A boot camp is a military style correctional facility in which inmates are subject to a highly structured and challenging regimen of physical training, in addition to vocational, educational, and therapeutic programming (Cronin and Han, 1994; Austin, Jones, and Bolyard, 1993; Mackenzie and Souryal, 1991). Originally introduced to rehabilitate first time adult offenders, boot camps increasingly have been used by several states to shock and rehabilitate youthful offenders (American Correctional Association, 1997). In this article, the authors carried out an institutional ethnography of Lakeview Academy, a 90-day boot camp for adolescent boys in Iowa. The analysis in this article is grounded in the daily lives of the boys who are incarcerated in the boot camp. Beyond the boy's perceptions of the boot camp as they expressed them, institutional structures and boot camp discourse are analyzed for the purpose of understanding the ways in which they shape the boys' ideas and everyday practices.