In a disturbing Special Report for the Justice Policy Institute last month, Barbara Anderson, George Hostetter and Lesli A. Maxwell invite you to visit a County Juvenile Hall 

“It's unsafe, decrepit, 'barbaric,' where children rot. Step inside.”

A Fresno County Juvenile Hall is an overcrowded maze of crumbling cells and dingy dorms where 300 or so boys and girls from ages 9 to 17 live in chaotic conditions that leave ample opportunity for the strong to prey on the weak. 

It is a place where five youths stuffed into a cell built for one is not unheard of and three is common. Where a boy sitting on a toilet in a communal bathroom never knows when he'll be slugged by a rival. Where a boy sleeping in a dorm might be awakened by a penis poking against his cheek. It is a place where youths facing criminal charges as varied as murder, rape, robbery and theft are locked in cells for as long as 23 hours a day. Where sexually active teen-age girls sleep next to fourth-graders. Where guards often pull 16-hour days and sometimes receive little or no training before going out to watch over some of Fresno County's most violent youths.

The hall, says Deborah Vargas, staff analyst with the San Francisco-based Center for Criminal and Juvenile Justice, is "barbaric." Fresno juvenile-justice watchdog Nancy Richardson sees but one solution: "Bulldoze" it. Neither would get an argument from inspectors with the state Board of Corrections, who wrote a scathing report after touring the hall twice in the past 15 months. Says Corrections field representative Ken Ventura: "The conditions there are completely unacceptable."

There's a reason hundreds of boys and girls suffer this degradation daily. The hall, built in 1957, is designed to produce it.

Experts long ago established the connection between architecture and human behavior. Put people in cages not fit for zoo animals, and they're likely to act like animals, they say. Immense strides have been made in this discipline over the past half-century. None is found in the hall in southeast Fresno.

Space is a big part of the problem. The hall's capacity is 265 youths, but the number often exceeds 300. Fresno County's rapidly rising population is one explanation for the overcrowding. So are the dramatically higher fees counties must pay to send nonviolent offenders to the California Youth Authority, fees which force cash-strapped Fresno County to keep more convicted youths at home.

Yet, building another wing is no solution. The current hall has too many dormitories. Gang rivals can't be easily separated. Guards can't see into each cell from their stations. Violence and illicit sexual activity are the inevitable results of these design flaws, experts say. 

Now, picture the newest halls. They're built around pods with 10 to 16 one-person cells per pod. Most cells have toilets. Each pod has its own classroom and dining area. Guards have a clear view of everything. Tulare County has gone this route with its new hall. So has the Bronx in New York City. The "podular" system isn't perfect, but it's far different from the one at Fresno County's hall.

See for yourself.

There's A Unit (actually divided into A and B, but regarded as one unit). The most dangerous boys are here.

G Unit, where the girls are housed, is every bit as appalling in its own way. Forty years ago, the typical girl sent to juvenile hall was a runaway. Not anymore. Juvenile crime has grown more complex, and so have the problems facing girls. G Unit hasn't kept pace.

C Unit is a lockdown area for boys showing improved behavior. D and E units are medium-security dorm areas. F Unit is the new treatment area for substance abusers. H Unit is where the youngsters, none older than 14, are housed. J Unit is for youths serving their sentences.

No one has a kind word for the place. In the hall, says a Fresno teen doing time at the county's Elkhorn boot camp, "you rot."

Riding the walls of hell

A hazy midafternoon sun barely penetrates the dust on the paint-splattered windows. It's dark in this nearly empty 20-foot-by-20-foot day room, so dark the place appears deserted to a newcomer. Only the sudden jangling of jailhouse keys and a couple of ghostlike voices break the spell.

Then the eyes adjust, and a handful of inmates, called wards, emerge from the shadows. They're on their way to class but have guards at their elbows, not books in their hands. None is older than 17, yet some are charged with crimes as violent as any committed by the adult cons at Corcoran or San Quentin state prisons. They're told to sit on a green bench.

So they sit. And hope no one attacks them. Unless, of course, one of them plans to do the attacking himself.

Dark, forlorn, lonely, mind-numbingly boring most of the time, blood-curdling dangerous too much of the time, heart-breakingly tragic all of the time. This is A Unit at Juvenile Hall. There's a day room, classroom, dining room, guard station, latrine and two rows of cells. All of it is 44 years old and showing its age.

Mom and dad might as well be on the far side of the moon.

The place is called lockdown.

In architectural lingo, A Unit represents the once-popular "linear" style of jail construction, with lots of straight lines and right angles fanning out from a hub -- the guard station. Popular when Eisenhower was president and Americans were awed by Sputnik, but popular no more.

The cells in A Unit are split into clusters on both sides of the day room, 11 on the north side, 10 on the south. The cells face each other. "Double loaded" is what the architects call it. Inefficient is another word since the guards can't see each cell from their station. The average stay is 30 days for boys, 29 for girls. In theory, the hall is mainly for youths awaiting their day in court, who've been booked for a crime but not convicted. "Pre-disposition" is how the hall describes them. In reality, an estimated 40% of the hall's daily population is "post-disposition." They are boys and girls convicted of a crime and either serving their time at the hall or awaiting placement in a group home or a spot to open in the California Youth Authority. Every unit usually has some "post-disposition" kids.

