(Nothing Done to Protect U.S. Children--The Result? A Groundswell of Engraged Families)
Children were isolated and hogtied, they report
Boulder woman exposes network of compounds that incarcerates kids in the U.S. and abroad
By Lou Kilzer
News Staff Writer (Rocky Mountain News -- November 15, 1998)
Matt Grise is not alone.
The 15-year-old honor student from Rifle captured Colorado's attention this month with reports that he is locked inside a fundamentalist Christian compound in Louisiana. He committed no crime but is not even free to talk to his grandmother.
Many American teen-agers share his fate.
The Matt Grise story
11/05-Students join effort to free Matt Grise
11/03-Religious beatings are recalled
11/01-Fighting to save grandson
Alexia Parks, a Boulder businesswoman, has for two years led a national movement to expose a network of religious and secular compounds that incarcerate America teen-agers both in the United States and in places as remote as Western Samoa.
Unlike what friends say of Matt, most of these youths are truly troubled. Their parents -- or often their single parent -- simply thought that a private lockup was the way to save their offspring from drugs, alcohol and crime.
Some programs work well. But sometimes when the parents buy into "tough love" as a way to readjust their daughters and sons, they unwittingly buy into terror.
That point was driven home last week when police in the Czech Republic raided a school for American youths that is part of a network based in St. George, Utah.
Fifty-seven youngsters were freed from the Morava Academy, and four staffers were charged with child cruelty, including Glenda Roach, the principal of the school, and her husband, Steven, of St. George.
Some of the children complained that they were isolated in a room and forced to lie flat on their stomachs with their hands tied behind their backs, said police investigator Petr Netik. They were not free to leave and were involved in strict "behavior modification" courses.
Robert Bezdek, an attorney for the staffers, told The Associated Press that the children may have lied to police.
The St. George consortium is known by various names: Teen Help, World Wide Association and Adolescent Services International. It sends kids, sometimes shackled and surrounded by guards, to facilities in Mexico, Samoa and Jamaica as well as Montana, South Carolina and Utah.
Parks, who runs a Boulder-based Internet firm, agrees that many parents who pay up to $150 a day for their child to be locked up believe they have done the right thing. But many, she learned, have not.
Her journey into the world of private youth incarceration began with the independent fundamentalist compounds in the South, like the one holding Matt Grise.
In the summer of 1996, a young relative came to visit Parks. The 13-year-old with a genius IQ was having trouble with her mother.
To Parks, the girl was nothing other than a warm, affectionate child with a keen imagination and a desire to attend law school at Stanford. The two got along well, and the teen-ager began answering phones at Parks' business.
But by the fall of 1996, the girl was back with her mother and trouble resumed. Soon Parks heard that the woman had sent her child to a compound three hours south of St. Louis.
Parks investigated and discovered a network of schools that incarcerate children, often in the name of the Lord. She dug deeper.
Some of these places have a similar structure, Parks said. For the first 30 days, the child must remain within six feet of a "buddy," walk with his or her head down and speak with no one else. Corporal punishment is the rule. Touching is prohibited. Often medical treatment is prohibited for the first 30 days.
It is not unusual for the child to be confined to a dark, small room as a punishment. Contact with the outside world, if allowed, is restricted to parents. No grandparents are allowed. The educational emphasis is on the Bible.
What Parks also found was how little anyone could do for these children. In a lengthy article she has written on the World Wide Web called An American Gulag, Parks says: "In America, adults can be locked up after a public trial with guarantees of due process. It is only children who have no way to defend themselves from adults. Only children who can be locked up with no witnesses, no evidence, no defense attorney, no independent judge, no rules of procedure, no watching public, no right of appeal, not even a right to be heard."
She's right, according to child advocacy officials.
"Children really have no rights," said Seth Grob, a lawyer for the Rocky Mountain Children's Law Center. "Basically, parents who have legal custody of their children can determine where to send their children, and that decision is not reviewable unless some party brings it to a court's attention."
Even then, it is difficult to act without proof of child abuse, and proof is hard to come by because of the child's inability to contact the outside world.
"When it comes to children's rights in this country and what parents can do to their children, the stories I have heard are unimaginable. Unimaginable," said Christine Doyle, lead researcher for Amnesty International in New York. "Sending them to Hawaii, to Jamaica to make them straight instead of gay, to make them go through shock therapy. The fact of a juvenile's inability to take care of themselves, to have any say in their future is frightening.
"I've come across these stories and, trust me, they're absolutely horrific."
One case that gained national media attention this year involves David Van Blarigan.
The 16-year-old was awakened just after midnight last November in his Oakland, Calif., home. Two large men had come to take him away.
Though he did not drink or use drugs and had no criminal record, his parents found him hard to control and decided that the services of the St. George consortium were needed. The men were from an arm of the St. George group that specializes in seizing children and delivering them to institutions.
As he screamed to be let go, the men took him out of his house and took him to the Brightway Adolescent Hospital in St. George.
Found by the hospital to be needing longer term care, David was sent to Tranquility Bay in Jamaica, one of the consortium's foreign detention centers. Through a momentary mix-up by the transport team, David was able to break away long enough to call an adult friend who, in turn, called the Alameda County District Attorney's Office in California.
Deputy DA Robert Hutchins thought he had a possible case of kidnapping and went to court. The psychological exam at Brightway was a smoke screen, he said, since David's parents had already signed on for a year at Tranquility Bay.
Judge Ken Kawaichi was not impressed with the arguments. As he dismissed Hutchins' motion to have David returned, some 100 parents and supporters of the Teen Help group broke out in cheers.
Parental rights were reaffirmed.
California attorney Thomas M. Burton, who is preparing 10 individual lawsuits against the Teen Help and its related companies, says he understands the parents.
"Single mothers become hysterical, desperate, looking for help and as a last resort turn to these groups at $3,000 a month. ... They're willing to pay anything, borrow anything, mortgage anything to come up with the money. Because no one is more important to a parent than one's child."
Often, he said, they find high quality facilities that help their children.
However, he said, the Morava Academy in the Czech Republic; Tranquility Bay; Paradise Cove in Western Samoa; Casa By the Sea in Ensenada, Mexico; and Teen Help's operations in the United States are not the garden spots their brochures depict.
"(The kids) are being hog-tied with their feet behind up next to their hands," he said about some of the facilities. "They are kept in isolation. Food is very, very bad. Very primitive accommodations. They claim to have an educational component, which is a joke. It's a self-study test is what it is."
The children are held incommunicado for the first few months, then progress through six levels of increasing freedom. "The more courageous these kids are in standing up to this abuse, the longer he or she stays at that lower level," said Burton. "Also we find that the richer the parent, the longer the kid is going to need the services of that program."
Justin Nielson, a manager at Adolescent Services International's St. George office, defended the quality of the programs.
He said that 98.6 percent of parents say they made a good choice in putting child in program, while 96.7 percent would recommend the program to a friend.
The transport service does not constitute kidnapping, he said. "In all cases, we have to have a signed and notarized permission from the parents which states exactly what we are supposed to do and exactly where the youth is being transported from and where they are going to."
Since publishing American Gulag on the Internet, Parks has become a lightning rod for the controversy surrounding private imprisonment of American kids. She receives so much e-mail that she has established a Web page --
http://www.TeenAid.org -- where parents can compare notes, and she is discussing with New York publishers converting American Gulag into a hard-cover book.
November 15, 1998
This Rocky Mountain News story was syndicated by Scripps Howard wire service and The Associated Press.
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