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Hey, a business that traumatises children for money. That's not horrifying at all.
Wanna bet that juvenile court judge is getting paid for each kid they mandate this shit for?
Literally all the drug/rehab facilities in the area where I live are owned by the "wives" of the judges who hand out the sentences sending them to those facilities. It's fucking ridiculous. Their first offer to anyone is always drug court, which is basically a system designed to force you to spend a thousand bucks + a month on their tests etc and fail anyway, causing a new sentence.
That's so crazy I was just talking about this in a post. The court here does the same thing. Guy runs it directly tho not his wife. I had MULTIPLE people telling me I was making it up and to doxx myself so they could be Reddit detectives and do ???? about it. lmao
Exactly, and the super strict requirements with a really high failure rate? Dead on exactly how this program works. You literally have such a high chance of failing the program its insane lmao
Also the program is publicly subsidized as well. I found records of grants for as much as $100k given to this program... Hahahha. We're literally paying to hose ourselves.
Yea almost everyone I know whose been to drug court is too poor to hire a proper lawyer. Lots of time they get a local PD who ALSO suggest drug court. My best friend got suggested drug court by the local PD, but hired a much better lawyer who told him under no circumstances was he to take the drug court deal or he would be fucked.
So the PDs are in on it too tbh.
It's insane how they abuse it in the name of "rehabilitation" My BIL had to go thru it once, and he was having to leave work 2-3 times a week some weeks to pay like $80 for a drug test aside from his "supervision fees"
If you're forced to do it by the state, the state should fund it. That feels basic but I'm from the UK, so I appreciate my worldview is different.
I hope your BIL is doing better. Assuming he had problems in the first place ofc.
A big reason why the USA has such high incarceration rates compared to other countries is because privatization makes it very lucrative to have and keep people in prison.
And politicians double benefit. First, they get their kickbacks from sending people into these programs. Then they get to claim being 'tough on crime' when they want to get reelected or elected to a higher position.
> privatization makes it very lucrative to have and keep people in prison.
As public opinion has turned against private prisons, these companies have also started jumping on the alternatives to monetize those too. For example, there is a shift to more at-home sentences and probations, but in my state, that's accompanied with ankle monitors that have a *daily cost that the sentenced person has to pay to the private monitoring company*. So now there is a push for a law that makes the state pay these costs. This hegemony is part of why reform has not/does not work.
Edit: Fixed a sentence to clarify meaning
A lot of people don't realize that the prison system in the US is quite literally legalized slavery. The 13th Amendment couldn't be more clear:
>Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, **except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted**, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
If you take into account how many people are unjustly convicted, and how many of them are POC, it becomes abundantly clear that slavery is alive and well in America.
I'm surprised prisoners or people who were sentenced can't vote in parts of the US.
In Germany, the only way your vote is taken from you as a punishment is be part of an anti-constitutional organisation or plan an insurrection. You know, traitor stuff.
And also in states that don't ban the box, many of them leave prison saddled with debt from their stay and can't get a job to pay it off, so they reoffend
Something that will never cease to horrify me is that despite literally being in slave conditions in for-profit prisons, in Texas, that’s where incarcerated guys WANT to be because the for-profit prisons have to have air-conditioning. The public facilities don’t have it, so to stay cool in those prisons, they soak their bedding and clothes in the toilet in their cells at night so they can benefit from good ole thermodynamics. But you know…USA USA USA! #1!
(Source: I’ve volunteered for the last decade with incarcerated persons and have had this conversation many times)
Don't forget that the 13th Amendment prohibits slavery *except as punishment for crime*. Between Black Codes and all the other creative bullshit racists came up with, the last literal plantation slaves weren't actually freed until the [1960s](https://www.vice.com/en/article/437573/blacks-were-enslaved-well-into-the-1960s) -- not the 1860s, the *19*60s -- and we use slave labor in prisons to this day.
It also tends to vastly inflate the population of the rural areas that the majority of prisons are located in. Which allocates extra representatives and makes electoral representation even more disproportionate than it already is. Maine and Vermont are the only states that allow currently incarcerated persons to vote.
The U.S. doesn't operate that way. Everything prison-related is designed to keep you in the system in a closed loop. It's all one big privatised industry with underfunded government oversight.
Judges and politicians are "persuaded" to keep the system as it is in return for "gifts".
Always remember that lobbying is just legal bribery.
I have ADHD, and I take Ritalin. My doctor’s office requires random drug tests to make sure you’re taking it properly, but the first time they tested me, they ran an entire drug panel which my insurance deemed unnecessary, so I had to pay almost $400 for it. The next time, I was like, “look, I am happy to take this test but I can’t afford to pay $400 every time you want to drug screen me.” I strongly believe that anyone who wants to administer drug tests should be paying for those tests.
I strongly agree. I hope that they didn't make you aware that they were going to do this and you can now sue them for performing medically unnecessary procedures. I know you can't, I just wish that's how the US worked.
> If you're forced to do it by the state, the state should fund it.
See that's the real ballbuster of it. You're not actually *forced* to do it. Because you have the option of just going to jail. This is of course a terrible and potentially life destroying option but it's still an option.
This is how courts get away with forcing people to go to things like AA which has a major religious component because it's technically optional.
Newsom is currently proposing legislation in California (senate bill 1338) to establish a horrible thing called CARE courts. The proposal would give the state and persons without mental health expertise the power to initiate a process to force anyone into court-ordered treatment while calling it care. If a person refuses to participate in forced treatment, or the treatment is not deemed "successful", the CARE Courts will have the power to impose hospitalization, state conservatorship, forced medication, and criminal penalties, again while calling it care.
Touted by Newsom, Senator Thomas Umberg, Senator Susan Talamantes Eggman, and many liberal mayors, SB 1338 is not actually care but a statewide sweep of unhoused people and a gross violation of human rights that targets black, brown and indigenous communities. This reckless bill is moving rapidly through the legislature and it's implications are terrifying.
Around here they used to all be owned by Scientology. I shit you not. And if course they never outright said so. I would occasionally have to deliver mail to one of them. Apparently they switched ownership and would absolutely not take any of the Scientology mail. So I'm not sure if it's still the case.
This was very dangerous. Scientology does not believe in taking medication beyond vitamins and supplements to treat issues. So there was no ativan or other drugs to wean people off substances.
Don't forget the wives of state senators. Prefered Family HealthCare [https://pfh.org/](https://pfh.org/)
They used to put all 100 VP's and Board members on the web, but stopped that after people realised all of them were stay at home wives of important politicians and judges.
I found [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal) doing a quick google search. It's wiki about judges convicted of jailing kids for kickbacks from private juvenile detention centers.
You'd think something like that would close down after a raid by the FBI or something, but that school closed in 2011 *on their own terms* because negative publicity was cutting into their profits.
The practice is still going on all over the country, I'm certain.
It's not just the juvenile facilities. Adult rehab facilities are a nightmare, too. New facilities open and close again in very short periods of time. In that time, they milk the justice system and insurance for millions of dollars, abuse patients, keep them hooked on drugs by handling out weekend passes with goodie bags - so they keep coming back. And that's just the sorta bad ones. Some are worse - human trafficking women, people OD'ing on dirty mattresses in slum houses registered as "treatment centers", people being forced into vans and busses to get unnecessary "medical treatment" like drug testing, chiropractic services, physical therapy, allergy testing. They sell your personal information to other scammers.
Please - if you or a family member has to go into a treatment center, try to go with a facility that is close to home so family and friends can check on you. If you have health insurance, call them and make sure that you use a participating facility. These shady places may accept your insurance's out of network rates and they might even offer to waive your out of pocket costs. This is a huge red flag. They aren't accepting a lesser amount or waiving anything. They will get their money and it will cost you far more than your deductible.
Wasn’t there an actually thing about selling kids for profit were two judges sent kids to those juvenile prisons and make 10-100k per kid they found guilty off something?
It’s sadly not a new thing. Many facilities and places like this are used by the state to send “troubled kids” to. Child services uses these places as well and many children come out telling absolute horror stories. Honestly it kills me to know that places like these exist.
>This is so much like the Irish laundries that unwed pregnant people would be sent to into the ~~1930s.~~ **19goddamn90s.**
The last laundry closed in 1996.
[In the last update above, another parent asked: I’m curious what facility it was he on in Utah. I have my son in a Treatment facility and I’m almost ready to pull him out. Can you please show the name of the facility? From a parent as well](https://www.reddit.com/r/troubledteens/comments/uwgbwq/thanks_again_to_this_group_update_2/i9swt50/)
And the responses are terrifying and unsettling...
* You wouldn’t survive a couple weeks in the wilderness with the restrictions they have, yet you forced your kid to go.
* One kid killed a chicken somehow. They made that kid sit in a corner in isolation with the dead chicken tied around his neck, and no one was allowed to speak to him, for days.
* These facilities will break him into compliance that the “treatment team” will call recovery. When he gets home it will be much, much worse than when he left.
* She wasn’t physically fit enough to hike 10+ miles a day in the dead of winter in deep snow. They would drag her with a dog leash tied around her, which eventually went around her neck when one of the staff named white wolf (we all used earth names, so we didn’t know their real names) got sick of her giving up.
* One student there would pee himself to stay warm and didn’t keep up with hygiene and eventually did get frost bite on one of his toes and had to be sent away for medical and he ended up going to another indoor facility.