In A Unit, the concept of "cell" takes on a new meaning. Even people who have never been in a jail cell have some idea, from movies or a tour of Alcatraz, of what one looks like. Steel bunk, government-issue blanket, institutional-gray walls, seatless toilet facing a wall of bars.

Nothing that civilized is found here.

Only 10 of the 21 cells have toilets. The water is turned off in them until a boy bangs on his door and yells, "Water! Water!" That's the only way he can flush. If the water was kept on, some wards might stuff their toilets with sheets and flood their cells. Boys in the nontoilet cells (the north side) hit a buzzer until a guard takes them to the two-urinal, six-toilet latrine. Toilet or no toilet, cells reek of urine, feces, sweat and dried food.

Nineteen cells have one or two built-in beds. Overcrowding forces boys -- two or three at a time -- to sleep on mattresses on the floor. There are no shelves or desks or pegs. Personal items, like a book, are lined up on the floor. The walls, showing the ravages of decades of bored, angry boys, are a crude mosaic of names, profanities, doodlings, gouges and scratches.

Late at night, after lights go off at 11, the walls reverberate with the "barking" of Bulldog gang members.

It is not unusual for boys to spend 16 hours a day in these cells. Some boys say they've been locked up as many as 23 hours a day. It's no exaggeration to suggest these cells are uncivilized. In 1991, a group of parents in Seattle filed a class-action lawsuit against a county juvenile hall with similar conditions. A judge ordered a halt to the practice of putting three or more boys into one cell. Too dangerous, the judge said. Probably unconstitutional, too.

Next to the south block of A Unit cells is a separate cluster of six cells called B Unit, or segregation. One boy to a cell here because the wards are suicidal or particularly dangerous. "It's like living in a cave," says a 15-year-old boy who spent three months there.

Boys with communicable diseases -- tuberculosis, for example -- are kept in segregation cells. The hall has no infirmary, let alone one with secure beds, and the first-floor clinic is so cramped the nurses do blood tests standing next to the boys' toilet. "Sometimes, I feel we're doing 'bush' medicine," says head nurse Carol Parmely.

"Lockdown" sums up in one word the entire reason for A Unit's existence. Lock 'em up until until something else happens. Until they go home or are sent somewhere else in the hall or they're kicked out to the county's Elkhorn boot camp or up to the California Youth Authority in Stockton.

Looking ahead isn't A Unit's strong suit. Getting through the day is goal enough. There are 27 cells (21 in A, six in segregation), none with any more warmth than a kick in the groin, and 60-plus alleged criminals who must be shoehorned into them. You do the math. The official word is that each cell is at least 8 feet by 10 feet. Step it off in a typical cell, and the measurement is closer to 7 feet by 9. The boredom is constant. Some boys catch cockroaches and tether them with string from their clothes. The floors once had tiles. Boys ripped them up and used the jagged edges to etch gang symbols into the scarred walls.

Hall officials finally removed all floor tiles from the cells. That's when they learned the adhesive contained asbestos. The boys who ripped them up never knew it.

Peek through a typical cell's narrow, dirty window, and you're likely to find two or three boys lying on mattresses, their backs to each other. That passes for privacy.

The entrance to A Unit is through a heavy steel door off the main hall. Visitors must be buzzed in, the norm since 1994 when electronic locks were installed. Getting through the door isn't the problem. Closing it is. The door to A Unit tends to stick slightly ajar when closed with a normal pull. A stuck door leading to the main hall, where cooks and secretaries and visitors may be walking by, is the kind of security threat that keeps hall administrators awake at night. Interim director Ollie Dimery-Ratliff says she is no different.

With good reason, since the hall has had its share of escape attempts. In 1991, seven boys in the dorm-style D Unit -- swinging pool cues, broomsticks and a baseball bat -- attacked their guards, then smashed their way out of the wire-reinforced windows. Three guards were hospitalized. Since the mid-1990s, the guards (who carry no weapons) have armed themselves with pepper spray.

On Christmas Eve 1999, two girls whose good behavior had earned them a work shift in the hall's kitchen, took off. One was caught on Christmas, the other 11 days later.

It doesn't happen just in Fresno County. In January, six boys tried to escape from a juvenile detention center in Santa Rosa. Dozens of sheriff's deputies responded to the ensuing riot, and one staff member was hospitalized after an attempted stabbing. This in a hall with only 90 youths. "We're working on fixing that," Dimery-Ratliff says of the stuck door.

Fresno County Chief Probation Officer Larry Price is ultimately responsible for what happens at the hall. The place, he says, is "a time bomb waiting to go off." The stuck front door of A Unit is one spark that could set it off. The hall is full of them.

The school day in A Unit begins on that green bench in the day room, where the boys are sitting. Some are giggling and horsing around, but they're not showing off for a coed. The only female around is the no-nonsense guard standing over them, arms crossed, a can of pepper spray within easy reach on her belt.

What is so significant about the seemingly simple act of getting a dozen or so boys from their cells to a classroom? In A Unit, the answer can be summed up in one word: movement. Sixty or 65 of the most volatile, dangerous teen-age boys in Fresno County are constantly shuttled around the tiny confines of A Unit. Every step they take outside their cells is potential trouble -- an opportunity to attack, a risk of being attacked. More than half the kids in the hall belong to gangs. That's one reason why the ritual on the bench is so dangerous.

