Can Nate Ybanez Ever Be Forgiven?

>> Tell us: Should Nate Ybanez's revenge cost him everything?

Cruelty comes in many shapes, but on these scorched-earth plains of the Rocky Mountains, the misanthropy is panoramic. The heat is a hammer, 102 in the shade, and the baked-brown deadness goes on forever: treeless, drought-choked. What follows you off the ramp from I-76, though, past the slumped motels and up a short turnout to the prison gates, is the odor of livestock waste. The cattle themselves are hiding somewhere, but their stench surrounds you and impedes you, a fence of barbed-wire air you can't climb over.

Inside the reinforced foot-thick walls of the Sterling Correctional Facility in Sterling, Colorado, the meanness is no less bracing. Stone-eyed guards glare down from their perches as you sign the visitors' log, then follow behind, down the long gray hall that leads to a sliding door. Ahead is a room where, alone at a table, sits a tall young man with mild eyes. "Thanks for coming so far," he says, as though you'd left behind the colonized world to see him on the moon.

Nate Ybanez knows something of harshness. He's been in adult prison since he turned sixteen, when the Department of Corrections saw fit to cell him with murderers and child molesters. At the time, he weighed less than most girls his age, a skeletal boy with rock-star good looks and no clear means of defense. Still, he fought the thugs who tried to punk him out, earning for his troubles several stretches in solitary confinement. At twenty-five, he's grown to tensile strength, a six-two length of braided steel, and is left alone now by the jailhouse canines who feast on young boys. As rough as this is, with the gangs in the yard, "I'm safer than I was at home," he says. "Here, at least, I can see them coming. With my father, I just never knew."

He has on his back a stairway of scars from the scapula to the lower spine. Some were put there by his mother, Julie, a strict evangelical who never spared the rod. Others came courtesy of his father, Roger, an ex-soldier who ruled the household by terror. He beat his wife when the mood arose, battered their son with belts and fists, and once tried to strangle him while he slept. The welts on Nate's neck have long since healed, but not the imprint of the deeper crimes: the years of being molested by both his parents, starting in the shower when he was around five.

In 1998, Nate snapped and brutally killed his mother when she foiled his attempt to run away. He was tried and found guilty in less than two days and sentenced to life in prison without parole. His best friend, Erik Jensen, was convicted as an accomplice and is also doing life without parole. Thus condemned, they joined dozens of Colorado teens put away till the end of their natural days for crimes they committed as children. Barring a reversal in appeals court, they will live and someday die within walls like these, taking in the corrosive fumes of a compound built on dung. In a neighboring state like Texas or Kansas, they might have been offered treatment and training in a juvenile facility. But Colorado doesn't believe in such coddling. These boys have a job, it has all but told them: to suffer for their sins till they draw their last breath, and then go straight to hell.

Over the last dozen years, something peculiar has happened in our nation's jurisprudence. Despite crime rates that have dropped in every crucial indicator, America is jailing people at an astonishing clip and keeping them caged for ever-longer stretches in a panoply of vast new prisons. This run-up in convicts -- there are more than 2 million men, women and children locked up now, a 300 percent increase since 1980 -- has spiked most dramatically since the early Nineties, when a series of laws was drafted and passed during the worst of the crack pandemic. Much of that legislation was aimed at teens, whom Republicans identified in the 1990s as the next great scourge of polite society: the so-called "superpredators."