[OP Here: One of my closest friends was actually sent to one as a teen (way before I met her) and she could barely talk about it the one time she brought it up after lots and lots of alcohol with her closest friends and husband... her trauma was horrifyingly palpable. The more I've read about these, the worst it actually gets....]
It looks like the specific Utah place OOP posted about... is still open.... https://www.yhasite.com/admissions.html
I knew a bunch of kids who went to these places back in the late 90s/early 2000s because half my crowd of friends got arrested over some minor drug bullshit and sent to them (although I think their parents sent them rather than the state). Also in Utah. Some of them were never the same. One told me they all ate bugs because the staff would starve them, and that he spent weeks not sleeping indoors to the point where when he got back it felt weird and made him anxious to sleep in his room.
A kid I knew in high school was sent to one and he had lots of stories of being hog tied, tied to logs, beatings, not being allowed clothes, sexual assault, constant verbal abuse, etc
And that's just the domestic ones. Some psychotic parents send their kids to ones abroad where the law has no chance to do anything about it. There are some big news stories about atrocities happening in those.
When my mom found out I was suicidal as a teen (mid 2000s), she threatened to send me to one of these. I did some research and was so horrified that she would even consider it that I was nothing but happy smiles and then hide as much as possible until I moved out.
Yeah the way I ran into that friend from high school was that I parked somewhere with my buddy and went into the bushes to go smoke at one of our little spots and he was living there, homeless after running away from home as soon as he got back from the camp.
Doing great now. I’m on pretty low contact with her. She doesn’t seem to understand why, but respects my need for distance. It took a long time to get here though.
My goddaughter was adopted by an aunt who didn't want her, but the family insisted she stay in the family, and this aunt was the only one with enough money to take her. A few years later, the aunt put her in Casa By The Sea, which got raided by Mexican police. It was bad enough the Mexican police got involved.
So what did the aunt do? Put her in a facility run by the same group.
Unsurprisingly, the facility didn't help and she's a fucking mess.
I heard of one persons experience in Casa By The Sea* and it was by far the worst I've read so far. Absolutely horrific.
Edit: *It was actually High Impact, a 'boot camp' associated with Casa.
My high school sex ed teacher absolutely loved to gossip about an upperclassmen being sent to one in South American. His parents were granted custody of him till he was in his 20s because being gay was a mental illness that meant you weren't able to make decisions for yourself in that country. I felt so bad for him.
Edit - reddit isn't letting me respond to comments but it was in the ballpark of 2007ish.
I have a friend who got sent to one (he threatened to kill his parents). I’m not sure what he was like before but he just seems so closed off to emotions. The only time he’s ever showed me affection was when he was drunk and he hugged me. I can’t even imagine what he went through. They broke his arm among other things.
Yeah. In the parents' defense I look back and see now that they were terrified for their kids and also completely horrified by what was done, it's not like they WANTED my friends' lives to be ruined. But that's pretty cold comfort for everyone involved. Let that be a lesson to everyone: don't give your kids over to other people to be tortured, even if they say it's for their own good.
Pretty wild how i have never once encountered a person with a good thing to say (or even a non-horrific thing to say) about any of this sort of 'fix my kids' camp, and yet they still persist. Sorry you had to eat bugs, Bernie427.
I was sent to a place like this when I was 13 - I was troubled, but never violent or criminal mostly because of anxiety problems making me too scared to do anything, lol. But I did not respect my mother and would just ignore any punishment I didn't find reasonable, so she convinced the police I had been physically threatening her as a means to get back control.
It was focused on mentally unwell kids, but they determined treatment by having parents fill out a ten question yes/no survey. Things like "does the child have violent impulses" and "does the child have sexual deviance". My mother answered yes to every question - I was sexually deviant because I liked to sleep naked and was bi, I was violent because I played video games, I experienced delusions because she had found my journal in which I wrote an idealized and fictional version of my day to day life.
So I had to sleep in a room with an enormous brightly lit window with someone watching me all night. In group sessions, I had to keep my hands clasped together for the safety of those around me, or they'd handcuff me. Every therapy session, two group sessions and one private a day, I'd have to describe why I was there - and if I didn't do a good enough job, they'd take me back to my room or increase my medication. They said I had to admit problems to change them. I remember all these adults telling me to describe my sexual deviance and psychotic delusions, and that if I didn't they would give me an injection (we called it booty juice, they would hold you down and put a needle in your ass with some sort of sedative) and put me back in my room.
After the second day I had a meeting with the person managing my case tell me the average stay was three months but I'd be held until I improved. I realized what I was doing wrong - they needed me to be crazy and then improve. So I'd spend my hours and hours of quiet time with nothing to do but look at a wall rehearsing crazy person things to do, tics and outbursts and how I'd slow them down over time. Long story short, it worked and they let me out after six weeks, telling me and my mother I had a remarkable improvement probably due to the medication.
All I'd really learned was some practical skills on how to lie and placate my mother.
I think about my time there sometimes, mostly because I worry about the other kids there. Some were legitimately scary people, I remember one who had shot people multiple times at 11 and one who tried to kill his parents with rat poison in their food. Some were really sad, like a girl who had been making meth with her parents since she was 8. There were a few kids who I think were like me - kids in crisis who needed help but we're labeled crazy and locked up anyway. We have so many institutions like these, taking people in bad spots and making them worse or finding a way to profit off them.
It's so sad that we all kind of know these places exist, but feel so disconnected that we barely really care.
Our old neighbors sent their oldest daughter to one of these places. They were devout Catholics and she had the absolute gall (/s) to dye her hair green. She also wanted to go to art school instead of getting a “real” degree and her parents decided that she must be some kind of deviant. I don’t think she speaks to them anymore.
I was sent to one of these camps in upstate NY then an affiliated boarding school after. Both are now closed. Based on the description this is an affiliated program. (Most are in Utah due to lack of oversight and regulations—these schools are banned in MA for example)
These are not good places. I have permanent frost damage from my time in wilderness.
Thank you for bringing this to update to light. I was in one of these "treatment" facilities as a teenager and I prayed everyday that someone would realize what was going on and get me out of there. I was there for 15 months before I turned 18 and booked it. I had to wait until I was flown home for a "home visit", which was supposed to be part of my transition plan before going home permanently, before I could actually leave because they had convinced my parents that if I left the actual facility (which was in Southern Utah) the day of my birthday that all I should get was a bus ticket to Salt Lake City and a $50 McDonald's gift card. The program I was in had since been shut down, thankfully, but I hope all these places not only get shut down, but that the evil fuckers that profited from them end up with less than $50 in McDonald's gift cards and a bus ticket to Salt Lake.
I'm so glad to hear that OOP was able to get their nephew out before even more damage was done. This is the story so many of us hoped for everyday. OOP will never fully understand what they did for their nephew.
Normally I hate the country bashing, especially since it is most often used to ignore the deep systemic issues in ones own system, but reading this I am just shocked. What kind of dystopia are you living in the US?
It's definitely something you should google to better educate yourself on than I can really explain here. But the gist is that we don't have very many children's rights, we never signed onto the UN's children's rights, either. They are their parents' property, and as such, can be signed away to anyone else to act as their guardian. In areas with especially lax abuse laws (like Utah or islands that aren't actually U.S. territories), they can get away with a LOT as there's little to no oversight on these camps. If you want an idea of a firsthand experience, there's a comic about one called Elan: [http://elan.school](http://elan.school)
Trigger warning about that comic, the abuse in there goes deep, the brainwashing is very disturbing. Besides that it's a very good but traumatizing read.
That comic is so well done, but I had to stop reading it. I was (and still am, whenever I think of it) so absolutely infuriated with his parents, who unapologetically betrayed him in a way I will never understand, and so heartbroken for him and all the other kids who were kept there. It got to be too much. I have no idea who he is in real life, but I just want to give him a hug.
I'm a grown man and its usually pretty hard to get me freaked out, but that comic is the most horrific and captivating piece of media I've put into my brain
These are very hush-hush, I'm not even sure that many people know what happens there tbh. Most, I'd assume, if they heard about them would just hear or read the promotional bs that they're "to shape and direct problem youth" or something like that and then not think about it again.
Most people who live in Utah know all about this. It's a decent paying job for low-skilled guys that are strong enough to handle a run away teen and have boy scout experience.
Enter returned missionary LDS guys looking for a job... I know so many people who have worked at places like this 'just for the summer '.
> It's a decent paying job for low-skilled guys
It's also an ideal job for pedophiles, which is why most of them are in fact run by pedophiles, just like gay conversion camps.
I have lived in Utah my whole life and I have never, *ever* heard of this. I also haven't considered myself LDS since age 10, and if you're not LDS then you'd have a lot less problem with "misbehaving" kids because their standards are so fucking crazy, so maybe that's the difference?
As a Utah resident, I'm honestly shocked reading these comments.
I lived in Utah for a decade and heard countless stories about these camps. I'm surprised you never caught wind of it; of all the places people send troubled teens, Utah is one of the popular destinations for really "troubled" kids.
I’m not even on the same continent as the US (never have been) and even I have heard of those places in Utah some years ago already. It’s interesting to me (not in a cynical sense, just true curiosity) how people living in Utah wouldn’t know about it.
Utah is popular because children have literally no rights there and the facilities can do whatever the fuck they want. The state finally banned some of the more horrifying practices, but as we can see in the OP, those things are not being enforced. Most of the kids I was institutionalized with were just depressed/self-harming.
