Outside the abandoned L.A. building she shares with her boyfriend Troll, Green, 16, has been awake for nearly four days in the throes of acid and speed. She says she started using drugs at home in Houston when she was 15. Once a week, she calls her Mom collect. ``Each time, I tell her I'll be home in a week, even though I know it's not true.''

Tyler Johnson poses with his project, created from spaghetti and marshmallows. Students created structures such as pyramids and cubes while learning about design and balance.

Portrait of Homer Bennett.

14-year-old 'Beavis' with a cat on Hollywood Boulevard. The clock starts the minute a young runaway hits the streets; with each passing day the youth is harder to reach, until finally youth itself is extinguished

Rene, age 15, in a detention cell after three days of sniffing carburator fluid. With nowhere else to detox, he ended up in Juvenile. They've taken a toll on Rene. The drugs, that is. Lots of drugs, beginning at age 13. Doctors suspect that he has brain damage, probably because of drug use. So, his parents turned to an alphabet soup's worth of agencies for help. His mother's experience: "I went all over the place and they wouldn't help me anywhere. I went to RAICES, to STACADA. They are more or less helping him at CAPS. We would be sent from doctor to doctor and then sent to run around looking for this or that paper. They would tell us that the rehabs here were voluntary. They said they couldn't make themselves responsible if he took off." So Rene's family turned to Juvenile to keep him away from drug-using friends. "It's not that we want to have him locked up," Rene's father says. "It's just so that he will see." Now Rene is a familiar face at Juvenile. But don't ask him for details. The drugs have taken their toll.

They try to scare them straight. That's a "crisis intervention" in a nutshell. If a child is causing trouble in school or acting up at home (like this 11-year-old here for fighting with his brother,) parents, administrators, or the courts can send the youngster to Juvenile for an intense dose of intimidation.

A reunion breakfast in Chicago between Molly Rudberg and her estranged father.

Paraprofessional teacher Nicole Spurvey with student Ryan Idleman during "morning circle," where the children gather together, sing and play games. This shows students and staff "exchanging emotional signals, reading and responding to each other, and sharing emotions while problem solving."

Zulema,5, making her fourth visit to Webb County Juvenile Detention, wanted to escape from a world filled with problems. First, she turned to pills. Then came marijuana and now crack cocaine: "When I do drugs it makes me forget about my problems: family problems, friend problems, boyfriend problems. I started drinking, and then I went to pills and then to marijuana, and now I'm on crack cocaine. And the worst part is when you're not drugged anymore, you're back to reality. I tried before, quitting drugs, but I can't stop. "I just give problems to my parents and they're nice people. Like this past time, I just . . . "I was doing cocaine and took some pills and I thought I was gonna die. . . . I wanted to die. And I was scared \'cause . . . I dunno, I got mad at my mom and we were fighting and I went to my room and I tried to cut my veins with my knife. "I wish it would have worked."

Joshua Kitts celebrates after successfully completing a game requiring memorizing and repeating the sequence of squares needed to pass through the game board safely. Students competing on teams work with one another to learn the pattern of steps created by the teachers. Experience-based activities are done daily to strengthen visual-spatial thinking, motor planning and sequencing, problem solving abilities, abstract thinking, and reasoning.

Jose Eduardo, 14, plays checkers in the cellblock common area of the Webb County Juvenile Detention Center. Nothing about the juvenile detention center--not the cinder-block cells, not the orange jumpsuits or the brown plastic slippers--seems made for children. And yet, every day the guests get smaller, and more confused about what brought them here. Psychiatrists say children do not react to punishment in the same way as adults. They learn more about becoming a criminals than they do about becoming a citizens. And one night of loneliness can be enough to prove their suspicions that nobody cares.

Jose, 14, sits in his cell with his hands an feet shackled after he refused to calm down when ordered by detention staff. >"I think I'm a good person, but when they get to me they get to me." Jose is back in Juvenile because he ran away from home. He's good at running away from his problems. There was the time Jose was sent to a residential halfway house. He mused aloud to his escorts that the place was not fenced in and the windows were open. Two hours later, he was gone. But there's more to Jose's story. He admits he's drunk, but a guard suspects he's high on drugs. And he's angry. Jose is often angry. Little things set him off--and get him in trouble. So, Jose keeps landing in Juvenile. There's no other place for him. But, as Jose seethes in his cell, his problems go untreated. His probation officer Sylvia Ortegon tells his story: "His mother is in prison and all he wants is to have his mother. That's all he wants. His mom. He received a phone call from his mother while he was in detention and she told him, 'When I get out of here you're not going to do what you're doing now.' And he was so happy. He was so happy. He told me, 'When my mom comes out, I will behave, Ms. Ortegon. I will behave.' But his mother is gonna be in prison for six years. . . . He is a very likable kid, and he tri

Florence, Colorado's supermax prison, ADX can be seen at left, situated beside a conventional maximum security facility at right.

Inmates, ages 10-16, march at dawn through the exercise yard at the Webb County Juvenile Detention facility. This is the world of young felons, of kids gone astray, of children who cry for their mothers from behind bars. Some have skipped class too much, some have murdered in cold blood. At least half of the kids have been incarcerated before. And, if society's attempts at rehabilitation ultimately fail--or if the parent can't or simply won't do anything to turn around years of neglect and abuse--just a few more visits to juvenile detention will harden some of these kids into full-fledged adult criminals.

Casper, Wyoming firefighters in Level A suits with flash fire protection