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Reason Online
The Trouble With Troubled Teen
Programs
January 2007
By Maia Szalavitz
The state of Florida tortured
14-year-old Martin Lee Anderson to death for trespassing. The teen
had been sentenced to probation in 2005 for taking a joy ride in a
Jeep Cherokee that his cousins stole from his grandmother. Later
that year, he crossed the grounds of a school on his way to visit a
friend, a violation of his probation. His parents were given a
choice between sending him to boot camp and sending him to juvenile
detention. They chose boot camp, believing, as many Americans do,
that “tough love” was more likely to rehabilitate him than prison.
Less than three hours after his
admission to Florida’s Bay County Sheriff’s Boot Camp on January 5,
2006, Anderson was no longer breathing. He was taken to a hospital,
where he was declared dead early the next morning.
A video recorded by the camp shows
up to 10 of the sheriff’s “drill instructors” punching, kicking,
slamming to the ground, and dragging the limp body of the
unresisting adolescent. Anderson had reported difficulty breathing
while running the last of 16 required laps on a track, a complaint
that was interpreted as defiance. When he stopped breathing
entirely, this too was seen as a ruse.
Ammonia was shoved in the boy’s
face; this tactic apparently had been used previously to shock other
boys perceived as resistant into returning to exercises. The guards
also applied what they called “pressure points” to Anderson’s head
with their hands, one of many “pain compliance” methods they had
been instructed to impose on children who didn’t immediately do as
they were told.
All the while, a nurse in a white
uniform stood by, looking bored. At one point she examined the boy
with a stethoscope, then allowed the beating to continue until he
was unconscious. An autopsy report issued in May—after an initial,
disputed report erroneously attributed Anderson’s death to a blood
disorder—concluded that he had died of suffocation, due to the
combined effects of ammonia and the guards’ covering his mouth and
nose.
Every time a child dies in a tough
love program, politicians say—as Florida Gov. Jeb Bush initially did
on hearing of Anderson’s death—that it is “one tragic incident” that
should not be used to justify shutting such programs down. But there
have now been nearly three dozen such deaths and thousands of
reports of severe abuse in programs that use corporal punishment,
brutal emotional attacks, isolation, and physical restraint in an
attempt to reform troubled teenagers.
Tough love has become a
billion-dollar industry. Several hundred programs, both public and
private, use the approach. Somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000
teenagers are currently held in treatment programs based on the
belief that adolescents must be broken (mentally, and often
physically as well) before they can be fixed. Exact numbers are
impossible to determine, because no one keeps track of the kids in
these programs, most of which are privately run. The typical way to
end up in a government-run program, such as the camp where Martin
Lee Anderson was killed, is for a court to give you the option of
going there instead of prison. The typical way to end up in a
private program is to be sent there by your parents, though judges
and public schools have been known to send kids to private boot
camps as well. Since they offer “treatment,” some of the private
centers are covered by health insurance.
In the nearly five decades since
the first tough love residential treatment community, Synanon,
introduced the idea of attack therapy as a cure for drug abuse,
hundreds of thousands of young people have undergone such “therapy.”
These programs have both driven and been driven by the war on drugs.
Synanon, for example, was aimed at fighting heroin addiction, its
draconian methods justified by appeals to parents’ fears that drugs
could do far worse things to their children than a little rough
treatment could. The idea was that only a painful experience of
“hitting bottom” could end an attachment to the pleasures of drugs.
But like the drug war itself, tough
love programs are ineffective, based on pseudoscience, and rooted in
a brutal ideology that produces more harm than most of the problems
they are supposedly aimed at addressing. The history of tough love
shows how fear consistently trumps data, selling parents and
politicians on a product that hurts kids.
Attack Therapy Utopia
Synanon was a supposedly utopian
California community founded in 1958 by an ex-alcoholic named Chuck
Dederich. Dederich believed he could improve on the voluntary
12-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous. Rather than rely on people
choosing to change, Synanon would use extreme peer pressure and even
physical coercion to impose the confession, surrender, and service
to others that 12-step programs suggest as the road to recovery.
At the time, heroin addiction was
seen as incurable. But when a heroin addict kicked drugs after
participating in Dederich’s brutally confrontational encounter
groups, the founder and other members began living communally and
promoting Synanon as an addiction cure.
