I have copies of parental agreements which ask parents to sign over consent (to staff) to open the kids incoming and outgoing mail while they are in programs so I understand this to be happening. These programs are mostly WWASP based and are slowly being closed down. The newer generation of programs I am familiar with allow much more communication with the outside world via therapists, phone calls, letters, engaging with local community and other students etc.
You're always praising Aspen programs, above all else. What about Mount Batchelors Academy, an Aspen Program in Oregon, which got in trouble with the authorities for Aspen's LifeSteps (something that was used, and probably still is under another name, at most if not all of their programs)? Maybe you can explain how the very same exact skit that was described at MBA I witnessed at Benchmark, another CEDU clone. If programs have changed so much, why is it that so many destructive things are still the same and the only thing that ever seems to change is the names? "Bans" becomes "non-com" and so on and so forth. I've heard programs swear countless times that "we've changed"... and then I look closer and in reality little of all of value has been modified at all.
Even with Benchmark. They claimed that they changed. Then I went down in november of 07 to take a look and behold... nothing had really changed at all. Are we supposed to take your word for it? Why is it that when I talk to kids today who just got out of these "new and improved" "safe" programs, they're telling the same stories the last generation of kids did. Come on now. You can't accuse them all of lying. Liars stories are inconsistent.
The fact remains that the general structure of these programs, the core elements of the thought reform process, have not changed. In order for programs to change they would first have to acknowledge they have been using thought reform, somethign i'm sure that very few understand, even many program directors. They're just doign what they were told and from their perspective, it works. There is no incentive to change. The physical abuse and some of the harsher confrontations might stop, but that's superficial and irrelevant to the real core abuse: stripping a person of their identity, ethics, and perceptions of their past without their knowledge or consent.