She giggles and flirts like any other teen, tossing her dark swath of hair with a flick of her glittery nail-polished fingers like she's all that.

She turned 16 last month. Five more birthdays from now, she will be an adult. She will be free.

But she will always be a convicted murderer.

On the evening of July 4, 2004, as fireworks exploded over the Pecos River, the Carlsbad girl picked up a knife and took revenge against a 15-year-old boy she believed had raped her cousin.

She was a hero, her family said.

She was 13.

The girl became one of the youngest murder defendants in New Mexico history, but few would recognize her name.

Then again, few would recognize many names of the 44 kids convicted as killers now serving out their time in prisons and juvenile facilities across New Mexico.

Most, like the girl with the glittery nails, remain nameless, faceless, quickly descending into the murky quagmire of the state juvenile justice system, bad seeds tucked away behind concertina wire and indifference.

But what becomes of them - and the hundreds of other kids who've committed violent acts - has recently come under debate in New Mexico.

The discussion is prompted in part by the flare-ups of violence this year at the Youth Diagnostic Development Center in Albuquerque, now a catchall for both minor offenders and major problem children because of the shutdown of other state juvenile facilities.

The closures are but one facet of the state Children, Youth and Families Department's bold new mission to refocus itself not on incarceration and punishment but on redemption and redirection.

The change has not been an easy one. Some argue it has not been the right one. They raise concerns that YDDC remains understaffed and unprepared - a cauldron of killers and violent scofflaws who prey on the more innocent while biding their time until they are back on the streets, more dangerous than ever.

Meanwhile, judges still struggle daily with burdensome caseloads, trying to sift out the salvageable child from those society needs to be protected from, all while dealing with a lack of treatment resources and alternatives to incarceration.

And the change in philosophy comes too late for those juveniles who killed years before, whose lives might have been redeemable but who now pose a possible threat to society when, years from now, they are released from custody, more hardened than before.

Advocates of the new mission say change does not happen overnight; transitions are not without bumps. Like the girl with the glittery nails, it takes time to be rehabilitated and reinvented and readied for the world again.

"We're in the midst of a cultural change," said Keith Smith, statewide milieu director and acting deputy director of CYFD juvenile facilities since April. "We're rebuilding an entire system right now."

Only time will tell if any of it takes.

A cultural change

New Mexico, like many other states, became fearful of its youth in the 1990s, as kids seemed suddenly more violent and soulless, and becoming so at younger ages.

Between 1993 and 1995 the rate of violent crime committed by juveniles in the state had risen by 47 percent. In 1995 alone, 35 teens were charged with murder - including three 14-year-olds.

The three were getting off lightly, many complained. Two of them walked free within two years. The third was released at age 21.

Violent youths were just as culpable as violent adults, critics argued. They needed to face tough consequences and lengthy confinement to protect the public.

Any thought of redemption had vanished into disgust.

"No matter what age they are, these kids should be tried as adults," declared Rick Johnson, owner of Duffy's Bar and Grill where 14-year-old Jamie Star Sedillo had killed one of his patrons in a brazen holdup.

He circulated a petition asking the Legislature to make "the punishment fit the crime" for all juvenile offenders.

It worked.

New Mexico followed the lead of 31 other states that had reduced or eliminated age limits to prosecute juveniles as adults for serious violent crimes. Children as young as 14 could now face adult sentences for murderous crimes.

More states followed suit.

All seemed to agree that these were lost children who could not - should not - be saved. The system had tried, and it had failed.

But by early 2003, New Mexico would change course again, shifting away from indiscriminate punisher to provider of mercy.

Youths gone bad are not adults, CYFD officials reasoned. They don't always deserve adult consequences for their delinquent and violent ways.

And, they said, the older, tougher ways were not working.

"The thing is, in reality the kids won't stay inside forever," Smith said. "They'll be hitting the streets, and we either prepare them to hit the streets or we don't."

The changes have prompted denunciation of the new policy, often centered on concerns that the push for rehabilitation has gone too far and been too soft.

The idealistic notion that all children can be fixed, critics argue, is a dangerous one in an already overloaded system ill-equipped to handle both parole offender and psychopathic killer under an ever-shrinking roof.

They worry that without stern punishment, juvenile facilities only serve as incubators to create even more violent offenders and as hunting grounds where the more vulnerable youth are preyed upon.

"Of course, it's a case-by-case basis," said Chief Deputy District Attorney Todd Heisey, who for 16 years oversaw the prosecution of juveniles, including some of the most notorious, in Bernalillo County. "But sometimes there are those kids who just can't be fixed."

Young guns

Earlier this year, the Bernalillo County Juvenile Detention Center counted among its clients 13 boys charged with causing someone's death.

It was the highest number of accused killer kids the Albuquerque facility had seen in years.

All but one had been in and out of the juvenile justice system before. Some had lengthy criminal histories and, presumably, numerous intervention attempts that never worked.

They were examples of the revolving door at Children's Court. Youths rack up an average of eight referrals before they are ever committed to a juvenile facility, CYFD officials said. In Bernalillo County, the average is 12.

Today, four of the 13 boys have had their day in court. Of those, one received an adult sentence - 25 years in prison.

