This ethnography explores incarcerated students' experiences and dynamics of identity formation inside a youth prison school. Across two years, 100 students and 50 adults were engaged. The structure, discourse, and adult-student interactions revealed a fixation on framing students as threats with a racialized undertone while also exposing the conditionality of the discourse. This study pulls attention into the youth prison school, aligning with educational research on the pipeline to prison, race talk, and identity formation.