ASR is not really a bad place at all. It's a gem of an alternative compared to the CEDU schools. With any Emotional Growth boarding school, you're just going to have to take the good with the bad. Obviously your daughter isn't doing well at home, and I don't blame you at all for wanting to do anything in your power to avoid juvenile detention or a drug rehab center.
But the downside is, there's a deep flaw in the whole emotional growth boarding school idea. You're stuck between a rock and a hard place. ASR will keep your daughter out of harm's way and definitely out of jail...for the time being. One of the previous posters said it best. Those places just don't reflect reality. And there are staff, like this Rudy Bentz guy in his CEDU days, and like the Gunn's and Yarborough's and Rookey's, that think they are God's gift to troubled teens. They'll try to re-program the minds of innocent kids like your daughter, regardless of whether they think they're doing the right thing or not.
You just have to be careful. You may have simply found a temporary solution, because I have found in myriad situations that a lot of kids really do come out of those schools with the original destructive tendencies gone (or perhaps merely subsided), but a whole mess of new confusion, anger, frustration, and whatever else comes as a result, embedded in their minds.
If you sift through the name-calling, slander, and hatred in these forums, you can find abundance of raw, disturbing truth.