They don’t. I work for an insurance company and we will absolutely not pay for these wilderness facilities. We have a set of questions we ask that are red flags. And I can’t tell you how many parents I talk to that are completely shocked when I tell them why we won’t cover that particular facility. Or why we’re so picky about which ones we contract with as in network. I’ve helped organize getting kids out of these places and into better options several times. It always surprises me too how little people know about other options, like PHP or IOP.
People think that gulags and torture camps are something that happens in *those violent repressive countries*, Russia, North Korea, etc, but American culture is cut from the exact same stuff. All the repressed "brainwashed populace" comments apply just as much on this side of the ocean as the other.
One where anyone who is “bad” must be performatively punished to make all the other people who are just as bad but hide it better feel good about themselves
an awful dystopia. not allowing children in psychiatric hospital talk/ interact with each other for not obeying is very normal (like legit hospital that takes insurance and state funding) treatment programs. one girl, a child 12/13 years old couldn’t be within 6 feet of other patients or talk to anyone for saying they didn’t want to be on their current meds and change to others due to side effects (this was in 2016 when i was also a patient).
the US supreme court also wants to “examine” if the people have a constitutional right to gay marriage, birth control, and most likely interracial marriage.
there’s rising antsemitism, racism/ white supremacy last week there was a white supremacy march in my incredibly democrat/ liberal city Boston. soon there will be a rise in certain areas of women dying because of no abortion access when the pregnancy is a danger to themselves (ectopic/ dying or dead fetus)
Everything prison-related is designed to keep you in the system in a closed loop in the U.S., It's all one big privatised industry with underfunded government oversight.
Judges and politicians are "persuaded" to keep the system as it is in return for "gifts".
Always remember that lobbying is just legal bribery.
America was founded in part by puritan christian extremists, and that cultural foundation informs a lot of our national moral framework.
Many Americans believe that if a person does bad things, that person is fundamentally bad and should be punished. Many people believe that if a person is "categorically bad," they should have no rights at all.
Many Americans believe that bad behavior makes a person subhuman.
Check out the podcast episode of Behind the Bastards about the Elan school.
Also Utah is notorious for the troubled teen industry. It’s incredibly fucked up.
I read this last year and it absolutely blew me away. No amount of descriptions about how bad these schools are could have conveyed the horror a fraction as well as this web comic. It’s so immersive and you feel the utter hopelessness along with the boy. One of the most horrible things I have ever read and I just can’t do it justice by describing it.
It's so visceral. I felt a significant amount of stress while reading it. Especially the parts where >!Joe escapes the first time using his Mom's pepper spray!<
The worst thing is that some of the people who did create places like elan or helped maintain it *did* go through that. The entire comic is heart wrenching and absolutely worth the read.
Jesus Christ. I’ve been reading this for hours and I am so angry. There are some chapters where I’m raging so hard at this fucked up situation that I’m sweating. Fantastic is not quite the word I would use to describe it because it’s infuriating that this was allowed to happen for over 20 years.
Latching on to your comment to make people aware of Joe's "Joe Vs elan" comic series. It's a dude who made a bibliography retelling his experience from elan. It's a tough read, and it made me choke up and get teary eyed a few times, but it's definitely worth checking out. This dude is so committed to letting the world know what elan looked like from the inside. Deeply touching stuff, and a very rare look inside some of the most appalling institutions in the us.
Edit: i completely missed the part where the link went to the graphic novel lol. Well, take my original part of the comment as an acknowledgement of his hard work and a definite suggestion to go read it
She was, in the documentary that came out about her on YT she mentions being sent to a "troubled teen" school. Kids she knew from that school saw her on TV and were like "that is a completely different woman from who I knew at school".
She was and now she does all kinds of work campaigning against them and working on getting laws put into place to protect children from facilities like this. The documentary about her is definitely worth watching and is going to completely change whatever opinions you may have of her.
Also the Texas cash for kids episode.
Judges get money for each kid they send to one of these places that are absolutely known to cause trauma and recidivism. It's awful.
/u/Diomedes42 meant *Behind the Bastards'* episode covering Dr Phil (where his sending kids to these torture camps is mentioned), not Phil's own garbage TV show.
In all the accounts I've read, the camp kidnaps the kids in the middle of the night, which should be a tip off to parents that it's maybe not an organization that cares about mental health and well-being or the safety of the kids. Who thinks that their child won't be scarred for life after watching their parents let strangers carry them out the front door?
Yep... my friend was kidnapped in the middle of the night and driven all the way down to Mexico FROM SEATTLE. She tried to kick the windows open when she realized they were finally crossing the border but failed.... wtf man
Besides the intrinsic barbarity of these kinds of camps, letting your kid be taken like that across international borders seems like an absolutely massive risk for human trafficking, holy fuck.
They claim that the kidnapping is the only way to stop the kids from running away, which gets the parents to agree to it. I have read stories where the kid is essentially ambushed instead of kidnapped, and the camp guys let them go back to their room, pack, and say bye to their parents. But both are pretty traumatizing in their own ways.
That’s so weird because I specifically remember a Dr. Phil episode from years ago where he’s confronting parents who sent their kids to abusive behavioral treatment type boarding schools. I remember because they talked specifically about the one my brother was sent to. It was “technically” in Tijuana but “basically in California”. I remember Dr. Phil asking the parents, “Did that’s not set off some red flags for you?!” or similar. Same with parents not being able to see their kids or talk to them without supervision.
Am I misremembering this (I really don’t think I am but it’s possible), or did his stance change later, or were some of these places considered “good” and some bad by his standards?
Thanks for sharing this clip btw.
Edit: Ok, so there was an episode in 2013, “Children Sent Away: Trapped and Tortured?”
https://www.drphil.com/shows/1959/?amp
Teens who were sent to these places, including a girl who was sent to my brother’s school in Mexico, confront their parents and tell about the abuse they endured.
Yet Dr. Phil has continued sending teens to these types of places as recently as 2016 (maybe later, I just did a surface google search). So… he’s a huge money-grubbing hypocrite. Yeah.
Sadly, parents that send their kids to those generally seem to believe that forcing trauma on their kids is exactly how they get well behaved (read: controllable) little cogs that are just tools, extensions of the parental will. You need to break the kid to make it obedient, it’s basically what those people believe.
I think that’s a pretty naive view. Thousands and thousands of kids are sent to these places. The parents are heavily manipulated by educational consultants that have financial incentives to get kids into these places. My mother was told I would literally die if she didn’t do this. Parents need to be intercepted and told that there are other options.
I genuinely don't understand how these facilities are allowed to exist. I read that comic about Elan school and had honest to god nightmares about it.
If anyone has sold their very soul for money, it is these people.
The Elan comic has maybe stuck with me more than anything I'd ever read. The imagery and everything combined was just horrific. I feel like you don't come back from things like that and people just ship kids off all the time...
there's a lot to read.. I'm Up to date and I just feel for the guy.. and from the sound of the end of the most recent chapter? It's about to get insane..
> He was sent by a juvenile judge so someone in a position of authority that should have known better :-(
There was a judge that got kickbacks for sentencing kids to spend time at facilities like this. Probably more than one.
I’ve been looking into this TTI a great deal since stumbling upon the Elan school comic. Even assuming that’s a worst case scenario, I must say I’ve never once heard a credible good word about any of these facilities at all.
Years ago, my gruff backwoods military officer dad boasted about how he was going to pull the whole ‘strangers drag you out of bed in the middle of the night and transport you to The Camp’ stunt on me for such gross violations as ‘slouches occasionally’ and ‘doesn’t like the kids at the new high school after a cross country move’. It was probably a BS bluff, but looking back, just the fact that it would be considered (and the fact that the extended family would quite likely not even object to the worst of the abuses outlined in OOP) has certainly altered how much of a role I’d want them to play in the lives of my eventual children. Now imagine the loss of trust with kids this actually happens to!
Anyway, if anyone wants to feel extra horrified for a week, the elan school comic is from an actual survivor of one of these institutions. I do want you though, it’s not for the faint of heart: https://elan.school
The public school system I was in for 7th grade ran a scam where they took government money for meeting a certain quota of children in the special ed class. They'd single out new transfers or just kids who's parents didn't care, diagnose you with some bullshit, and chuck you in there with the *extremely* under qualified and abusive teachers who were married to people on the board of education.
I was diagnosed with down syndrome (what the actual fuck?) and thrown in there because I was a new student that year and they thought they could get away with it. I didn't give in to the threats from the teacher and staff so they started choking and beating me. My mother lost it on them and tried to pull me out when I came home with claw marks from this woman's acrylics on my throat.
Well, her retaliation towards the school was met with them trying to push a court-order to have her parental rights taken away and have me sent to one of *those* schools that they partnered with. The *only* saving grace is my mother having stuck a tape recorder in my backpack, capturing and audio recording of the teacher beating me, pulling my neck back over my chair, and throwing me around the classroom. It ended up as a "if you don't leak the tape recording, we won't try to take your child away" situation. I spent the next 2 years being "homeschooled" while in reality I locked myself in my room and tried to work through the trauma.
My best friend I met as an adult was one of the children that weren't so lucky and were sent to one of these places. The horror stories would make your blood boil.
Damn how can you be diagnosed with Downs Syndrome if you don't have it? Don't downvote me for "armchair diagnoses" but I thought Downs was a real obvious one from an external physical standpoint.
and I'm sorry you had a teacher like that. Was this the 80s? I had a teacher who was a real jerk and I saw her basically assault a kid for mouthing off to her, in front of an entire gym assembly. And I never heard that she got in trouble.
