Film on Aaron Bacon

[psy]

http://jonfordham.com/aaron_bacon_tease ... v-235.html

[Anonymous]

http://jonfordham.com/aaron_bacon_teaser_f23_acv-235.html

that kind of looks like it sucks

[wdtony]

I hope it is done well. Thanks for posting this. The more exposure the better.

[Anonymous]

great job on the teaser.   cannot wait to see the movie.

[iamartsy]

Wow. It looks really good.

[Anonymous]

Wow. It looks really good.

Did you watch the trailer? It looks bad, movie of the week lame. The "teen" looks to be in his early 30s. The Tagline is: "they used tough, not love," but there is no study of how his parents were involved in the "tough" but not "love" themselves,  by having him abducted and imprisoned. There is no observation about how they screwed up their other kid by sticking him in a drug treatment center for smoking pot.  These parents are HORRIBLE parents. None of that is discussed. The angle of the film is, this kid was fucked up, (he really wasn't, his parent's were) He needed help, but this went too far. In other words, abduction and imprisonment is OK to deal with kids who irk their parents enough to deem them "out of control," just don't, you know, KILL them. I don't like that incompleteness

It looks like it really sucks. Not just the story-line, but the acting, the filming, everything. Ugh. Rent the Magdelane Sisters to watch a good rendition of Program in action. Or rent 1984. Those are the only films I've seen to get programs right.

[Froderik]

Did you watch the trailer? It looks bad, movie of the week lame. The "teen" looks to be in his early 30s. The Tagline is: "they used tough, not love," but there is no study of how his parents were involved in the "tough" but not "love" themselves,  by having him abducted and imprisoned. There is no observation about how they screwed up their other kid by sticking him in a drug treatment center for smoking pot.  These parents are HORRIBLE parents. None of that is discussed. The angle of the film is, this kid was fucked up, (he really wasn't, his parent's were) He needed help, but this went too far. In other words, abduction and imprisonment is OK to deal with kids who irk their parents enough to deem them "out of control," just don't, you know, KILL them. I don't like that incompleteness

It looks like it really sucks. Not just the story-line, but the acting, the filming, everything. Ugh. Rent the Magdelane Sisters to watch a good rendition of Program in action. Or rent 1984. Those are the only films I've seen to get programs right.

Finally, someone with a little taste!! (assuming what you said is true about the entire movie)

Nothing about the parents' fucked up decision to put their "troubled teen" in a program, as if they weren't at all responsible. Never saw the Magdalen Sisters, but I would have to agree with you about 1984. I hate the thought of lame movies being made about REAL abuse. Seriously, where does the exploitation end?

[Che Gookin]

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.

[Anonymous]

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. 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.

the assumption that they're kicking themselves is an interesting one. Maybe you are right. But if you knew program parents, you'd know that assumption is not necessarily accurate--at least they don't kick themselves in the sence real parents would. These people tend to be crazy and if they kick themselves its the way that oj kicks himself. In the book they remark that they are comforted now that at least aaron understood why they had him kidnapped.

think about that.

[Che Gookin]

Believe me, I know program parents all to well for my own comfort. I had the mis-fortune of meeting way to many of them. I met the sadists, I met the dupes, I met the uncaring, and I met the true believers. I'm only viewing Aaron Bacon's parents as the parents of a boy who was killed by the neglect of others. I don't for a second believe they wanted that for their son.

As for the book I'd have to read it in full before I felt confident in thinking about anything they said in it.

[Ursus]

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.

For the longest time juvie and/or reform school were considered to be the only options. And juvie wasn't quite as distinct from the adult sector in the penal system, as it is these days. There were plenty of cases of impressionable kids being turned to a life of crime due to time spent on the other side of bars. Or worse, being victimized and raped by older, hardened sorts.

Wilderness programs and psych hospitals started to become options around the same time in the 1970s, psych hospitals a little ahead of wilderness in that game. Although I do not have any authoritative proof, it is my opinion that this was perhaps part of the genesis of the (many) insurance scams surrounding a very great many inappropriate forced hospitalizations.

