Bush donor exports kids to Jamaican torture camp.
How sleazy do you have to be before Republicans
stop ?
----------------------------------------
23 January 2006 By John Gorenfeld,
AlterNet : Independent Media Institute
No More Nightmares at Tranquility Bay ?
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 US 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 US 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 US 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 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 ...............
Read the rest :
http://alternet.org/story/31000
----------------------------------------------
2 Feb 2006
Bush donor exports kids to Jamaican torture camp.
I had a brief exchange with John Gorenfeld the other day,
and he mentioned his new article for AlterNet (see below)
about the "teen rehab industry" and its financial ties
to the GOP. He was apparently "having the damndest
time getting anyone to pay attention to the fact that GOP
pols help export kids to gulags for profit. Literally".
Even though he should have expected the reaction it got
from the increasingly stupefied American sheeple, "yawn,
who's on (insert 'reality' show name here) this week,"
it's still hard to believe when the story goes like this :
"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
(http://www.tbfight.com)
and Fornits ( http://fornits.com/wwf
)
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 (
http://isaccorp.org/casa/highimpact.pdf
) 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
( http://www.house.gov/apps/list/press/ed31_democrats/rel122105.html
),
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 US 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 US. 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 given [sic] over
$1 million to GOP politics at the local and national level"."
That's just a taste of what's in this story, but there's
very little public interest and the legacy media won't
waste its beautiful mind on such things. I told John
"this guy is a nobody until you tie him to Bush," and
then proceeded to do so :
LICHFIELD, ROBERT B - LA VERKIN,UT 84745
6/5/2001 - $100,000 2001 - President's Dinner/Non-Fed Indiv
He donated $100K to a presidential fundraising event
3 months before 9/11, and only 33 other individuals
donated to this thing (
http://www.opensecrets.org/parties/affiliates.asp?txt=2001+President%20's+Di
nner+Cmte&Cycle=2002 ).
If anyone knows what this Lichfield guy looks like,
there might be some nice screenshots in there; maybe
even one of Bush shaking Lichfield's hand in thanks
for all that moolah.
On the Bush fund-raising scale, that $100,000 qualifies
as a Pioneer-level donation. At $574,550, Ken Lay
was also a Bush Pioneer. I couldn't find out for sure
whether Lichfield was one or not. Even if not, that
kind of cash would certainly get Bush & Rove's
attention. But wait, that's not all! A couple years later,
we see the maximum individual donation allowed
by law to Guess Who :
LICHFIELD, ROBERT B MR - LA VERKIN,UT 84745
SELF-EMPLOYED/CONSULTANT
8/7/2003 - $2,000 - Bush, George W
For the kind of money Lichfield ponies up for the GOP,
there's no way that Rove and Bush don't know about this
guy. Those two were the donations that stood out for me,
but don't forget the rest of that million he dropped on
the GOP in Utah and elsewhere. Anyway, later in the
article we see this interesting graf :
"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"."
How original. Another fucking religious loony toon
claiming that barbarity is the height of piety. At first,
I thought to look for some quid pro quo action in
the Faith-Biased Iniquity and the Dept. of Ejumacashun
( http://www.whitehouse.gov/government/fbci
) , but
there were no hits on grants and funding. Then I thought
about it -- in June 2001, Lichfield dropped a lot of bling
on a single meal where Bush was the main course.
Why did this guy make a "Pioneer" sized donation
to a widely-unpopular president, for a one-time event ?
Remember, that dinner happened after 9/11, but
Lichfield's donation happened before. That was
in the days before the artificial "rally 'round the flag"
effect -- when Bush's overall approval rating was
somewhere between "ambulance-chaser" and "used
car salesman." (Around 41% at the time IIRC)
The answer : fundraisers like that represent "access
for sale" in its basest form. What do you want to bet
he was there to talk to Bush about federal tuition vouchers
for his "charter schools," maybe as part of Bush's
push for school choice ?
PBS FRONTLINE : What about running schools on
a profit-making basis ?
BUSH : Here's my question: are the children learning ?
So much of the debate is focused on process. I'm going
to focus the debate on results and accountability. If
the children are meeting standards, we ought to applaud
the delivery mechanism. I welcome all kinds of
innovation into the system, recognizing that one size
doesn't fit all, and understanding that the best reforms
are those that have been tried at the local level.
- Called for the creation of charter [schools] that would
receive maximum flexibility with federal funds in
return for meeting high performance measures in
increasing student achievement
- Supports increasing choices for parents in the education
of their children by allowing federal funds to be used
for public and private school choice and innovative
education programs
- Supports establishing a Charter School Homestead
Fund to provide $3 billion of loan guarantees to help
establish or improve 2,000 charter schools nationwide
in two years http://www.issues2000.org/George_W__Bush_School_Choice.htm
The key part is that this prison camp is not on American
soil, so US law does not apply to what happens within
its walls. Is your kid being a pain in the ass ? Thanks
to people like Lichfield, you can send him to Gitmo --
almost literally. This would explain why people didn't
get very exercised about Abu Ghraib; after all, if we do it
to our own kids, what are those terrists bitching about ?