It's a vicious cycle: Bulldogs keep an eye out for the vulnerable Sureno to attack, Surenos look for a Norteno, Nortenos look for a Bulldog. In A Unit, with only one classroom, there's no way to separate gang members and still get them to class.

Gang-related assaults are routine. "Sneak and punch" is the favorite tactic. It used to be called a sucker punch, where one boy slugs an unsuspecting victim looking the other way. In A Unit, the fist to the back of the head is the favored way alpha males strut their territorial imperative. "Like the kid on the street looks for a victim, the kid in here looks for a victim, too," a guard says.

It takes only seconds. Like the day when a boy from a cell on the south side of A Unit was let out long enough to spot a rival in the bathroom on the north side. In lightning-quick fashion, he ducked into the bathroom and slugged the victim twice. Pop, pop.

Guards, who could only shout at the attacker as he shot past them, quickly wrestled the boy to the floor. Handcuffed, he was hustled back to his room. He didn't care. The boy told anyone who would listen that he got in two punches before they tackled him. Using physical force to break up fights is unusual. Typically, guards prefer pepper spray. They used pepper spray 107 times last year. Wards learn early that guards will use the spray in a pre-emptive strike. The boy or girl who is threatening a staff member and ignoring a command to cool it also can get a short, quick burst to the face.

Pregnant and asthmatic wards don't get sprayed. They're the only exceptions.

Finally, A Unit's version of the school bell rings for the wards sitting on the bench. The call to academics is the bark from a guard to assume "pat-down" position -- eyes to the wall, hands on the back of heads. Nobody thinks about the square root of pi until a full body search is done. Pat-down is done after class, too, because it's easy for a boy to hide a pencil or staple inside his baggy shorts.

Guards tear apart the cells every day while the boys are in class, looking for potential weapons. They still shake their heads in grudging admiration of the boy in C Unit who smuggled a box of pencils into his cell. The threat is real. Juvenile Hall usually houses at least one youth facing murder or attempted-murder charges. The most at one time was 18 in 1994.

In an office near the public entrance, hall officials keep a sample of the homemade weapons they've confiscated from youths: There is a foot-long shard of plastic covering from a fluorescent light fixture, filed to a point. And what looks like a bedspring, straightened into a potentially lethal stiletto. One juvenile didn't even need the wood casing from his pencil. He smuggled just the pencil lead into his cell, then wrapped a piece of cloth around it.

The most curious weapon is a beige ball slightly bigger than a marble. It is composed of countless chips of paint patiently scraped from cell walls and solidified with some kind of ad-libbed glue. Whatever its engineering, the ball is rock hard. A handful could turn a pillowcase into a potentially lethal weapon.

On this day, the boys waiting for class are clean. A guard unlocks the metal gate separating the dining area from the day room, and the boys scoot to a modest-size classroom with rows of desks. State law requires each ward to spend four hours a day in class. Because A Unit is so crowded, that means three daily four-hour sessions, from 8:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. This time, the boys leave the sucker punches at home. Everyone gets to class without mishap.

All too often, they don't. At least four fights on average happen somewhere in the hall every week. Most don't result in charges, but 62 youths were booked for crimes committed inside the hall last year. Twenty-nine were for battery.

One of the most delicate relationships in any unit, but especially in a heated atmosphere like lockdown, is between youths and guards. It can turn violent in an instant. Last year, staff members were assaulted 72 times by the boys and girls they guarded. Four assaults were so serious the boys were booked with additional charges. Anything can be turned into a weapon. One guard was assaulted by a youth swinging a pillowcase stuffed with three Bibles.

But they need each other. The constant interaction between guards and youths can make a unit click. It helps guards get a sense of what's really happening, and the troubled youngsters get a much-needed human touch from authority figures.

Here, again, Fresno County's hall fails its mission of juvenile justice. For one thing, guards are overworked. It's not unusual for Terryl Thomas, a supervising guard in C Unit, to work 16 straight hours. And sometimes he'll pull three back-to-back shifts in one week. He's not alone. Full-time guards worked 27,000 hours of overtime last year. The state Board of Corrections found that guards often are undertrained, too. Some get none before starting work. For them, it's on-the-job training.

Combine overworked and undertrained guards with youths who often are abusive, and the result, in any jail, can be guard-on-inmate violence. Similar allegations have rocked the California Youth Authority in recent years. Price, the county's chief probation officer, says he knows of no serious guard-on-ward attacks. Yet, the possibility is always there.

Like the night late last year when A Unit guard Leon Hernaosoa, making the rounds of segregation, hears a boy banging on the door. Hernaosoa opens it, and the boy thrusts out his arm, revealing a purple bruise near the biceps. The boy says a guard did it. Hernaosoa touches the arm but doesn't take sides. It'll be investigated, he tells the boy: "Just chill, man." Hernaosoa closes the door, but hasn't forgotten the boy's bruise.

"The work can change your personality if you're not careful," he says. "I see it with some of the staff. I'm trying to stay away from that."

State law requires one guard for every 10 youths in the hall during waking hours, which puts enormous pressure on administrators and guards. Part-time guards worked 62,000 hours last year. Nor is it unusual for guards with just a few months' experience to find themselves in positions of considerable responsibility, where a seemingly simple mistake can have serious consequences.

