Rosalyn “Bird” Holmes spends her time working at FedEx in the hub. When she’s not at work she is studying to get her driver’s license, taking classes to graduate from high school and thinking about what she wants to do with her life.

Just two years ago, the 18-year-old wasn’t sure what the future held as she sat in a women’s prison in Henning, Tennessee under the state’s “safekeeping” law. The law that dates back to 1858 allows pretrial detainees including youths charged as adults, pregnant detainees and others with medical conditions to be held in a state prison if a local jail or facility is deemed “insufficient” to house them even though they have not been convicted of a crime. 

Meeting in the middle: ‘Who doesn’t want less juvenile crime?’

Holmes, at 16, was deemed a “safekeeper” after she and three other teenagers were accused in the 2018 kidnapping and robbery of a 28-year-old Collierville man outside of a Memphis nightclub. Police said the two teen boys in the group forced the man at gunpoint to go to his home and then to an ATM. Holmes and another teen girl were in the car driven by one of the boys.

Holmes was charged as an adult and later transferred from Shelby County to the West Tennessee State Penitentiary, 50 miles from home. Her bond was set at $60,000 and her family unable to pay her bail, Holmes sat in in prison for 40 days without being indicted on the charges.

She was released in May, 2018 after the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights organization paid her bail. The heard about her case from local activists including the Shahidah Jones with the Memphis chapter of Black Lives Matter, the Memphis Community Bail Fund and the Memphis criminal justice advocacy group, Just City.

“We are thrilled that Bird is finally free, but we have a long way to go to ensure our criminal punishment system stops violently disrupting people’s lives in the name of seeking ‘justice’,” said Wade McMullen, senior vice present of programs and legal strategy at Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights. “If this case teaches us anything, it’s that every American must deeply question the legitimacy of a system where the amount of money in one’s bank account corresponds to the justice you receive.”

Josh Spickler, executive director of Just City, agrees and said youths are too often charged as adults in Shelby County.

“We were very surprised that she (Holmes) got transferred because the allegations against her were not strong allegations,” said Spickler, who is also an attorney who represented Holmes. “When we later did a bond hearing, the victim in the case testified that he never saw her outside of the car, so this idea that she should be transferred into the adult system is ludicrous frankly, but there are multiple children charged with crimes and this happens all the time.”

Juvenile Court records show a 15% increase in 2019 over the number of transfers in 2018, from 78 to 90 and most of the youths transferred were African-American.

Pandemic poses challenges for Youth Villages’ LifeSet program

In 2020, to date 37 youths have been transferred from juvenile court to adult criminal court. As of Sept. 30, Juvenile Court spokesman Leon Gray said no girls have been transferred to adult court.

Spickler said Holmes and Teriyona Winton were two teen girls charged as adults in Shelby County and sent to a women’s prison because the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office said since girls are not often charged as adults they had no place to house them when their cases are transferred to adult criminal court. Boys charged as adults are housed at the women’s jail, Shelby County Jail East.

After Holmes was released from prison on bail, it would be another two years before the charges against her would be dropped. That happened in August and since then Holmes said she has kept busy working, going to her favorite restaurant, American Deli at Southland Mall for hot wings, and thinking a lot about what is next for her. 

“When I went to court and the judge said the charges were dropped, I was so happy,” Holmes said as she sat in a Whitehaven park recently. “I left the courtroom and called my daddy and started screaming in the phone that the judge dropped all the charges. Then I called my grandmama and did the same thing.”

Juvenile homicides on the rise in Memphis

When COVID-19 hit, Holmes was attending classes at Pathways, a high school in Memphis. She is now taking online classes and hoping to finish and get her diploma soon.

She said right now she isn’t interested in going to college but would like to go to a trade school to learn how to do hair, nails or even take photography classes.

“I’m still deciding, but I do know that in the next year, I want to move out of Memphis,” she said. “I want to see other parts of this country, like maybe Texas or someplace where it’s always raining because I like the rain.”

When asked about her time in the women’s prison where she was held in solitary confinement because state law requires youths to be “separate and removed” from adult inmates, Holmes said it was “one of the hardest times” of her life.

“You get up, you go to school, you eat, you lay back down and then you repeat that over and over every day,” she recalled.

Holmes was housed at the West Tennessee State Penitentiary in Henning and while there she became close friends with Teriyona Winton, another Memphis teen, who was also housed at the prison under the “safekeeping” law.

Winton, at 15, was charged with killing 17-year-old Deago Brown in 2017 in Binghampton. This summer, Winton, now 18, was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to 15 years in prison. She will be eligible for parole in January.

“Me and Teriyona made the best of our situation,” said Holmes, who goes by the nickname Bird because she said her father said she looked just like a baby bird when she was born. ”We got real close and always kept each other going. It was like we never let one another get down and be sad. We were always there to pick each other up.”

Soon after Holmes’ release on bail in 2018, former Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam made changes to the state’s 161-year “safekeeping” law. Under the changes to the law, it now bans housing juvenile safekeepers in adult prisons and makes sure that adults in the prison system don’t languish in solitary confinement.

Holmes said she was glad to hear the news when Gov. Haslam changed the law and is grateful for the support from the national advocacy organization, Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, Just City, the Memphis Chapter of Black Lives Matter and her family.

“When they charge you as an adult, they already have this image of you,” Holmes said. “I would tell any teenager in the situation I was in to prove them wrong. Show them you can do everything they don’t want you to do.”

She also offered this advice to teenagers: “Trouble is easy to get into and hard to get out of. My grandmama and my family always preached that to me, but once I got into some deep trouble, I realized that. I’ve got a clean slate. They gave me a second chance and I am most definitely going to run with it.”