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No More Nightmares at Tranquility
Bay?
By John Gorenfeld, AlterNet
January 23, 2006.
Largely unregulated, the teen rehab industry has
scarred thousands of kids for life. Now one lone congressmember is
pushing to stop the abuse.
 From the Czech Republic to Costa Rica and Mexico,
cops have seized American overseers for caging or mistreating American
teens at harsh "boot camps" run under foreign flags to escape U.S. law.
But here at home, the companies that ship teenagers
to remote reform schools can freely go about their business in many
states. You can dial 1-800-355-TEEN to reach the sales staff of Teen
Help, LLC, who can arrange for your child to be spirited away. They
might put you in touch with "escorts," guys who can pull up to your
driveway in a van and transport even the most defiant child to the
airport. The next destination is up to you: a "tough love" school here
in the 50 states, like Majestic Ranch in Utah or Spring Creek Lodge
Academy in Montana?
Or perhaps Tranquility Bay, a barbed-wire
discipline facility in Jamaica, where some of the approximately 250
teens can find themselves confined against their will and marched around
by guards. Only the devil stands in the way of your consumer choice. The
devil, that is, and a lone congressman, Rep. George Miller, D-Calif.
Just ask Ken Kay. He's the president of the tightly
knit group of Utah men who run these outposts with their families, under
the umbrella company World-Wide Association of Specialty Programs and
Schools (WWASPS), whose leaders, critics say, try to hide their role in
running the schools by running them under different names. Ken's son
Jay, a college dropout who ran a mini-mart in San Diego, now oversees
Tranquility Bay, where he had admitted to the media that he
squirted pepper spray on his charges in the past.
As a teen at Tranquility Bay, you can't call home
and are escorted between rooms by Jamaican "chaperones." Talk out of
turn and your punishment might be that a trio of guards wrestles you to
the ground. "They start twisting and pulling your limbs, grinding your
ankles," a student told the British newspaper The Guardian. Not knowing
when you'll go home, you might take cold showers and watch "emotional
growth" videos. The promise is that you will return a respectful, happy
teen. But many WWASPS alumni who've banded together at online survivor
websites like
Tranquility Bay Fight and
Fornits say their lives haven't been saved, they've been devastated.
Several WWASPS schools have been shut down after
abuse claims. Tranquility Bay's counterpart, High Impact, a WWASP
affiliate in Mexico, closed in 2002 after dark stories emerged. Teens
said they were kept in dog cages. Two parents, Chris Goodwin and
Stephanie Hecker, told the
Rocky Mountain News
their children were made to lie in their underwear for three nights with
fire ants roaming over them and were threatened with a cattle prod if
they scratched.
In December, Rep. Miller asked Congress's
nonpartisan General Accounting Office (GAO) to launch a fact-finding
probe into similar schools, claiming the $1.2 billion teen
rehabilitation clinic industry is shrouded in secrecy. Miller's office
is awaiting word from the GAO on the investigation request. After a call
to the GAO, AlterNet was told no decision had been made yet as to
whether to launch the study, which would look into whether the industry
was receiving special tax treatment or using fraudulent marketing
techniques. Asked why he requested the probe, Rep. Miller explained,
"Far too little is known about the so-called 'behavior modification'
industry, even as it has surged in size since the 1990s, and that is why
I have asked the GAO to review it... There is no excuse for allowing
children to be placed in unlicensed programs where their physical or
emotional health is jeopardized."
But company president Kay told AlterNet he
questioned the congressman's motives. "I think that he must just want to
be powerful, or seen as, 'oh, the guy that saved all these children from
abuse,'" says Kay. "My fear is that he has a vendetta."
The WWASPS schools rake in about $80 million a
year. Claiming to enlist about 1,250 students (the official number has
dropped from 2,500 in 2003), the company schools are part of a wider
industry, estimated to hold 10,000 teenagers, that is rarely covered by
the news media.
Miller, senior Democrat on the U.S. House Committee
on Education and the Workforce, is pushing for a bill, H.R. 1738, to
increase state licensing of the teen control trade and hold Americans
who run foreign discipline schools accountable to U.S. laws. Company
president Kay, however, suggested Miller may also have a partisan,
anti-Republican motive against WWASPS.
It's true that WWASPS is generous to the GOP. The
schools and "teen transport" company are run by a web of cell-like
corporate entities that deny their interconnectedness -- but share
family members, billing addresses and other obvious signs of
affiliation. At the top is founder Bob Lichfield, who lives in Utah on a
posh ranch, his lifestyle and political presence fueled by tuition
payments. According to the Salt Lake City Tribune Bob Lichfield and his
family and business associates have
given over $1 million
to GOP politics at the local and national
level.
