Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform > News Items

More programs shutting down

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Anonymous:
Lon Woodbury is an idiot.

"Parent-choice" (I can't even type that in quotes without feeling my gorge rise) hellholes are, by and large, reliant on the government to exist. Three reasons come into play:

1. Often the exact same hellholes paid for by parents are also recipients of court-ordered victims. Knock out those ties, and revenues go down and shutdowns go up.

2. In places where 1's not the case, the same people who run one often run the other.

3. (The big one) The key reason investigative agencies refuse to do their job is because of conflicts of interest and good-old-boy-networkism. How can you shut down a hellhole that a judge referred some kid to just last week? Being able to say "well, we do that over in this other place"- even if the "we" is in another state- discourages any kind of serious investigation.

Let's say the government abandoned child torture altogether. Would the private hellholes get a surge in business? Maybe.

But then what do we have? A handful of societally isolated hellholes, vulnerable to lawsuit and even more vulnerable to investigators, under the umbrella of an organization (the National Association for Torture, Sadism, and Anal Pain, aka NATSAP) that the government does not take seriously. Ideally we get to the situation where abuse in "parent-choice"  ::puke:: shitfarms is treated exactly as it would be if the parents were at home doing it. Similarly, without government backing at any level, it becomes a lot easier for a variant of Miller's bill to march through and declare this whole thing toast.

Ursus:
Cut me some slack if I am wrong about this, but I wasn't under the impression that tremendous numbers of court-ordered kids are currently enrolled in these "parent-choice" hellholes. An exception might be where a kid gets into trouble with the law for a minor infraction and has to go somewhere or to juvie, and a parent negotiates a private duck farm as an alternative to the government run institutions. And well they might, given the current state of affairs at the latter.

Given the crappy and functionally non-existent oversight going on at the public sector gulags, do you honestly think the government is going to invest extra manpower to oversee what's going on in the private sector? The "parent-choice" alternatives are seen as country clubs by penal system diehards.

Sure, "conflicts of interest and good-old-boy-networkism" play into it, but I think the old economic bottom line plays into it a lot more than you think.

Anonymous:
I'm sure TSW can fill you in on more details, but Eckerds, AFAIK, had a substantial mix of both court ordered and not. And this was a privately-run institution.

Peninsula Village is another example, and I'm sure Zen and act.da and everyone else there can fill you in on that.

viewtopic.php?f=62&t=26248

And there's even been tales of school systems getting into the act because they think these hellholes have something to do with actual public education.

There's conflicts of interest from Idaho to Florida. It's not a time and money thing for the investigations, Ursus. Can you imagine if police claimed not to have the time or money to investigate, say... drug possession? Or speeding? Or minor-in-possession? Or people's private homes for child abuse? "We can't", nine times out of ten, means "we won't".

There is, of course, a presumable financial reason for abandoning juvenile jails for private contractors that claim to charge less and rehabilitate, but that's being abandoned in part because they don't actually do either, and in part because various officials are starting to think that they can get in trouble if they send kids to be killed (after what happened in Florida, and the Miller investigations).

Ursus:

--- Quote from: "Guest" ---I'm sure TSW can fill you in on more details, but Eckerds, AFAIK, had a substantial mix of both court ordered and not. And this was a privately-run institution.
--- End quote ---
Sorry, but Eckerds has been a public sector gulag for over forty years. They just recently privatized three of their currently 21 facilities, but the other 18 or so are still public.

"Eckerd Youth Alternatives (EYA) has helped more than 70,000 youth in public programs since they were founded by Jack and Ruth Eckerd in 1968."[/list]

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--- Quote from: "Guest" ---Peninsula Village is another example, and I'm sure Zen and act.da and everyone else there can fill you in on that.

viewtopic.php?f=62&t=26248
--- End quote ---
Residential treatment centers are precisely where you do tend to get more court-ordered kids, due to that unique combination of lockup-capabilities plus alleged psychiatric services. Presumably the degree and/or quality of psychiatric services rendered are deemed to be greater than that available at a cheaper price. These cases are then contracted out to places like Peninsula Village. How much of PV's income is generated by such contract jobs? That I do not know.

However, my guess is that you do not get that many court-ordered cases like this at less physically restrictive programs, e.g., many of the Aspen programs, CEDU-ite, Hyde, etc...i.e., places that teach you to create the fences yourself, in your own mind. Basically most of the non-RTC programs. Maybe I'm wrong.

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--- Quote from: "Guest" ---There's conflicts of interest from Idaho to Florida. It's not a time and money thing for the investigations, Ursus.
--- End quote ---
I never said it was a "time and money thing," exclusively. I said:

Sure, "conflicts of interest and good-old-boy-networkism" play into it, but I think the old economic bottom line plays into it a lot more than you think.[/list]

It would appear that there is a semantic quibble here, and I'm not sure that this is really worth pursuing, but I do think downplaying economic factors during a recession is not a very realistic stance to take.


--- Quote from: "Guest" ---Can you imagine if police claimed not to have the time or money to investigate, say... drug possession? Or speeding? Or minor-in-possession? Or people's private homes for child abuse?
--- End quote ---
Yup, actually I can. Happens all the time. They make judgment calls as to which investigations to pursue, or pursue with greater vigor. They just won't call it that.

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--- Quote from: "Guest" ---There is, of course, a presumable financial reason for abandoning juvenile jails for private contractors that claim to charge less and rehabilitate, but that's being abandoned in part because they don't actually do either, and in part because various officials are starting to think that they can get in trouble if they send kids to be killed (after what happened in Florida, and the Miller investigations).
--- End quote ---

I'm not sure what you mean by this in the context of the OP:

--- Quote ---COLUMBIA, S.C. – State budget cuts are forcing some of the nation's youngest criminals out of counseling programs and group homes and into juvenile prisons in what critics contend is a shortsighted move that will eventually lead to more crime and higher costs.

Tennessee, South Carolina, Kentucky and Virginia are among states that have slashed juvenile justice spending — in some cases more than 20 percent — because of slumping tax collections. Youth advocates say they expect the recession will bring more cuts next year in other states, hitting programs that try to rehabilitate children rather than simply locking them up...
--- End quote ---
I'm afraid I don't see a decrease in contracting out "difficult jobs" happening any time soon. Perhaps you could enlighten me.

Anonymous:
I think what we're actually quibbling over is what public and private mean. When most people say "privatized", they mean that the money is going to some private organization. (Compare the use of "Private prisons" for the recent contracts-out in that department.) Eckerds may have been in the public sector, but it wasn't directly run by the state, was it?

Also, take "budget cuts caused" with a grain of salt. The real question is "Why was the budget cut?" It's not like they didn't think about the budget before they slashed it (well, one hopes they didn't). Recessions are a great time to kill off stuff you don't want around anymore, and "budget cuts" is a convenient scapegoat when the child torturers who are about to lose their jobs come to legislators asking why the flow of kids has stopped.


--- Quote from: "the article" --- Youth advocates say they expect the recession will bring more cuts next year in other states, hitting programs that try to rehabilitate children rather than simply locking them up...
--- End quote ---


--- Quote from: "Ursus" ---I'm afraid I don't see a decrease in contracting out "difficult jobs" happening any time soon.
--- End quote ---

Huh? You just quoted it. When the article says "programs that try to rehabilitate children", you can pretty much bet your bottom dollar that they mean shitpits. "Simply locking them up" refers to the actual juvenile justice system. And yes, I know the latter is FUBAR.

And from the other side of the government equation: Remember who Mitt Romney's campaign finance managers were?

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