The program under examination involved a State contract with a private vendor to provide substance abuse treatment in the form of a therapeutic community (TC) within a public juvenile correctional facility. The authors focused on the basic infrastructure and ideological tensions between a private treatment vendor and a public correctional system. The authors argue that for such a TC to work within a correctional facility, two main infrastructural elements must be successfully merged: (1) private versus public organizations and (2) treatment versus security paradigms. The authors examined data from a recent process evaluation of the implementation of the TC in order to examine the infrastructural elements of goals, organizational environment, and organizational level. The authors found that the differences in the treatment versus the security paradigm, coupled with the hiring of treatment personnel with little to no experience in an institutional environment, set up precursors for model confusion, leading ultimately to program failure. The tensions apparent in this particular case show the basic conflict between a treatment model of juvenile justice and a punishment model of juvenile justice. The findings suggest that where basic infrastructures are incongruent, treatment models introduced within punishment and security models are inherently tension-filled and perhaps, as a result, doomed to failure. The authors recommend that when such programs are undertaken, success is more likely if goals are clearly articulated by all parties and program planning is inclusive. Table, notes, references