The lobbying seems to have paid off. Seeing as how
the National Mental Health Association has categorically condemned
juvenile boot camps as counterproductive "bullying," the goal would
appear to be keeping oversight out of the hands of mental health
experts. Like some timber companies and others, a number of "troubled
teen" companies have promoted the idea that they should be their own
watchdogs. While the rules are tightening this year in Utah, a frontier
is opening in Montana. As
Michelle Chen reported in the
NewStandard, a pro-WWASPS plan
is winning out in the state over a tougher one, coinciding with WWASPS
school Spring Creek Lodge Academy's $50,000 lobbying push to water down
the rules. Instead of the state Department of Health, the
new plan lets industry insiders watch over schools such as Spring
Creek and others. And there will be exemptions for "faith-based"
schools.
So far, WWASPS hasn't chosen the God loophole, but
its officials attach such religious zeal to teen control that the
"faith-based" label would fit the company snugly. "Do I believe that God
is finding a way for teens to get help? I do," Lichfield once told the
Los Angeles Times. "Do I believe that Satan is interested in thwarting
it? I do." Asked in December about his boss's remarks, Kay waxed
philosophical: "If you have a spiritual side, I think you can truly
believe that there may be some adversarial part of our nature and makeup
that gets involved." Then there are other adversaries, some of whom Kay
has called "wackos" -- a steady parade of unhappy mothers and teens, as
well as the pesky foreign cops who have arrested camp leaders at Kay's
schools for "human rights violations."
The company has spent the last decade trailblazing
an unregulated frontier. Like manufacturers, they've outsourced to
foreign countries which have different laws and standards. A predecessor
like STRAIGHT, Inc., from 1976 to 1993
the foremost teenage drug
rehab outfit in America, was driven out of business by liability and
sued for false imprisonment and manhandling of children. But as industry
watchers have discovered, the early 1990s saw new business models
emerging for "tough love." WWASPS' approach has been a goldmine. By
splintering its business empire into fragments -- including Teen Help,
Adolescent Services, Inc., and Teen Escort (the teen retrieval arm) --
it has received much more leeway to conceal accountability and money
trails, its critics argue. Draw a map of the network, Utah state
prosecutor Craig Barlowe told the New York Times in 2003, and you'll see
"a lateral arabesque with no hub except for these connections in Utah."
Barlowe was pursuing a child abuse charge against the director of a
WWASP-affiliated school at the time.
On the consumer end, parents are offered thousands
of dollars in sales incentives for finding new kids or promoting WWASP
schools, the New York Times has reported. The schools' hunger for pupils
has created a
proliferation of promotional websites -- like FamilyFirstAid.org --
beckoning mom and dad to ship the kid to the "friendly
tourist Island [sic]" of Tranquility Bay, the "prime forest land" of
WWASPS' Spring Creek Lodge and other pleasurable-sounding destinations.
(As author Maia Szalavitz documents in her upcoming book,
Help at Any
Cost, at WWASPS program Paradise Cove in Samoa, which is now
shuttered, kids caught scabies, and guards confined bad kids to a 3 feet
by 3 feet plywood chamber that teens referred to as "The Box.")
School of hard knocks
Two Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters, Lou Kilzer of
the Rocky Mountain News and Tim Weiner of the New York Times have
written exposes of the kennel cages, bug infestations, unqualified staff
and confinement to punishment rooms that have been passed off under the
Harry Potter-esque language of "boarding school." Rep. Miller's
spokesman Tom Kiley said that substandard education is just one of the
areas of concern that the GAO needs to help resolve about WWASPS and the
wider industry. This August, one facility with the prestigious name
"Academy at Ivy Ridge" in New York had to refund more than $1 million
after pretending to offer legitimate high school diplomas.
WWASPS eludes the attention and regulation it might
receive if its institutions were presented as health care facilities
instead of schools. There is little to show for them as high-water marks
in American education, however; when not being bombarded with Tony
Robbins motivational tapes, kids learn by rote and fill out
multiple-choice tests. While a promotional website claims that "more
than 80 percent of the graduates of these programs go on to attend some
of the best universities and professional schools in the country," Kay
didn't respond to a request for an example of a student at an Ivy League
or other top school. Referring to WWASPS-affiliated institutions, Maia
Szalavitz said admissions officers are unlikely to be impressed by the
education, which not only stresses conformity over critical thinking but
can include long stays in solitary confinement.
