They've become little more than custodians in a city that is ranked the nation's poorest and among its most violent; as Willingham puts it, "The people who secure the city are less secure than they've ever been".
The drug war, Mr. Shirk and other analysts say, is increasingly coming down to a fight to the death between the Sinaloa cartel, a more traditional drug-trafficking organization widely considered the most powerful, and Los Zetas, founded by former soldiers and considered the most violent as it expands into extortion, kidnapping and other rackets in regions far off the drug route map.
"Pentonville is one of the busiest prisons and it will, by its very nature, be one of the most violent prisons as well," he said.
In Iraq, as early as 2006 the American military described some of the most violent regions as having Iraqi battalions "in the lead".
They concluded that most violent individuals with AS suffer from comorbid psychiatric disorders that raise their risk of offending, as they do in the general population.
Guerrero has long been among the country's most violent states as a patchwork of cartels fight to control territory used for the cultivation, transport and distribution of drugs, as well as other criminal activities such as kidnapping and extortion.
Over the next five years, nearly every state changed its laws to be able to charge and sentence the most violent juveniles as adults.
The most violent, known as the Koliivshchyna, occurred in 1768 and was put down only with the help of Russian troops.
Violent crimes of all types, including the most violent, such as aggravated assaults and assaults with weapons, are more than 30% higher than they were 30 years ago and more than 100% higher than they were 40 years ago.
The judge, Jonathan Lippman, is proposing that the state transfer jurisdiction for 16- and 17-year-olds accused of less serious crimes to family courts, which have more social services, while continuing to prosecute the most violent juveniles as adults.
Yet the war in the western region of Darfur, which reached its most violent stage as the CPA was being finalised, has eaten up most of the foreign diplomatic and financial resources that were promised to bolster the north-south agreement.
