'alra Bradley, right, speaks with Sivivian Merrick, her former caseworker, at the offices of SER Jobs Houston. Hannah Gaber, USA TODAY

C’alra remembers her early childhood with a rosy fondness. Growing up in the “country” town of Hempstead, about an hour northwest of Houston, a place so small she knew most everyone within its five square miles. Being raised, along with a brother and sister, by her grandmother in a small, green house.

Back then, C’alra loved school. She tore through Junie B. Jones books, got As and Bs on her report cards, was always one of the last students standing in spelling bees. In fourth grade, she relished impressing classmates by correctly spelling “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”

Still, there were fissures just beneath the surface. A biological father who spent most of her childhood in prison. A mom and stepfather whose lives in Houston were marked by domestic squabbles and arrests for theft and drug possession. A lingering hurt because her mother left her and her two siblings but kept custody of six other children.

In sixth grade, the pressures from home spilled over at school. C’alra got into the kind of spat typical of middle school girls: One friend was annoyed with another classmate, then resented C’alra because she still spoke to that girl.

The disagreement turned into a scuffle in the cafeteria -- and the girls ended up with in-school suspension. C’alra spent 30 days in an alternative classroom, falling behind on her regular class work and losing valuable instructional time. After that, she felt like she was perpetually scrambling to catch up.

In the second half of eighth grade, her grandmother suffered kidney failure that required regular dialysis and became too ill to care for her. At 14, C’alra moved to Houston -- trading her rural town for a sprawling city she had never even visited before, a bedroom of her own in the green house for a pallet on the floor in her parents’ cramped apartment.

Her Houston middle school was chaotic -- a place where students routinely talked back to the teachers and constantly disturbed class. When C’alra tried to quiet her classmates, she was usually the one written up for starting trouble.

More in-school suspension, more hours out of the classroom, more falling behind.

C’alra doesn’t remember any teacher or counselor ever asking her what was going on, no one ever inquiring about problems at home or in school. The default was always discipline.

According to a report by the National Women’s Law Center, black girls are more likely to be suspended than white girls in every state -- not because of greater misconduct on their part, but because of biased perceptions by teachers and administrators.

They are dismissed as combative, as C’alra was, for speaking up in class or trying to engage with the teacher. They are penalized more often for dress code violations overlooked in white students or for wearing culturally specific hairstyles and clothes.

In Camden, New Jersey, for example, a charter high school student who wore a Nigerian head wrap for this year’s Black History Month observation was told to remove the scarf or serve in-school suspension for violating dress code. In 2017, black female students at a charter high school in Malden, just outside Boston, were put in detention and threatened with suspension for wearing box braids.

Even laughing has landed some black girls in trouble, as was the case in January when four 12-year-old middle school students in Binghamton, New York, were strip searched because they seemed giddy during lunch hour.

Nia Evans, manager of campaign and digital strategies for the National Women’s Law Center, traces the disproportionate disciplining of black girls to three main drivers: a convergence of racial and gender stereotypes, overly harsh and vague policies, and punishment of trauma.

Community members, activists and members of Progressive Leaders Of Tomorrow ally in front of East Middle School in Binghamton to protest the alleged strip search of four female students on January 29, 2019. Kate Collins, USA TODAY Network

African American girls are often unfairly viewed as hypersexualized, more dangerous than their peers and in need of more control. Educators penalize them for subjective infractions such as “being distracting” or “having an attitude.” They are twice as likely as black boys to be disciplined for “disobedience.”

Black girls are also less likely to get resources in the wake of adverse childhood experiences, such as abuse, neglect and sexual assault, and less likely to be believed and supported after trauma.

The disparities caused by those biases start as young as pre-school, where black girls make up about 20 percent of female enrollment but 54 percent of girls suspended, according to the National Women's Law Center. Overall, researchers found, black girls were 15.6 percent of girls enrolled, but 36.6 percent of girls getting in-school suspensions and more than half of those who received multiple suspensions.

Disciplinary actions not only result in lost classroom time and stalled academic progress, but they also erode self-esteem and reinforce the idea that black girls are not welcome in class.

That’s what happened with C’alra. The spelling bee aficionado who had always prized learning began to dread going to school.

In ninth grade, it would only get worse.

Mounting problems

The problems at César E. Chavez High School began almost from the first day of class. Some older girls glared at C’alra in the hallways and on the bus. They muttered insults and mumbled warnings as they watched the freshman with her boyfriend.

One day, as the school bus rumbled along the route home, rumors rolled from one seat to the next: The girls were planning to jump C’alra. Frantic, she called her mother and stepfather, who said they would meet her at the stop.

As C’alra exited the bus, one of the girls -- a 12th grader -- swung at her. C’alra’s sister, who had arrived with her parents, rushed at the senior. There was yelling, grappling, parents wresting the girls apart.

The brawl ended with another threat: The girls said they planned to go to C’alra’s apartment to rough her up.

Later that night, on Oct. 30, 2012, they did. According to court records, they stood outside her front door, along with a posse of friends and relatives, shouting C’alra’s name and daring her to come out.

