They skipped school, drove without a license, stole, fought, or damaged property. As a result, they are now behind bars for one to four weeks. The time in juvenile detention is meant to be short and tough. It is intended to deter, to create a shock - and thus prevent the young people from reoffending. Why have these particular youths ended up in prison? How are they doing there? How does the detention stay affect their psyche? And what does this mean for their future legal behavior? Christoph Müller focuses on these questions in his study and answers them in the empirical part through narrative-understanding interviews with juvenile detainees, which were analyzed using deep hermeneutics. These interviews vividly demonstrate how much the individuals suffer from their time in juvenile detention.