The other three were given juvenile penalties - one was committed for two years, two until age 21. Their sentences are being carried out at the YDDC, a lushly landscaped 174-bed facility in the North Valley where low- and high-risk inmates commingle. It's a place that, on the surface, seems more private school campus than child prison, more treatment center than detention center.

"I will never call this a jail. I just won't," said Roger Gillespie, director of CYFD Juvenile Justice Services. "There are people here who still believe this is a jail. It is not a treatment center, either. But there is going to be a more therapeutic aspect. Our job here is not just to lock kids up."

With the closure of two secure institutions in the last two years, YDDC is also the only major facility in the state to house juvenile offenders.

CYFD officials say the number of violent youth coming into the justice system has decreased as the state population of those ages 10 to 17 increases. With fewer juveniles being committed, they add, the facilities are no longer needed.

The closure of the New Mexico Boys School in Springer, once the state's largest juvenile facility, did not happen simply because of a declining population or a new mission statement, however.

The American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico and the Youth Law Center in San Francisco had threatened a lawsuit over the facility conditions it felt were not conducive to the rehabilitation, safety and health of youths.

An agreement was reached with CYFD last February. Among the points agreed upon was the closure of the Boys School, in operation since 1909.

"The ACLU had two key aims with this litigation," ACLU of New Mexico Executive Director Peter Simonson said in a written statement. "We wanted to protect the safety of children in CYFD's facilities and make sure the youthful offenders in our state get a fair shot at putting their lives back on a positive track."

In short, the same mission CYFD officials had already begun to envision in 2003 under the administration of then-CYFD Cabinet Secretary Mary-Dale Bolson.

"We needed to stop seeing these clients as the worst thing they've done," said Bolson, who resigned from CYFD earlier this year. "Kids need support. They gravitate to it. Maybe it's the first time they've ever gotten it."

Not only was the consolidation of facilities better for the juveniles, it was better for the state's bottom line, Bolson argued.

It cost $50,000 a year to house one client at Camino Nuevo, a maximum-security facility in Albuquerque that shut down in 2004. But it only cost $18,000 a year to provide the same inmate with a wide range of out-of-custody crime prevention services, she said.

Today, the price tag for a year's commitment to a juvenile facility has risen to $75,000 per client, Gillespie said.

A work in progress

Bolson is fond of saying she has never met a child she could not reach.

Gillespie has a similar mantra.

"I'm an optimist," Gillespie said. "I believe I can reach them all."

Their positive tone is representative of how other upper level CYFD officials talk about its mission of helping rather than warehousing juvenile offenders.

But that optimism is not shared by everyone down the CYFD chain of command and those who work in juvenile justice.

"The downside of reform is that CYFD no longer acknowledges some of the children are violent and others need to be protected from them, and the community needs to be protected," said Nancy Neary, chief prosecutor on juvenile cases at Children's Court in Albuquerque.

The critics say they are concerned that the rehabilitation model lacks enough providers to accomplish its goals - especially those for youths transitioning back to the real world.

"We need to have more resources on the outside," Children's Court Judge Marie Baca said. "Locking them up longer is not necessarily an answer. They will get out and on the outside again. We need to make sure there are services waiting for them, and right now there aren't enough."

CYFD officials call the incidents of violence "missteps" and missing services "bumps in the road," reminding the public that the system is still in transition.

"Give us a year, and then we'll see how things are going," Smith said.

In the end, officials say the success or failure of the new mission rests on the shoulders of the kids.

One of those successes could be Rodolpho Ramirez, who leaves YDDC this month when he turns 21.

"This place is as bad as you want to make it," said Ramirez, a convicted drug offender.

He is one of the "good kids," who has earned his way to privileges, even if they include emptying office trash cans unsupervised.

"For me, it's one of the better things to happen to me," he said of his 1 years at YDDC. "Now, I think about my life, my future outside."

The girl with the glittery nails

Of the 150 clients now in custody at the YDDC, 11 juveniles are here for convictions of murder, manslaughter and vehicular homicide.

Of those, eight are committed until they reach age 21.

The girl with the glittery nails is one of them.

She does not want her name used, but she is willing to be paraded out before reporters alongside two other girls as shining examples of how well rehabilitative measures are working at YDDC.

They are three of the seven girls housed in a low-security residence, called Life Future Ambition, just outside of the gates and guard shack of YDDC.

"It's like your own little village, your own little world," she said.

They have earned the right to live here with their good behavior. They have earned the right to wear street clothes rather than the color-coded T-shirts and khakis the others wear.

They have earned the right to wear makeup, hair ties, nail polish.

Life is good here, they say.

"We think different now," said Vanessa Harper, a 15-year-old Rio Rancho girl, who before her commitment to YDDC had amassed more than 15 referrals for incidents involving burglary, auto theft, harassment, battery and bringing a deadly weapon on campus. "We have more positive stuff."

She grows visibly perturbed when asked about the wisdom of having murderer and minor offender residing together under one roof.

"What's wrong with that?" she snips. "You could go to any school and see kids that are way worse."

The girl with the glittery nails is her friend.

Harper said she wants the public to know that giving kids second chances is a good thing, that YDDC is a good place doing good things.

"It's not as bad as you guys say in the newspaper," she said.

Later, out of view from the reporters, out of view once again from the public, the girls laugh.