Meet the teens in lockup.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Reforming juvenile offenders at the Ethan Allen School for Boys in Wisconsin - Crackdown on Kids - Cover Story

Short of prison, the last stop for young males who commit serious crimes in Wisconsin is the Ethan Allen School for Boys. Set in the pretty, rolling countryside outside the town of Wales, it was originally built as a tuberculosis sanitarium. Ethan Allen, or Wales, as it's commonly called, could easily be mistaken for a prep school, except that the grounds are surrounded by tall, chain-link fences and razor wire.

At the most remote end of campus, a new, maximum-security building has coils of razor wire wrapped around the roof, on top of the fence outside, and above the basketball courts in the backyard. A guard in a riot-proof central control booth monitors the building and opens the automatic doors so kids who become violent or suicidal can be hustled in here. During my visit, three men arrive with one such kid - a short, black teenager with cornrows - and take him into a chamber to be stripped and showered, then into a holding cell across the hall, where a heavy door closes behind him.

Hoots and wails emanate from other cells along the hallway. A couple of kids are lying limply on mats on the floor. One pudgy white boy is placidly brushing his teeth and staring into space. "He's doing real well," the guard in the control booth tells me. "He's just waiting here while his room is cleaned. Pretty soon they'll come and take him back to his cottage."

Ethan Allen has a capacity of 340. Right now there are 505 boys in the facility. The boys live in residential cottages, where they sleep in bunk beds or, because of overcrowding, on extra mats on the floor. During the day they attend school, go to therapy sessions, and hold down campus jobs.

"In the adult system, prisoners are just there to do time - to pay a price," says superintendent Jean Schneider. "That's not true here." Education, treatment, and skills development are a big part of the program, he tells me. "We're still trying to raise kids. We believe that people can change."

Nobody believes that adult criminals change for the better in prison. And given the increasingly punitive tone of public policy toward juvenile offenders, it's hard not to be cynical about the concept of juvenile reform. Ethan Allen has a particularly forbidding aura. The whole place is currently being transferred out of the Department of Health and Human Services and into the Department of Corrections. School kids and teachers around the state will tell you the worst boys in Wisconsin go to Wales. I wanted to meet some of these kids and find out what they were like. I was prepared to see some disturbing sights. What I wasn't prepared for was that many of these kids would share Schneider's belief in changing their lives.

Beyond the maximum-security facility - "the hole" as the kids here call it - I meet a lot of very polite young men in the school's classrooms, wearing white shirts and ties. They shake my hand when we're introduced, and seem eager to talk. Boosterism for the school, and for the whole concept of reform, is a common theme.

One young man named Gordy greets me shyly and explains that he is working on a video about sports at Ethan Allen, which might be used to promote continued funding for the athletic programs. He shows me the script he wrote, called "Champions of Change," extolling the virtues of discipline and teamwork: "It starts with determination, and determination is usually connected to a goal. The sports programs offer several goals you can achieve ... developing leadership...