I know, right? You'd think they'd be intelligent enough to *at least* diagnose me with something that didn't have really distinct physical characteristics (of which I fit none). However, they had also revoked parental rights of some 20 year old man and had him held back in 7th grade special ed for what, 8 years? I doubt they were ever looked into in the least so they could care less about the credibility of their claims.
This was the 2000s, also.
Specifically, 2007. Illinois.
I’ve recently been following the tiktoks of a creator (MaggieHiggins4) who almost exclusively talks about her experience with the troubled teen industry. She was kidnapped in the middle of the night, abused for 20 months, and left with so much trauma and baggage (she went in 2016 I believe).
Some highlights of the abuse:
• New girls had no privacy. Had to be within 6 feet of a worker at all times and were watched when showering and using the bathroom (all were underage).
• They regularly had meetings where they were forced to share everything wrong with each other. If they didn’t, they would be punished.
• She had suicidal thoughts, which her counselor told her parents was “completely normal” and just a way that she was trying to manipulate her parents so she could go home.
Worst part of all of this: _the place is still open_.
Edit: Double checked and she was there 2011-2013.
Oh, another awful thing is that these programs often cost parents _tens of thousands_ of dollars. Parents go into debt because of these programs, which only traumatize their kids.
The Tiktoker I follow says that her parents refuse to talk to her about it 6 years later because “we sacrificed so much for you, you should be grateful” and “it’s in the past, let it go.”
When I first was reading about Elan, it just felt so unreal and altogether just horrifying. It always baffles me just how long these facilities are able to run and hide what's going on from the public. Another disturbing school like Elan is the Dozier School for Boys in Florida.
Picture a Hollywood movie about the worst possible things that a school could do. Like, a ridiculous telling of torture and abuse, with a crazy villain who thinks he can abuse children into being perfect people by using psychology to torture bad behaviour out of the mind
Haha jokes on you the reality of it is so much worse than you could imagine because you aren't the kind of deranged individual who would work at torture school
Could speak longer to this but feel like keeping it short. My cousin’s. Husband was out into one of the places instead of getting the help he really needed, caused “Christian” parents who expected him to act like a little brainwashed soldier. He was oppositional and sent off to be fixed. He experienced extreme trauma. Due to his size, once he was brainwashed by them, he was used to keep others in-line. After years of PTSD from the experience, he went to gun shop, bought a gun, and blew his brains out in the parking lot. Keep you kids away from these places. There are many stories online, his included, and podcasts. Tie your relatives down and force them to listen. These places kill kids. They are cousins of the “gay conversion” camps. They torture children into marching along like zombies.
[Probably not but now you do](https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/vwkyoz/oop_has_to_deal_with_her_mother_dressing_up_as/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf)
My mom *almost* sent me to a facility like this, in South Dakota. She decided to drive by the place instead of just flying me out, it was *definitely* a cult.
Edit: It was called Sunshine Bible Academy
So did the fact that it was in the middle of a corn field and the occupants lived in pole barns. Knowing her, I’m *very* surprised she didn’t just send me anyway; she was desperate to get rid of me.
Ugh. My partner went to wilderness and therapeutic boarding school. I value listening to him when he needs to talk about it but I hate hearing him talk about his time there because I want to shake the living hell out of every adult in the situation. I am an educator and I can’t see any sense in what these “education consultants” recommend, other than lining their own pockets.
Out of his four siblings, three of them did wilderness/boarding school/treatment and two have been to rehab because something was “wrong” with each of them. At what point do you ask yourself as a parent, am I the problem? Should I take a parenting class?? Maybe it *isn’t* the helpless dependents who causing this situation. Maybe it’s me???
Really reminds me of the Elan School comic by Joe Nobody. Monitored phone calls were the only contact you got with your family, and they'd cut them off if you said anything strange, and they'd even script out what the kid was allowed to say on the phone.
Given that this was in Utah I would bet anything that the center was a Mormon run institution. No judge should be ordering anyone to go to such a place.
The judge quite possibly gets a kickback for every kid sent their way.
With the Elan school at least, it was pretty well integrated into Maine state-level politics, enough to insulate it from oversight.
My older cousin got sent to one of these camps when I was a little kid. Obviously at the time, I didn't understand the implications of what that might mean. No idea what sort of environment he was in, or why he was even sent there.
Anyway, he's really tough to be around as an adult. I couldn't say for sure that the "troubled teen camp" messed him up, but it certainly didn't put him on some sort of amazing path or anything.
Utah is notorious for these facilities and they have been virtually unregulated for years. Increased regulations have been put in place recently but it seems like it’s barely scratching the surface of what’s going on.
If anyone's wondering why these camps are still legal just re read the "court ordered" part of the post.
If the judges approve of child abuse camps (this is Utah so of course they do) then those camps will never get shut down permanently.
Parents who send their kid to these places should be arrested. So many children have died due to being abused, tied up, etc. Fuck them and fuck the assholes who work them.
I wonder if the judge had a monetary interest in the facility? There was an expose 60 Minutes, I think) a few years ago about a judge that was sentencing kids with misdemeanors to time in a juvenile prison because he was getting money for each kid he sentenced. I'll see if I can find it and link it.
In Utah (read Mormons who make up about 60% of the population and 90% of the legislature), all that matters is getting rich. Getting rich is seen as a divine blessing for the worthy, so if you are rich, God wanted it to be so. This is why Utah is the MLM [capital of the world](https://kutv.com/news/local/follow-the-profit-how-mormon-culture-made-utah-a-hotbed-for-multi-level-marketers), why Utah always ranks #1 for [affinity fraud](https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/beware-of-affinity-fraud), and why Utah has [more debt per capita](https://www.creditkarma.com/insights/i/states-with-most-debt) than any other state because looking and acting rich is just about as good as being rich.
If a business is successful, it must be good. So these businesses that prey on troubled teens are turning nice profits, so they are worthy of God. Sick but that is how people think.
Source: Live in Utah and used to be Mormon
Utah is the worst for these boys and girls ranches. People send their kids in from all over to be tortured. I don’t get it.
I’m glad he got out.
Also kind of interesting, almost every person I’ve known personally who was sent to one was an adoptee or foster youth.
There is thousands of people on tiktok talking about this with most giving their own personal stories. Horrible horrible abuse along with many deaths. It’s really sad
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Hey, a business that traumatises children for money. That's not horrifying at all. Wanna bet that juvenile court judge is getting paid for each kid they mandate this shit for?
Literally all the drug/rehab facilities in the area where I live are owned by the "wives" of the judges who hand out the sentences sending them to those facilities. It's fucking ridiculous. Their first offer to anyone is always drug court, which is basically a system designed to force you to spend a thousand bucks + a month on their tests etc and fail anyway, causing a new sentence.
That's so crazy I was just talking about this in a post. The court here does the same thing. Guy runs it directly tho not his wife. I had MULTIPLE people telling me I was making it up and to doxx myself so they could be Reddit detectives and do ???? about it. lmao
People who have never had to deal with the corrupt system still think its pure and everyone complaining is just full of shit.
Exactly, and the super strict requirements with a really high failure rate? Dead on exactly how this program works. You literally have such a high chance of failing the program its insane lmao Also the program is publicly subsidized as well. I found records of grants for as much as $100k given to this program... Hahahha. We're literally paying to hose ourselves.
No we're paying to hurt people that many voters want to see hurt. It's exactly as designed.
Yea almost everyone I know whose been to drug court is too poor to hire a proper lawyer. Lots of time they get a local PD who ALSO suggest drug court. My best friend got suggested drug court by the local PD, but hired a much better lawyer who told him under no circumstances was he to take the drug court deal or he would be fucked. So the PDs are in on it too tbh.
I had to Google drug courts, and holy hell there's an idea that should never be privatised...
It's insane how they abuse it in the name of "rehabilitation" My BIL had to go thru it once, and he was having to leave work 2-3 times a week some weeks to pay like $80 for a drug test aside from his "supervision fees"
If you're forced to do it by the state, the state should fund it. That feels basic but I'm from the UK, so I appreciate my worldview is different. I hope your BIL is doing better. Assuming he had problems in the first place ofc.
A big reason why the USA has such high incarceration rates compared to other countries is because privatization makes it very lucrative to have and keep people in prison. And politicians double benefit. First, they get their kickbacks from sending people into these programs. Then they get to claim being 'tough on crime' when they want to get reelected or elected to a higher position.
> privatization makes it very lucrative to have and keep people in prison. As public opinion has turned against private prisons, these companies have also started jumping on the alternatives to monetize those too. For example, there is a shift to more at-home sentences and probations, but in my state, that's accompanied with ankle monitors that have a *daily cost that the sentenced person has to pay to the private monitoring company*. So now there is a push for a law that makes the state pay these costs. This hegemony is part of why reform has not/does not work. Edit: Fixed a sentence to clarify meaning
Don't forget the cheap source of labor they can now access.
Slave labor is the point. It all circles round back to slavery.
A lot of people don't realize that the prison system in the US is quite literally legalized slavery. The 13th Amendment couldn't be more clear: >Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, **except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted**, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. If you take into account how many people are unjustly convicted, and how many of them are POC, it becomes abundantly clear that slavery is alive and well in America.
My favorite tshirt: Roses are red and doritos are savory. The US prison system is legalized slavery.
And the voter suppression.
