Fornits
Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform => The Troubled Teen Industry => Topic started by: Nihilanthic on February 19, 2006, 03:16:00 AM
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http://www.sptimes.com/2006/02/18/State ... _boo.shtml (http://www.sptimes.com/2006/02/18/State/Attention_This_is_boo.shtml)
Attention! This is boot camp
Follow a new crop of boot camp detainees through their first day; a day when they lose their freedom, their hair, and learn a little bit about chaos.
By CURTIS KRUEGER, Times Staff Writer
Published February 18, 2006
[Times photos: John Pendygraft]
Drill Instructors Michael Picardi (left) and Thomas Sideris (right) yell at a recruit during the intake process of the the first day of the Pinellas County Sheriff's Bootcamp at the Pinellas County Jail.
A tear runs down the face of a juvenile as he is moved through the intake process of the Pinellas County Sheriff's Bootcamp at the Pinellas County Jail.
Juveniles are lead past their cubicles during the intake process on the first day of Pinellas County Sheriff's Bootcamp at the Pinellas County jail. The recruits are quickly taught to march in step with their heads on each other's backs.
LARGO - Ever since a 14-year-old boy died after spending one day at a North Florida boot camp, a debate has raged about whether these tough programs for juvenile offenders should shut down.
But for nine juveniles who entered the Pinellas County Boot Camp last week, there was no time to debate public policy. Last Thursday was a day to bow their heads and submit to a set of hair clippers and the thunderous commands of a dozen drill instructors.
It didn't take long before piles of hair - and streams of tears - hit the floor.
To supporters, boot camps like this one are a great way to break the bad habits of teenage offenders, of instilling discipline and self-esteem, and of saving lives that otherwise seem destined for prison. Boot camps gained popularity in Florida during the 1990s to toughen a system many lawmakers believed had grown lax.
But today, several legislators say the programs are ineffective, harsh and downright dangerous. Their complaints gathered steam Friday when state officials released a grainy video showing several guards at the Bay County Boot Camp knocking Martin Lee Anderson to the ground, kneeing him and striking him.
An autopsy concluded the boy died not from the blows, but from internal bleeding caused by a blood disorder.
Still, the controversy continues. So the St. Petersburg Times got permission to witness the intake of this new platoon, the 61st group to enter the Pinellas camp on 49th Street near the jail.
Drill instructors wearing black pants and shirts, black boots and wide black hats drove to the nearby Juvenile Detention Center shortly after 7 a.m. and returned with their nine. The teenagers got out of a van, wearing sneakers, baggy pants and T-shirts. One had a black eye from trying to escape the night before.
They were told to take off their shoes to prove they had no weapons or drugs. Drill instructors questioned them harshly.
"What's your claim to fame?" Cpl. Beverly Rosenberry asked one. "I'm telling you what," she said to another, the largest boy in the platoon, "you're going to change your nasty ways."
She barked a command to another youth, who told her, "Sir, yes sir!"
That brought her a centimeter away from his face.
"Oh, don't you call me sir, don't . . . call me sir!"
"Ma'am, yes ma'am!" the boy said.
The boys moved inside a concrete block room, facing a wall. They eventually went to staff members for medical and psychological screening.
Rosenberry and others kept questioning the boys, and their stories began to emerge. One short, athletic teen in black pants and a red shirt said he had been arrested for selling cocaine, but insisted he had stopped all that now.
"Of course you're not a . . . drug dealer now, you're locked up!" Rosenberry screamed.
Another boy staring at the concrete said he was arrested for burglary after setting off fireworks in an abandoned house.
"What are you shaking for?" a drill instructor asked.
He was nervous, he admitted.
"Now you're nervous, but on the outs, you're all off the chain."
The boy kept shaking.
The hard part hadn't started yet.
One by one, the youths left the room and ran - nobody was allowed to walk - down a long hall of cells with camouflage paint, past a small library and into a room to be strip-searched. They came out wearing black sneakers, khaki shorts and white T-shirts. They were weighed, measured and photographed.