Like the night this winter in another unit when a guard with six months' experience was put in charge of dinner. The normal routine, unfamiliar to the guard, is to hand each boy a spoon and his tray of food. Instead, she set up a row of spoons on a table to let each boy take one. Some boys might not be content with just one. And in the wrong hands, a spoon can be turned into a lethal weapon. Supervisor Danny Pallares quickly set the rookie guard straight. "These guys are so quick, they'll take two spoons without you seeing," he says.

Actually, any movement of boys outside their locked cells is a tense moment for even the most experienced guards. Almost any personal hygiene task, for example, is a dangerous, labor-intensive job for guards.

A night this winter is typical. Hernaosoa is in charge of getting 66 A Unit boys into showers without an incident. He brings 12 boys to the dining room for a pep talk: "Soap up. Rinse off. Get out." The boys stare at Hernaosoa passively, but one raises his hand: "Are we going to have hot water?" Hernaosoa shrugs his shoulders. He can't guarantee hot water in this hall.

Hernaosoa takes the 12 boys back to their cells, then picks two to go first into the showers. Any more than two is too risky. All 66 boys finally get their showers, but it takes more than six hours.

Shaving is done one boy at a time in front of the unit's only glass mirror -- over the sink in the guards' bathroom. Through it all, Hernaosoa is careful to watch his back, to watch his colleagues' backs, to be firm yet fair with the youths.

Lockdown, he adds, is a place where even veteran guards avoid yelling at youths facing the most serious charges: "You set them off, and they'll come at you."

No guard has ever killed a ward in Juvenile Hall, nor has a ward killed another ward, hall officials say. But youths often try to take their own lives. In January 1991, a 17-year-old boy hanged himself with bedsheets, the hall's first suicide in more than 12 years. Just last year, a 14-year-old boy in A Unit for stealing a gun almost joined him.

Although there were six documented suicide attempts and 65 reports of self-inflicted injuries in 2000, the actual numbers probably are much higher. "Every day, someone is trying to commit suicide," says a guard in lockdown. "If not, they're on a watch. I guarantee you're going to get one a week." Standing a mere 5 feet tall and weighing only 100 pounds, the 14-year-old shattered the plastic light fixture in his cell's ceiling, grabbed a sharp, jagged piece and dug it into the skin of his left arm. He did this repeatedly, working his way down his arm and stopping only when he got close to his wrist. Then he switched arms.

Over the next few weeks, he mutilated himself again and again. Once with staples he'd hidden in his shoes. Another time with a broken plastic food tray. He slashed his arms and chest that time. Then there was the time he talked a cellmate into helping. The cellmate dug a deep gash from the 14-year-old's elbow to his wrist. The boy had to be rushed to University Medical Center. This boy is no angel. He threatened to "gut like a fish" a public-school classmate with a shard of glass. He told his school principal that he planned to shoot himself. Holding up an empty ammunition clip, he said, "I know where the gun is."

Within his first week in the hall, the boy tried to drown himself in a sink full of water. He has been seeing a psychologist since he was in third grade and long ago was diagnosed with a list of psychological disorders. The boy was in A Unit not because it is well equipped to handle youths with serious mental problems, but because it's the most secure place in the hall. The 14-year-old with a road map of scars on both arms isn't in A Unit these days. The Probation Department finally found a group home for him. The boy survived seven months in A Unit waiting for his deliverance. Occasionally sucker punched when he stepped outside his cell, inside he spent his less-self-destructive moments fashioning dolls out of toilet paper and thread from his socks.

Guards such as Audrey Ireland know all about suicidal boys. She walks the "double-loaded" cellblocks of A Unit and segregation every 15 minutes on her shift, looking for life through each door's Plexiglas window. She'll take an extra minute at a door if a head is under the blanket. She doesn't move on until she sees the rhythmic rise and fall of the cover. That way, Ireland says, "you can tell he's breathing."

That's not always the case. Guards found a boy last year with a piece of torn mattress around his neck. Hall officials revived the boy, then placed him in the "restraint" chair, where he was held at the ankles and wrists by leather straps. The boy stayed there until he was calm enough to head back to the same cell where he had just tried to kill himself.

Guards used handcuffs or the restraint chair 193 times last year. Often, a youth who attempts suicide is put into one of the hall's eight camera rooms. Each room has a camera high in the corner, which beams the youth's every action back to monitors in the guard station. Whether the guards actually get a good view is another question. Youths will throw food or even feces against the lens. And if there's a fight in the unit's day room, for example, the guards must respond, leaving the monitors unattended. That's why the hall takes a different approach to boys who come close to killing themselves.

They are usually stripped. Not even underwear, which could be turned into a noose, is left. They're given only a suicide gown -- part wool blanket, part dressing gown with Velcro snaps -- and watched 24 hours a day by rotating guards who peer through a cell door's window.

One day last October is typical of the watch. A boy is huddled in the corner of his cell, knees under his chin, gray gown around his body. He has tried to hang himself. He pulls his toes inside the gown, his pale cheek a stark contrast to the cloth. If the boy looks up, he'll see the impassive face of a guard staring through the window. The boy doesn't look. His gaze is down. Always down.