If Abramoff money is considered "tainted,"
why isn't ......................
Read the rest :
http://www.blogesque.com/?p=353
---------------------------------------------
13 April 2005 By Tony Messenger - Columbia Daily Tribune
Boonville needs to think twice before getting
stung by WWASP
The problem with Robert Lichfield isn't that he breaks the law.
It's that the law allows him to do what he does.
Lichfield knows about the law. He's used the absence
of laws in many states and Third-World countries as
cover for a series of business ventures that by most
accounts have made him a wealthy man. The Utah
businessman is founder of World Wide Association
of Specialty Programs, an umbrella group connected
to dozens of tough-love teen rehabilitation centers
all over the world.
Many of the schools connected in some way to
Lichfield have been accused by parents and
authorities of child abuse.
Some of them have closed.
Now Lichfield has his eye on Missouri. Specifically,
he and his partners, Randall and Russell Hinton,
want to buy the former Kemper Military School in
Boonville and turn it into another of their behavior
modification facilities for troubled teens.
Long before Missourians heard of this plan, Shelby
Earnshaw was trying to stop it.
Earnshaw is director of International Survivors
Action Committee, a watchdog group that keeps
an eye on the kinds of facilities Lichfield owns.
She's not a fan of the growing industry that takes
advantage of parents who are at their wits' end
because they can't seem to control their teenagers.
The facilities are multiplying because many states,
such as Missouri, have few laws regulating the
activities at these so-called private schools. Parents
sign over their rights and agree to confidentiality.
Proving abuse is no slam-dunk. The Virginia woman's
Web site keeps track of the various facilities across
the world that have been accused in one way or
another of abusing teens.
Stories from media reports and parents on the Web site
tell of children held in animal cages, teens sprayed with
pepper spray and the kind of emotional and physical
abuse that many of us would consider torture.
Many of the teen centers are connected to WWASP in
some way, and wherever there is WWASP, Lichfield
generally isn't far behind. That's why, when Earnshaw
heard about his intent to buy the Kemper property, she
started to let folks in Missouri know a little bit about
Lichfield and his various companies.
Her actions earned her a typical Lichfield response.
He sued.
On Feb. 22, in Washington County court in Utah, Lichfield
sued Earnshaw and her husband, William, alleging
defamation, invasion of privacy and interference with
prospective economic advantage. According to the suit,
Earnshaw "contacted public officials in Boonville,
Missouri, and Salt Lake City, Utah, and spread false,
defamatory and misleading information about plaintiff
with the intent to interfere with plaintiff's business
relations and with plaintiff's prospective economic
interests."
Earnshaw says the suit won't stop her from letting
anybody who cares to listen know how destructive
she believes WWASP facilities are to children.
"A lot of folks are intimidated by the man and the money
he has," she says. "I'm not."
I called Lichfield's attorney to ask about the suit. He
didn't call back. It's no wonder. He's a busy man.
Earnshaw is hardly the first to be sued by Lichfield
and/or his associates.
Before her, there was Sue Scheff, and her organization,
Parents Universal Resource Experts, or PURE. Scheff
was sued for defamation in federal court by WWASP
after she set up her own watchdog group and accompanying
Web site. A Utah jury ruled in her favor last year, and
US District Judge Paul Cassell denied a WWASP request
for a new trial in November.
Scheff, who lives in Florida, had sent her teenager to one
of the WWASP schools in South Carolina. It was
Randall Hinton who sold her in an effective sales pitch
on the phone, she says. "I was completely brainwashed,"
she says. "I completely fell for them."
Hinton talked about the school's effective therapy programs.
He played up the horses that were advertised in the
facility's brochure.
"Once she got there, I found out they didn't have horses,"
she says. "They didn't have therapy."
Scheff pulled her child and started researching Lichfield,
the Hintons and everybody connected to WWASP. She
put up a Web site telling her story, and soon parents all
over the country were contacting her. She put up their
stories, often under assumed names. WWASP sued.
From the beginning, Scheff says, it's clear they wanted
one thing : silence.
"I was telling true stories," she says. "In the end, the jury
decided everything I said was true. They weren't out
to do anything other than silence me. This is the way
they do business."
In Boonville, Lichfield and his gang of pseudo-therapists
want to convince a city in need of money and an alumni
group that wants to preserve history that this time things
will be different.
The paper trail says otherwise.
Like a parent with a troubled teen, Boonville has a
choice. "WWASP preys on desperate parents," Scheff
says. She knows. She was one. Now Boonville is in
the same boat. The easiest solution would be to turn
the city's problem child over to Lichfield. Scheff made
that decision once in her life, and she saw her child
suffer badly. She knows that the tougher call - and
.................................... Read the rest :
http://www.showmenews.com/2005/Apr/20050413Feat001.asp
----------------------------------------
7 Dec 2004 By Raphael Rowe - BBC News
Tranquility Bay : The last resort
Reporter, Locked in Paradise
Some parents of rebellious teenagers in the US are
turning to privately-owned correctional institutions
to steer their wayward children back on the right path.
