Giving Compass' Take:

• The Marshall Project reports on a jail in New Orleans, where teenagers convicted as adults can earn credits toward a high school degree — but the conditions around them are rough.

• How close are we coming to reforming the system, so that we reduce the incarceration of teenagers? Does the program in this article (created in partnership with a nonprofit) show promise?

• Rikers doesn't put teens in solitary, but other New York jails do.

It was Juron’s second day in the New Orleans jail and he was bewildered. At 17 years old, he had been arrested for the first time and charged as an adult for allegedly taking a woman’s cell phone during an argument and firing a gun into the air, which he denied. His mother couldn’t afford bail, so he would be locked up for months until a trial, sleeping on a hard slab. If he was convicted — a possibility he could barely acknowledge — he faced 15 to 104 years in state prison.

Yet there was a deputy, waking him up on a Monday morning in February, telling him he had to go to school.

“I was like, school? I'm not going to the school,” Juron said later. “I go to school in the world. I'm not about to adjust to no school.”

Being a teen charged as an adult is a lesson in dizzying mixed messages. You’re too young to vote or drink, maybe even to drive, and you’ve been told that kids can grow and change. Yet your own future is set out in the starkest terms: years or decades in prison followed by a lifelong criminal record.

It’s even weirder to hear that you still have to learn trigonometry.

In the U.S., there is adult jail and there is school, and the two rarely go together. Most juvenile detention centers have educational programs, and prisons often have GED or college classes. But since August, the New Orleans jail has offered something unusual: a full-day high school that’s part of the public school system and offers real credits. The only others are in the nation’s largest cities, such as Chicago and New York.

Read the full article about trying to teach kids at a violent adult jail by Eli Hager at The Marshall Project.