"The goal was responsible citizenship," says Dulit, who remains committed to such tactics. "It's fighting fire with fire. These are people who have caused enormous trouble in their lives. And I think people who tiptoe around these adolescents are wimps. You need a powerhouse to fight a powerhouse. And Joe was that model for me."[/list][/size]
It is depressing how little has changed.
The below piece by Kevin Gray, from
Details Magazine.
I'm sure most of you have read it, but it doesn't seem to be archived here anywhere. So... here it is (thanks, Felice):
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DETAILSNOVEMBER 2001BAD COMPANY / The Elan SchoolOnce upon a time, when a very different Lord of the Flies haunted the classroom.BY KEVIN GRAY
PHOTOGRAPH BY SCOTT PETERMANCaption for 3/4 page image:SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS: An unassuming dorm on Elan's 33 lakeside acres. Weak students wore signs: "I'm a pussy and can't express my feelings."[/list]
Superimposition on image:"AN ATMOSPHERE OF PERVASIVE FEAR AND SUSPICION" THAT TURNED KIDS INTO "AUTOMATONS."[/list][/list]
ON A FEBRUARY MORNING IN 1979, DEEP IN THE PINEY WOODS OF MAINE, 20-YEAR-OLD LIZ Arnold watched as a houseful of teens berated a weeping girl who'd just wet her pants. The girl's name was Kim. She was 17. Moments before, she'd been spanked with a paddle in front of the 100 fellow delinquents and drug addicts—more than two thirds of them men—who made up the student body of the Elan School, a therapeutic community of last resort that, during its seventies heyday, may have been something far from therapeutic.
As the residents surged over the scuffed linoleum of the dining room, knocking over metal chairs, Kim curled into a ball. "You fucking bitch, fucking whore, fucking
fuck-up!" Kim was enduring a "learning experience." She'd mouthed off to the school's senior residents, and at Elan in the seventies, this was the response. But the lesson was getting out of hand. "[We] were whipped into a mob," says Arnold, an ex-speed addict who'd arrived at Elan in 1978 after a phony suicide attempt forced her affluent Ridgewood, New Jersey, parents to seek professional help. "It was brainwashing. People like Kim were gonna be junkies or hookers if we didn't
make them get their shit together." Arnold soon added her voice to the eardrum-breaking sound of 100 young adults caught up in the adrenaline rush of anger. To an outsider, it must have looked like madness, a
Lord of the Flies outpost with castaways who were regularly dressed in tinfoil, diapers, and "hooker" skirts. Some had signs around their necks that read: I'M AN EMOTIONAL VAMPIRE or ASK ME WHY I'M A BABY or CONFRONT ME AS TO WHY I'M A WHORE. All were red with rage. "Kim," Arnold recalls, "was semi-catatonic."
No one can say what became of Kim after she left Elan five months later. But her story, and dozens like it, continues to haunt many former students. Some three decades later, there is a growing chorus of voices waking as if from a bad dream. Many say they were paddled; others say they were put into boxing rings, chained to chairs, restrained in straight jackets, all in the name of "personal growth."
For 31 years, Elan—which remains open to 184 residents at $44,596 a year for a two-year program—has been among the most controversial of the nation's residential therapeutic communities. Though the school no longer employs such Draconian methods, its administrators claim that the behavior modification they practiced was the only effective way to salvage delinquents. The approach—tearing down destructive character traits through relentless peer pressure—has even been praised by several parents and by some of the psychologists who treated the students; a number of former residents claim to have found emotional and mental calm through Elan's rigidity.
But many Elan survivors say they've suffered lasting psychological scars. In 1975, deep in the heart of the flower-power, bell-bottomed sexual revolution, a team of investigators from the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services accused the school of abusing the eleven Illinois residents in its charge. After removing them, the team issued a report detailing "an atmosphere of pervasive fear and suspicion," in which residents become "automatons." The report charged Elan with starving its children, forcing them into useless labor, handcuffing them to chairs. Elan's practices, it concluded, "violate...civil rights and liberties and deprive...children of their self-respect and dignity." Another 1975 inquiry, by the Massachusetts Department of Youth Services, noted that residents were subjected to "severe humiliation" as well as "painful" punishments, including putting "bullies" in boxing rings to fight other residents (in one case, the bully was a pregnant girl).
