The Trouble with Troubled Teen Programs

How the "boot camp" industry tortures and kills kids

Maia Szalavitz from the January 2007 issue

(Page 2 of 4)

When kids entered The Seed, they lived in “host homes” —houses of parents of other program participants that had been specially prepared to incarcerate teenagers at night. If these “newcomers” didn’t give convincing enough confessions in group sessions, they would not be allowed to “progress” in the program and return to home and school.

In 1974 Sen. Sam Ervin, the North Carolina Democrat best known for heading the congressional committee that investigated Watergate, presented a report to Congress entitled “Individual Rights and the Federal Role in Behavior Modification.” Ervin and other members of Congress were concerned about federal funding for efforts to change people’s behavior against their will, seeing a fundamental threat to liberty if such efforts were successful. The report cited The Seed as an example of programs that “begin by subjecting the individual to isolation and humiliation in a conscious effort to break down his psychological defenses.” It concluded that such programs are “similar to the highly refined brainwashing techniques employed by the North Koreans in the early 1950’s.”

The Seed Germinates
Ervin’s report led Congress to cut off The Seed’s funding. But The Seed had produced two important true believers: Mel Sembler, who went on to serve as campaign finance chairman for the Republican Party during the 2000 election season and as U.S. ambassador to Italy from 2001 to 2005, and Joseph Zappala, who would go on to serve under the first President Bush as ambassador to Spain and who at the time was also a major Republican campaign donor.

In 1976 Sembler and Zappala founded a program virtually identical to The Seed, staffed by former Seed parents and participants (including some who had become Seed staffers). They named it Straight Incorporated. The federal agency that had funded The Seed, the Law Enforcement Assistance Agency, had been barred from funding further human experiments because neither the agency nor projects like The Seed had procedures for informed consent. Despite that fact, and despite the congressional critique of The Seed, Straight soon received federal money from the same agency. It, too, never informed parents that it was experimental.

Straight expanded rapidly in the ’80s, around the same time newspapers, TV, and other media were filled with dire warnings about the dangers of crack. Nancy Reagan called it her “favorite” drug program. In fact, it was a visit to Straight, suggested by Sembler, that had inspired the first lady to make drugs her cause.

An undated issue of Straight’s newsletter, Epidemic, from around this time carried a photo of the legs of a young-looking corpse with a tag on one toe: “Cocaine, crack and kids.” The accompanying article said crack was “almost instantaneously addictive”—“the most addictive drug known to man”—and passed along the tale of a 16-year-old girl who had recently tried smoking cocaine. “One night I noticed a big lump on my back,” she wrote. “I was rushed to the hospital and operated on and had two tumors removed. The tumors were caused by impurities in the coke which built up in my blood and got infected.” Such a story, if true, would have made medical history.

But for the media, drugs act as an anti-skeptic; the scarier the consequences, the bigger the story, the higher the ratings, and the lower the incentive to qualify extreme claims. The 1986 documentary 48 Hours on Crack Street purported to show the crack menace spreading ineluctably to the middle class. It drew one of the largest TV audiences ever for a news program.

Between 1981 and 1989, Straight opened sites in Atlanta; Cincinnati; Orlando; Boston; Detroit; Yorba Linda, California; and Springfield, Virginia. Former employees opened virtually identical programs in New Jersey, Kentucky, Utah, New Mexico, and Florida in the late ’80s and early ’90s.

Spanking and Motivating
As far back as 1978, however, employees had begun to quit Straight and contact regulators, reporting beatings and other maltreatment. “The program was getting…so bad that I felt it was hurting more kids than it was helping,” one anonymous former staffer told the St. Petersburg Times that year. Miller Newton, Straight’s national clinical director, admitted to authorities in 1982 that he had kept teenagers awake for 72-hour periods, put them on peanut butter–only diets, and forced them to crawl through each other’s legs to be hit in a “spanking machine.”

At Straight, The Seed’s hand-waving procedure to get staff attention during group sessions mutated into “motivating,” in which kids flapped their arms so vigorously it looked like they were trying to fly away. The movements were so violent that more than once teenagers hit those sitting next to them, resulting in broken bones.

Richard Bradbury, whose activism eventually helped shut Straight down, was forcibly enrolled in the program in 1983, when he was 17. His sister had had a drug problem, and Straight demanded that he be screened for one as well. After an eight-hour interrogation in a tiny room, Bradbury, who was not an addict, was nonetheless held. He later described beatings and continuous verbal assaults, which for him centered on sexual abuse he’d suffered as a young boy. Staffers and other participants called him a “faggot,” told him he’d led his abusers on, and forced him to admit “his part” in the abuse.

