Prepared by the Youth Center's Juvenile Justice Legal Advocacy Project, it is offered as a tool for officials and advocates attempting to solve the very serious problems of inadequate and counter-rehabilitative conditions of confinement for juveniles in institutions throughout the country. The material in this compilation represents efforts made by youth advocates to address through litigation the problems juveniles face in custodial institutions, where conditions dehumanize and expose youths to the skills of crime more often than they serve rehabilitative goals. The consent decrees, stipulations, and final judgments summarized here are mostly of unreported cases involving various types of facilities where children may be detained, including detention centers, training schools, jails, and mental health facilities. The first section of the manual defines the conditions mandated by the decrees according to topic, It covers areas from mail and telephone use to monitoring and reporting compliance with the decree. The second section, a case index, repeats the material contained in the preceding section but presents it alphabetically by case name. The third section summarizes all the cases, including pending ones, which consider conditions of confinement of juveniles in institutions. Each listing contains the name of the case, the citation or case number, and a summary description of the issues under dispute. The final section of the manual presents verbatim reproductions of six major consent decrees and judgments. (Author abstract modified)