The media took note, and soon state
officials from across the country were visiting and setting up
copycat programs back home to treat addicts. Only New Jersey
bothered to do an outcome study before replicating Synanon. The
investigation, released in 1969, found that only 10 to 15 percent of
participants stayed in the program for more than a few months and
actually ended their addictions, a rate no better than that achieved
without treatment. A 1973 study of encounter groups by the Stanford
psychiatrist Irvin Yalom and his colleague Morton Lieberman found
that 9 percent of participants experienced lasting psychological
damage and that Synanon groups were among those with the highest
numbers of casualties.
But the research didn’t matter. To
both the media and the politicians, anecdote was evidence. The idea
that toughness was the answer had a deep appeal to those who saw
drug use as sin and punishment as the way to redemption. And Synanon
produced testimonials worthy of a revival meeting. Indeed, it
eventually recast itself as the “Church of Synanon.”
By the early 1970s, the federal
government itself had funded its own Synanon clone. It was located
in Florida and known as The Seed.
In this program, teenagers who were
using drugs or who were believed to be at risk of doing so would
spend 10-to-12-hour days seated on hard-backed chairs and waving
furiously to catch the attention of staffers, most of whom were
former participants themselves. Like Arnold Horshack in Welcome
Back, Kotter but with more desperate urgency, they would flutter
their hands, begging to be called on to confess their bad behavior.
Even before the excesses of the ’80s, parents were so frightened of
drugs that they were willing to surrender their children to
strangers for tough treatment to avoid even the possibility of
addiction; some parents even hit their children themselves at Seed
meetings, following the instructions of program leaders.
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.”
The Way of WWASP
But as the Martin Lee Anderson case
makes clear, tough love continued to thrive. Indeed, the New York
Times business section reported on tough teen programs as an
investment opportunity last year, saying the number of teenagers
attending residential programs to deal with drug and behavior
problems had quadrupled since 1995. Exposés of programs like
Straight or Florida’s government-run boot camps almost always
include positive anecdotes along with the accounts of abuse. As a
result, for parents terrified of drugs, these stories seem to
portray the programs as the only ones tough enough to “do what
works.” Since the media play positive anecdote against negative
anecdote, often without citing the negative research data, exposés
can actually serve as advertisements. The suggestion that the
programs work serves to justify any abuse. In 2004, for example,
Time quoted a father who said a tough-love program “improved his
[son’s] attitude and sense of responsibility,” even as it reported
that the family removed the child after finding some of the
program’s disciplinary measures too harsh.
One of the largest chains of
currently operating tough love schools is known as the World Wide
Association of Specialty Programs (WWASP), sometimes called the
World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools. Like
Straight, it took tactics from Synanon; its ideology, the language
it uses, and its methods for discrediting teens’ complaints are
eerily similar.
Variously claiming to hold 1,200 to
2,500 teenagers and reporting 2003 revenues of $80 million, the
group currently has at least eight affiliates, in Jamaica
(Tranquility Bay), South Carolina (Carolina Springs Academy), Nevada
(Horizon Academy), Utah (Cross Creek Programs, Majestic Ranch
Academy), Georgia (Darrington Academy), Mississippi (Respect Camp),
and Iowa (Midwest Academy). WWASP is a series of limited liability
corporations that frequently switch corporate officers and names.
This strategy is often used to limit losses from lawsuits by
disgruntled customers, and until very recently, WWASP has been
successful in deterring major law firms from pursuing such cases
against it.
Through its public relations
representative, James Wall of Freeman Wall Aiello, WWASP denies
charges of abuse. But nine of its affiliates have closed following
abuse allegations and government investigations. Mexico has shut
down three programs since the late ’90s; at one, police shot video
of teenagers held in outdoor dog cages. (That program currently
faces a civil suit by a boy who claims he not only was kept in a dog
cage but was sexually assaulted and forced to eat vomit.) In 1998
the U.S. State Department found “credible allegations of physical
abuse” at WWASP’s facility in Samoa, citing “beatings, isolation,
food and water deprivation, choke-holds, kicking, punching, bondage,
spraying with chemical agents, forced medication, [and] verbal
abuse.” It called for an investigation by the local government,
which resulted in the program’s closure. The man who ran that
program, who once admitted to 48 Hours that teens had been bound
with duct tape at the Samoa site, now operates the WWASP facility in
Iowa.