One tall, skinny boy came out with tears streaming down his face, saying a friend got him in trouble.
"You know what the tears are for?" a drill instructor asked.
"Sir, no, sir," the boy said.
"To bring back dead grass. Your tears don't matter nothing to me."
The drill instructor asked if the boy had ever cried over his crimes. The boy said yes.
"No you weren't, don't lie to me!"
The questions and the yelling came so fast and so loud that the boys got confused about what to say.
"Underwear or boxers?" said one drill instructor as he handed out clothes to recruits.
"Sir, yes, sir!" the boy said.
"Which ones?"
Next stop: the barber's chair. Drill instructor Richard Stotts put his clippers on the No. 1 setting, to shear mounds of hair off the boys' heads, and tufts of peach fuzz from their chins.
The cocaine seller sat down. He had been crying, and his chest was still heaving.
"Why are you shaking?" Stotts said.
A boy with six months' worth of dreadlocks sat down and Stotts began working his clippers around the boy's head. Soon his hair looked like a floppy wig someone had tossed on top of him. Then the pieces fell, curling into his lap and dropping to the floor.
The hard part still hadn't started.
After every hair had been cut, the boys were lined against a camouflage wall in the hallway, with more than a dozen drill instructors lined on the opposite wall a few feet away. Boot camp Commander Kimberly Klein stood between them.
"For the next 12 months," she told them, "you are the property of the Pinellas County Boot Camp."
She told the boys not to fight, not to threaten or disrespect staff. If they do, "there may come a time when you'll stay here until you're 19 years old. That choice is yours."
And then it hit.
The drill instructors rushed across the hall like a Buccaneers blitz.
With lightning speed, they crowded into the boys' faces, grabbing their shoulders, jostling them down to the ground, demanding push-ups.
One boy, the most athletic of the bunch, froze on his belly, looking terrified. The biggest of the group slowly pushed up and two drill instructors yelled in his face the whole way.
The hallway turned into a scene of chaos, with boys littered across the floor like they had been thrown there, and the black-suited drill instructors bent over and barking commands that echoed like shouts in a tunnel. At any moment, some of the boys were feebly cranking out push-ups while others laid on their backs and raised their legs. The instructors yanked some up and told them to do jumping jacks, and then told the others to get back, bellowing at every move.
They lined the boys against the wall and let them catch their breath. One drill instructor loudly complained the boys weren't showing any motivation.
"Is that the . . . problem here, girls?"
And the blitz came back. More screaming, more push-ups, more chaos.
Later the boys were lined in front of individual cells, and each given a number corresponding to their cell. The tall skinny boy started crying again. A drill instructor asked his number, and he had already forgotten that he was now called No. 3.
"This is not stinkin' Burger King," drill instructor Matthew Kingsley said afterward, "and you will not have it your way here."
The boys were sent to a classroom to be lectured on boot camp rules, and later to the chow hall.
The boot camp is open only to kids who are at least 14, have committed at least one felony, who pass medical and psychological screenings and are not taking psychotropic medications.
They also must be classified "moderate risk." So the boy who tried to escape the night before would be incarcerated elsewhere.
But for the other eight, this was a preview of the next year of their life. They are scheduled to stay in the boot camp for four months, move into a transitional phase with some home visits for four months and to be on "conditional release" for four months after that.
The point of all this yelling and intimidation, said Klein, was "putting the boys in a state of confusion to try to get them to understand that they're no longer in control. It's that breaking-down piece, and then we start to build them back up."
Later, she said, the boys will work on drill and ceremony, cadences and especially school, to improve their self-confidence and steer them toward law-abiding habits. The goal, she said, is to let the boys realize they can turn away from the kinds of crimes they have been committing.
She stressed that physical punishment is forbidden.
Florida grew enthusiastic about boot camps in the mid-1990s after a series of tourist murders created international publicity and prompted lawmakers to overhaul and toughen the state juvenile justice system.
