This chapter explores the nature of JJCs as seeming “total institutions” (Goffman, 1961), analysing their practices through the lenses of Foucauldian governmentality, critical developmental psychology, and childhood studies’s discourses on contemporary hegemonic childhood. It interrogates how this hegemonic construction of childhood shaped by developmentalism (Burman, 2017) justifies control and surveillance of youth under the guise of care, while pathologising defiance and obscuring agency. This control, it poses, can be suffocating because it is imposed on the youth as youth and as “offenders”. While acknowledging this, the chapter argues for the recognition of the youths’s autonomous interdependence (Cordero Arce, 2018) within JJCs, showing that, despite the very real structural constraints, moments of genuine interpersonal connection between educators and youth arise in the cracks of the institutional totality.