Despite the charges (which were later disputed by Maine's Department of Human Services), the attention eventually faded. And no one looked very closely into what happened to the young men and women of Elan for nearly a quarter century.
Now Elan is once again under scrutiny, this time thanks to activity surrounding the school's most high-profile alumnus; a former teen preppy from Greenwich, Connecticut, named Michael Skakel.
Skakel, a nephew of Ethel Kennedy's, is charged, as the tabloids have repeatedly trumpeted, with the 1975 Halloween Eve murder of his neighbor Martha Moxley, who was found bludgeoned and stabbed with a golf club on her family's estate. Skakel was 15.
Last year, Connecticut prosecutors filed charges after two former Elan residents told a grand jury that Skakel, now 41, confessed to the killing in 1978, when he was a resident at the school. Skakel enrolled at Elan as a 19-year-old alcoholic and spent two years dying out (he'd later call the place a "concentration camp for kids"). A fellow resident claims to have heard him brag: "I am going to get away with murder. I'm a Kennedy."
It turns out the Kennedy name didn't help much at this very undemocratic enclave: According to a classmate, Kennedy was pummeled in the boxing ring and forced to wear a degrading five-foot dunce cap and model a sign that read I AM AN ARROGANT, RICH BRAT. CONFRONT ME ON WHY I KILLED MY FRIEND MARTHA. Skakel's attorney has said that any alleged admissions at the school were simply attempts to avoid more abuse.
In an effort to look back at the three decades of similar practices,
Details talked to more than 30 former residents and staff members, as well as several adolescent therapists. Oddly enough, Elan opened amid the peace and understanding of the seventies counterculture. But left to its own devices, the school became and emotional cauldron of peer pressure and humiliation, scorching some of the very souls it was meant to save.
Route 26 is a two-lane highway that winds from the town of Gray, nineteen miles northeast of Portland, to the fire roads of Poland Spring, home to America's favorite bottled water. The drive takes you past car-repair shops, plastic deer on tidy lawns, and swimming holes abandoned by tourists on this warm September day.
The Elan campus is a cluster of cream-colored cabins and trailers set on 33 acres of lakeside forest. On a picnic table, four teens chat with happy intensity. The place seems otherwise deserted. It's a pleasant picture, making what once transpired here all the more unbelievable.
Elan was conceived in 1971 by Joe Ricci, a former addict and petty criminal from Port Chester, New York, and Gerald Davidson, a Boston psychiatrist. The pair set out, with one house and thirteen residents, to create a moneymaking venture; their small operation would grow into a multimillion dollar business with 100 staff members, fifteen buildings, and 184 residents from 26 states and three foreign countries.
More than anything, Elan was forged by Ricci's swaggering charisma.
Raised by blue-collar grandparents just 32 miles outside New York City, Ricci was hooked on heroin by 15 (thanks to a car accident that started him up the painkiller ladder); he was busted for robbing a mail truck at 18. A judge gave him an ultimatum: seven years in federal prison, or time at the residential rehabilitation facility of Daytop Village in New Haven, Connecticut. Ricci chose rehab.
At Daytop, Ricci ran smack into a boot-camp-style commune. There was a rigid chain of command, menial jobs, and placards on addicts describing their faults, a device Daytop had adopted from California's Synanon, the granddaddy of all therapeutic communities. The goal was sel-discipline combined with the grueling reshaping of personality through fierce confrontations. The emphasis was on pain.
At the time, corrections officials across the nation—with the blessing of sociologists—had begin to question conventional rehab, turning instead to hard-core therapeutic communities. These programs seemed to accomplish what few others could: a profound change in outlook and behavior that allowed hopeless junkies to begin their lives anew. With a surge of government money, they sprouted across the country, many of them run by Synanon graduates.
Ricci became convinced that such programs would make him rich. But it wasn't until he met Davidson, a psychiatrist and Harvard lecturer, that he found his true calling: his own full-blown therapeutic community, where he could implement his particular brand of in-your-face psychotherapy. The Elan School opened for business on May 30, 1971.