Thomas Blomberg, dean of Florida State University's College of Criminology and Criminal Justice, noted that boot camps originally were sold as a way to improve the success rate for rehabilitating young offenders.
But statistics generally indicate that bootcamps have proven no more successful than other residential programs for "moderate risk" juvenile offenders. "If I'm a legislator, I'm going to have a hard time justifying the expenditure of funds on a program that is not only not producing what we hoped it would produce, but it's having these unintended consequences as well," Blomberg said.
The Pinellas County Boot Camp staff sees it differently. Composed of sheriff's deputies, most of whom previously worked in the adult jail, the staff says they like the chance to help youths turn their lives around.
"Hopefully," Lt. Klein told the boys on Thursday morning, "you will learn to make better choices."
[Last modified February 18, 2006, 16:00:06]
ANY idiot, even if theyre not aware of the proper vocabulary to describe it without resorting to messy, run on sentances using analogies to express it, knows this is nothing but a humiliation and intimidation based camp with the veiled goal of a psychological regression.
But, well, why the fuck do we buy it?
Why is it when you describe psychological regression as "building down and breakin up" and claim that they somehow 'build self-esteem' by being tormented and terrified into obedience (and further punished and humiliated if they dont perform EXACTLY as they are told to do) and finally perform their little circus acts without being punished or humiliated, it sells so damn well?
Its like with programs - people think that "it" will do "this" and "that", but dont even know what the program is, or does, or what theyre supposed to be doing besdies the vague terms of "grow" and "develop", or the like.
But well, now that the studies come out and show what anyone could have guessed in the first place - that it doesnt work - and a video comes out of some of these trained child humiliators we finally look at this little mindfuckery with a critical eye except for an all-too-hopeful mindset that "it" will maigcally fix all of our problems with these children.
Yet, even that withstanding, some people seem to think its acceptable, "okay", good for them, or even NECESSARY to do this to children! What the hell has infected everyones minds in this nation?
We've turned almost exactly into what we fought in the first place and the writers of the constitution were trying to avoid! Thomas Jefferson would flip his wig if he were alive today to see this. This goes completely against Locke's ideals and almost all of the other philosphers that influenced our nations birth.
So, anyone wanna take a crack at this? Other than just the slide of our collective culture towards the authortarian, "govt knows best, or at least better than you" end of the political scale, WTF is up with everyone? Everything in moderation, including moderation.
Mark Twain
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My rich neighbor drinks too much cheap beer.His 12 year old son (looks 20 yrs old)constantly telling his fat ass mother "fuck you".
Every time his father says "put on your lifejacket",the kid speeds off in his motor boat (on his 5th boat motor now,Im 40 and have never owned even one boat motor!)and ignors his spineless dad.
So the kid finally did something and got involved with the cops at about age 14.
I was sick of this little creep busting out my camper windows.I found his mothers monogramed butterknife wedged in my door lock,but these people REFUSED to acecpt their kid was vandalizing my home.The sick kid was not even bright enough to steal anything,devoting his time to breaking all my stuff and leaving my place unlocked for the real thieves to come and steal my stuff.
I was happy the kid was getting a taste of Florida Law,but at the same time,I FEAR what he will be like when he returns home from bootcamp.
At best,he will be qualified to get a job in a child bootcamp.
I let his father know that when this kid turns 18,I will deal with him as an adult and not a child.
The father is a loser.The mother is a loser,and this man/boy will be a loser the next time I catch him nosing around my place.
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On 2006-02-19 00:50:00, Anonymous wrote:
"My rich neighbor drinks too much cheap beer.His 12 year old son (looks 20 yrs old)constantly telling his fat ass mother "fuck you".
Every time his father says "put on your lifejacket",the kid speeds off in his motor boat (on his 5th boat motor now,Im 40 and have never owned even one boat motor!)and ignors his spineless dad.
So the kid finally did something and got involved with the cops at about age 14.