In 2003 Costa Rican child welfare
authorities raided WWASP’s Dundee Ranch Academy. They found staff
“unqualified to attend to needs of children,” “inadequate food and
meal portions,” and “some punishments [that] qualify as physical and
psychological abuse.” The owner of the facility was arrested for
human rights violations, and a source in the Costa Rican government
says a prosecution is imminent. Yet Pillars of Hope Academy, an
affiliated program for young adults run by Dundee Ranch’s owner,
operates in the same building; it is not subject to Costa Rica’s
regulations for programs aimed at minors.
Last year one WWASP program in
upstate New York, the Academy at Ivy Ridge, was forced by the state
attorney general to return nearly $2 million for fraudulently
claiming to offer New York high school diplomas. It says it is no
longer affiliated with WWASP, but it has changed neither its staff
nor its treatment methods. (It is currently facing a $100 million
class action suit for educational fraud.) Another WWASP affiliate,
Spring Creek Lodge in Montana, likewise claims to be independent
now, although it has the same staff and still gets referrals through
the WWASP phone line and websites. In July a press release announced
a new website, troubledteenprograms.org, linking all of the WWASP-associated
programs under the name “Teen Revitalization.”
WWASP seems to have learned
Straight’s P.R. lessons well: Deny abuse; smear kids who report
problems as drug addicts, liars, and manipulators; insist that the
media “balance” negative stories with positive anecdotes; and when
the charges begin to stick and the press and regulators have
thoroughly discredited a program, simply change its name and reopen,
changing location only if necessary.
In an email message, James Wall,
the WWASP publicist, says: “Clearly you can speculate about
similarities between Straight and WWASPS. However, the two are
completely separate organizations with no links whatsoever. You
should also note that WWASPS and associated organizations continue
to thrive (in terms of growth) despite continued attacks from
individuals (online, etc.) and the media.”
WWASP seems to have learned from
Straight’s political and regulatory strategies as well. Since the
2002 election, founder Robert Lichfield, his family members (some of
whom run WWASP programs), and their various business entities have
donated more than $1 million to the Republican Party and its
candidates. Together the Lichfields and their businesses are the
third largest Republican donor in WWASP’s home state of Utah,
according to the Deseret News. WWASP has moved to block or water
down state legislation aimed at reigning in tough love programs in
at least two states, Utah and Montana.
In 2004 Marty Stephens, speaker of
the Utah House of Representatives, used a procedural maneuver to
block a vote on legislation, which backers say had more than enough
support to pass, imposing stricter controls on a WWASP facility near
Randolph, Utah. Six days later, he received a check from Robert
Lichfield for his gubernatorial campaign. Lichfield insisted to the
Salt Lake Tribune that “that check had nothing to do with” the
bill’s blockage. He added: “I’d like to use my means and resources
to bless people’s lives. Does that also imply influencing policy
makers to make good policies that support good family values,
quality education, and the things I believe in? Definitely.”
Prior to 2005, Montana didn’t
require teen programs to let the state know they existed, let alone
impose regulation. But local and national exposés led to calls for
greater oversight. In the 2005 legislative session, Spring Creek
Lodge registered five lobbyists and spent at least $50,000 to block
a bill that would have imposed strict state rules, according to the
Missoula Independent. The legislation died in the state House of
Representatives. An alternative bill, sponsored by Spring Creek’s
competitors, passed. It created a governor-appointed board with five
members—three of whom represent the industry. One of the members is
the “principal” of Spring Creek Lodge.
The Tide Turns?
Thanks to the potent combination of
political influence, industry and government fear-mongering, and
media malpractice, tough love has so far survived its detractors.
But Martin Lee Anderson’s death may have marked a turning point.
The case has revealed the politics
of tough love in one of its home states, and has turned a new
spotlight on the data. In a departure from the usual journalistic
pattern, the early coverage of the case consistently cited the
research finding boot camps to be no more effective than juvenile
prison, and editorials mainly called for their closure.
The movement toward
“evidence-based” social policy has been growing since the early
’90s, as insurers, patient advocates, and government agencies alike
demanded proof that expensive policies produce demonstrable results.
