My Time at Paint Rock Valley Boys
I worked as a counselor at Three Springs of Paint Rock Valley Boys from 2002 to 2004. During that time I participated in abusive acts and witnessed even more. My actions have brought me a great deal of personal pain and remorse. It wasn’t until after I was terminated, for what essentially was the exercising of poor judgment that I came to realize the full extent of what I did and saw. Everything must have a start and my story started with the extremely poor training I received, moved on to the appalling lack of supervision, and is rounded out by the horrible conditions of the facility.
I started working at Three Springs a few weeks before Christmas at the end of 2002. At my time of hire I spent four or so weeks going through the Three Springs 100 hour new employee training. During this time I went to classes all day and spent time with a group at night. The training program was inadequate to say the least. Most of it went over the various levels of the stages system, the medicine wheel, and creed. We received minimal medical training, minimal training in how to deal with violence, minimal training in dealing with people who were upset. All in all we received very little useful training to prepare us for covering the group we were being trained to cover.
Once training was complete, and we passed our tests, which most of us cheated on, we were given our group assignments. My group was the group of Lisicha. This group was the youth group that consisted of boys from the ages 10 to 14 or so. My first introduction to Lisicha involved a restraint in the middle of the dining hall during lunch hour between two of my training classes. Restraints were something that I learned happened quite frequently in Lisicha.
My first restraint with my group occurred at night after a young man attempted to hit my co counselor. Nearly 10 restraints later the group was finally willing to calm down enough to go to bed. At some point it became apparent that the traditional methods of SAMA (Satori Alternatives to Managing Aggression) were pretty useless. The methods taught to me by Three Springs took too long, were too awkward, and normally resulted in the restraints taking longer. At this point I began to use what could be termed as Shock and Awe, which actually works pretty well if your goal is to pound a group into passive submission.
Shock and Awe restraints are when I would slam the kid into the ground as hard as I could to force him to submit in the shortest amount of time. Luckily for the boys no one was seriously physically hurt. The worst injury incurred during a restraint was a broken collar bone. That was more from the location of the restraint that the force, which was fairly minimal but on a rocky trail. My Shock and Awe methods of restraints rarely seemed to raise an eyebrow. I used these techniques of rendering a boy submissive in public on a regular basis in front of other counselors, supervisors, family worker, and unit directors. I think during my time I was written up twice for improper restraint during the performance of roughly 300 restraints and very few of them by the book.
The book also called for the proper filling out of paperwork. However, in my experience, when you have 16 incident reports to fill out you tend to gloss over the details and do your best to justify your actions. I often lied on my progress reports and heard of other counselors doing the same. Once during an incident involving a restraint in where I restrained a boy in Lisicha's cabin for hiding under a bed I wrote up the boy for attempting to run away. Not a single eyebrow was raised about the report or the incident despite the fact it was pretty obvious I was blatantly being dishonest to protect myself. My embellishments on incident reports didn't seem like such a serious problem at the time as my group was experiencing such severe behavioral problems that everyone seemed to think that the number of restraints were justifiable.
The group’s behavior was so up and down that multiple restraints became the norm. During one particularly sickening day I performed twenty-six restraints with no help from my co-workers. One supervisor even called over on the radio and asked me to keep my group quiet as it was disturbing a meeting. At some point I had to beg for someone to come relieve me so I could use the toilet. Restraints became so common in Lisicha that I became sort of trigger happy. If a kid even twitched too hard he ended up in a restraint. I remember restraining a kid for using the f-word once and nothing was even said to me. If my restraints were bad, some of the supervisors and other counselors were worse. I’ll describe this more later on in this statement. I began to suffer physically and mentally from the stress, but it was the boys who suffered the most through the variety of consequences they endured on that day and others like it.
Consequences at Three Springs are designed to bring about compliance of an individual or group. Here is a list of the commonly used ones:
1.) Sitting on a rock all day
2.) Group Ignore: The child was completely ignored by his group and had to cook al his own food and sleep in a tent.
3.) Primitive: This is where the boy was kicked out of his group completely and forced to live in his own campsite, cook his own food, and was not allowed to speak to anyone.
4.) Quiet Time: Not being allowed to talk
5.) Standing Quiet Time: Not being allowed to talk and standing quietly
6.) Personal Fire Drill: The child was given a few fire drills randomly throughout the night for behaviors in the day.
7.) Building Ban: Not being allowed in the buildings
8.) Campsite: The whole group was made to eat and cook on their campsite, get up earlier, and not allowed to talk on campus.
9.) Manure Therapy: Shoveling horse manure at the horse barn all day
10.) Personal Gott: Being forced to carry a 5 gallon jug of water
11.) Work Projects: This could vary from chopping wood to cleaning their campsites
One of the stranger consequences I witnessed, involved a young man who was made to carry his own gott of water everywhere, and was made to walk 100 poles a day until he began to comply with the program. Walking poles was where the child walked the distance from 1 telephone pole to the next and then back, to count as 1 lap.
Another consequence that struck me as odd involved a blunder on my own part. I was caught making three of my own group members carry cinder blocks around the bleachers by the baseball field. One of the higher ups from the Huntsville office witnessed it and complained that I wasn’t making sure the consequence had some meaning attached to it. She later told me that I should have gotten the boys to move the whole pile of cinder blocks so they could clean out underneath them. According to her, this would have given the consequence some sort of legitimacy. Personally, in retrospect, I think both her and my consequence were nonsense.
