It still seems you don't completely grasp how a program works, and what it does, to do what it does.
First of all, to re-iterate, it is NOT therapy, or therapeutic!Furthermore, they say they are not therapeutic and not set up to provide therapy! Any program that does so uses someone who is an actual therapist to give it to a kid on their 'campus'.
What a program does is "behavior modification" and "emotional growth". Behavior modification boils down to "do what we want and we won't hurt you, and we just might slowly give you back normal rights, but call them priviladges, you bad little kid!" and "emotional growth" is that nonsensical psycho-cryfest nonsense with the seminars and the loaded language and the mind-games, blah blah blah screaming until you cough up blood and thinking that emotional outbursts and the euphoria after traumatic events are 'good'.
Factor in the isolation from the outside world AND THEIR OWN PARENTS, in addition to telling everyone to not believe them and to EXPECT the child to try to escape the place, and you basically have something set up to keep the kid cut off from any means of escape or outreach to help, and to keep them in their own little 'program world'. Naturally, in those conditions, you can instigate any sort of "Behavior modification" (what we call brainwashing or mind control) you want. Why? You have all the essentials needed to do that!
http://www.ex-cult.org/bite.html <- BITE model. Behavior, information, thoughts, emotions. Programs control how they behave, control what information gets to them, challenges and undermines their thoughts through the seminars, stress, isolation and loaded language, and also fucks with their emotions.
Waking up with someone shireking at you, and being forced to make a bed perfectly or face humiliation, physical punishment or more time in the program, marching "nut to butt" heel to toe to eat breakfast and finish the plate or you're threatened with more of the same from above for anorexia or whatever, then doing self-taught school work with no teacher, tons of 'worksheets' for any rules you have broken (and belive me, you've broken something) and forced to rat out everyone else to move up the program as well as their bullshit "raps", "propheets" or "seminars" does not fix anything, does not treat anything, does not prevent anything, except possibly a normal life.
Any changes that occur in a program is a function of their age. You grow up in your teens, no matter were you are while you are in that age!
Again, there is ZERO proof of changed recidivism for a program (except I have heard STRAIGHT increased drug use but I don't have the statistic on me, nor do I have the inclination to go look) and zero proof of any positive change or benefit at all to anyone except the people who own a program making money!
Someone can SAY that it saved them because if they were acting bad before a program, and get out and they don't, someone looking for some explanation or reason or meaning might pin it on the program, especially after being the programs property and having thier mind fucked with for such a long time and their pro-program family reinforcing it while they were still in the program, but again there is basically no justification or substance to such a statement.
Again, because there is no proof programs have done anything except warehouse a kid while he grows up (thats like saying WWASPS cured you of a cold if you were put in a program while you had a cold and when you got out you did not have one..) and say coallation is causation.
Additionally, I remember someone saying most kids who "go off the path" do so for 18 months said and done. Most people just need to act out in their teens anyway becuase they're teenagers and they're going from being a child to an adult even though society and thier parents don't want them to, and there is a lack of maturity as well.
Programs are very good at presenting themselves as a fix to certain death or failure (dead insane or in jail) but humanity got by fine without them, MOST people get by fine without programs (never heard of them or just can not afford them) and when they're gone we'll be fine as well. They just say they treat everything, prey on or create parental hysteria, and once they sink their teeth into a kid they use every hook they can to make sure the kid stays there and the money keeps rolling in.
Sorry to be so long winded but there is a lot to say.
