Legal prisons for teens -- criteria for entrance is simply annoying your parents

Annoying your parents can be as trivial as backtalk or being gay, these businesses don't care, they are just waiting for a check. If the facility is out of the country (and the really bad ones usually are, although many only slightly less nasty ones exist in the States) Classic examples of these institutions are WWASP facilities. The most notorious of which were eventually closed but the company is still at large and donated to Mitt Romney's campaign!

Tranquility Bay in Jamaica and High Impact in Mexico both closed when their secrets got too public. It is proven with video evidence that at High Impact many children were kept in dog cages outside and herded around a track to keep them busy. Punishments were brutal often approaching torture. There is no real educational criteria and none of the establishments seem to have any accreditation although they are not honest about this fact to their costumers (the parents!).

Lawsuits flow freely concerning WWASP and they settle out of court often but are protected and rich. I suppose the republican party is a great ally.

So it does seem the program sometimes works (or scars you for life), but at what cost? And what is really gained?

I almost got sent to one of these hell holes as a child and am ashamed of my apathy, so here it is. The least I can do is post to this forum.

Information is hard to come by, many people saying negative things are sued by this company, the wikipedia pages are constantly deleted for "bias", although it's hard to be unbiased if you know anything about the program.

This facility closed a couple years ago, but is widely acknowledged as being as bad or worse than the one with the dog cages:
Tranquility Bay - Secret Prisons for Teens

I know my source is sketchy, but this is not widely known. I encourage anybody with better sources to let me know.

I know PBS did a documentary on a particular school that was quite damning, when I find it I'll let you know.

 

Here's some photos some of which I recognize from the PBS documentary:
Tape Released Showing Teen Beate
Notice the photo involving a child tied down in a cage. This is from high impact.

(10 minutes later)
I found it!!!
Who's Watching the Kids? | MontanaPBS Presents | PBS Video
This will make you bleed out of your eyes! PBS is a bit better of a source, I know it's old, but the same company still exists.

 

Sorry Steve, you're right. I was referring to Mitt Romney and some other republicans that have accepted donations or actively defended them. The primary issue is ignorance, but unfortunately, in this instance, it is the democratic party (and only a few) that are trying to do anything about this. The republicans are either in cahoots or burying their heads in the sand, in all fairness, most of the democrats are too. It's just that the two or three exceptions to the rule are all democrats, and I do believe that fits in with the democratic party's strengths. Most people who know me are aware that I recognize strong and weak points in both parties, and this type of issue is patently in the republican weak points column. Unfortunately as with most issues in which I prefer them, the democrats only get a "slightly less weak" grade.

 

And I definitely am not talking about members of the party that aren't elected officials. Please don't misunderstand, I'm upset about the powerful within the party itself. I should have been MUCH clearer.

 

According to the PBS documentary $365,000 was donated mostly to republicans; however, the documentary is woefully out of date and does not include donations to Mitt Romney and others.

 

No offense to republicans, but apparently there is a strong connection to highly placed republicans, as well as deals with local officials in many places where WWASP operated. Basically, officials often looked the other way.

There was a well researched book about WWASP and its predecessors and all of the awful stuff they did. I have it somewhere, and if I can find it, I'll post the info.

 

I don't know about the organizations to which you refer, but can comment of a similar but hopefully less extreme concept along the same lines.

Juvenile boot camps. When I first heard of the concept I thought it was great. Who can argue with a little discipline? Then I took a course in juvenile justice. This really didn't affect my opinion until I selected as the topic of my term paper juvenile boot camps. I learned a few things. First, they don't have a better recidivism rate than less aggressive approaches. Second, they cost more. Third, there is an inherent physical risk associated with this style of discipline.

Just so there's no misunderstanding. I am not a touchy-feely kind of guy. I don't believe in coddling troublemakers. I believe rules and discipline are a fact of life for most civilized people. I spent three years in the army so get what a boot camp is all about. But there is a difference between teaching kids, most of whom have various troubles to deal with, and training soldiers.

 

Chip, the fact that you are aware of these circumstances is so encouraging to me.

PerryMK: While the industry as a whole hasn't shown the abuses that WWASP has, I'm not surprised to hear that the effectiveness is not as high as some would anticipate. I'm very grateful for your open-mindedness when researching the subject! If I were to speculate I would have to say that as long as the person being subjected to the treatment holds whole-heartedly that they are right and others are wrong the treatment will never work. A treatment full of discipline but lacking in any apparent love or concern is doomed to failure, or at least, that's what I would expect. One must know in their heart that there is something to be corrected. I also attribute the failures of AA and other often involuntary treatments to these factors.

I hope people will educate themselves. I've been trying to re-tool an old connection through my parents from my child-hood with an X-Senator (Jim Talent) to see if there's anything he can do. My only concern is that it appears he has strong ties to Mitt Romney. I can only hope he and Mitt are ignorant of the people supporting them. In the case of Mitt, it seems bleak as criticism was levied and defended against by his staff, in the case of Jim I will gladly assume the best.

Thanks for your posts.

 

Typically, a juvenile boot camp lasts around six weeks in duration, making it very difficult for a teen to leave with a lasting change. Struggling teens often need therapy and more time to give them the direction they need to solve old problems and fortify their lives so as to not repeat their old problems when they finally transition back into the home. According to statistics most teens and adolescents take years to fully get out of old habits and into new ones. While change certainly takes time, the bulk of the major work for most teens can usually be done in about 12 month's time, still much more time than teen boot camps offer.

 

I'm curious, Superjake, why you resurrected a four-month-old thread for your very first post, and posted something that was word-for-word stolen from a pro-WWASP website. One of the things that DegreeInfo regulars don't appreciate is people shilling for programs, particularly when it is done without revealing their affiliation.

Please explain.

 

I just have to say, if parents where doing there job these camps wouldn't be an issue because there would be no need for them. I got out of line with my father once and disrespected my mother when I was about 13, I garauntee you it never happened again. These places exist today because parents don't do their job. Hell, if they did do there job some raging liberal would cry foul and have them arrested for disciplining their children. By and large, children today behave the way they do because parents allow it.

 

That really isn't fair. While I agree that there's an epidemic of bad parenting, there are also an awful lot of parents that have 2 or 3 kids that grow up perfectly, and one that is just a hellion. Psychologists are very divided on why this happens, but it seems clear that nurture is not the sole influence on behavior, and criminologists who have studied this phenomena from a neurological perspective seem to believe that it is not solely an environmental/nurture factor.

 

Here's somebody who agrees with Chip:

When good parents have difficult children

When Good Parents Have Difficult Children: It