The central public issue behind the study is what to do with youths who are too young to be criminals and too violent to be treated as youths. The data suggest that youths in both facilities are youths first. How they do time can be understood as their attempt to make an indeterminate sentence determinate and short. In the adult institution, youths must learn to survive by accepting violence as a way of life, a mundane event, and a way of being with others. They lose sight of getting out. Youths in juvenile facilities learned to be con men; they took on and used the treatment language of the program to describe themselves to others in the facility. In this way, they did not have to present their existential self and made time determinate and short: they got better. Youths at both places understood their sentence as punishment. Tabular data and 18 references are given. (Author abstract modified)