Over two years ago, Rep. Miller was turned down by
then-Attorney General John Ashcroft when he asked him to investigate
possible crimes revealed in the New York Times reports. "Congressman
Miller sees this as a top priority," says Miller's spokesman Kiley. "The
promise is that your child is going to be treated with respect, and that
these are the people meant to help them. In fact, the opposite is
happening."
The money linking WWASPS and Republicans, says
Kiley, "definitely sends up red flags," but he wouldn't go so far as to
claim a web of connections. Miller's proposed End Institutional Abuse
Against Children Act, would give states $50 million to help license
schools, establish new criminal and civil penalties for leaders of
abusive programs and let the government regulate overseas camps that are
presently beyond the arm of the law. Right now, the State Department
warns that it "has no authority to regulate these entities."
Company president Kay, however, told AlterNet that
local authorities already do a "great job" regulating the schools.
Under Montana's new plan, that board, dominated by
industry insiders, will be responsible for making sure companies avoid
some of what has befallen WWASPS's 450-teen Spring Creek Lodge Academy
campus in Thompson Falls, Mont., in the last three years. Such as the
time that Karlye Anne Newman from Denver, days shy of 17, hanged herself
in a bunkhouse there in 2004. Or making sure the firm doesn't again
allow a man like former employee Keith Wood, 31, in the proximity of
troubled youth. Wood last February went to nearby Plains and shot a
romantic rival seven times with a Glock pistol before turning the weapon
on himself.
According to a 2004 report in the Missoula
Independent that re-opened Karlye's forgotten death, the kids are
forbidden to speak of her suicide -- or spread tales of Jamaica, a
distant island that looms over them as a fate worse than Montana. "That's
a Cat-4," a student said when the paper asked about the dead girl.
"We can't talk about Karlye." A card around the student's neck helpfully
informed the reporter that a Cat-4 meant losing rank in the program,
meaning staying longer at the camp and costing dad thousands more in
tuition. Tuition at the lodge runs at about $40,680 a year, a typical
figure for these schools.
Abuse, says Kay, doesn't happen anymore often than
in the public school system. "That doesn't mean we're gonna shut down
the public schools," he said.
Unless, of course, if your middle school principal
kept girls in multi-day "stress positions" similar to the kind approved
by Donald Rumsfeld for use on Muslim prisoners. As Maia Szalavitz
relates in "Help At Any Cost," that was the case at a WWASPS school for
girls in Mexico. It was called Sunset Beach and was shut down after
being raided by local police in 1996. Authorities seized and later
released overseers Glenda and Steve Roach. A company official blamed
"the local legal system" for the ensuing closure of the school.
But across the world in the Czech Republic, two
years later, authorities reached similar conclusions after finding that
the WWASPS-affiliated Morava Academy was holding kids in windowless
rooms and forcing them
to remain
on their stomachs for days. Czech cops arrested and released the
overseers on bail for illegal imprisonment and torture, the British
Guardian
reported.
The accused were the Roaches, the same people
arrested in Mexico. At press time AlterNet could not locate the Roaches
for comment or determine the outcome of their case, though industry
watchdog group International Survivors Action Committee has claimed to
have located them in the Bahamas living under new names. Czech press
reports paint a cloudy picture as to their whereabouts, with Glenda
leaving the country before trial on a health waiver, and Steven "at
large" to avoid criminal investigation, according to
Radio Prague
and other sources.
But somehow, according to WWASPS officials'
statements to the press, it was the teens' fault for being "master
manipulators" who'd tricked the European officials into thinking there
was abuse. In 2003, a dramatic teen uprising in Costa Rica at the
company's Dundee Ranch school brought WWASPS to the attention of Times
national security reporter Tim Weiner. The uprising began after a visit
by Costa Rican officials, who told students they had more rights under
local law than WWASPS allowed them. "They told us you have the right to
speak, you have the right to speak to your parents, you have the right
to leave if you feel you've been mistreated," 17-year-old Hugh Maxwell
told the Times. "Kids heard that and they started running for the door.
There was elation, cheering and clapping and chaos. People were crying."
Six people told the Times that staff beat the
children to stop them from leaving. As order collapsed, Costa Ricans
seized control and hauled off the founder's brother, Narvin Lichfield,
in handcuffs for holding kids against their will, releasing him a day
later. In a statement, the company complained that the Latin American
prosecutor, with his "Rambo-like tactics," had told kids they could "do
whatever they wanted, without consequences." According to the Salt Lake
Tribune, Narvin Lichfield was charged in Costa Rica with "aggravated
privation of liberty, coercion and international crimes." A Costa Rican
judge ordered him to stay in the country for six months, but ultimately
Lichfield did not stand trial.