America's juvenile-justice system tries to balance hope with punishment. That is why the youths are called wards and the guards are called counselors. The system wants the youths to believe they have a future. None of that hopeful message gets to the boys of A Unit. The result is a venom as toxic as anything on earth. "In the hall, you hear the people fighting all the time over who they are and where they're from," says a 17-year-old former McLane High student who did time in A Unit and now is about to graduate from the Elkhorn boot camp. He means much of the trouble in A Unit is racially or gang motivated. Like the trouble boiling inside a 17-year-old Hispanic in lockdown this winter. He's a member of the Bulldogs, the hall's dominant gang.

This boy always sleeps alone in a segregation cell. Orders from the judge. The boy likes to boast to guards when a rival gangbanger walks by: "I want to eat him for breakfast." Already in the hall seven months for firearm possession, he dreams of getting out and starting his own tattoo parlor. But not until he takes care of the African-American boy, leader of the rival Crips, in a nearby cell. That, the tattoo artist told one guard, is who he really wants to kill.

Boys who have endured A Unit say life there only increased their anger. "You sit in your room, you sleep, get up, maybe go to school, an hour on the yard and that's about it," says a boot camp cadet who did time at the hall. "It drove me nuts. I couldn't stand it."

Not many can. A 15-year-old who spent three months in A Unit last summer for strong-armed robbery said he would tie a knot in a bedsheet and swing it at the overhead light fixture until he broke it. He said he couldn't sleep. Mostly, he was just angry.

Yet, in a perverse way, the rage in A Unit has one redeeming quality: It gives the boys a common bond, one that often expresses itself in "who-riding." That is the boys' slang for beating the concrete walls and steel doors of cells with their fists. It usually occurs after lights-out at 11 p.m. One boy at first: bang, bang, bang. None of the other boys knows who is "riding" the wall of his cell with his fists. Hence the term -- who-riding.

But the answer doesn't matter. A second boy joins in: bang-bang, bang-bang, bang-bang. Pretty soon, everyone in lockdown is "riding" their cell walls and doors.

"The hall doesn't teach you nothing," says a Kerman teen at Elkhorn boot camp. "When your temper gets going and you get mad, you need somebody to explain to you: 'OK, this is why you're doing it, this is why you got mad.' At the hall, they don't do that. They say, 'You want to get mad? OK, we'll throw you in a room.' "What does that teach you? It teaches you to get mad and take it out on the room. There's nothing there but the walls. So, you hit the walls."

Handcuffs and a sonogram

G Unit is different from the others -- only girls here. The capacity is 36, one girl each in six isolation cells, and 30 in an open dorm. The actual population often reaches 50 or 55. There's something else different -- the atmosphere. At first glance, it seems almost pleasant.

The high-pitched din is the first thing a visitor hears at night. Chattering teen-agers, just back from a long school day, stand in clusters beside a row of narrow, metal bunk beds. A few sit cross-legged on thin mattresses and talk quietly. One lies on her stomach, legs kicked up and her head resting on a pillow.

Small metal shelves hang from peach-colored concrete walls next to the beds. They hold the girls' belongings: Bibles, magazines, paper for writing letters home, a teen-age romance paperback here and there. Pieces of the hall's standard-issue uniform -- khaki shorts, navy T-shirts, gray sweat shirts -- dangle from pegs. Shampoo and hair conditioner line the shelves.

Don't be fooled. G Unit is an ominous place.

"You always watch your back in there," says a 16-year-old runaway. "You can never really let your guard down. It doesn't feel any safer in there than it did on the streets."

What some of these girls have done on the outside is chilling.

Like the 15-year-old brought in for cocaine possession who stashed $1,000 -- six $100 dollar bills, two $50s and 15 $20s -- in her vagina. Or the pair of 15-year-olds who admitted they helped a boy elude police. The boy was later accused of stabbing an old man to death. Or the 13-year-old who tried to strangle her mother.

But the most important difference in G isn't easily seen or heard. Simply put, girls' mental and physical needs are different from boys'. Girls get pregnant. Girls shoulder the abortion decision. Girls are more likely to be primary caregivers of young children. More likely to be sexually abused at home. More likely to run away from home to escape such abuse. More likely to be physically abused in close relationships. And that's just scratching the surface, says Deborah Vargas, staff analyst with the San Francisco-based Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice.

These girls need single-person cells, Vargas says, not dorms. They need a place where 9- and 10-year-olds aren't sleeping near sexually active teens, where accused murderers aren't sleeping next to runaways, where rival gang members aren't sleeping side by side. They need a bit of privacy and a chance to bond with each other in safety. They need special counseling for their unique needs and small, private rooms where they can get it.

G Unit fails them. "A lot of these girls have been abused their whole lives," Vargas says. "And the [juvenile-justice] system is abusing them again."

There's a strict system of cause and effect in this unit. Good behavior and "doing the program" earn privileges such as hair ties and name-brand shampoo and conditioner. These well-behaved girls are called "stage golds." Everyone else gets generic-brand hair products. All too often, the sexually experienced and aggressive girls prey on those who aren't.

It all adds up to a dicey mix for the girls who stay here and the guards who work here. Peacekeeping is a perpetual challenge. So is safety. "I try to promote a family atmosphere in here, but it's hard," says senior counselor Rodney Walker. "There's a lot of negative stuff they bring in here with them. I tell them over and over to leave what happens on the outside to the outside."