I was sick of this little creep busting out my camper windows.I found his mothers monogramed butterknife wedged in my door lock,but these people REFUSED to acecpt their kid was vandalizing my home.The sick kid was not even bright enough to steal anything,devoting his time to breaking all my stuff and leaving my place unlocked for the real thieves to come and steal my stuff.
I was happy the kid was getting a taste of Florida Law,but at the same time,I FEAR what he will be like when he returns home from bootcamp.
At best,he will be qualified to get a job in a child bootcamp.
I let his father know that when this kid turns 18,I will deal with him as an adult and not a child.
The father is a loser.The mother is a loser,and this man/boy will be a loser the next time I catch him nosing around my place."
So, you were happy to make him suffer, but when you actually think through it youre afraid of whats gonna happen when hes done being made to suffer? You're letting your anger run out ahead of you, and only once youre forced to think about it do you realize how shortsighted it is.
Your effort would be better spent on an alarm system and some decent doorlocks that a butterknife cant fix (as a real thief would walk through that kind of a lock like a wet paper bag, just fyi) and your anger should be focused on his parents which you so quickly realized are very, very shitty!
But well, other than your poor choice of doorlocks youre pretty sharp! :silly:
You realized the problem is his very, very bad set of parents and shitty parents and admitted it, and you admitted after you had your little venting moment that the bootcamp wont fix anything.
Why not focus on the problem, not the symptoms of it, like... his lack of parents instead of puhishing him but ultimately not helping anything? Yeah, Id be pissed too and probably one up you and punch him in the head for breaking my shit, but once I calmed down and put ice on my knuckles Id realize all the beatings in the world would at most just break him down but not actually help anything.
I think the problem is everyones anger and resentment. In the same sentance you say hes a sick kid but then get pissed at him - not that you dont have a reason to, of course, but its self contradictory to say hes sick and then deserving of punishment. The kid needs some help, and a bootcamp isnt going to do anything but at most the psychological equivilant of painting over rust, and jailtime is just going to lock him into a cycle of being in and out of jail, sucking tax money behind bars and being a loser when hes not.It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
-- Aristotle
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On 2006-02-19 02:23:00, Nihilanthic wrote:
"
On 2006-02-19 00:50:00, Anonymous wrote:
"My rich neighbor drinks too much cheap beer.His 12 year old son (looks 20 yrs old)constantly telling his fat ass mother "fuck you".
Every time his father says "put on your lifejacket",the kid speeds off in his motor boat (on his 5th boat motor now,Im 40 and have never owned even one boat motor!)and ignors his spineless dad.
So the kid finally did something and got involved with the cops at about age 14.
I was sick of this little creep busting out my camper windows.I found his mothers monogramed butterknife wedged in my door lock,but these people REFUSED to acecpt their kid was vandalizing my home.The sick kid was not even bright enough to steal anything,devoting his time to breaking all my stuff and leaving my place unlocked for the real thieves to come and steal my stuff.
I was happy the kid was getting a taste of Florida Law,but at the same time,I FEAR what he will be like when he returns home from bootcamp.
At best,he will be qualified to get a job in a child bootcamp.
I let his father know that when this kid turns 18,I will deal with him as an adult and not a child.
The father is a loser.The mother is a loser,and this man/boy will be a loser the next time I catch him nosing around my place."
So, you were happy to make him suffer, but when you actually think through it youre afraid of whats gonna happen when hes done being made to suffer? You're letting your anger run out ahead of you, and only once youre forced to think about it do you realize how shortsighted it is.
Your effort would be better spent on an alarm system and some decent doorlocks that a butterknife cant fix (as a real thief would walk through that kind of a lock like a wet paper bag, just fyi) and your anger should be focused on his parents which you so quickly realized are very, very shitty!
But well, other than your poor choice of doorlocks youre pretty sharp! :silly:
You realized the problem is his very, very bad set of parents and shitty parents and admitted it, and you admitted after you had your little venting moment that the bootcamp wont fix anything.