C’alra’s mother and her stepfather emerged from the house brandishing a metal pipe and a firearm. Within seconds, a melee erupted. C’alra’s mother called the police and said she had acted in self-defense.

Instead, C’alra’s parents were charged with aggravated assault and sentenced to prison -- two years for her stepfather and four for her mother.

C’alra’s older sister, pregnant with her first child and left to care for five younger siblings, blamed C’alra. The school labeled her a troublemaker and refused to let her come back.

At 15, she found herself out of school, living on the street, sleeping in her car, working part-time jobs at Jason’s Deli and Whataburger.

She would often sit for hours under the night sky, feeling as if the world was against her. Not knowing that more troubles were around the corner.

Black girls are more likely than white girls to be referred to police for disciplinary actions at school and less likely to be sent to diversion programs for juvenile offenses, according to the National Women's Law Center. They are charged more often than any other group for non-violent offenses such as truancy, violating curfew or court orders, or running away from their families and foster care placements, said Christina Beeler, a staff attorney with the Juvenile and Capital Advocacy Project at University of Houston Law Center. Another significant number are arrested for survival crimes and misdemeanors, such as petty theft or shoplifting.

Even charges that appear more serious can be misleading, Beeler points out. A skirmish between family members or friends, for example, can result in an assault charge.

A ride with a friend on Feb. 19, 2015 was all it took for C’alra. The other girl convinced C’alra to go with her and an acquaintance to their old high school campus, where she wanted to challenge a classmate with whom she was feuding.

Once there, the other girls hurled at each other. C’alra panicked. The police are going to come, she shouted at her companions. She grabbed her friend’s car keys and called for the others to jump in.

She started to drive away just as a school police officer arrived in a golf cart. He yelled at her to stop. In his report, the officer said C’alra tried to run him down; C’alra says he jumped in front of the car and tried to block her from leaving.

C’alra, by then 17, says she was confused and scared, and didn’t realize the officer was trying to detain her. She just wanted to get somewhere safe.

A short while later, she got a message from her brother: Two felony warrants were out for her arrest.

“They said you tried to kill a police officer,” he told her. “You’re a fugitive now.”

Caught in the system

C'alra Bradley points out the name of her former mentor, Nory Angel, on a wall at SER Jobs Houston. Hannah Gaber, USA TODAY

“What am I going to do?” C’alra thought, after turning herself in.

It was her first time in legal trouble, her first time before a judge. She looked around at the other defendants in the Harris County courtroom. Some were with parents and spouses; others accompanied by private attorneys. She was alone.

She was afraid that Child Protective Services would find out that she was homeless, that they would take her siblings away from her sister and into foster care, that she would end up incarcerated like her parents.

C’lara cornered a lawyer she had seen vigorously defending another client. She begged him to take her case, even though she had no idea how she would pay for his services.

She had ample reason for concern. C’alra had entered a system stacked against girls like her.

Nationally, black girls make up 14 percent of the general population, but about 33 percent of girls in juvenile detention, according to Georgetown Law's Center on Poverty and Inequality and the Human Rights Project for Girls.

“We need to call it what it is and it’s the issue we dance around in every community nationally -- and that's the whole issue of racism,” said Judge John J. Romero Jr., president of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges. “Racism is still among us and and it shows its ugly face in school, in the community, and certainly in our courts.”

Black girls also must confront a paternalistic attitude on the part of many judges, Romero said. They are especially vulnerable to sexual exploitation, with African-American youth making up about 57 percent of all juvenile prostitution arrests.

Yet, rather than being treated as victims, they are often incarcerated for nonviolent offenses or as a form of “protection,” Romero said, to keep them from running away from foster care or out of the hands of sex traffickers.

“We've learned that that's not a reason for incarcerating anyone,” said Romero, who sits on the Children’s Court Division of the Second Judicial District Court of New Mexico, “We're doing more harm than good.”

For nearly six months, C’alra was in and out of court. She missed countless days of work and lost both her jobs. She explained that she was homeless, that her parents were in prison.

In the end, she was offered five years deferred adjudication for evading arrest. If she stayed out of trouble during that period, no conviction would be on her record. The other charge -- aggravated assault on a police officer -- was dropped. She felt she had no choice but to accept and plead guilty.

C’alra didn’t know how she would pay the mounting court fees or her lawyer’s bill.

But at least she wasn’t behind bars.

She could not foresee that, a year later, a misdemeanor charge of shoplifting less than $175 of clothes and cosmetics would send her down the path she was so desperately trying to avoid.

No second chances

After C’alra’s arrest at Walmart in the summer of 2016, she returned to classes at SER's Youthbuild program. She impressed her caseworker, Sivivian Merrick, and Nory Angel with her diligence.

She didn’t allow herself to believe that she could end up in prison, as her mother had.

On Aug. 9, 2016, two weeks after the shoplifting arrest, C’alra was again in a courtroom. This time, Merrick and Angel were on hand to show support. Both had written letters to the judge, urging leniency and citing her determination to rise out of poverty.