Ricci was soon ministering to the nation's hardest of hard-luck cases (many of whom were provided for with state money), addicts and criminals who'd bounced from jails to group homes to hospitals to rehab and back again. Alongside these felons, Ricci welcomed refugees from America's affluent suburbs—kids whose social rebellion had led them from Hendrix to heroin. Youngsters from Harlem slums worked out their pain with the children of CEOs from Chicago's wealthy North Shore. After the first year, Elan had 40 residents. Ricci was soon presiding over a student body in which residents were regularly shouted down by dozens of their peers.
"I've never seen a sponge like you." "You've been a parasite all your life." Meanwhile, Ricci dug into the emotional core of his targets. "If you didn't come here, you'd be in a mental institution," he would growl. "People weren't put on earth to accommodate you."
"Joe was a Doberman," says Everett Dulit, emeritus professor of psychiatry at New York's Albert Einstein College of Medicine, who referred several Elan patients in the seventies.
"He'd say, 'Now, you listen to what I'm going to tell you, asshole. Because it's gonna save your worthless piece-of-shit life.'"
"Joe was very challenging in groups," adds Stuart Berry, who entered Elan as a 20-year-old junkie on opening day and became its first graduate in 1972; he briefly became a therapeutic director the following year. "There were some pretty bad guys; he needed them to understand their facade wasn't working."
Berry was a typical Elan elite: white, middle-class, and strung out from "living on the lunatic fringe" of the sixties. A grandson of a Cape Cod pharmacist, he'd found his way into Grandpa's medicine locker after a book on the Hell's Angels triggered his curiosity. Drugs turned out to be a great chaser for youthful alienation.
But as Berry soon learned, Ricci had his own cure for apathy. It began with hard work and peer pressure, using the strict hierarchy of a military outfit. Newcomers toiled on kitchen and grounds crews, working their way through the ranks, from "ram-rods" (crew foremen) to department heads to expeditors (who acted as a secret police that "booked incidents" of bad behavior on notepads), and, finally, coordinators, who were charged with overseeing such house activities as group therapy.
"The goal was responsible citizenship," says Dulit, who remains committed to such tactics. "It's fighting fire with fire. These are people who have caused enormous trouble in their lives. And I think people who tiptoe around these adolescents are wimps. You need a powerhouse to fight a powerhouse. And Joe was that model for me."
If a resident disobeyed an order, or if he failed to "relate" his feelings on a regular basis, punishment could come in the form of a "haircut." At Daytop, this meant shaving one's head in atonement. At Elan, it became a verbal firing squad.
Bolded quote:"THERE WOULD BE BLOOD, THERE WOULD BE CRYING, THERE WOULD BE CHEERING," A FORMER RESIDENT SAYS OF "THE RING."[/list][/list]
Caption for image:THAT SEVENTIES SHOW: Ken Zaretkzy, left, was a former druggie turned counselor who helped hide Elan's abuses from state investigators in 1975. As a student, he was forced to eat ketchup-soaked cigarettes.[/list][/list]
Ken Zaretzky was Elan's 22nd resident. He was 15. He'd come from swank Highland Park, Illinois, hooked on heroin. Though the program set him straight, he has many complaints about Elan's tactics—including the time he was accused of stealing cigarettes. The punishment for such a crime? A "general meeting," the highest form of retribution, in which, he says, he was forced to eat four packs of cigarettes—coated with ketchup—in front of the entire house, until he got sick.
"Things could be out-and-out abusive," Zaretzky recalls. Now 45, he owns a suburban Chicago software company and runs a Web site, ElanAlum.com, where former Elan residents (and their parents) compare experiences. "They were nuts from time to time," says Zaretsky. Stuart Berry claims the kids' value as dollar signs outweighed any cause for concern." Joe was accepting them because of the money," he says.
