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The Synanon Connection

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Ursus:
The Cult That Spawned the Tough-Love Teen Industry
By Maia Szalavitz
August 20, 2007

The idea that punishment can be therapeutic is not unique to the Rotenberg Center. In fact, this notion is widespread among the hundreds of "emotional growth boarding schools," wilderness camps, and "tough love" antidrug programs that make up the billion-dollar teen residential treatment industry.

This harsh approach to helping troubled teens has a long and disturbing history. No fewer than 50 programs (though not the Rotenberg Center) can trace their treatment philosophy, directly or indirectly, to an antidrug cult called Synanon. Founded in 1958, Synanon sold itself as a cure for hardcore heroin addicts who could help each other by "breaking" new initiates with isolation, humiliation, hard labor, and sleep deprivation.

Today, troubled-teen programs use Synanon-like tactics, advertising themselves to parents as solutions for everything from poor study habits to substance misuse. However, there is little evidence that harsh behavior-modification techniques can solve these problems. Studies found that Synanon's "encounter groups" could produce lasting psychological harm and that only 10 to 15 percent of the addicts who participated in them recovered. And as the classic 1971 Stanford prison experiment demonstrated, creating situations in which the severe treatment of powerless people is rewarded inevitably yields abuse. This is especially true when punishment is viewed as a healing process. Synanon was discredited in the late 1970s and 1980s as its violent record was exposed. (The group is now remembered for an incident in which a member placed a live rattlesnake—rattle removed—in the mailbox of a lawyer who'd successfully sued it.) Yet by the time Synanon shut down in 1991, its model had already been widely copied.

In 1971, the federal government gave a grant to a Florida organization called The Seed, which applied Synanon's methods to teenagers, even those only suspected of trying drugs. In 1974, Congress opened an investigation into such behavior-modification programs, finding that The Seed had used methods "similar to the highly refined brainwashing techniques employed by the North Koreans."

The bad publicity led some supporters of The Seed to create a copycat organization under a different name. Straight Inc. was cofounded by Mel Sembler, a Bush family friend who would become the gop's 2000 finance chair and who heads Lewis "Scooter" Libby's legal defense fund. By the mid-'80s, Straight was operating in seven states. First lady Nancy Reagan declared it her favorite antidrug program. As with The Seed, abuse was omnipresent—including beatings and kidnapping of adult participants. Facing seven-figure legal judgments, it closed in 1993.

But loopholes in state laws and a lack of federal oversight allowed shuttered programs to simply change their names and reopen, often with the same staff, in the same state—even in the same building. Straight spin-offs like the Pathway Family Center are still in business.

Confrontation and humiliation are also used by religious programs such as Escuela Caribe in the Dominican Republic and myriad "emotional growth boarding schools" affiliated with the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs (wwasp), such as Tranquility Bay in Jamaica. wwasp's president told me that the organization "took a little bit of what Synanon [did]." Lobbying by well-connected supporters such as wwasp founder Robert Lichfield (who, like Sembler, is a fundraiser for Republican presidential aspirant Mitt Romney) has kept state regulators at bay and blocked federal regulation entirely.

By the '90s, tough love had spawned military-style boot camps and wilderness programs that thrust kids into extreme survival scenarios. At least three dozen teens have died in these programs, often because staff see medical complaints as malingering. This May, a 15-year-old boy died from a staph infection at a Colorado wilderness program. His family claims his pleas for help were ignored. In his final letter to his mother, he wrote, "They found my weakness and I want to go home."

java.gurl:
You know what kills me Ursus? (Did you go to Elan or to one of the other places like it?) Is that we all know the danger of these so called "Behavioral Mod" joints and the news of how bad they truly are is finally trickling out to the public (AFTER so many have died and/or suffered at the hands of the staff and/or students that "run" these joints) YET they are still filling up with students daily. Hell, hourly. Better yet, as we speak.

It kills me. It really does. Parents seem to think that these reports and places like "Fornits" are filled with crap written by bitter, drugged out ex-students. So, they disregard our stern but oh-so true warnings and send little Johnny away. Then before you know it little Johnny is telling the tales we all told only now Momma realizes they are NOT tales but reek of the cold, bitter truth!

