Youth justice houses have established themselves as a fixed component of juvenile criminal law practice over the past two decades. Starting as a model project in 1999 in Stuttgart Bad Cannstatt, the idea of spatially integrating youth assistance in criminal proceedings, police, and juvenile public prosecution has gained significant traction in most federal states. To this day, their expansion remains a popular measure in criminal policy. Based on a document analysis and conducted expert interviews, the aim of this work was to explain how this idea originated in Germany and how it has been implemented so far, as well as to critically examine the approaches that currently exist in practice from a criminological perspective. A focus was placed on the legal review of the joint spatial accommodation, particularly regarding case-specific conferences. Another emphasis was on a comparison between the virtual youth justice houses and the real facilities.