More nonsense that went on regularly at Three Springs was Treatment Team. Each week the counselors (no formal psychological training), the family worker (no formal psychological training, and the supervisor (no formal psychological training) would all get together and assess the progress of the members of their group. Most of these treatments did not involve the facility psychologist. Of course, this was the same psychologist the kids saw a mere 20 minutes or less every month. During this meeting, interventions were created to help move the boys through the program.
One of the worst aspects of Treatment Teams was the evaluation of topics that the boys did every week. These topics done in Nightly were examined and discussed. I frequently witnessed the boys being told that they weren’t being honest enough about why they are in the program. Often, I believe anyway, the boys resorted to gross exaggeration to bluff their way past Treatment Team to satisfy the mania for introspection.
Another problem I witnessed was the living conditions. Three Springs houses the boys in campsites that have three to five buildings. These buildings include the cook shed, woodshed, nightly site, cabin, and trunk room. More often than not counselors allowed their groups to leave their campsites in a disgusting state. I often found myself sleeping in a cabin that smelled so vile that it was not uncommon for me to sleep with my head out the door. I regularly found rat feces on plates, clothing, in trunks, under beds, and on shelves. Shower houses tended to have green slime and mold on the walls; another frequent complaint was mice and rats in the pantry in the kitchen.
The kitchen presented another item of concern during my stay at Three Springs. The food cooked and served by the kitchen staff with the assistance of the boys was often disgusting and unappetizing. Many of the boys in my group complained of weight loss due to not being able to eat. I’m not a finicky eater so loosing weight wasn’t an issue for me. However, several residents who had medications that increased or suppressed their appetites, tended to suffer from the lack of quality food. Weekend meals often served were sandwiches with white bread, baloney, and potato chips as a ‘nutritious’ meal.
Poor food led to one of the most violent incidents I witnessed at Three Springs. I was sitting at my table talking to the kids in my group when a resident grew angry about something and started lashing out at others. Three counselors restrained him, very painfully, on the floor in the corner. I later asked him what got him angry and he said that he was just sick and tired of eating crappy food and being hungry all the time. This wasn’t the only incident of violence that occurred at Three Springs.
Here is a list of incidents that occurred during my time at Three Springs:
1.) A counselor at the County Choices program restrained a kid with such force he cracked the wooden cabin floor.
2.) A counselor drove his shoulder into the stomach of a kid who was being carried down a hill by two others and performed what he termed a ‘T-bone Maneuver’.
3.) A unit director picked a boy up by his feet and banged his head on the ground.
4.) Another unit director picked a kid up and swung him around like a rag doll and then apparently threw the kid.
5.) I jumped over a table and restrained a kid with such force I ended up with a knot on my head and bruised knee.
6.) Another counselor regularly used to tell others that the best thing to do on your first day in group was to, “boom a kid” to get them to behave.
7.) A female unit director bragged of suplexing a kid.
8.) A supervisor restrained a boy on the concrete and deliberately ground the boy’s elbows and knees into the concrete to inflict pain on him.
9.) Another supervisor performed a running tackle on a boy for cursing at another staffer.
10.) I restrained a boy in the gravel with such force it left his imprint in the ground.
11.) I personally witnessed a staffer use a choke hold on a boy.
12.) Another staffer bragged that he found banging a kid’s head on the concrete a good way to settle them down.
There is so much more I could add, but the sheer number of incidents makes it hard to sort threw them all. At night, I sometimes have nightmares about what went on at Three Springs. Guilt was what led me to examine myself and my actions. It was remorse that made me want to do some sort of penance for what I did, and for what I didn’t do. My biggest regret to this day isn’t what I did, but the fact that I remained silent while working at Three Springs.
It wasn’t until I was terminated for handing out a consequence that resulted in a young man sustaining a minor abrasion to his nose that I was forced to see the bigger picture.
My termination forced me out of a world where abuse on a weekly to daily basis seemed routine, and part of the job. It forced me into the real world where such things are not tolerated. It wasn't to long before I began to feel a huge sense of guilt over all that had transpired. I don't hate Three Springs for terminating me. Quite the opposite, as I'm more than willing to thank them for forcing me out of such a soul destroying operation. Many people have claimed Three Springs saved their life with the time they spent there. I claim Three Springs saved my life by forcing me to leave. This action helped me to move onto a healthier place.
It took me awhile to readjust to not waking up every hour, not living with the constant hyper-awareness of living with 10 young boys, not suffering panic attacks, not throwing up from those panic attacks, not suffering constant knee and back pain, and finally not being in a place where hurting people appears to be part of the job as long as it is in the name of treatment. I offer no excuses or explanations as to why I didn't report what I witnessed other than to say it never once occurred to me to do so during my twenty-two months of employment, nor was it ever overly encouraged of us to act in our mandated reporter roles as we all should have been doing. This, at times, has added to my guilt factor, but my sense of remorse and guilt for what I have done and not done has more or less been exorcised after making contact with some of the boys I worked with. To date all that have been contacted have accepted my apologies and we have maintained a friendly relationship.
It makes me happy to know that despite Three Springs, and the hell they endured, those wonderful young men have grown up to be better a better sort of man than I ever have or will be.