When Ricci began ordering quarrelsome residents to dig pointless ditches and created a boxing ring as a learning tool for bullies, Berry was appalled. Students were suited up with headgear and sixteen-ounce gloves. Then the entire house would form a human ring as the bully was forced to duke it out with four or five people in a row, until defeated. "There would be blood, there would be crying, there would be cheering," says Cindy Robbins, a suburban-Chicago runaway and chronic truant who entered Elan in 1982, at the age of 16. "A lot of people were just afraid. But it's not like you could step in and stop it. You'd be punished."
"I didn't like that at all," says Berry of Ricci's ring. "But at this point, Joe was out of tricks. Sometimes I think he did it for his own amusement."
AS THE YEARS PROGRESSED, JOE RICCI became a millionaire, a larger-than-life evangelist who'd strut through Elan in a leather coat, fedora, and aviator sunglasses, his silver Mercedes parked out front. "He called himself the god of therapy," recalls Liz Arnold. "But he looked like a pimp. He was cocky as hell."
As Ricci's demeanor became more eccentric, so too did the tenor of his therapies. Promiscuous young women (even kissing is not permitted at Elan) were tarted up in hooker costumes with garish makeup and forced to carry poles with signs that said 42nd street. Their male counterparts were dressed like hustlers. A person who acted like a child would be put in diapers and given a rattle. If you "reacted" negatively, you were encased in a tinfoil box with nuclear-reactor symbols and red buttons. One guy, caught peering into the women's dorm, was forced to wear a Peeping Tom raincoat.
The physical punishments also took on a more severe character. In between the paddling and the boxing ring, says Harry Kranick, who entered Elan at 16 in 1977 with a taste for Quaaludes—and mourning the recent death of his father—"[residents] were thrown into a cold shower. When they came out, they were spanked again. This went on for days." Kranick himself—who says the program straightened him out, though he remains bitter about its tactics—was the target of humiliating punishments. After the Elan football team lost several games against local high-school rivals, Ricci screamed at them "for being a bunch of pussies," recalls Kranick. "And I said, 'You know something, Joe, we're not here to play football. We're here to get our shit together.' He made us sleep naked in the dorm, guarded by guys with bats. I had to wear a sign around the house that said I'm a pussy and I can't express my feelings." But that wasn't the worst for Kranick, a witness in the Skakel case. After getting belligerent with a senior resident one day, Kranick says, he was stripped to his underwear, forced to put on a diaper "made of a nasty rag," and ordered to climb into a Dumpster and clean it with a spoon and a toothbrush. The task took two days. When investigators from the Massachusetts Department of Youth Services made their visit in 1975, they were horrified by what they found. Jerry Docherty, a member of the team, says Elan's "born-again" philosophy was well-meaning, but that he had doubts about any positive effects. "You're reinforcing negative behavior with negative behavior," says Docherty. "I had real problems with that."
Ironically, the 1975 state investigations at Elan— and the later exoneration by Maine health officials who ruled that its therapy was "innovative, appropriate, and beneficial"—only emboldened Ricci, says Zaretzky, who claims to have helped cover up practices during the Illinois review process.
"We lied through our teeth," says Zaretzky, a five-year Elan vet who started out as a resident and became a therapeutic director by the time he was 20. "That was my family. And my family was under attack. But everything the investigators said was true. That should have been a warning to mellow out. But we let it get worse." Zaretzky believes Elan's practices violated residents' civil rights—especially when they ran away and were hunted down. "We'd break into shooting galleries in the Boston slums, places where our guys had run off," he says. "We'd just grab them and say, Anybody that wants to fuck with us, you're welcome to.'"
By 1975, Elan's Gerry Davidson, the program's psychiatric director and co-founder, had begun accepting "full-blown" mentally ill patients, says Zaretzky. One of the biggest indignities newer residents suffered was the "electric sauce." Rumored to have contained feces, it was a simple goo, says Zaretzky, of kitchen trash, syrup, mustard, and ketchup. Upon being coated in sauce, some residents would scream, rip off their clothes, and lash out at counselors and fellow residents.
"We could not deal with these people," Zaretzky explains. "[They] should have been in a nice, warm hospital. We were absolutely not equipped."
LAST JANUARY, ELAN FOUNDER JOE Ricci died of lung cancer. He was 54. During his entire, 31-year tenure, Ricci had vehemently defended his practices (Elan claims that 80 percent of its graduates go on to college, though the school does not follow up on alumni academic success thereafter). Ricci also denied that Skakel ever confessed to the Moxley killing. Current school administrators, still reeling from his death, refused to comment.