So now a dilema is at hand, take little J home and possibly have a even more "damaged" kid on your hands filled with more resentment than when you put him in or leave him there thinking that YOUR kid is smarter, stronger, different than the freaks (like us) and that the good will seep in and the bad will somehow avoid his fragile ego and sense of well being. These delicate years (in a boys life especially) can't be fucked with. You fuck with kids already troubled in their adolescence and you will have YEARS of damage to un-do on top of what was already damaged to begin with!

It's JUST like Prison, Jail whatever you wanna call it. You know it sucks big time yet you keep doing shit to end up there. When you get out 9x out of 10 you usually go right back to the same old crap UNLESS something drastic went down to change your behavior. You know it's bad and hear horror stories about how rotten it is 24/7 yet ppl KEEP going back, willingly at that! It is not like you are just picked up out of the blue and slammed in the pokie for being a good citizen, working hard, raising a family, playing fetch with Fido or rolling a ball of yarn around with Meow-Meow. Nope, you were usually being a grade A asshole so you end up where you belonged to "protect" the good, law abiding citizens and yourself from yourself (believe it or not).

No matter how much bad we hear or even experience personally we still go to these joints (and go back). No one wants to think it will happen to their kid or relative until it does happen. Then they are wracked with grief and crying on the news and trying to get a law named after their loved one protecting others in their loved ones (former) posistion. IF they had listened to the warnings to begin with they would not be blubbering on the 6:00 pm news about how cruel life is while your funny lookin mug is plastered all over the nightly news.

So people need to learn the hard way. Be it the victim or the victimizer (in this case the parents/guardians that send their kids away to these joints to be abused on their dime).

Even if little Johnny does not die from dehydration or a blood clot or a spider bite he will most likely end up suffering for YEARS afterwards. The mental suffering you feel from these joints is intense, deep and incurable. THAT is precisely why so many have ended up snortin coke, drinkin, shootin up, poppin pills, killing themselves, killing others, harming animals and/or kids. It is serious what goes down after you leave. If you graduate you seem to fare a tad bit better but not by much. I know of Elan grads that have commited suicide, od'd, Etc.

Sad thing is that there are troubled kids sprouting up everywhere and the answer to the issues their parents face is un known. It is a bad place to be and I don't envy it at all. I feel for the parents that agonize over these decisions for they are not easy ones to make. You don't want to see your kid suffer and waste a potentially good life nor do you want to send your kid to Elan. What to do?

If you figure it out, anyone out there. Please tell us all right away. Better yet patent that shit cuz you'll be the next Anthony Robbins or Deepak Chopra (They BOTH made over 10 million last year ALONE).

Ursus:
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...

ajax13:
AARC in Calgary, Canada is a direct descendent of Straight.  The Executive Director of AARC, F. Dean Vause, worked at Kids Inc.  Vause was involved in the attempt to establish Kids of the Canadian West, which was nixed due to bad publicity surrounding Kids in New Jersey/New York.  AARC implemented the confrontational practises from Straight, the oldcomer newcomer hierarchy, and the use of host homes to house the inmates.  Vause and his supporters repeatedly disavow the connection to Kids, but it must be pointed out that the original peer cousellors, another Straight trait, were former prisoners of Kids.

The Elan Reporter:
Actually java.gurl, elan was forced to merge houses together due to lack of students a few years back. It was the negative media attention that spawned from the skakel trial that had back fired on elan. Once parents heard about the past abuse ie, the ring and deprived of sleep ect, elan slowly saw a dramatic loss in admissions and parents were even pulling their kids out of the program.

Not sure if the houses that merged due to lack of admissions is still in play as of current, but the negative media attention exposing the truth about what went on did have a devastating effect on the school.

And I am sure sites like this and others also could've played a role in making parents aware what goes on behind the close doors of these places.

It seems like these days in this generation parents are more concerned for the welfare of their children and really think twice and or throughly look into these treatment centers with a white glove. I had came across sites on the web in the past where concerned parents asked alot of questions about treatment programs and seek out every bit of info they can before shipping their kids off to one of these places.

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