Straight ultimately paid out millions of dollars in dozens of lawsuits related to abuse and even kidnapping and false imprisonment of adults. But the Straight network remained in operation until 1993. Even today, at least nine programs in the U.S. and Canada still use tactics, such as host homes and “motivating,” that come directly from Straight. Some are run by former Straight employees, sometimes in former Straight buildings. Among them: SAFE in Orlando; Growing Together in Lake Worth, Florida; Kids Helping Kids in Cincinnati; the Phoenix Institute for Adolescents in Marietta, Georgia; Turnabout/Stillwater Academy in Salt Lake City; Pathway Family Center in Detroit; the Alberta Adolescent Recovery Center in Calgary, Alberta; and Love in Action, a program aimed at “curing” homosexual teenagers, located near Memphis. The Straight Foundation itself, which coordinated the organization and doled out the money, never died; it simply renamed itself the Drug Free America Foundation, which to this day works to promote student drug testing and to oppose efforts to end the drug war. Its website lists Mel Sembler and his wife Betty as “founding members.”

Meanwhile, other organizations found they could profit from tough love with legal impunity. As negative publicity finally began to hurt Straight and skepticism about the drug war itself grew, other groups began to use similar tactics, all converging on a combination of rigid rules, total isolation of participants from both family and the outside world, constant emotional attacks, and physical punishments. These programs were sold as responses not just to drug use but to teenage “defiance,” “disobedience,” “inattention,” and other real or imagined misbehavior.

Military-style “boot camps” came into vogue in the early ’90s as an alternative to juvenile prison. The media spread fears of a new generation of violent teenaged “super-predators,” and this solution gained political appeal across the spectrum. Liberals liked that it wasn’t prison and usually meant a shorter sentence than conventional detention; conservatives liked the lower costs, military style, and tough discipline. Soon “hoods in the woods” programs, which took kids into the wilderness and used the harsh environment, isolation, and spare rations to similar ends, also rose in popularity, as did “emotional growth” schools, which used isolation and Synanon-style confrontational groups.

Again, little evidence ever supported these programs. When the U.S. Department of Justice began studying the boot camps, it found that they were no more effective than juvenile prison. For a 1997 report to Congress, the department funded a review of the research, which found that the boot camps were ineffective and that there was little empirical support for wilderness programs. In late 2004 the National Institutes of Health released a state-of-the-science consensus statement on dealing with juvenile violence and delinquency. It said that programs that seek to change behavior through “fear and tough treatment appear ineffective.”

Comments

|10.4.09 @ 3:00PM|#

I think parents now consider on how well they can control their troubled teens by learning & training their selves with the tools that are necessary for effective parenting of today's teens. Limits and rules are critical in the development of safety, growth, and fulfillment of individuals or groups. If you are dealing with a troubled or defiant teen you are already familiar with the need for more defined structure. When setting rules for troubled teens you need to create several layers of preventative rules to assist your teen. For example: It probably would not work to have a rule of "Don't Use Drugs" but then allow your teen to associate with drug using friends or hang out at the wrong places. You should set some very clear preventative rules with your teens concerning "WHO" they may associate with, "WHAT" types of activities they are allowed to attend and/or participate, "WHERE" they are allowed to go, and "WHEN" they may go, as well as expected to return.
http://www.helpfortroubledteen.....tions.html , these suggestions might be very helpful for parents of troubled teens.

Pingback| 10.9.09 @ 10:32AM

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with Troubled Teen Programs - Reason Magazine | Finally! Be free from smoking Finally! Be free from smoking Home The Trouble with Troubled Teen Programs - Reason Magazine January 1, 1970 Jonathan Foulds, MA, MAppSci, PhD wrote an intriguing post today on Here’s a little taster As far back as 1978, however, employees had begun to quit Straight and contact regulators, reporting beatings and other…

Jacob W|10.12.09 @ 1:07PM|#

Anderson's death never should have happened. The biggest problem with these types of programs is the lack of staff training. If the staff think a kid is faking they should treat the kid just as if they were having a serious problem. Most deaths occur within the first few days of being admitted. The first days are very challenging for the teens and the staff. The problems with many of these kids are deeper than the outward signs they are displaying. There needs to be better oversight on these programs and better training dealing with new admissions. There are also reviews available for many of these places online http://fortroubledteens.com