It is the twisting of the mind that seems to do the worst damage in the long run. Somehow pure brutal incarceration, barring attendant trauma, usually doesn't quite seem to fuck you up as much long term. It is what it is, and it is pretty clear about that.
But when they mess with your mind... when bad is good and good is bad, when ratting on your friends for petty shit becomes doing their souls a favor... when characterizing kids who underwent trauma as having been responsible for not only their own suffering, but also for the suffering of everyone around them... when kids are coerced and bullied into reliving
The Lord of The Flies... and everyone is accusing everyone of everything and the chips finally fall just where "they" want them to fall...
There were "winners" and there were "losers," but guess what? It was just a game. The winners graduated, the losers got expelled or ran away, but after a few years, everybody found out:
it was all just a game. Let's all play psychotherapy, anyone can do it. A "fun" little experiment on the part of the powers that were at that point in time, and yet winning or losing in that little experiment bore little relation to who you were as a person, as a human being, or anything else that really matters in life...
But how much time did it take before the brainwashing wore off? Before people woke up and tried to put their lives back together? Sometimes it took quite a long time. And sometimes the job was done incompletely, cuz you know, that shit went down during our adolescence, when your concept of self is being formed, and you're confused about a lot of things, and feeling your way blindly at best. Myself, I'm
still working on finding my way home...
I found the
interview with Matthew Israel (the man who founded the Judge Rotenberg Center) quite illuminating. Jennifer Gonnerman would sometimes deflect his focus on "inconsequentials" so he was taken off-guard, and ended up revealing quite a lot when she poked around for the juicy stuff. I gained a lot of insight, I guess, into what stuff was going on at the time, the "cultural climate," if you will, when he founded the Behavior Research Institute in Rhode Island in 1971 (which later became the Judge Rotenberg Center due to a certain Judge's ruling in his favor in a lawsuit brought against the place)... which is, if I'm not mistaken, kind of around the same time that Joe Ricci founded Elan, and a bit after the time Joe Gauld founded Hyde (which is where I went, Java.gurl, in answer to your question).
Something about that time, I'm not sure what it was, created a hotbed for these types of places. There were a lot of new ideas floating around about the human psyche, and people tried mucking around with that, for whatever reasons, and I am sure that there were many, perhaps some of them were even good-intentioned. I guess some people thought they could apply these ideas to solving some of the "problems of the day," e.g., straightening up the errant and wayward youth and turning them into productive citizens. It would seem that the idea that one's teenage years are, by definition, turbulent times fraught with stress and filled with a modicum of experimentation, had not yet been accepted as not necessarily a bad thing. Apparently it still isn't. Anyway, a lot of lines were crossed, there was a lot of disrespect paid to people's autonomy, and a lot of people got hurt in the process. And still are...