CINCINNATI -- In Hamilton County, officials say a growing number of teens and boys are finding themselves facing adult charges and time in adult prisons.

Juvenile Court Judge Thomas Lipps said it's a trend he sees every day. On one day's docket, nine of the 11 cases before Lipps involved guns.

"We're seeing an increase in the usage of guns. That is the major problem that we're seeing," he said. "It's gone up over five-fold since just 2002."

Lipps said there were 177 juvenile cases involving guns in 2001. In 2006, there were almost 500.

Lipps said the courts are not soft on kids using guns.

"In Hamilton County, kids who commit serious offenses are going to be dealt with in a serious manner," he said.

That includes children accused of murder. Every single teen charged with murder in the last two years has been bound over to adult court.

And every one of those suspects is African-American.

"Oh, this is reality. I'm the coroner. I can tell you about reality downstairs in the morgue. Many of the people that are killed are black," Dr. O'dell Owens said. "It is what it is. As I said, as an African-American, I feel badly about flipping through here and seeing nothing but African-American faces. But that's the reality of our society today. If we put our head in the sand and say we don't want to recognize that, then this is gonna get thicker."

There are 85 teens serving time in Ohio's prison system, and almost a quarter of them are from Hamilton County, including four of the 10 convicted of murder.

Owens said he'd like to reverse that trend.

"People need to be punished. Let us be clear. When you cross that line, you need to be punished. But at the same time, let's work to keep more and more kids from crossing that line," he said.

Owens is starting a campaign to hand out pocket dictionaries to kids at risk in Hamilton County.

"I ran on a platform, the higher the graduation rate, the lower the homicide rate and in three years of being a coroner, nothing has changed that. If I could have gotten more of these young men to graduate, to be on target, they wouldn't be in jail now," he said.

"The homicides occur in the neighborhoods with the highest drop out rate from high school. We have some neighborhoods where that's as high as 65 percent," Owens said. "I've gone to crime scenes where I've stood there over a dead body and I look and young kids are playing, they're jumping rope, they're laughing, they're joking because it becomes so common in certain neighborhoods. How sad. How sad."