The relational lives and subjectivities of incarcerated youth far exceed the institution’s mission to rehabilitate. What does this obvious argument mean to the youth themselves? In this talk, Dr. Mary Thomas explores the desires, beliefs, and creative sexualities of adolescent young women (on a femme-masculine spectrum) in confinement. While justice-oriented scholarship on youth imprisonment emphasizes the disciplinary reach of the total institution to call for its shuttering, Thomas resituates institutional space from the perspectives of young women and asks how the goals of the prison actually transect their subjectivities through relational care, sexual identity experimentation, and for some, stability. The talk foregrounds a theory of relational space to ponder what incarcerated youth experience might suggest for prison abolition.