Though Ricci can no longer defend his school, understanding what drove him may explain what took place there. Over the years, as residents swapped stories of abuse, Elan, with its autocratic leader and his demand for complete devotion, has drawn comparisons to cults—such as the People's Temple and the Unification Church—with Ricci standing in for Kool-Aid shillers like Jim Jones. "The group process was very powerful," says Professor Dulit, "and in some respects, very cultlike."
Bolded quote:"YOU RUN THE RISK OF TRAINING SOCIOPATHS," SAYS ONE PSYCHIATRIST. "PEOPLE WHO OPERATE JUST THIS SIDE OF LEGAL."[/list][/list]
Ricci's rigid insistence on absolute faith in his tenets seems to have created an army of true believers. But instead of producing believers, says Daytop co-creator David Deitch, now a professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, Ricci may have been turning out "closet fascists." Elan, it seems, empowered aggressive young men—and women—to crush the weak and fragile. Its residents learned to crave that power; many became emotional despots.
"You run the risk of training sociopaths," says Dulit. "They're people who operate just this side of legal. The other person never counts for much unless he can be used or exploited."
Over the years, say former Elan staff members and residents, Ricci himself became cruel and vicious—and he freed others to do the same. "It all got crazy," says Berry of the early seventies. "He'd unleash this rage on someone in a meeting for hours." An Elan consultant, Marvin Schwarz, now chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at Glen Oaks Hospital in Illinois (and a Harvard classmate of Davidson's), referred more than 100 adolescent patients to the school. But by the decade's end, he says, "the tactics were destructive rather than therapeutic," with the school's infamous haircuts little more than "symbolic castrations—and these were sick kids." He later quit in protest.
By the early eighties, several former residents claim, Ricci was getting drunk and smoking pot regularly. Though never proved, this tainted the program's credibility and made residents cynical. One day, in 1984, the internal attitude was so bad (by this time, Ricci had bought the state's largest harness racetrack, Scarborough Downs; he would later suffer two unsuccessful runs for governor) that several Elan staff members were busted to entry-level positions. Ricci sauntered in, says Ben Foster, a former truant and suburban "burnout" who was 15 at the time, and delivered a hypocritical soliloquy. "I'm going to go home, pour a nice glass of wine, and smoke a joint," he told a general meeting. "And you're all going to be here scrubbing floors."
In 1987, a woman named Bethany Berry claimed that she'd suffered sleep-and food-deprivation as well as assault as an Elan resident between the ages of 16 and 18. She later filed a lawsuit against the school, Ricci, and the state of Maine, charging abuse (it was eventually settled out of court for an undisclosed sum). No other former residents who spoke to
Details say they have any interest in suing; most only want to put their toxic memories behind them. "They wasted two years of our lives," says Barrie Hughes, who entered Elan in 1983 at 14 after her mother placed her in a psychiatric hospital. "That pisses me off. But it's done."
Former residents wouldn't have much recourse if they changed their minds anyway: The Maine statute of limitations for physical or emotional abuse expires after six years, a term that begins for minors on their 18th birthday.
Nevertheless, wary perhaps of such lawsuits, Elan has changed many of its practices over the years. The school no longer forces its residents to wear humiliating signs. There are no more spankings. And the boxing ring hasn't been used in over a year, stopping, coincidentally, when the Skakel media coverage was at its height. (General meetings are still held here on occasion, as Elan's attorney, John Campbell, told
Details in a brief letter, "when a student has not been responsive to other learning experiences.")
Meanwhile, the harsh glare that came with the Skakel case may be fading. A critical witness, Gregory Coleman, one of two former residents who claimed to have heard the alleged confession, died of a heroin overdose in August, a development that has weakened the prosecution's case. As
Details went to press, Skakel's attorney was seeking to return the case to juvenile court, where, if convicted, the Kennedy cousin would likely face little or no jail time.
And back at the Elan School, safe in the woods, a new student body is learning how to get along.
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