In the 1990s, when Texas experienced an unprecedented wave of violent crime, Gov. George W. Bush and legislators responded by overhauling the state's juvenile justice system. They prescribed much longer sentences for violent offenders, expanded the range of crimes that could send a youth to adult prison, and worked hard to make sure that young thugs would do hard time for hard crime.

Edwin Debrow Jr. and Bill Everett were two young criminals who ended up on the hard-time side of that equation. Both products of grotesquely dysfunctional families, they committed crimes that earned them long sentences in adult prison. Beyond that, their stories diverge. Debrow is an urban killer who disconnected from society about the time he was old enough to lift a gun and continued to act out his rage through years of incarceration. Everett was a rural methamphetamine addict who ended up in prison as much through stupidity as intent, but has become a model inmate under the tutelage of a caring mentor. The pair share one other trait: Both were willing to give Dallas Observer Editor Julie Lyons their intimate perspectives on what it's like to be a kid in the big house.

For Fort Worth Weekly , this story concludes a collaborative occasional series on Texas' juvenile justice system.

The image is still fixed in the mind of the Bexar County assistant prosecutor 10 years after the trial. Leticia Cortez, who'd just come off maternity leave, remembers Edwin Debrow Jr. casually swinging his legs as he sat at a table in the courtroom, flanked by his defense attorney and his mother. The jury would be looking at horrific autopsy photos of Debrow's victim, and still, those skinny legs would swing, swing, swing.

Jury forewoman Sandra Castro-Guerra would look in the tiny defendant's eyes, and she'd see the face of a 12-year-old boy. How could a little boy have done this? The jurors got part of the answer to that question, but only in the punishment phase, after they had found that Debrow had murdered the cabbie. What they heard about the ugliness of his life, plus the thought in general of sending a child to prison, was so heartrending that jury members cried during deliberations. Despite their tears, however, they felt they could not let Debrow out to steal or kill again. They sentenced him to 27 years of incarceration. Debrow says he knew what he did was wrong. But his rage, and the inability to predict the consequences of his actions, would propel him from the Texas Youth Commission into the adult prison system and continue to scar him and others for years to come.

William R. Everett IV wasn't angry, just scared, when he woke up with a Palo Pinto County deputy sheriff's gun barrel sticking in his eye. He confessed. NEXT »

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