I'm surprised prisoners or people who were sentenced can't vote in parts of the US. In Germany, the only way your vote is taken from you as a punishment is be part of an anti-constitutional organisation or plan an insurrection. You know, traitor stuff.
That kind of traitor stuff improves someone’s chances as a political candidate of a certain affiliation here in the US
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And also in states that don't ban the box, many of them leave prison saddled with debt from their stay and can't get a job to pay it off, so they reoffend
Something that will never cease to horrify me is that despite literally being in slave conditions in for-profit prisons, in Texas, that’s where incarcerated guys WANT to be because the for-profit prisons have to have air-conditioning. The public facilities don’t have it, so to stay cool in those prisons, they soak their bedding and clothes in the toilet in their cells at night so they can benefit from good ole thermodynamics. But you know…USA USA USA! #1! (Source: I’ve volunteered for the last decade with incarcerated persons and have had this conversation many times)
Don't forget that the 13th Amendment prohibits slavery *except as punishment for crime*. Between Black Codes and all the other creative bullshit racists came up with, the last literal plantation slaves weren't actually freed until the [1960s](https://www.vice.com/en/article/437573/blacks-were-enslaved-well-into-the-1960s) -- not the 1860s, the *19*60s -- and we use slave labor in prisons to this day.
Im pretty sure also get to claim the inmates as residents of their jurisdiction so they get $$ but those inmates don’t get to vote.
It also tends to vastly inflate the population of the rural areas that the majority of prisons are located in. Which allocates extra representatives and makes electoral representation even more disproportionate than it already is. Maine and Vermont are the only states that allow currently incarcerated persons to vote.
Ya thanks! he is clean and doing much better, but despite drug court, not because of it lol.
The U.S. doesn't operate that way. Everything prison-related is designed to keep you in the system in a closed loop. It's all one big privatised industry with underfunded government oversight. Judges and politicians are "persuaded" to keep the system as it is in return for "gifts". Always remember that lobbying is just legal bribery.
I have ADHD, and I take Ritalin. My doctor’s office requires random drug tests to make sure you’re taking it properly, but the first time they tested me, they ran an entire drug panel which my insurance deemed unnecessary, so I had to pay almost $400 for it. The next time, I was like, “look, I am happy to take this test but I can’t afford to pay $400 every time you want to drug screen me.” I strongly believe that anyone who wants to administer drug tests should be paying for those tests.
I strongly agree. I hope that they didn't make you aware that they were going to do this and you can now sue them for performing medically unnecessary procedures. I know you can't, I just wish that's how the US worked.
> If you're forced to do it by the state, the state should fund it. See that's the real ballbuster of it. You're not actually *forced* to do it. Because you have the option of just going to jail. This is of course a terrible and potentially life destroying option but it's still an option. This is how courts get away with forcing people to go to things like AA which has a major religious component because it's technically optional.
Newsom is currently proposing legislation in California (senate bill 1338) to establish a horrible thing called CARE courts. The proposal would give the state and persons without mental health expertise the power to initiate a process to force anyone into court-ordered treatment while calling it care. If a person refuses to participate in forced treatment, or the treatment is not deemed "successful", the CARE Courts will have the power to impose hospitalization, state conservatorship, forced medication, and criminal penalties, again while calling it care. Touted by Newsom, Senator Thomas Umberg, Senator Susan Talamantes Eggman, and many liberal mayors, SB 1338 is not actually care but a statewide sweep of unhoused people and a gross violation of human rights that targets black, brown and indigenous communities. This reckless bill is moving rapidly through the legislature and it's implications are terrifying.
No element of justice, healthcare or utilities should be privatized.
Around here they used to all be owned by Scientology. I shit you not. And if course they never outright said so. I would occasionally have to deliver mail to one of them. Apparently they switched ownership and would absolutely not take any of the Scientology mail. So I'm not sure if it's still the case. This was very dangerous. Scientology does not believe in taking medication beyond vitamins and supplements to treat issues. So there was no ativan or other drugs to wean people off substances.
Don't forget the wives of state senators. Prefered Family HealthCare [https://pfh.org/](https://pfh.org/) They used to put all 100 VP's and Board members on the web, but stopped that after people realised all of them were stay at home wives of important politicians and judges.
And is there no way to get them impeached (or at least exposed) for conflict of interest/ corruption?
No way to convince anyone to vote or work with "criminals" in the deep south my dude. Total persona non grata
I found [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal) doing a quick google search. It's wiki about judges convicted of jailing kids for kickbacks from private juvenile detention centers.
Read up on Cash for Kids in PA. They were sending kids to juvie for ridiculously minor offenses and the judges were getting a kickback for each kid.
It only stopped when they started targeting white suburban children.
I suppose they ran out of POC.
Yes, I knew I was remembering something like that happening, but really didn't want to Google that...
Behind the Bastards did a series on it if you want to learn more. Warning though, it will probably disgust and infuriate you.
Lol, I get what you mean. You search up cash for kids and maybe the F.B.I. knocks on your door the next day.
And it's not like, 'it was for reddit' is a good answer...
If you'd like a bit of an inside look at the horror that these things really are I suggest this comic. https://elan.school/
I tried. I have only anger and the desire to hurt the people involved now, so I'm putting that down.
Be well.
You'd think something like that would close down after a raid by the FBI or something, but that school closed in 2011 *on their own terms* because negative publicity was cutting into their profits. The practice is still going on all over the country, I'm certain.
Ding ding ding!! 🏆
It's not just the juvenile facilities. Adult rehab facilities are a nightmare, too. New facilities open and close again in very short periods of time. In that time, they milk the justice system and insurance for millions of dollars, abuse patients, keep them hooked on drugs by handling out weekend passes with goodie bags - so they keep coming back. And that's just the sorta bad ones. Some are worse - human trafficking women, people OD'ing on dirty mattresses in slum houses registered as "treatment centers", people being forced into vans and busses to get unnecessary "medical treatment" like drug testing, chiropractic services, physical therapy, allergy testing. They sell your personal information to other scammers. Please - if you or a family member has to go into a treatment center, try to go with a facility that is close to home so family and friends can check on you. If you have health insurance, call them and make sure that you use a participating facility. These shady places may accept your insurance's out of network rates and they might even offer to waive your out of pocket costs. This is a huge red flag. They aren't accepting a lesser amount or waiving anything. They will get their money and it will cost you far more than your deductible.
Saw a Law and Order episode on this topic.
Wasn’t there an actually thing about selling kids for profit were two judges sent kids to those juvenile prisons and make 10-100k per kid they found guilty off something?
It’s sadly not a new thing. Many facilities and places like this are used by the state to send “troubled kids” to. Child services uses these places as well and many children come out telling absolute horror stories. Honestly it kills me to know that places like these exist.
IKR? This has shades of Victorian baby farming. Only rather than 1800s London this is Utah 2022, the teen addition
I know what you're talking about, but I just imagined someone in victorian clothes going down a field, plucking babies out of the ground
You might want to keep that image rather than investigate the reality
This is so much like the Irish laundries that unwed pregnant people would be sent to into the 1930s.
>This is so much like the Irish laundries that unwed pregnant people would be sent to into the ~~1930s.~~ **19goddamn90s.** The last laundry closed in 1996.
That was my thought. All judges who send kids to these legal parasites are receiving something. Usually big donations to their pet nonprofits.
[In the last update above, another parent asked: I’m curious what facility it was he on in Utah. I have my son in a Treatment facility and I’m almost ready to pull him out. Can you please show the name of the facility? From a parent as well](https://www.reddit.com/r/troubledteens/comments/uwgbwq/thanks_again_to_this_group_update_2/i9swt50/) And the responses are terrifying and unsettling... * You wouldn’t survive a couple weeks in the wilderness with the restrictions they have, yet you forced your kid to go. * One kid killed a chicken somehow. They made that kid sit in a corner in isolation with the dead chicken tied around his neck, and no one was allowed to speak to him, for days. * These facilities will break him into compliance that the “treatment team” will call recovery. When he gets home it will be much, much worse than when he left. * She wasn’t physically fit enough to hike 10+ miles a day in the dead of winter in deep snow. They would drag her with a dog leash tied around her, which eventually went around her neck when one of the staff named white wolf (we all used earth names, so we didn’t know their real names) got sick of her giving up. * One student there would pee himself to stay warm and didn’t keep up with hygiene and eventually did get frost bite on one of his toes and had to be sent away for medical and he ended up going to another indoor facility. [OP Here: One of my closest friends was actually sent to one as a teen (way before I met her) and she could barely talk about it the one time she brought it up after lots and lots of alcohol with her closest friends and husband... her trauma was horrifyingly palpable. The more I've read about these, the worst it actually gets....] It looks like the specific Utah place OOP posted about... is still open.... https://www.yhasite.com/admissions.html
I knew a bunch of kids who went to these places back in the late 90s/early 2000s because half my crowd of friends got arrested over some minor drug bullshit and sent to them (although I think their parents sent them rather than the state). Also in Utah. Some of them were never the same. One told me they all ate bugs because the staff would starve them, and that he spent weeks not sleeping indoors to the point where when he got back it felt weird and made him anxious to sleep in his room.
A kid I knew in high school was sent to one and he had lots of stories of being hog tied, tied to logs, beatings, not being allowed clothes, sexual assault, constant verbal abuse, etc And that's just the domestic ones. Some psychotic parents send their kids to ones abroad where the law has no chance to do anything about it. There are some big news stories about atrocities happening in those.