Why not focus on the problem, not the symptoms of it, like... his lack of parents instead of puhishing him but ultimately not helping anything? Yeah, Id be pissed too and probably one up you and punch him in the head for breaking my shit, but once I calmed down and put ice on my knuckles Id realize all the beatings in the world would at most just break him down but not actually help anything.
I think the problem is everyones anger and resentment. In the same sentance you say hes a sick kid but then get pissed at him - not that you dont have a reason to, of course, but its self contradictory to say hes sick and then deserving of punishment. The kid needs some help, and a bootcamp isnt going to do anything but at most the psychological equivilant of painting over rust, and jailtime is just going to lock him into a cycle of being in and out of jail, sucking tax money behind bars and being a loser when hes not.It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
-- Aristotle
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Exactly.
When the problem first started I told his father (this family used to give me plates of food and if I wanted to borrow $5,they would hand me $20 and say "dont worry about it".)by writing him a note,the guy quickly shoved the kid in the car to hide him at the grandparents house for fear of the police coming by.
I was a rotten kid too, but I had a motive to filtch and plunder,where this kid just broke my stuff,and I was always nice to him and he was always nice to me before.
The red flag was his refusal to wear the lifejacket in the boat and his father doing nothing about it but open another can of Milwaukees Finest.
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On 2006-02-19 00:50:00, Anonymous wrote:
"My rich neighbor drinks too much cheap beer.His 12 year old son (looks 20 yrs old)constantly telling his fat ass mother "fuck you".
Every time his father says "put on your lifejacket",the kid speeds off in his motor boat (on his 5th boat motor now,Im 40 and have never owned even one boat motor!)and ignors his spineless dad.
So the kid finally did something and got involved with the cops at about age 14.
I was sick of this little creep busting out my camper windows.I found his mothers monogramed butterknife wedged in my door lock,but these people REFUSED to acecpt their kid was vandalizing my home.The sick kid was not even bright enough to steal anything,devoting his time to breaking all my stuff and leaving my place unlocked for the real thieves to come and steal my stuff.
I was happy the kid was getting a taste of Florida Law,but at the same time,I FEAR what he will be like when he returns home from bootcamp.
At best,he will be qualified to get a job in a child bootcamp.
I let his father know that when this kid turns 18,I will deal with him as an adult and not a child.
The father is a loser.The mother is a loser,and this man/boy will be a loser the next time I catch him nosing around my place."
This sounds like a typical program case, I'm sure if the deadbat dead knew about WWASPS/PROVO and similar programs he would already be using them. This type of parent is ALL too typical of the type of program parent who sends their kid for years, or until they turn 18, just to get rid of them because they can, and have the money to do so. It's also pretty typical parents use these abusive programs as a last resort of sorts, which suggests they waited until the problems got out of hand to do anything. Then they send them away at 16-17 and expect the facility to fix all the mistakes the parent made and turn out a freshly made kid at 18 to enter society a perfect stepford kid.
This kid will probably turn himself around, as most teenagers do when they become adults. Or mayb not and he'll end up in prison, who knows. But it sounds like a typical punk teenager who's father did a shitty job raising him. That kid doesn't seem to know the consequences of burlary... but around here that can get your shot and killed pretty easily if you go into the wrong house. Hope he doesn't have to learn that lesson the hard way!
[what was the point of that little heartwarming story anyways?]
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I was happy the kid was getting a taste of Florida Law,but at the same time,I FEAR what he will be like when he returns home from bootcamp.
At best,he will be qualified to get a job in a child bootcamp.
Cruelty breeds cruelty- I think you should be afraid.
I don't think that they train kids to be boot camp experts...oh wait, right, it takes zero education to brutalize others- perhaps your right. In boot camps the victim inevitibly becomes the perp--- sigh, and the world goes 'round. and 'round....and 'round...
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Its a shame,ALL THE LOST POSTS ABOVE!
Would anyone care to rewrite their post again?