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This wonderful country of ours with its freedom loving people incarcerates its citizens at a rate greater than any other nation on earth. The incarcerated include children and adolescents. The following are the stories of some of the many incarcerated adolescent males I have had the honor to work with over the course of twenty years. To continue to ensure a level of confidentiality, their actual names and hometowns are not used. In some cases the stories are a composite of several adolescents' life experiences. The young men range in age from 14 to 20, and are overwhelmingly Afro-American, reaching 85% of the incarcerated population. They hail from our major urban cities, and at the time of my work with them, many had already moved from the more secure adolescent facilities to the minimum security residential centers in which I met them. Some of them had just arrived from local urban juvenile holding centers, to the more rural residential setting in which they were to finish out their sentences, and with good behavior work off some of the days in their often multi-year sentences. These are their stories. Their stories reflect their resilience and courage, as they struggle to understand their life narratives and turn their lives around.