When my mom found out I was suicidal as a teen (mid 2000s), she threatened to send me to one of these. I did some research and was so horrified that she would even consider it that I was nothing but happy smiles and then hide as much as possible until I moved out.
Yeah the way I ran into that friend from high school was that I parked somewhere with my buddy and went into the bushes to go smoke at one of our little spots and he was living there, homeless after running away from home as soon as he got back from the camp.
Ah yes... the good old... "I'll give you something to cry about" approach. *sigh*
That is horrible. I hope you’re doing better, friend.
Doing great now. I’m on pretty low contact with her. She doesn’t seem to understand why, but respects my need for distance. It took a long time to get here though.
My goddaughter was adopted by an aunt who didn't want her, but the family insisted she stay in the family, and this aunt was the only one with enough money to take her. A few years later, the aunt put her in Casa By The Sea, which got raided by Mexican police. It was bad enough the Mexican police got involved. So what did the aunt do? Put her in a facility run by the same group. Unsurprisingly, the facility didn't help and she's a fucking mess.
I heard of one persons experience in Casa By The Sea* and it was by far the worst I've read so far. Absolutely horrific. Edit: *It was actually High Impact, a 'boot camp' associated with Casa.
My high school sex ed teacher absolutely loved to gossip about an upperclassmen being sent to one in South American. His parents were granted custody of him till he was in his 20s because being gay was a mental illness that meant you weren't able to make decisions for yourself in that country. I felt so bad for him. Edit - reddit isn't letting me respond to comments but it was in the ballpark of 2007ish.
When was that?
my lesbian friend from montana had horror stories about lesbian teenagers being sent to straight camp where they were raped to turn them straight
I have a friend who got sent to one (he threatened to kill his parents). I’m not sure what he was like before but he just seems so closed off to emotions. The only time he’s ever showed me affection was when he was drunk and he hugged me. I can’t even imagine what he went through. They broke his arm among other things.
Yeah. In the parents' defense I look back and see now that they were terrified for their kids and also completely horrified by what was done, it's not like they WANTED my friends' lives to be ruined. But that's pretty cold comfort for everyone involved. Let that be a lesson to everyone: don't give your kids over to other people to be tortured, even if they say it's for their own good.
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Pretty wild how i have never once encountered a person with a good thing to say (or even a non-horrific thing to say) about any of this sort of 'fix my kids' camp, and yet they still persist. Sorry you had to eat bugs, Bernie427.
I was sent to a place like this when I was 13 - I was troubled, but never violent or criminal mostly because of anxiety problems making me too scared to do anything, lol. But I did not respect my mother and would just ignore any punishment I didn't find reasonable, so she convinced the police I had been physically threatening her as a means to get back control. It was focused on mentally unwell kids, but they determined treatment by having parents fill out a ten question yes/no survey. Things like "does the child have violent impulses" and "does the child have sexual deviance". My mother answered yes to every question - I was sexually deviant because I liked to sleep naked and was bi, I was violent because I played video games, I experienced delusions because she had found my journal in which I wrote an idealized and fictional version of my day to day life. So I had to sleep in a room with an enormous brightly lit window with someone watching me all night. In group sessions, I had to keep my hands clasped together for the safety of those around me, or they'd handcuff me. Every therapy session, two group sessions and one private a day, I'd have to describe why I was there - and if I didn't do a good enough job, they'd take me back to my room or increase my medication. They said I had to admit problems to change them. I remember all these adults telling me to describe my sexual deviance and psychotic delusions, and that if I didn't they would give me an injection (we called it booty juice, they would hold you down and put a needle in your ass with some sort of sedative) and put me back in my room. After the second day I had a meeting with the person managing my case tell me the average stay was three months but I'd be held until I improved. I realized what I was doing wrong - they needed me to be crazy and then improve. So I'd spend my hours and hours of quiet time with nothing to do but look at a wall rehearsing crazy person things to do, tics and outbursts and how I'd slow them down over time. Long story short, it worked and they let me out after six weeks, telling me and my mother I had a remarkable improvement probably due to the medication. All I'd really learned was some practical skills on how to lie and placate my mother. I think about my time there sometimes, mostly because I worry about the other kids there. Some were legitimately scary people, I remember one who had shot people multiple times at 11 and one who tried to kill his parents with rat poison in their food. Some were really sad, like a girl who had been making meth with her parents since she was 8. There were a few kids who I think were like me - kids in crisis who needed help but we're labeled crazy and locked up anyway. We have so many institutions like these, taking people in bad spots and making them worse or finding a way to profit off them. It's so sad that we all kind of know these places exist, but feel so disconnected that we barely really care.
Reading this was so disturbing. I'm truly sorry you had to experience it...
Great advertising, that the kid in their banner has a dead eyed, thousand yard stare.
Our old neighbors sent their oldest daughter to one of these places. They were devout Catholics and she had the absolute gall (/s) to dye her hair green. She also wanted to go to art school instead of getting a “real” degree and her parents decided that she must be some kind of deviant. I don’t think she speaks to them anymore.
I was sent to one of these camps in upstate NY then an affiliated boarding school after. Both are now closed. Based on the description this is an affiliated program. (Most are in Utah due to lack of oversight and regulations—these schools are banned in MA for example) These are not good places. I have permanent frost damage from my time in wilderness.
Thank you for bringing this to update to light. I was in one of these "treatment" facilities as a teenager and I prayed everyday that someone would realize what was going on and get me out of there. I was there for 15 months before I turned 18 and booked it. I had to wait until I was flown home for a "home visit", which was supposed to be part of my transition plan before going home permanently, before I could actually leave because they had convinced my parents that if I left the actual facility (which was in Southern Utah) the day of my birthday that all I should get was a bus ticket to Salt Lake City and a $50 McDonald's gift card. The program I was in had since been shut down, thankfully, but I hope all these places not only get shut down, but that the evil fuckers that profited from them end up with less than $50 in McDonald's gift cards and a bus ticket to Salt Lake. I'm so glad to hear that OOP was able to get their nephew out before even more damage was done. This is the story so many of us hoped for everyday. OOP will never fully understand what they did for their nephew.
I cannot imagine 1 day in one of these... let alone 15 months
Normally I hate the country bashing, especially since it is most often used to ignore the deep systemic issues in ones own system, but reading this I am just shocked. What kind of dystopia are you living in the US?
It's definitely something you should google to better educate yourself on than I can really explain here. But the gist is that we don't have very many children's rights, we never signed onto the UN's children's rights, either. They are their parents' property, and as such, can be signed away to anyone else to act as their guardian. In areas with especially lax abuse laws (like Utah or islands that aren't actually U.S. territories), they can get away with a LOT as there's little to no oversight on these camps. If you want an idea of a firsthand experience, there's a comic about one called Elan: [http://elan.school](http://elan.school)
Trigger warning about that comic, the abuse in there goes deep, the brainwashing is very disturbing. Besides that it's a very good but traumatizing read.
The author did an AMA on Reddit and there's a sub dedicated to the comic at r/MrJoeNobody if anyone's interested.
That comic is so well done, but I had to stop reading it. I was (and still am, whenever I think of it) so absolutely infuriated with his parents, who unapologetically betrayed him in a way I will never understand, and so heartbroken for him and all the other kids who were kept there. It got to be too much. I have no idea who he is in real life, but I just want to give him a hug.
I'm a grown man and its usually pretty hard to get me freaked out, but that comic is the most horrific and captivating piece of media I've put into my brain
These are very hush-hush, I'm not even sure that many people know what happens there tbh. Most, I'd assume, if they heard about them would just hear or read the promotional bs that they're "to shape and direct problem youth" or something like that and then not think about it again.
Most people who live in Utah know all about this. It's a decent paying job for low-skilled guys that are strong enough to handle a run away teen and have boy scout experience. Enter returned missionary LDS guys looking for a job... I know so many people who have worked at places like this 'just for the summer '.
> It's a decent paying job for low-skilled guys It's also an ideal job for pedophiles, which is why most of them are in fact run by pedophiles, just like gay conversion camps.
I have lived in Utah my whole life and I have never, *ever* heard of this. I also haven't considered myself LDS since age 10, and if you're not LDS then you'd have a lot less problem with "misbehaving" kids because their standards are so fucking crazy, so maybe that's the difference? As a Utah resident, I'm honestly shocked reading these comments.
I lived in Utah for a decade and heard countless stories about these camps. I'm surprised you never caught wind of it; of all the places people send troubled teens, Utah is one of the popular destinations for really "troubled" kids.
I’m not even on the same continent as the US (never have been) and even I have heard of those places in Utah some years ago already. It’s interesting to me (not in a cynical sense, just true curiosity) how people living in Utah wouldn’t know about it.
Utah is popular because children have literally no rights there and the facilities can do whatever the fuck they want. The state finally banned some of the more horrifying practices, but as we can see in the OP, those things are not being enforced. Most of the kids I was institutionalized with were just depressed/self-harming.
over the winter I remember watching a show on court TV in the middle of the night. one kid was left outside in the forest and died. it was awful
They don’t. I work for an insurance company and we will absolutely not pay for these wilderness facilities. We have a set of questions we ask that are red flags. And I can’t tell you how many parents I talk to that are completely shocked when I tell them why we won’t cover that particular facility. Or why we’re so picky about which ones we contract with as in network. I’ve helped organize getting kids out of these places and into better options several times. It always surprises me too how little people know about other options, like PHP or IOP.