Deborah and others have posted extensively about the genesis of Wilderness Programs. For an example of how they were seen as an alternative to juvie, read what Vision Quest founder Bob Burton has to say about it:

In the early 1970's troubled youth in America were treated very differently than they are today. Youth in trouble with the law -- at times for simply running away from home -- were often locked up in state or county correctional facilities. Private programs were primarily church-run orphanages for pre-adolescent boys, or private mental health and psychiatric facilities for those families who could afford to pay.

Bob Burton had worked in the State of Delaware corrections system for four years when he was placed in charge of the youth detention center for Clark County (Las Vegas) Nevada. In that capacity he was selected to participate in a conference in Long Beach, California on "Corrections of the Future". During the conference Bob was particularly inspired by the words of a mathematician who predicted that more success could be obtained in the field's outcomes by having more alternatives, or "redundancy," patterned after the design of a three-stage rocket. Bob left that conference with genuine enthusiasm for what he wanted to accomplish. He took the ideas of the mathematician to heart and decided that he had to provide an alternative for the "one way in and one way out" way that the corrections system operated.

Little did he know where that decision would take him and the thousands of kids who would be affected by it.

In 1973 Bob found an Arizona judge -- John Collins of the Pima County Juvenile Court in Tucson -- who was also fed up with what the system was doing with kids in trouble. A visionary with a heart and little patience for the bureaucracy, Judge Collins placed the first youth into VisionQuest and ordered the State to pay. With financing from Bob's retirement, and some help from his parent's credit cards, VisionQuest began operations with a contract to take six youthful offenders from Pima County. While VisionQuest wanted to provide services to youth in their own homes, regulatory and funding mechanisms required that VisionQuest operate as a residential program. A wilderness component was quickly added...[/list]

[Che Gookin]

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.

For the longest time juvie and/or reform school were considered to be the only options. And juvie wasn't quite as distinct from the adult sector in the penal system, as it is these days. There were plenty of cases of impressionable kids being turned to a life of crime due to time spent on the other side of bars. Or worse, being victimized and raped by older, hardened sorts.

Wilderness programs and psych hospitals started to become options around the same time in the 1970s, psych hospitals a little ahead of wilderness in that game. Although I do not have any authoritative proof, it is my opinion that this was perhaps part of the genesis of the (many) insurance scams surrounding a very great many inappropriate forced hospitalizations.

Deborah and others have posted extensively about the genesis of Wilderness Programs. For an example of how they were seen as an alternative to juvie, read what Vision Quest founder Bob Burton has to say about it:

In the early 1970's troubled youth in America were treated very differently than they are today. Youth in trouble with the law -- at times for simply running away from home -- were often locked up in state or county correctional facilities. Private programs were primarily church-run orphanages for pre-adolescent boys, or private mental health and psychiatric facilities for those families who could afford to pay.

Bob Burton had worked in the State of Delaware corrections system for four years when he was placed in charge of the youth detention center for Clark County (Las Vegas) Nevada. In that capacity he was selected to participate in a conference in Long Beach, California on "Corrections of the Future". During the conference Bob was particularly inspired by the words of a mathematician who predicted that more success could be obtained in the field's outcomes by having more alternatives, or "redundancy," patterned after the design of a three-stage rocket. Bob left that conference with genuine enthusiasm for what he wanted to accomplish. He took the ideas of the mathematician to heart and decided that he had to provide an alternative for the "one way in and one way out" way that the corrections system operated.

Little did he know where that decision would take him and the thousands of kids who would be affected by it.

