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Mother Jones
The Cult That Spawned the Tough-Love
Teen Industry
August 20, 2007
By Maia Szalavitz
The idea that punishment can be
therapeutic is not unique to the Rotenberg Center. In fact, this
notion is widespread among the hundreds of "emotional growth
boarding schools," wilderness camps, and "tough love" antidrug
programs that make up the billion-dollar teen residential treatment
industry.
This harsh approach to helping
troubled teens has a long and disturbing history. No fewer than 50
programs (though not the Rotenberg Center) can trace their treatment
philosophy, directly or indirectly, to an antidrug cult called
Synanon. Founded in 1958, Synanon sold itself as a cure for hardcore
heroin addicts who could help each other by "breaking" new initiates
with isolation, humiliation, hard labor, and sleep deprivation.
Today, troubled-teen programs use
Synanon-like tactics, advertising themselves to parents as solutions
for everything from poor study habits to substance misuse. However,
there is little evidence that harsh behavior-modification techniques
can solve these problems. Studies found that Synanon's "encounter
groups" could produce lasting psychological harm and that only 10 to
15 percent of the addicts who participated in them recovered. And as
the classic 1971 Stanford prison experiment demonstrated, creating
situations in which the severe treatment of powerless people is
rewarded inevitably yields abuse. This is especially true when
punishment is viewed as a healing process. Synanon was discredited
in the late 1970s and 1980s as its violent record was exposed. (The
group is now remembered for an incident in which a member placed a
live rattlesnake—rattle removed—in the mailbox of a lawyer who'd
successfully sued it.) Yet by the time Synanon shut down in 1991,
its model had already been widely copied.
In 1971, the federal government
gave a grant to a Florida organization called The Seed, which
applied Synanon's methods to teenagers, even those only suspected of
trying drugs. In 1974, Congress opened an investigation into such
behavior-modification programs, finding that The Seed had used
methods "similar to the highly refined brainwashing techniques
employed by the North Koreans."
The bad publicity led some
supporters of The Seed to create a copycat organization under a
different name. Straight Inc. was cofounded by Mel Sembler, a Bush
family friend who would become the gop's 2000 finance chair and who
heads Lewis "Scooter" Libby's legal defense fund. By the mid-'80s,
Straight was operating in seven states. First lady Nancy Reagan
declared it her favorite antidrug program. As with The Seed, abuse
was omnipresent—including beatings and kidnapping of adult
participants. Facing seven-figure legal judgments, it closed in
1993.
But loopholes in state laws and a
lack of federal oversight allowed shuttered programs to simply
change their names and reopen, often with the same staff, in the
same state—even in the same building. Straight spin-offs like the
Pathway Family Center are still in business.
Confrontation and humiliation are
also used by religious programs such as Escuela Caribe in the
Dominican Republic and myriad "emotional growth boarding schools"
affiliated with the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs (wwasp),
such as Tranquility Bay in Jamaica. wwasp's president told me that
the organization "took a little bit of what Synanon [did]." Lobbying
by well-connected supporters such as wwasp founder Robert Lichfield
(who, like Sembler, is a fundraiser for Republican presidential
aspirant Mitt Romney) has kept state regulators at bay and blocked
federal regulation entirely.
By the '90s, tough love had spawned
military-style boot camps and wilderness programs that thrust kids
into extreme survival scenarios. At least three dozen teens have
died in these programs, often because staff see medical complaints
as malingering. This May, a 15-year-old boy died from a staph
infection at a Colorado wilderness program. His family claims his
pleas for help were ignored. In his final letter to his mother, he
wrote, "They found my weakness and I want to go home."
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