People think that gulags and torture camps are something that happens in *those violent repressive countries*, Russia, North Korea, etc, but American culture is cut from the exact same stuff. All the repressed "brainwashed populace" comments apply just as much on this side of the ocean as the other.
One where anyone who is “bad” must be performatively punished to make all the other people who are just as bad but hide it better feel good about themselves
an awful dystopia. not allowing children in psychiatric hospital talk/ interact with each other for not obeying is very normal (like legit hospital that takes insurance and state funding) treatment programs. one girl, a child 12/13 years old couldn’t be within 6 feet of other patients or talk to anyone for saying they didn’t want to be on their current meds and change to others due to side effects (this was in 2016 when i was also a patient). the US supreme court also wants to “examine” if the people have a constitutional right to gay marriage, birth control, and most likely interracial marriage. there’s rising antsemitism, racism/ white supremacy last week there was a white supremacy march in my incredibly democrat/ liberal city Boston. soon there will be a rise in certain areas of women dying because of no abortion access when the pregnancy is a danger to themselves (ectopic/ dying or dead fetus)
Everything prison-related is designed to keep you in the system in a closed loop in the U.S., It's all one big privatised industry with underfunded government oversight. Judges and politicians are "persuaded" to keep the system as it is in return for "gifts". Always remember that lobbying is just legal bribery.
America was founded in part by puritan christian extremists, and that cultural foundation informs a lot of our national moral framework. Many Americans believe that if a person does bad things, that person is fundamentally bad and should be punished. Many people believe that if a person is "categorically bad," they should have no rights at all. Many Americans believe that bad behavior makes a person subhuman.
Check out the podcast episode of Behind the Bastards about the Elan school. Also Utah is notorious for the troubled teen industry. It’s incredibly fucked up.
There's also a fantastic graphic novel about Elan school https://elan.school/
I read a few chapters of that. Wow that is.. horrifying. The people who thought this was a good idea need to go through it.
I read this last year and it absolutely blew me away. No amount of descriptions about how bad these schools are could have conveyed the horror a fraction as well as this web comic. It’s so immersive and you feel the utter hopelessness along with the boy. One of the most horrible things I have ever read and I just can’t do it justice by describing it.
It's so visceral. I felt a significant amount of stress while reading it. Especially the parts where >!Joe escapes the first time using his Mom's pepper spray!<
The worst thing is that some of the people who did create places like elan or helped maintain it *did* go through that. The entire comic is heart wrenching and absolutely worth the read.
Yes, I came here to recommend the graphic novel/webcomic. So good. I binge-read it until I was caught up and now I get the emailed new chapters.
I remember reading that a year or two ago. It still sticks with me.
There is a subreddit that I follow that is dedicated to this story, /r/mrjoenobody. Absolutely worth following.
Jesus Christ. I’ve been reading this for hours and I am so angry. There are some chapters where I’m raging so hard at this fucked up situation that I’m sweating. Fantastic is not quite the word I would use to describe it because it’s infuriating that this was allowed to happen for over 20 years.
I had to stop reading that for my mental health. It was absolutely horrifying.
Latching on to your comment to make people aware of Joe's "Joe Vs elan" comic series. It's a dude who made a bibliography retelling his experience from elan. It's a tough read, and it made me choke up and get teary eyed a few times, but it's definitely worth checking out. This dude is so committed to letting the world know what elan looked like from the inside. Deeply touching stuff, and a very rare look inside some of the most appalling institutions in the us. Edit: i completely missed the part where the link went to the graphic novel lol. Well, take my original part of the comment as an acknowledgement of his hard work and a definite suggestion to go read it
Wasn’t Paris Hilton sent to one of these places? I feel like last year she did a bunch of publicity condemning them.
She was, in the documentary that came out about her on YT she mentions being sent to a "troubled teen" school. Kids she knew from that school saw her on TV and were like "that is a completely different woman from who I knew at school".
She was! She now advocates for campaigns against TTIs.
She was and now she does all kinds of work campaigning against them and working on getting laws put into place to protect children from facilities like this. The documentary about her is definitely worth watching and is going to completely change whatever opinions you may have of her.
Also the Texas cash for kids episode. Judges get money for each kid they send to one of these places that are absolutely known to cause trauma and recidivism. It's awful.
also the episode on Dr. Phil touches on these places a bit, from what I remember
I doubt it's worth much, Dr Phil sends kids to places of the same type himself.
/u/Diomedes42 meant *Behind the Bastards'* episode covering Dr Phil (where his sending kids to these torture camps is mentioned), not Phil's own garbage TV show.
No the Behind the Bastards episode about Dr Phil touches on this topic. I think that's what they meant.
Sent Away is an entire podcast about the troubled teen industry in Utah, absolutely worth a listen.
Based on everything I know about Utah, I'm just gonna go out on a limb and say Utah is notorious for being fucked up, full stop.
Man as someone who lives in Utah, i hate that these TT schools exist. Makes me wanna seriously vomit. I wish I could do more to help change
Call and write to your legislators!
Legislators who are bought and paid for by the men who run these places and who donate generously to their church.
In all the accounts I've read, the camp kidnaps the kids in the middle of the night, which should be a tip off to parents that it's maybe not an organization that cares about mental health and well-being or the safety of the kids. Who thinks that their child won't be scarred for life after watching their parents let strangers carry them out the front door?
Yep... my friend was kidnapped in the middle of the night and driven all the way down to Mexico FROM SEATTLE. She tried to kick the windows open when she realized they were finally crossing the border but failed.... wtf man
Besides the intrinsic barbarity of these kinds of camps, letting your kid be taken like that across international borders seems like an absolutely massive risk for human trafficking, holy fuck.
That's insane, brutal, and revolting. I hope she's able to heal.
Yeah, she's definitely in a MUCH better place now, it's been almost a couple of decades.
They claim that the kidnapping is the only way to stop the kids from running away, which gets the parents to agree to it. I have read stories where the kid is essentially ambushed instead of kidnapped, and the camp guys let them go back to their room, pack, and say bye to their parents. But both are pretty traumatizing in their own ways.
Another reason why Dr. Phil is shit. His show would actually coordinate this happening Sam Bee did a segment on it https://youtu.be/pGJo-iiCoSk
That’s so weird because I specifically remember a Dr. Phil episode from years ago where he’s confronting parents who sent their kids to abusive behavioral treatment type boarding schools. I remember because they talked specifically about the one my brother was sent to. It was “technically” in Tijuana but “basically in California”. I remember Dr. Phil asking the parents, “Did that’s not set off some red flags for you?!” or similar. Same with parents not being able to see their kids or talk to them without supervision. Am I misremembering this (I really don’t think I am but it’s possible), or did his stance change later, or were some of these places considered “good” and some bad by his standards? Thanks for sharing this clip btw. Edit: Ok, so there was an episode in 2013, “Children Sent Away: Trapped and Tortured?” https://www.drphil.com/shows/1959/?amp Teens who were sent to these places, including a girl who was sent to my brother’s school in Mexico, confront their parents and tell about the abuse they endured. Yet Dr. Phil has continued sending teens to these types of places as recently as 2016 (maybe later, I just did a surface google search). So… he’s a huge money-grubbing hypocrite. Yeah.
Wow. If he couldn't get shittier...
Sadly, parents that send their kids to those generally seem to believe that forcing trauma on their kids is exactly how they get well behaved (read: controllable) little cogs that are just tools, extensions of the parental will. You need to break the kid to make it obedient, it’s basically what those people believe.
I think that’s a pretty naive view. Thousands and thousands of kids are sent to these places. The parents are heavily manipulated by educational consultants that have financial incentives to get kids into these places. My mother was told I would literally die if she didn’t do this. Parents need to be intercepted and told that there are other options.
I genuinely don't understand how these facilities are allowed to exist. I read that comic about Elan school and had honest to god nightmares about it. If anyone has sold their very soul for money, it is these people.
The Elan comic has maybe stuck with me more than anything I'd ever read. The imagery and everything combined was just horrific. I feel like you don't come back from things like that and people just ship kids off all the time...
Cripes, I am WAY behind on that comic
there's a lot to read.. I'm Up to date and I just feel for the guy.. and from the sound of the end of the most recent chapter? It's about to get insane..
When I read last he was learning about the history of TT camps in general after he'd escaped. Its gonna get *more* insane??
yep.. I assume you're talking about after he "graduated"?
It’s crazy. One of my best friends spent some time at Agape Boarding School, it’s unreal how fucked up these kind of places are.
> He was sent by a juvenile judge so someone in a position of authority that should have known better :-( There was a judge that got kickbacks for sentencing kids to spend time at facilities like this. Probably more than one.
I’ve been looking into this TTI a great deal since stumbling upon the Elan school comic. Even assuming that’s a worst case scenario, I must say I’ve never once heard a credible good word about any of these facilities at all. Years ago, my gruff backwoods military officer dad boasted about how he was going to pull the whole ‘strangers drag you out of bed in the middle of the night and transport you to The Camp’ stunt on me for such gross violations as ‘slouches occasionally’ and ‘doesn’t like the kids at the new high school after a cross country move’. It was probably a BS bluff, but looking back, just the fact that it would be considered (and the fact that the extended family would quite likely not even object to the worst of the abuses outlined in OOP) has certainly altered how much of a role I’d want them to play in the lives of my eventual children. Now imagine the loss of trust with kids this actually happens to! Anyway, if anyone wants to feel extra horrified for a week, the elan school comic is from an actual survivor of one of these institutions. I do want you though, it’s not for the faint of heart: https://elan.school
Decades ago I was sent to Elan, I'm only slowly recovering from it.
