Lessons From a Juvenile Training School

This article examines the lessons learned by youths confined to a maximum-security juvenile correctional facility. Using data from an ethnographic study of a cottage of violent offenders in one state’s end-of-the-line training school, the author describes the lessons the institution and its staff members hoped to teach the young people in their care and the informal but vital lessons the inmates indicated they had learned during their incarceration. The continued viability of training schools as a response to serious and violent juvenile offenders is analyzed and discussed.