The girls with experience in G Unit say there are just two ways to protect yourself on the inside. "You've got to claim a gang or be bisexual," says a 12-year-old girl, who has been in and out of the hall since she was 9. "Juvenile Hall ain't Chowchilla [women's prison], but it ain't no joke, either."

The swing-shift crew clocks in at 3 p.m. Senior counselor Nate McKinney, leaving for the day, tells his replacements: "You're blessed. The pop [population] is way down. They've been good."

Thirty-six girls is manageable, says Walker, who's in charge until 11 p.m. On this night, for a change, no one will sleep on the floor. Not like last month, when girls had to sleep in the hallway with only a thin mattress between them and the concrete. There's a pecking order when all the bunks and cells fill up yet new girls keep coming through the front door. Rookies sleep on the floor, veterans in the beds. Unless a girl is pregnant or sick. Then a veteran will give up her bunk.

A 13-year-old, who now lives in a group home, says she slept nine nights on the floor during her three-month stay in G Unit. "I never did sleep well there," she says. There's a lot of movement during the swing shift. Between 3 and 11 p.m., the girls exercise, shower, take part in group therapy and eat dinner. Every activity is highly choreographed.

Two guards, Desiree Escovedo and Mary Helen Mendoza, start organizing shampoo, soap and toothbrushes for the hygiene ritual. Another guard arranges chairs in the day room for a presentation from Barrios Unidos, an anti-gang program.

The girls hang out on their beds and wait. The volume in the dorm rises. Bam! Then a wail of pain. The guards scramble toward the dorm. A 14-year-old clutches her fist, the one she used to punch the concrete wall. Escovedo whisks her into the laundry room and shuts the door. A minute passes, and Escovedo emerges with the girl. Her right hand is red and her cheeks are wet.

"She pissed me off," the girl says to Escovedo and Walker, talking about a dormmate. "I wanted to hit her, but I didn't." No matter, Walker replies. Punching the wall was a bad choice. He sends her down to the first-floor medical clinic. The clinic is so small that, should the girl need X-rays, they'll be taken in the hallway. She soon returns with a bandaged hand and a smile. She flashes a wrapped wrist, her badge of honor, to the other girls. Walker shakes his head. It's just 10 minutes into his shift.

There's a vulnerability to many of these girls that's as unsettling as their street-tough veneer. A 16-year-old cries because she wants to send her mother a letter but doesn't know the address. There's a 15-year-old chronic runaway who prefers living in the hall to being at her home or in a group home. And a 17-year-old who wants to slash her wrists.

A pregnant 15-year-old asks if the chips and soda she sees in the guard's station are for her birthday party. When the guard shakes her head no, the girl turns back. "I thought I was going to get a party," she says.

The chatter is incessant in this locked dorm where these girls spend as little as one night or as long as six months. They lie on their beds and flip through magazines. They brush and braid each other's hair. They write letters to boyfriends and family members.

Moments when they are just girls.

Walker hustles the girls from their bunks. They line up across the dorm and, at his command, begin their jumping jacks. Squats are next. It's all part of the routine in G Unit, but four girls stay on their beds. They're pregnant. The unit always has expectant mothers, some as young as 13. Most get better prenatal care while they're locked up than they would outside, Mendoza says. Like the 14-year-old who is in the hall for prostitution.

Down at the first-floor booking area, the hall's entrance/exit for youths, probation officers escort the 14-year-old in handcuffs to a waiting car. The hall-issued T-shirt and pants hang off her small frame. She returns an hour later, still handcuffed, gripping a sonogram of her fetus. "We've known her since she was 11," a probation officer says.

The girls file out of the dorm into the day room. Some are tiny in baggy Juvenile Hall uniforms. Without a trace of makeup on their faces, they all look so young.

Guard Lorelie Beaton tells the girls where to sit. They munch on Cornnuts. An ex-con and former gangbanger sits down with them. He tells them how hard it was "to leave the life." How it took years of being cooped up in concrete and steel prison cells for him to change. He's in his 40s and just now holding down a steady job.

Deeply moved, they listen in silence. It's the first time they've been quiet in more than an hour. The ex-con finishes his half-confession, half-warning. A girl fires questions at him: "How'd you stay clean? How'd you take care of your kids?" Before he answers, she tells him about the guilt eating her up. Her baby daughter is living with her mother while she's locked up. She breaks down, and the girl next to her puts a hand on her back.

The room's silence is broken only by the girl's crying.

A few girls don't come out of the dorm for the Barrios Unidos presentation. They're locked alone in cells for behavioral problems or suicide threats.

Escovedo uses the Barrios Unidos lull to let each cell girl out to shower. They aren't allowed to mix with the rest of the dorm. A girl who tried to hang herself has been on constant watch for hours. She's the first to shower.

Walker calls the mental health counselor who has been keeping tabs on the girl, asking whether it's safe to give her clothes. She's been wearing the "suicide gown," with only Velcro-closing tabs. The mental health counselor says the girl can have underwear after her shower. But she has to earn the rest of the clothing back, one piece for every hour she shows progress.

The suicidal girls trouble Walker most.

