On the morning of March 26, 2005, Jason Wang and two other teenagers, all disguised as utility workers, left a Mesquite, Texas, home with a safe containing nearly $70,000 in stolen cash and valuables. Having tied the family up at gunpoint inside, the three teens took a car parked in the garage and sped off to a rendezvous point nearby, where a getaway ride waited.

The house belonged to the owners of a nail salon in town, and the thieves had known there was plenty of cash inside, along with jewelry and electronics, Wang told me recently. But even with meticulous planning, which included scoping out the neighborhood a year prior, missteps during the getaway led to the gang’s arrest.

When they were eventually charged with armed robbery, the friends faced divergent fates in Texas’s sprawling criminal justice system. Wang, who was 15 and considered a juvenile at the time, now has an MBA and owns two businesses––success he attributes to the rehabilitative programs offered in Texas’s juvenile system that helped reshape his life. But an accomplice who was 17 and automatically charged as an adult wasn’t afforded the same benefits, and now struggles with a blighted criminal record, Wang said.

“The thing about juvenile facilities is that they are heavily geared towards rehabilitating juvenile offenders,” Wang told VICE. “They have programming, staff, facilities that are all around the idea of housing kids [under the age of 19].” But unlike the juvenile system, Wang said, adult prisons lack enforced rehabilitative and educational programs, as well as safety measures for minors housed there.

Read the rest of the article at The Vice.