An evil world without consequences, populated by
lying teens, is what WWASPS's officials and pro-company parents often
say they're up against, a nearly metaphysical threat. Participating
families must attend motivational seminars on the struggle.
Ex-participant Karen Lile, a piano seller in Northern California, has
written an essay alleging that she suffered "distress
and emotional shock" from a Teen Help "discovery seminar" she
attended at a Holiday Inn which, she wrote, encouraged her to keep her
child in the program. Witnesses at similar events describe the
atmosphere as rising to the fever pitch of religious revival road shows,
with adults wailing and beating on chairs.
So how are mom and dad talked into keeping their
kids at a foreign detention center? The pamphlets for one Teen
Help-affiliated school show kids playing basketball and wandering amid
natural wonders, rediscovering lost innocence. As long as parents ignore
the small letters warning, "Not all Photos [sic] taken at the facility,"
they can tell themselves they are buying a snooty private education.
And they are told it's this or death on the
streets. "If your child needed a kidney transplant to save their life,
you would come up with the money," Kay said. "If the value of your
child's life isn't worth the cost of a new car " And they're warned not
to believe teens who may spin tall tales of abuse. After a high school
basketball player named Paul Richards was sent to Paradise Cove in
Samoa, Szalavitz recounts in her book, his parents received a
newsletter, "WHUTZ UP in Paradise Cove," offering a lesson in how to
avoid being "manipulated" by letters from the front.
The lesson presents a sample letter reading, in
part: "It is not the camp you promised ... The [program staff] are mean
and beat me when I do something they don't like."
Parents are encouraged to write back with
dispassionate jargon: "Work your program."
The young basketballer later told Szalavitz that
"working" his own $2,000-a-month "program" meant letting groups of
shaved-headed teens belittle him for refusing to "see the light" and be
grateful. "They just circle you up, and they all start yelling at you at
the same time and say how shitty a person you were," he said. "'You're
worthless, you're pathetic, you're a piece of shit, you're a compulsive
liar and nobody likes you,' just basically stuff 'til they broke down
your self-esteem."
Was a shipment to the Jamaica security complex
appropriate for a teenage girl who'd been sleeping around? Kay, asked
the question, stressed that being flown to a school like Tranquility Bay
is "a child's right." Teens "should expect that their parents have the
right to step in on their behalf and make some decisions for them," he
said. Some kids have entered WWASPS-affiliated schools for no infraction
more serious than fighting with a stepmother. No court order is
required.
Szalavitz says there's no evidence for the
legitimacy of the "treatment" at most of the schools, which operate in a
regulatory climate without consequences. As there is no research into
long-term effects, she'd like to see studies done on whether any WWASPS
alumni have been left with post-traumatic stress disorder. Some parents
have described their kids' WWASPS transformations with language more
"Dawn of the Dead" than "Dead Poets Society." Alex Ziperovich, 16,
emerged from Spring Creek Lodge "35 pounds lighter, acting like a
zombie," his mother, a Seattle attorney, told the New York Times.
Where's the outcry?
Why haven't stories like the ones by Weiner and
Kilzer, Pulitzer winners both, caused a public outcry and swift
government reaction? Do press accounts give WWASPS too much equal time?
"It's a ridiculous way of covering things. We don't cover any other kind
of health care that way," Szalavitz says, suggesting the press wouldn't
be so charitable to non-doctors who claimed to have a new method for
extracting tumors. Most news features take the he-said-she-said approach
familiar to us from recent reporting on Intelligent Design: "WWASPS
isn't for everyone ..." But, says Szalavitz, "This is not a story of
'some people go to this church, some people go to that church.'"
Szalavitz added, "We're selling what they stamped out of psychiatric
institutions 100 years ago."
Oddly enough, WWASPS president Ken Kay himself has
raised unsettling questions about the programs Rep. Miller is waging his
battle to regulate. During a period in 2002 when he'd split with WWASPS,
he told the Rocky Mountain News' Kilzer: "These people are basically a
bunch of untrained people who work for this organization. So they don't
have any credentials of any kind. We could be leading these kids to
long-term problems that we don't have a clue about because we're not
going about it in the proper way ... How in the hell can you call
yourself a behavior-modification program -- and that's one of the ways
it's marketed -- when nobody has the expertise to determine, is this
good, is this bad?"
Kay has since rejoined WWASPS as president. Asked
in an email interview in December whether his concerns had since been
calmed since 2002, Kay said he was quoted out of context. "Nobody
[calmed] my worries for children," he wrote back. "There are trained
authorities that deal with abuse. All necessary systems are in place
..."
John Gorenfeld is a freelance writer in San
Francisco. He has a blog at gorenfeld.net.
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