In 1973 Bob found an Arizona judge -- John Collins of the Pima County Juvenile Court in Tucson -- who was also fed up with what the system was doing with kids in trouble. A visionary with a heart and little patience for the bureaucracy, Judge Collins placed the first youth into VisionQuest and ordered the State to pay. With financing from Bob's retirement, and some help from his parent's credit cards, VisionQuest began operations with a contract to take six youthful offenders from Pima County. While VisionQuest wanted to provide services to youth in their own homes, regulatory and funding mechanisms required that VisionQuest operate as a residential program. A wilderness component was quickly added...[/list]

Yeah more or less what I thought and knew already. Though you forget that wilderness therapy spun out of the Salesmanship Club Program down in Texas which went on to spin off into Eckerd Youth Alternatives. Short term programming was merely the next logical progression.

And like I said everyone back then just knew what horrible places juvies were and how terrible psych wards were, and how reforms schools were for kids who smoked the dreaded devil herb. Wilderness programs never had it easier ripping people off.

[Ursus]

Yeah more or less what I thought and knew already. Though you forget that wilderness therapy spun out of the Salesmanship Club Program down in Texas which went on to spin off into Eckerd Youth Alternatives. Short term programming was merely the next logical progression.

And like I said everyone back then just knew what horrible places juvies were and how terrible psych wards were, and how reforms schools were for kids who smoked the dreaded devil herb. Wilderness programs never had it easier ripping people off.

Yup, didn't want to even get into that whole-hog 'cause this web has been interconnecting from many different sources all over the place for a long long time.

Mostly I wanted to shove Bob Burton's statement in there, lol. Simply because he says flat out why he wanted to be an alternative to juvie. Conditions at juvie, and the incredibly minor reasons that could end up landing you there, were a real concern back then.

An interesting coincidence here: I came across a real heartbreak of a story yesterday when I was mucking about for a John Looney* post (of Timberlawn Psychiatric Center / Hospital fame). This was an undated orphan page about a young man who was on trial for murder, and part of his childhood history was his foster mother's consideration of the Dallas Salesmanship Club as a placement. At the time of that consideration, the Shady Brook School and Residential Treatment Center was also suggested to her, and the kid ended up attending the latter from June 11, 1974 through sometime in December of 1975.

Mrs. Marek expressed the opinion that John needs more structure than she is able to provide, more so now when she is running for office, and I agree that John needs more structure than he is getting right now. She is considering the Adventure Trails of the Salesmanship Club in Dallas, and St. Joseph's School of the Catholic Charities a possible placement possibilities, and I also gave her the name and address of Shadybrook School in Richardson as another possibility. She is going to check on them and see what kind of placement she can come up with. Champus Insurance will cover 80% and the rest will be paid by the Welfare Department.

* (The connection with Dr. John Looney is that he was employed as an Attending Psychiatrist at Shady Brook School & RTC for about ten years: 1976-1986, concurrent with the time he was employed at Timberlawn Psychiatric Center in the same capacity.)

[psy]

Robert Bacon's testimony on the death of his son:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDwanoycFcM

[FemanonFatal2.0]

I am of the strong opinion that if irresponsible, mentally unstable, selfish, and over controlling parents didnt exist, neither would these programs.

When a kid gets sent away for smoking weed and cutting class, or running away to escape their parents you can ONLY blame the parents for their lack of ability to raise children. Too many stupid people have kids when they are not aware what raising kids intails. I dont speak from an outsiders view either, I raise kids for a living and I am 10 times better at it then most. The problem is a lack of respect. Aaron's mother and father did not respect Aaron enough to realize that he was just being a teenager and if he needed help he would have asked for it.

When we get into this whole "parents get conned" issue there are several factors you need to consider before that excuse can be awarded. One, did you even care to do the research or were you sold by an Edcon and a fancy brochure? Two, was your child truly in need of help? (this I believe is where most parents are simply acting out of spite) Three, did you truly exhaust all options and do everything you could BEFORE you considered a program? The answers to these questions will most likely always be the opposite of the truth. Because most parents are blinded by their own emotions and pride.

I think there should be programs for troubled parents that kids could send them to against their will. I would utilized that service.