The site is not very viewer friendly in China. No matter..
I'm not going to speculate on the motives of the young man's parents regarding their decision to place young Aaron in a program. Did they do it for the sheer pleasure of sadism or did they buy a false bill of goods?
I've never met them and I doubt I ever will.
Unlike parents of today who make their decisions for whatever reasons the parents of 1994 didn't have 1/100th of the material open to them to make an informed decision.
March 1, 1994, the day of Aaron's death, isn't exactly a standout day for the proliferation of information about the evils of programs. Looking back programs like North Star were being touted as the alternative to abusive programs. Now they are being billed as some sort of jiffy lube for fixing all your kids ails in 15 minutes or less. To say that the idea that programs, military schools, and juvies are abusive is a new one is idiotically absurd. This knowledge has been floating around the edges of the American conscious for decades. Given the cultural trends of the or pre1994 it isn't hard to remind ourselves that programs more or less had a free ride because back then they were considered the last refugee for kids who either were an embarrassment, going to end up deadinsaneorinjail, or genuinely crazy fuckers who are probably Nascar fans today.
Wilderness programs were seen as the safe place to send kids to keep them out of those psych hospitals that Iamartsy talks about a couple forums up. Not pleasant places and I'm damn certain that even back in the 1970's it was general knowledge that they were abusive hell holes.
The franchising or McDonaldization of programs to the extent that torture became a packaged business with the comparable ease of going through a drive through did not exist back in the 1990s. A few large congloms existed like Eckerds, CEDU, Three Springs and a couple others. The majority of programs were mom and pop outfits that tended to fly under the radar due to the burden of advertising. Negative publicity did the trick and when ever some bootcamp managed to get itself on the news or some juvie hall was found to be the next Dachau I'm almost positive these mom and pop's did back flips with the extra income flow.
Mind you it was on the cusp of exploding into it, but I tend to think programs didn't really hit their big growth surge until around 2000 and about the time of the dot com boom.
The sort of the long:
Regardless of their motives, the parents of Aaron Bacon didn't have the information available to them that parent's have today. Parent's today send their kids to programs with the full knowledge at their fingers that they kids could be killed, abused, or neglected.
I think one thing we can safely assume is that since March 1st 1995 the mum and pop of Aaron Bacon have done a far better job of kicking their own asses than we could ever hope to do. Might want to remember that when going hunting for a pound of flesh that isn't around to take in the first place.