Cottage staff members in a juvenile training school play a crucial role in the state’s attempts to rehabilitate or resocialize adolescent offenders. As the predominant adult influences in the lives of juvenile inmates during their incarceration, cottage staff members set the tone and help to define the institutional experience for the youth assigned to the living unit. In this ethnographic study of one cottage of violent offenders, the author examines and discusses the crucial role of cottage staff members who, in many ways, embody the spirit of parens patriae and serve as their adolescent inmates’ guardians, keepers, counselors, and role models.