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Over the past few decades, juvenile justice theories and practices have shifted from punishing youth to a more trauma-informed approach focused on helping youth heal from trauma. While on the surface this shift to care seems to be a positive one, this latest approach continues to perpetuate harmful carceral tenets of defect and control without addressing the systems of harm that youth must navigate. This paper is broken into two parts. The first part employs a critical youth studies and a Black abolitionist feminist lens to contextualize the carceral experiences of three Black young women who experienced multiple forms of structural trauma before, during, and after their involvement in the carceral system. All three are similar in age, where they grew up, and how they experienced carceral care approaches to their trauma. The three young women highlighted were participants in a larger interview study with 30 adults who were incarcerated as adolescents. The second part explores how non-carceral approaches rooted in Black abolition feminism and critical theories, such as critical developmental psychology, could have better addressed the structural trauma experienced by these young women and avoided the added trauma they experienced under carceral care.