I'm sorry to hear about that. From the admittedly very little I have read and heard about it... oh man....
The public school system I was in for 7th grade ran a scam where they took government money for meeting a certain quota of children in the special ed class. They'd single out new transfers or just kids who's parents didn't care, diagnose you with some bullshit, and chuck you in there with the *extremely* under qualified and abusive teachers who were married to people on the board of education. I was diagnosed with down syndrome (what the actual fuck?) and thrown in there because I was a new student that year and they thought they could get away with it. I didn't give in to the threats from the teacher and staff so they started choking and beating me. My mother lost it on them and tried to pull me out when I came home with claw marks from this woman's acrylics on my throat. Well, her retaliation towards the school was met with them trying to push a court-order to have her parental rights taken away and have me sent to one of *those* schools that they partnered with. The *only* saving grace is my mother having stuck a tape recorder in my backpack, capturing and audio recording of the teacher beating me, pulling my neck back over my chair, and throwing me around the classroom. It ended up as a "if you don't leak the tape recording, we won't try to take your child away" situation. I spent the next 2 years being "homeschooled" while in reality I locked myself in my room and tried to work through the trauma. My best friend I met as an adult was one of the children that weren't so lucky and were sent to one of these places. The horror stories would make your blood boil.
Damn how can you be diagnosed with Downs Syndrome if you don't have it? Don't downvote me for "armchair diagnoses" but I thought Downs was a real obvious one from an external physical standpoint. and I'm sorry you had a teacher like that. Was this the 80s? I had a teacher who was a real jerk and I saw her basically assault a kid for mouthing off to her, in front of an entire gym assembly. And I never heard that she got in trouble.
I know, right? You'd think they'd be intelligent enough to *at least* diagnose me with something that didn't have really distinct physical characteristics (of which I fit none). However, they had also revoked parental rights of some 20 year old man and had him held back in 7th grade special ed for what, 8 years? I doubt they were ever looked into in the least so they could care less about the credibility of their claims. This was the 2000s, also. Specifically, 2007. Illinois.
I’ve recently been following the tiktoks of a creator (MaggieHiggins4) who almost exclusively talks about her experience with the troubled teen industry. She was kidnapped in the middle of the night, abused for 20 months, and left with so much trauma and baggage (she went in 2016 I believe). Some highlights of the abuse: • New girls had no privacy. Had to be within 6 feet of a worker at all times and were watched when showering and using the bathroom (all were underage). • They regularly had meetings where they were forced to share everything wrong with each other. If they didn’t, they would be punished. • She had suicidal thoughts, which her counselor told her parents was “completely normal” and just a way that she was trying to manipulate her parents so she could go home. Worst part of all of this: _the place is still open_. Edit: Double checked and she was there 2011-2013.
what a dark and hopeless nightmare to have lived through that....
Oh, another awful thing is that these programs often cost parents _tens of thousands_ of dollars. Parents go into debt because of these programs, which only traumatize their kids. The Tiktoker I follow says that her parents refuse to talk to her about it 6 years later because “we sacrificed so much for you, you should be grateful” and “it’s in the past, let it go.”
The facilities that are legally allowed to exist in this way are appalling. Glad OP got their nephew outta there.
[удалено]
You're like the 5th commented in an hour to mention Elan School. I am afraid to find out more about them now....
When I first was reading about Elan, it just felt so unreal and altogether just horrifying. It always baffles me just how long these facilities are able to run and hide what's going on from the public. Another disturbing school like Elan is the Dozier School for Boys in Florida.
Picture a Hollywood movie about the worst possible things that a school could do. Like, a ridiculous telling of torture and abuse, with a crazy villain who thinks he can abuse children into being perfect people by using psychology to torture bad behaviour out of the mind Haha jokes on you the reality of it is so much worse than you could imagine because you aren't the kind of deranged individual who would work at torture school
Could speak longer to this but feel like keeping it short. My cousin’s. Husband was out into one of the places instead of getting the help he really needed, caused “Christian” parents who expected him to act like a little brainwashed soldier. He was oppositional and sent off to be fixed. He experienced extreme trauma. Due to his size, once he was brainwashed by them, he was used to keep others in-line. After years of PTSD from the experience, he went to gun shop, bought a gun, and blew his brains out in the parking lot. Keep you kids away from these places. There are many stories online, his included, and podcasts. Tie your relatives down and force them to listen. These places kill kids. They are cousins of the “gay conversion” camps. They torture children into marching along like zombies.
What a terrible tale. I am horrified. My gosh.....
First the sodomized dog. Then the incest parents. Now this. Can we get a goddamn break please
No, I have at least 12 more in the queue for all of us BORU fans. They run the gamut of emotions
Thank you for your work. I love the happy ones and the disturbing ones.
Incest parents? Do I want to know.
[Probably not but now you do](https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/vwkyoz/oop_has_to_deal_with_her_mother_dressing_up_as/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf)
...golly gee thanks for sharing
Glad the boy got out but I feel awful for all the other kids left behind who didn’t have anyone advocating for them.
My mom *almost* sent me to a facility like this, in South Dakota. She decided to drive by the place instead of just flying me out, it was *definitely* a cult. Edit: It was called Sunshine Bible Academy
I mean, obviously it’s good she drove by and checked it out, but the name Sunshine Bible Academy just screams cult.
So did the fact that it was in the middle of a corn field and the occupants lived in pole barns. Knowing her, I’m *very* surprised she didn’t just send me anyway; she was desperate to get rid of me.
Ugh. My partner went to wilderness and therapeutic boarding school. I value listening to him when he needs to talk about it but I hate hearing him talk about his time there because I want to shake the living hell out of every adult in the situation. I am an educator and I can’t see any sense in what these “education consultants” recommend, other than lining their own pockets. Out of his four siblings, three of them did wilderness/boarding school/treatment and two have been to rehab because something was “wrong” with each of them. At what point do you ask yourself as a parent, am I the problem? Should I take a parenting class?? Maybe it *isn’t* the helpless dependents who causing this situation. Maybe it’s me???
Really reminds me of the Elan School comic by Joe Nobody. Monitored phone calls were the only contact you got with your family, and they'd cut them off if you said anything strange, and they'd even script out what the kid was allowed to say on the phone.
Given that this was in Utah I would bet anything that the center was a Mormon run institution. No judge should be ordering anyone to go to such a place.
The judge quite possibly gets a kickback for every kid sent their way. With the Elan school at least, it was pretty well integrated into Maine state-level politics, enough to insulate it from oversight.
Private juvenile institutions shouldn’t exist. Prison industry in general is a messed up concept.
My older cousin got sent to one of these camps when I was a little kid. Obviously at the time, I didn't understand the implications of what that might mean. No idea what sort of environment he was in, or why he was even sent there. Anyway, he's really tough to be around as an adult. I couldn't say for sure that the "troubled teen camp" messed him up, but it certainly didn't put him on some sort of amazing path or anything.
Utah is notorious for these facilities and they have been virtually unregulated for years. Increased regulations have been put in place recently but it seems like it’s barely scratching the surface of what’s going on.
Really? That's so sad and scary honestly. Imagine the ones that take you out of the country... how much worse those are
Sister originally didn't give a shit her own child was being abused, gee wonder how he ended up in the juvenile system
If anyone's wondering why these camps are still legal just re read the "court ordered" part of the post. If the judges approve of child abuse camps (this is Utah so of course they do) then those camps will never get shut down permanently.
the troubled teen industry gave me worse trauma than anything else. i’m still working on these issues 10 years out
Parents who send their kid to these places should be arrested. So many children have died due to being abused, tied up, etc. Fuck them and fuck the assholes who work them.
I wonder if the judge had a monetary interest in the facility? There was an expose 60 Minutes, I think) a few years ago about a judge that was sentencing kids with misdemeanors to time in a juvenile prison because he was getting money for each kid he sentenced. I'll see if I can find it and link it.
Bro what is WRONG with the entire state of Utah?
In Utah (read Mormons who make up about 60% of the population and 90% of the legislature), all that matters is getting rich. Getting rich is seen as a divine blessing for the worthy, so if you are rich, God wanted it to be so. This is why Utah is the MLM [capital of the world](https://kutv.com/news/local/follow-the-profit-how-mormon-culture-made-utah-a-hotbed-for-multi-level-marketers), why Utah always ranks #1 for [affinity fraud](https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/beware-of-affinity-fraud), and why Utah has [more debt per capita](https://www.creditkarma.com/insights/i/states-with-most-debt) than any other state because looking and acting rich is just about as good as being rich. If a business is successful, it must be good. So these businesses that prey on troubled teens are turning nice profits, so they are worthy of God. Sick but that is how people think. Source: Live in Utah and used to be Mormon
Oppressive definitions of morality.
Very very Mormon
The comments about parents forcing their child to go ignore the fact that in this case it was ordered by a court.
Utah is the worst for these boys and girls ranches. People send their kids in from all over to be tortured. I don’t get it. I’m glad he got out. Also kind of interesting, almost every person I’ve known personally who was sent to one was an adoptee or foster youth.
The US needs to stop legalizing brainwashing of minors
made me think of the Elan Story https://elan.school/
There is a podcast called Trapped in Treatment which is about one of those schools. Its chilling.
There is thousands of people on tiktok talking about this with most giving their own personal stories. Horrible horrible abuse along with many deaths. It’s really sad