But is this tough love tactic a step too far ?
Perched on the edge of a cliff in Treasure Beach - a
remote fishing village in southern Jamaica - there is
a hand-painted sign on the wall : "Welcome to
Tranquility Bay."
This isolated boarding school is surrounded by security
cameras, iron gates, barred windows and high concrete
walls.
It looks like a top security prison; but it is neither a
prison, nor a juvenile detention centre.
At a cost of between $25,000 (£13,000) and $40,000
(£20,800) a year, parents of unruly teenagers send
their children here to learn how to behave.
Hard line
Tranquility Bay is one of several facilities run by an
American business organisation called WWASPS,
the World Wide Association of Speciality Programs
and Schools.
According to their website, Tranquility Bay exists "to
challenge and motivate the student in a structured,
individualised learning environment... so they become
mature, responsible and contributing members of society."
The teenagers inside are typically enrolled on the
programme for three years, but this varies and largely
depends on when the institution, and their parents,
think they are fit to graduate.
As I glanced around the institution, some pupils - mostly
white Americans dressed in khaki shorts and shirts,
and flip flops - walked past me in line, military-style,
with vacant expressions.
Not one of them looked at me, not even a peep from
the corner of an eye.
Rules of admission
Fifteen-year-old Shannon Levy's parents arranged for
their daughter to be forcibly taken from their home
and escorted to Tranquility Bay.
"Three strangers - a lady and two big men - came into
my house and sat me down on the sofa," Shannon told me.
"They said I was going to Jamaica and they handcuffed
me and said I could co-operate or they were going to
throw me over their shoulder. I was screaming for
my mom because I had no clue what was going on.
I was very scared," she said.
When I asked Shannon's mother Jayne why she felt
the need to send her daughter to a school reputed
for its harsh treatment of pupils, she simply said :
"Desperate parents do desperate things."
Shannon had disrespected her mother, was sleeping
around, drinking alcohol, smoking pot and not doing
well at school.
Arguably, most of the children sent to the school
flaunt typical teenage behaviour.
Ultimate endurance
In order to recondition these children, once inside,
they are completely cut off from their home life.
They are not permitted to talk to their families until
they conform to the programme - which is a reward
and punishment system.
If you do what you are told, when you are told to do it
- and do it the way the programme says you should -
you earn points.
These points move you up to the next level in a "six-point
plan", a method of acquiring "privileges".
If you do not obey the rules, or as one former student
told me, you cannot do what is required of you, you
have to face the consequences.
One consequence is being sent to Observational Placement,
or what is known to the kids as OP.
On my way to the OP room I caught a glimpse of the
sleeping dorms.
They were furnished sparingly with thin, lumpy mattresses
on wooden bed frames that fold up against the wall, and
wooden shelves on which children have attempted
to neatly fold the few items of clothing they are issued.
In OP the children are made to lie on thin plastic mats
on the floor, all day, sometimes day after day. They eat,
sleep and stay in the room until the staff members
guarding them decide they can leave.
Shannon Levy told me she spent eight weeks in OP.
Parrot fashion
To continue their education, the children work from
text books and are partly self-taught.
If they fail a test exam they do it again and again until they pass.
Staff members are not trained teachers in all the subjects
they supervise and are often recruited from the local community.
During meals, students are bombarded with self-
improvement messages over the tannoy. They are
played over and over again.
The children must then write essays about what they
have learnt straight afterwards.
Controversy
Despite its hard and strict methods, many parents like
Megan Quinn - who placed her son in the school -
are pleased with the results.
Megan told me: "If it wasn't for the God-sent gift of
this programme you'd be going to the lakeshore of
Chicago where my father's buried, where my sister's
buried, and putting flowers on his grave. So yes it
hurts right now not to see him for 12 months but it
would hurt a heck of a lot more not to see him for
the rest of his life."
Other parents are not so convinced and taking legal
action against WWASPs. "It was an act of desperation...
and we were conned," said Julie Wilkinson, mother
of ex-student Winston.
Concerns about the school's methods have also been
raised by Bertrand Bainvel, head of the United
Nations Children's Fund (Unicef), based in Jamaica.
He wants OP scrapped, because he says: "There is
a high possibility it falls under the definition of child abuse."
In response to the criticism, WWASPs say : "The
schools have a tremendous record of success and
growth. They have helped thousands of teens and
their families and have a 97% parent satisfaction rate."
I began to consider a conversation I had earlier with
the uncle of one young female student, as he tried
to make his way past security to visit her.
"They're criminalising adolescence," he said, and
as I walked out ...............................
Read the rest :
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/programmes/this_world/4058833.stm
Locked in Paradise was broadcast on Tuesday, 7 December,
2004, at 1930 GMT on BBC Two.
----------------------------------------
Much More :
http://parentadvocates.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=article&articleID=6136
http://newstandardnews.net/content/?action=show_item&itemid=2619
|
