It's not right to institutionalize people and then try to "adjust" their minds against their will.
I support outpatient commitment for people who are immenently suicidal or imminently likely do violence to others.
I also support those same people's right to sit in a mental hospital without having their minds "adjusted" against their will, to refuse any and all treatments and accept confinement (instead of treatment) for the sake of preventing that violence, and to still be treated completely humanely.
People who, as a result of mental illness, are dangers to themselves or others still have the right not to have their minds "adjusted" against their will, and still have the right to be treated as gently and humanely as is consistent with protecting the physical safety of their caregivers.
Convicted criminals have the right not to have their minds "adjusted" against their will and still have the right to be treated humanely while incarcerated.
Teenagers and children are human beings. They have the fundamental right not to have their minds "adjusted" against their willl. Loving parenting, in the family home of a parent or legal guardian equivalent, is entirely qualitatively different from having their minds institutionally, coercively "adjusted."
If they have to be institutionalized for the protection of themselves or others from their own imminent violent acts, teenagers and children have the same right as any other human beings to independence of the mind, sanctity of personal freedom of thought---a freedom *not* held in trust by their parents but inhering in themselves. They have the same right as any other human being to humane treatment while incarcerated or institutionalized, regardless of the reasons they're there.
That's enough argument against the "Brat Camps" of this world all by itself.
Even the most rotten human beings on the face of the Earth have the unalienable right to the freedom and privacy of their own thoughts. Even the most rotten human beings on the face of the Earth have the unalienable right to be humanely treated by the rest of us.
Even convicted multiple murderers who are under sentence of death have the unalienable right to be humanely treated while waiting for that sentence to be carried out, and have the right to have that death be humane, as dignified as possible under the circumstances, and as painless and quick as humanly possible.
The death penalty is, sadly, necessary as the only certain method to ensure the most vicious of the vicious will never hurt another human being again.
But even when we have to put a Ted Bundy down like a mad dog, just as a fellow human being he has the right to have us not screw with his mind coercively and to be dispatched humanely and with as much dignity as we can manage.
Dogs and cats deserve that much. Rats deserve that much. And any human being, no matter how monstrous, deserves that much.
And any human being, no matter how young, no matter how disapproved of or worrying to his parents, church, pshrink, or society, has the right to be treated with as much dignity as possible, to be treated humanely, and to not have his mind coercively changed.
There is a world of qualitative difference between spanking and beating. There is a world of qualitative difference between scolding/lecturing and verbally abusing. There is a world of qualitative difference between being grounded or levied with extra chores at home versus being shipped off to an institution or camp. There is a world of qualitative difference between being incarcerated after a fair criminal trial to merely "do time" versus being "changed" coercively while being held against your will. There is a world of qualitative difference between being constrained by rules that have a rational purpose, and rules whose only purpose is to break the subject to unquestioning, abject obedience for the purpose of chaining of the mind and will.
The line may look blurry to the morally bankrupt, but those things are worlds apart and anyone with a basic sense of morals knows the difference.
There are many people who would think that one leads to the other and would allege a certain method of socializing free human beings is wrong or ill-advised, but they know the difference between attempting to socialize someone versus abusively breaking them.
For one thing, attempts at socialization accept the right of the subject to choose to resist and refuse to be socialized--completely or partially--without having the ante upped and to the point that their mind and will are broken.
To fail to know the difference is moral bankruptcy. To know and fail to accept the difference is evil.
Julie