It also seems to have spurred at least some journalists to view
scientific data as superior to anecdotes when assessing the
performance of tough love programs. This has reduced the false
balance in prior coverage that simply played success stories against
abuse accounts. Some Florida papers even noted how the research and
prior abuse scandals had led other states to shut down their
government-run boot camps. They cited a Maryland scandal in which
the Baltimore Sun photographed guards at a state-run boot camp
openly beating inmates, which led that state to drop such programs.
They also mentioned a similar scandal that prompted a federal
investigation of Georgia’s public boot camp programs, leading to
their closure. Some coverage of the Anderson case noted the 1999
death of 14-year-old Gina Score at a South Dakota boot camp
following forced exercise similar to that endured by Anderson, an
incident that led that state to shutter its programs.
As the Florida case unfolded,
political missteps dogged boot camp supporters. First, the state
refused to release the videotape of the boy’s beating to the media,
leading to an outcry and greater media attention. Guy Tunnell, who
had founded and staffed the sheriff’s boot camp in which Anderson
died, had gone on to head the Florida Department of Law Enforcement;
as a result, he was initially in charge of investigating the death.
Email messages from Tunnell—who serves on the board of the Drug Free
America Foundation—showed that he supported the boot camp he was
supposed to be objectively investigating, and that he had adamantly
resisted releasing the video. The revelations prompted the
appointment of a special prosecutor, generating yet more media
attention. No criminal charges have been filed so far, but
Anderson’s family has filed a $40 million lawsuit against the state.
Because Anderson was
African-American, some activists raised the question of racism.
(Most teens killed in these programs have been white, since blacks
are less likely to be able to afford the private camps and more
likely to be incarcerated instead of diverted to public boot camps.)
On April 19, students occupied the governor’s office in an attempt
to spur the arrest of the guards responsible for Anderson’s death.
Two days later, more than 1,500 people attended a rally at the state
Capitol in Tallahassee calling for the state to shut down its boot
camps. (Full disclosure: I spoke there about the dangers of the
tough love approach.) The event was also aimed at keeping pressure
on prosecutors to indict the guards and the nurse who didn’t stop
the beating. At the rally, two Florida legislators spoke in favor of
legislation that would shut down the boot camps. Tunnell was forced
to resign as head of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement after
he mocked two men invited to speak at the rally, referring to Jesse
Jackson as “Jesse James” and to Illinois Sen. Barack Obama (who
ultimately did not attend the event) as “Osama bin Laden.”
This series of events has placed an
unusual spotlight on tough love, connecting it not with
rehabilitation but with death, cronyism, and bigotry. Previous
deaths haven’t generated anywhere near as much activism.
To his credit, Jeb Bush recently
signed into law a bill that shuts down the state’s youth boot camps.
The replacement programs it creates are prohibited from using
physical punishment or “harmful psychological intimidation
techniques,” including humiliation and attempts to “psychologically
break a child’s will.” But the kinder, gentler programs will still
be run by the county sheriffs, and the regulations (which are
limited to Florida, of course) do not apply to the majority of
programs, which are private. Right now, children sent to private
tough love programs have fewer rights than convicted prisoners. A
parent can send a child to a private program where he can be held
incommunicado until he turns 18, without any medical diagnosis or
rationale for the treatment and without any oversight or means of
appeal.
In both public and private
programs, policies on the use of force are far less stringent than
they are for adult prisoners or psychiatric patients. At the
government-run boot camp where Anderson died, for example,
restraint, punches, and kicks were routinely applied to teens to
punish them for not completing exercise, for “whimpering,” or for
“breathing heavily.” Administrators who reviewed 180 “use of force”
reports found inappropriate actions in only eight cases, even though
most people would think that beating someone for “breathing heavily”
is not acceptable. In a prison or mental hospital, by contrast,
force is officially permitted only if the prisoner or patient is an
immediate threat to himself or others. Parents who engaged in such
practices could be charged with child abuse.
And the parents who send their kids
to these camps? For the most part, they are uninformed about the
absence of evidence supporting tough love programs and often
desperate to save their kids from drugs and delinquency. Until we
figure out a better balance between the right of parents to place
their kids in whatever programs they choose and the right of kids to
be free from inappropriate punishment by agents of their parents or
the state, the abuse will continue. The shame of it all is that we
know hurting kids doesn’t help them.
Maia Szalavitz (maiasz@gmail.com)
is the author of Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry
Cons Parents and Hurts Kids (Riverhead).
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