How does America’s juvenile justice system work? In what ways has it failed? And what would it take to improve it so that it routinely operates in the best interests of offenders, their victims, and society as a whole? These are not simple questions, as this Fred Friendly Seminar points out—and they become all the more complex when moderator Charles Ogletree, of Harvard Law School, casts 13 experts as figures in a hypothetical scenario involving two families, four teens, and a sequence of violent crimes culminating in a murder. By incrementally raising the stakes, Ogletree moderates a passionate discussion that addresses different conceptions of justice, the balance between rehabilitation of a minor and the safety of the public, the need to strengthen the home environment, availability of social services, and matters of race and socioeconomic status. Panelists include Cregor Datig, chief deputy district attorney for Riverside County, California; Patricia Lee, deputy public defender for San Francisco County; Lisa Hill, of the Alameda County Probation Department; Indiana Superior Court Judge James W. Payne; Congressman Dan Lundgren (R-CA), former attorney general of California; Taalia Hasan, of the West Contra Costa County Youth Services Bureau; Walter Allen III, director of the California Youth Authority; Lateefah Simon, of The Center for Young Women’s Development, in San Francisco; Luis Aroche, outreach director of Boys & Girls Clubs of San Francisco; Laurence Steinberg, from the Department of Psychology at Temple University; Amy Holmes Hehn, senior deputy district attorney for Multnomah County, Oregon; Eddie Ayala, of the Oakland Police Department; and Robert Long, news director for KNBC-TV, Los Angeles. Produced in association with The Institute for Child and Family Policy at Columbia University. (58 minutes)