Even so, C’alra could sense the doubt in the people around her. They don’t believe me, she thought. Not the judge. Not my lawyer. Not my probation officer. Not the guards.

They shrugged off her tears as a ploy to gain mercy, C’alra recalls. “They were so ready to wipe their hands of me.”

She never had a chance to address the judge. Neither did Merrick or Angel.

C’alra was handcuffed and taken into custody. She had fallen behind on court fines (a $642 supervision fee, $130 drug testing fee, $66 court fee, $100 screening fee, $50 Crime Stoppers fee, $12.50 offender ID fee) and missed a hearing date after her sister was shot at a house party and C’alra spent the night by her side in the ICU -- invalidating the plea deal on her evading arrest charge.

In dark times, C'alra Bradley turns to books, including the Bible, for encouragement. Monica Rhor, USA TODAY

Her sentence: Two years in prison.

For nearly a month, she sat in the county jail, waiting to be transported to a state facility. Every night, as her grandmother had taught her, she prayed: Please, God, if you can get me out of this situation, I promise to do better. Please, God, forgive me.

C’alra kept praying when she was loaded onto the Texas Department of Criminal Justice bus, her hands and feet shackled. She prayed over the next three months, as she was transferred from one prison unit to another, from one part of Texas to another.

She prayed on Nov. 2, 2016 when she arrived at her final stop -- Bridgeport PPT, a privately-run facility about 300 miles from Houston -- and felt the stares of the other female inmates.

Two days later, on her 19th birthday, her fellow inmates brought out a cake and sang “Happy Birthday.” Only then did C’alra relax and begin to think that she could make it through her sentence.

She didn’t have long to wait. On Nov. 7, she learned that the parole board had voted to release her at the end of the month. It had met to consider her case in August, just after she had been put in jail.

She fashioned a makeshift calendar out of a cardboard rectangle -- and counted down each remaining day with an X. “Twenty more days.” “Nineteen more days.” “Eighteen.”

Every night, she got out her prison-issue Gideon Bible and chose a scrap of paper denoting a verse to read. She tucked the small slips deep into the crevices of the book and underlined passages that brought her comfort.

“Make this a daily prayer,” one notation reads, under Psalm 142. “There is no one who takes notice of me. No refuge remains to me. No one cares for my soul … Bring me out of prison that I may give thanks to your name.”

As her calendar filled with X’s, she had time to ruminate about her past, about the family patterns that had repeated for generations. An estimated 81 percent of female inmates in Texas prisons are mothers and about one-quarter are African American, according to the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition -- a snapshot of the long-term impact when black girls are pushed out of school and into the legal system.

C’alra vowed to break that mold, to go back to SER and get her GED, to go on to college, to become the kind of mother any future child would be proud of. She dreamed of having an “average paid-off house,” “an average paid-off car,” of being able to buy new clothes.

She spent hours in the prison library and borrowed books to read on her top bunk. Angel, the SER director who regularly wired money C’alra for necessities and spoke often to her by phone, recommended a particular volume: Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.”

C’alra glimpsed snippets of her own life in Angelou’s memoir: the run-ins with racism that grind at the soul, the childhood spent in a grandmother’s care, the bouts with homelessness. Even the bird in the title, taken from a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar, so desperate to escape that it beats its wings bloody against the bars of a cage.

“Man, this is a strong lady,” C’alra thought. “In the end, it all led to her becoming great. She made it through.”

That’s when C’alra knew she could do the same.

'Turn and live'

On a recent spring day, more than two years after that turning point moment, C’alra sat at her dining table, the curtains pulled tight across a nearby window. She bowed her head, her long braids brushing close to a vase of purple silk flowers, and skimmed through her dog-eared prison Bible.

Past the front page where she had written in blue ink “I am God’s child.” Past the underlined scriptures and the wisps of paper wedged in the seams.

She stopped at Ezekiel 18:19-32 and read the words out loud. “Cast away from you all the transgressions that you have committed, and make yourselves a new heart and a new spirit! … Turn and live.”

In the margin was the date she had highlighted the verse: Nov. 25, 2016 -- five days before her release from prison.

She thought about everything that had happened since. Returning to the SER program two weeks after getting out. Earning her GED in February 2018. Moving into her first apartment, a small one-bedroom in a battered brick apartment complex. Finding a job at a Houston truck stop, where she works the cash register and cleans the showers -- as many as 60 times a day.

The night before, bone-tired after a long shift, C’alra promised God she would not give up on herself. Now, a tear rolling down her cheek, she thought about the second chances she was never given, about the benefit of the doubt that could have changed the course of her life, about the challenges still before her.

A few weeks later, C'alra would leave her job at the truck stop for a part-time job at the Houston Food Bank. The working conditions are better, the opportunities a bit brighter, but the income is even more meager.

With a paycheck that barely covers the bills, she can’t afford college. With a record, she can’t become a nurse, a long-held dream.

With so much behind her, she still has so far to go.

This story was published with the support of a fellowship Monica Rhor received from Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights.

Follow Monica Rhor on Twitter: @monicarhor.