"The hardest thing is dealing with the ones who want to hurt themselves," he says. "They can't really do anything because we're constantly monitoring them. But the idea that they want to kill themselves really gets to me. And if I make one wrong move in those situations, it could mean life or death."

Sometimes it's the little things that push the hall to the edge. Little to someone on the outside, but not to those behind locked doors.

It's too early for dinner, so the girls continue to groom themselves. A girl who's in charge of gathering dirty laundry strides back and forth in the row of bunks, stuffing T-shirts, shorts and underwear into a bag. It's a chore she earned for good behavior, a measure of freedom in a place without much. All the laundry is mixed together, washed and passed out. No one gets the same clothes again. Even underwear isn't exclusive. There's a set for girls on their period, and a set for those who aren't, standard policy in corrections.

What isn't standard is who passes out the underwear. In G Unit, the power resides with the best-behaved girls. This only raises the unit's tensions because some girls say they're singled out to get the least-desirable items. "It grosses me out," says a 16-year-old girl, now living in a group home. "We always fought over who got the underwear without stains."

The last girl to shower alone is 12 years old. She has been locked in a cell after she got caught in bed with another girl. Escovedo complains to Walker that the girl was "being nasty" during her shower. Gesturing and cursing. Walker tells Escovedo to get the girl dressed and send her out to talk with him. The 12-year-old emerges from the dorm, hair still wet. She sits down at a table with Walker and complains that guards target her because she's gay.

Walker asks what happened the night before. She tells him she got into bed with her girlfriend. "We weren't doing anything but kissing," she says. "If they're going to trip about that, I should have just f***** her."

She tells Walker, "If you're going to keep all the gay people apart, then you'll have to separate half the dorm." Walker reminds her that any kind of sex won't be tolerated in the hall.

There is a sexually charged atmosphere in G, perhaps inevitable when so many teen girls are housed in an open dorm.

In the middle of the night, say those who have been through G, it's easy for girls to crawl into bed with each other. Or they'll sneak around the dorm on foot, stealing a kiss or touching a breast. They master the timing of the walk-through, when guards patrol the dorm in 15-minute intervals doing bed checks. The girls jump back into their own beds before the adults show up.

A 13-year-old remembers waking one night to bright lights and shouts -- usually a sign of a suspected sexual encounter in the bunks. That's when a guard made everyone hop out of bed and stand until someone admitted guilt.

Some girls are gay, says another 12-year-old girl. Others say the homosexual activity is bravado -- a way to show their moxie. "They may do that while they're in, but they're [straight] on the outs," the 12-year-old says.

Guards keep the younger, more vulnerable girls in beds in front of their station, Walker says. They interrupt any conversations among the girls that turn to sex. And they never put more than one girl in a cell. It doesn't always work.

"They can be very conniving," Walker says.

The girls in isolation are locked back inside their cells. The rest return from the day room to the dorm to start their showers. Escovedo stands watch over six girls at a time. She can't take her eyes off them for a second. Someone could get jumped. But sometimes a guard's gaze is diverted, and the result is quick, furtive oral sex. A 17-year-old says she hates group showers because there's always one girl who stares.

Mendoza stays in the dorm with the girls waiting their turn. The first few emerge from the showers, their heads wrapped in towels. More girls come out of the shower room and line up in front of Mendoza. They raise their hands over their heads while she fires a shot of "powder fresh" Secret into their armpits. No one applies her own deodorant. Mendoza passes out combs. The girls stand in small groups as they comb through tangles. One conversation turns to sex.

A girl with long, brown locks taunts another with short, blondish spikes. "Are you gay or bi?" The girl with spikes answers: "I ain't either. I'm not that way. I don't know why everyone thinks I'm that way."

Mendoza interrupts them. Walker shakes his head.

"That talk is constant," he says. "And it can get heated, especially when there are girls who are militantly straight and preach that God will condemn them for that lifestyle."

The tyranny of numbers

Hall officials aren't ignorant of the connection between environment and the youths' behavior. This is clear on the maximum-security C Unit, with its eight-bed dormitory and 13 cells. As many as 50 boys are housed here, and hall officials use any psychological trick they can to keep the peace. Each boy can have a deck of cards, three family pictures (including a baby picture for boys who are fathers), one incoming letter and a magazine or paperback book.

The cells are numbered 1 through 12, then skip to 15. There's no 13 or 14 because "thirteeners" and "fourteeners" are gang symbols.

"Food," says juvenile hall architect Patrick Sullivan of Claremont, "is No. 1" when it comes to keeping peace in any jail for boys and girls. Feed them a lot and feed them the same amount, he says. The wards hate it when some get seconds and others don't, like on a November night in C Unit.

The food isn't bad, even if an occasional box of orange juice is past its expiration date or a bug sometimes finds its way into the meal. The first-floor kitchen makes about 1,600 meals a day, feeding not only the hall but also Elkhorn boot camp. Mistakes happen.

The menu on this night: Italian roast beef, au gratin potatoes, salad, squash, wheat bread, peanut butter cookies. It's fairly typical of dinner in the hall. The big question is who gets leftovers after the food cart has made its rounds. On this night in C Unit, there were extra potatoes, green salad, and a loaf and a half of Wonder bread.

Just enough for half the unit. The boys, locked behind steel doors, didn't know if they were blessed or cursed until the guard made his decision. The losers learned their fate when they heard the creak of the food cart growing faint.

