This dissertation examines the American social inequalities that lead to the incarceration of inner-city youth into residential treatment centers, how the youth are socialized once institutionalized, and how the youth come to understand and discuss the experiences of this socialization process. I argue the socialization process occurs through a particular institutional cultural knowledge based on institutional practice and local formulations of emotionality. The learning and practice of new cultural knowledge, the power dynamics, and the transformation of subjective states occurred through various kinds of communicative events and ways of speaking, particularly through "sharing," (through talk, body language, and intimate physical engagements) and emotional engagements (e.g., trust) within interpersonal relationships. I argue that this cultural knowledge is situated within relationships of power primarily based on racial identity, American racial inequality, and habitual practices of White privilege. I also argue that a transformation of internal affective lives of residents is the practical work of residential treatment. I conducted eighteen months of ethnographic research at one institution I call Havenwood. One cottage I call Steele was the focus of in-depth study. Over the course of my research, two hundred youth lived at Havenwood. Steele was the primary residence for 36 teen-age men, 30 of whom were African American. This dissertation contributes to anthropological scholarship in two main ways. First, I formulate a new understanding of the transformation of subjectivity through the process of recovery at Havenwood. Second, I show how African American ways of speaking and racial subjectivities privileging emotional connections understood as "love" are themselves a kind of therapeutic practice that might be used effectively in the socialization of institutionalized adolescents in the United States. This dissertation research was funded by the National Science Foundation, Cultural Anthropology.