Jaki Murillo was 12 years old when she first entered the juvenile justice system in California. When she was 9, she tells Teen Vogue, she was arrested for making “terrorist threats” after telling a teacher that she was going to send her uncles to hurt the teacher; she was then put on probation. A few years later, Jaki started running away from home and skipping school, a violation of her probation. At 12, she was sent to a juvenile detention hall in Los Angeles.

When she arrived there, she was immediately placed in a secure housing unit (SHU), also known as room confinement or solitary confinement. It was due to her age — because she was under 14, she was not able to be in “general population” with the rest of the minors in the juvenile hall due to departmental protocol at the time. Jaki was kept locked in her room all day, and only allowed out of the room for two hours a day. Even then, she describes her interactions as limited to “TV and food” — and only with the adult staff who would facilitate both of those things. As a young juvenile offender, the confinement that Jaki experienced was meant to keep her safe from older youth in general population. But the true effect she remembers was that she was isolated, largely barred from interacting with others.

For various reasons, Jaki stayed in the juvenile hall longer than she had anticipated, and because of her age, that meant more time in SHU. “I was supposed to be there for three months and it ended up being over a year,” Jaki tells Teen Vogue.

Jaki recalls how alone she felt, isolated in her cell without contact. There were times she would scream for hours on end out of anger or frustration. There were times she would throw her food or just bang on her cell door over and over and over again, for lack of anything else to do. She had hardly anyone to talk to.

Eventually, she says, “I was in there for so long that I got used to it.”

Spokespeople for the LA County Probation Department and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation told Teen Vogue that a lot has changed since the time Jaki was in the system. The LA County Board of Supervisors passed a motion in 2016 to restrict how solitary confinement is used in the county’s juvenile detention facilities, like where Jaki was, and the state has enacted reforms based on a 2016 state law and also as part of a legal settlement, a spokesperson said.

However, justice advocates say more needs to be done on the issue. “As long as there is one child in one facility who is being unnecessarily isolated, we can do better,” Cheryl Bonacci, director of communications and program director for the Anti-Recidivism Coalition (ARC) and a former Catholic chaplain in the juvenile system, tells Teen Vogue. “We must continue to evolve the way we see and treat our children in the criminal justice system, listen to how they got to where they are, and work together as a community to help them heal in order to be able to move forward productively.”

The effort to end solitary confinement — the practice of isolating people in a closed cell for 22 to 24 hours a day — for minors is growing around the country. The 2016 California law limits the use of room confinement for juveniles in detention. Now, room confinement in California is banned for youth as a form of punishment, and only allowed in narrow circumstances, such as for the safety of the youth or staff — and even in those cases room confinement is limited to four hours. Over two dozen states and the District of Columbia now have laws that limit or prohibit solitary for youth, and others have seen a reduction in the use of solitary confinement for minors as a result of litigation, as has happened in Wisconsin and Illinois. In 2016, President Barack Obama issued a presidential memorandum banning the use of solitary confinement for minors in the federal prison system. However, the majority of minors presently in custody are in state, county, and city jails and prison systems — and it’s up to individual states to determine whether the practice can be used in their jurisdiction.