Then the rumble began among the losers. First raised voices, then a few scattered metallic clinks. A tinny symphony of protest soon filled C Unit as the losers pounded spoons against their cell doors. Only when the last slice of Wonder bread was gone and the food cart was wheeled back to the dining room did the protest stop and C Unit fall quiet.

Oh, to be in lockdown again

D and E units are near-mirror images of each other, a pair of 32-bed dormitories for medium-security inmates. In some ways, the units are the hall's version of luxury suites. There are cots instead of bunk beds. The walls at both ends of E Unit are decorated with a mural of trees. Boys who stick to the game plan can land a spot in the honor section, a room with just four beds. D and E units send a clear message: Play by our rules and reap the blessings.

Many boys grab the offer. Some don't.

Like the two boys in E Unit playing a card game called "killer." They're moaning about the hall's daily routine, as do many of the youths. For one thing, their tennis shoes don't fit. "We get docked points when our heels hang out of our shoes," one boy says. "But I'm a size 8, and they gave me a 61/2."

But that's not their real beef. They don't like E Unit's rules. They don't like waking up early, they don't like the daily jumping jacks, they don't like making their beds before breakfast. So, they're thinking about screwing up so they'll get sent back to lockdown. Says one boy: "It's better over there 'cause you get to sleep."

Little boys, serious charges

They're all 10 to 14 years old in H Unit, an almost mirror image of G's layout next door. It's nicknamed the "little boys" unit. This is a dangerous age range. The 10-year-olds are preadolescents, more interested in sports or horseplay than teen-age obsessions. Some of the 14-year-olds no doubt are sexually active. Here in H Unit, the truly little boys and some boys taller than grown men sleep together in a dorm with 32 bunks and cots.

One of the 10-year-olds on this December day is all of 4 feet and 90 pounds. He's also accused of participating in a robbery and murder. That's not the norm in H Unit. Most of the boys are in for stealing or bringing a knife or gun to school or fighting. They've stolen their share of cars, too. But the boy perhaps looking at a murder charge has no trouble fitting into the routine. He hangs his head over the edge of bunk 29 to whisper to the boy below in bunk 30. Hangin' out in H Unit.

Guards keep score here, as they do in every unit. A hundred points means you're obeying the rules. Points are deducted for misbehavior. Rewards disappear, too.

A boy on bunk 12 is passing gas to the delight of his dormmates. He's kicking his blanket up in the air and pulling it over his head. He's bad-mouthing a new arrival about getting in trouble on only his second day. Suddenly, the guards have had enough of the boy on bunk 12, and he's put into one of the six isolation cells at the end of the dorm. That will cost him points, and he knows it. The dorm clown rattles and pounds on his door. He yells at the female guard: "Hey, skinny-ass b****!"

A reward here is doing such chores as the daily ritual of setting up and dismantling a makeshift classroom. It's a common task since so many classrooms have been turned into cells and dorms.

Boyish pranks make up most of the trouble in H Unit. A poster warns: "Remember, if you want to keep using the hair grease, keep it in your hair, not on the walls, cameras, beds, etc. or you will lose the privilege." But pranks aren't all the trouble. Sex is a constant threat here, too, especially in the showers and at night. Some boys demand oral sex from others. A penis on the cheek in the dark is one way it begins.

The sexual activity seldom rises to the level of assault, hall officials say. Usually, they say reassuringly, it's consensual.

Into the abyss

Your juvenile hall, says architect Sullivan, "sends a message to the kids about what you think of them." Many Fresno County youths will get that message the hard way. 

Like the 14-year-old boy brought to the hall this winter for a probation violation. He's thin, arms and legs like sticks, and has walked the 100 or so yards from booking to A Unit. Most boys start out in lockdown until hall officials get a feel for who's trouble and who's malleable.

The door to A Unit opens, and loud, angry voices hit him in the gut. Two guards are behind him, but he keeps moving forward without being told. Past the dining room where a handful of boys stop playing dominoes long enough to check him out. No one smiles. The procession stops at the guard station. A guard grabs his wrist and looks at the yellow tag to get his name and ward number. He neither resists nor looks at her face.

"If you see someone you don't like, you're not going to go out of your way to cause problems," she says. "I don't want to hear no cussing, no barking. I don't want to see no handshakes, you know what I mean?" She gives him a half-hearted demonstration of the gang handshake he'd better avoid.

The guard flicks her finger against the boy's arm to get his attention. "And don't be so serious. It's not that bad in here," she says.

Bedding and hall-issued tennis shoes in hand, the boy is taken to his cell by another guard, a man. The cell door opens, and the boy waits as the guard yells, "Roommate." The door starts to close, but the guard suddenly sticks his head back inside. "You been in here before?" he asks. The boy shakes his head no. "Well," the guard tells his roommate, "help him out with the rest room."

It's impossible to know whether the female guard's final words are still ringing in the boy's head: "It's not that bad in here." But one thing is likely -- he has no idea what it's like to sleep three or four to a tiny cell for weeks or months, to fear being sucker punched when he goes to the bathroom, to wonder if a stranger's hand might slide up his bare leg late at night as the "barking" of gang members echoes through a darkened concrete cavern.

He's about to find out.

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