I Was A Teenage Inmate

Reason has a disturbing article detailing the various abuses prevalent at 'boot camp' behavior modification programs. The ostensible purpose of these programs is to give some much needed 'tough love' to some coddled teens who merely need some discipline to straighten up. Fourteen-year old Martin Lee Anderson found out that these camps often offer something quite more severe than tough love. He found out the hard way.

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.

That's overdoing a bit don't you think? I've worked with troubled teens before and I can attest that you often feel like whipping their asses at times. The key word is feel. I can't imagine, not for a second, myself or my former co-workers beating a kid to death. This clearly puts us up for a humanitarian award of some sort, I'm sure, but that's not the point. What is the institutional culture of a place that even allows a situation to get anywhere near the point where you're beating the shit out of a kid.

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.

I have absolutely no illusions about teenagers and how nasty they can act. They can be real shits. Some grow out of it with adult guidance, some grow up to be dickheads as adults but are otherwise productive citizens, and yes, some go to jail. However, I can't fathom how sentient adults can think these types of programs would be productive. They're calculated for maximum cruelty, which almost seems to be the point. People know that beating a dog will make it aggressive, yet we are too often willing to treat troubled teenagers like Pelican Bay inmates. For some reason, Americans equate being 'tough' with being effective. I'd like to think that an approach that quite obviously will create a generation of fucked-up, justifiably angry adults won't have adverse consequences, but I know better.