Raps were held 3 times a week for us on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. They lasted three hours. During the week you could put in a "Rap Request" to try and get a specific student or staff member in to your rap ahead of time.
On the day of the rap, the staff would be in the office going through all of the requests, along with their own, and putting together all the raps that would take place that day. Usually four to six, each with 15-20 students and 1 to 3 staff facilitators.
Raps took place after lunch so everyone was hanging out around the "pit", a seating area in the living room where most announcements would take place. The staff would walk in, many of them smiling, knowing who was going to be getting destroyed shortly in his or her raps, and then they would announce who was in what rap and what room to go to. There was often quite a bit of humiliation involved in this process, as someone above noted, where people would get their names called and a staff would make a snide comment about them and students were expected to giggle, laugh or whatever to look good and stroke the ego of the staff.
Once in the raps, you tried to get a good seat, which for me tended to be next to the staff chair. Most of the "power" staff generally took a seat in a particular spot each time, and since you couldn't yell at someone next to you, sitting next to a staff, or actually two seats over, was a good spot. And since the students generally put the chairs in to a circle to set the place up, if you were there early you could grab a more comfortable chair.
Once the staff were there and everyone was seated, you had to listen to some psycho-babble speech from the staff before things begun. Then you'd hear the magic words "Let's have a rap!" and all hell would break loose. Anywhere from three to fifteen people screaming to get the floor, usually the loudest and most persistent got to go first. They would mostly be upset at a fellow student for some minor thing they had done like take an 11 minute shower instead of 10, hogging the washer and dryer, not "pulling their weight" or something equally trivial. On rare occasions you might hear someone get "indicted" as the term was, for something serious like planning to run away, admitting to taking drugs on a home visit (which meant an older student because you didn't go home till after a year, so these people had managed a year or more in the program and yet took drugs the moment they had a chance, suggesting the program didn't really work.) There could also be "breaking bans", which meant you spoke to someone you had been banned from communicating with, banning itself being a violation of our civil rights and right to freedom of speech. But mostly the indictments were for the most trivial matters.
Then other people would join in. In order to talk to someone, you had to be somewhat across the room from them so as not to be physically intimidating as usually people who were talking tended to be on the edge of their seat, fingers pointed, screaming at the top of their lungs, which is definitely threatening. So you would point at someone across the room, make eye contact, letting them know you wanted to switch seats with them, and if they had nothing more to say, or weren't planning on saying anything to the person being talked to, they would get up and switch seats. So if you are the person being yelled at, as you watch, two, three, seven, ten, fifteen people all scrambling to move across the room from you, this can generate quite a bit of fear and anxiety because you know every single one of them has something to say. Not necessarily anything true, or anything relevant, as often people who keep the heat on you rather than let it end and potentially mean someone else gets yelled at. There was a lot of fake indictments to keep the rap moving but against others, so as to avoid getting yelled at yourself.
I remember one rap where I could tell a student, whom I barely knew kept switching with me. Anytime I would switch seats, he would be quick to jump up and change. Or if he couldn't, he would wait so he could get in to position to be able to indict me when the current person being talked to was finished. So I made shit up to say to the person to keep things going, saying something everyone could comment on so more people would want to join in and go "Yeah, me too!" and in doing this I managed to get him to change places one too many times and the staff member caught him and said sit down! Commenting that he had switched about six times during the indictment on the other student but had not actually said a word. And this kind of killed the current indictment so suddenly another student got yelled at and since I was sitting right next to the guy, he couldn't say a word. So I had basically manipulated the rap for over an hour to prevent myself from being yelled at, and I know everyone else did similar things. It wasn't always hard to know if you were about to be yelled at. Especially if during the first seconds of the rap, one of those fifteen people trying to get the floor were yelling your name, but lost out. Waiting and knowing you are going to be screamed at is an intimidating and fearful way to spend three hours.
One aspect of raps rarely mentioned is how students at the school were often meant to feel equally guilty about events in their life compared to others who might have had less crap or more crap go on in theirs. An example would be going to death row in prison for jay walking, whereas someone else went there for murder. If you had little about your life that was horrible, staff would try and create something. I know for me, my parents divorce was a rather simple affair, it wasn't a battle, there was no fighting, my father moved close by and he remained a part of our lives. The divorce had nothing to do with me. But the staff tried to make me feel horrible about it, suggesting my father divorced my mother and I was partly to blame at age 7. It was bogus, but this is what they did. You had to feel guilty, horrible, deep penetrating anguish all the time, and God help you if you had trouble crying because generally they don't stop until you cry. I also was meant to feel bad for my being adopted too. All of this to make me feel as bad as people who had raped others, been raped by others, kids who had been molested by family members, kids who had OD'd on drugs, or had severe alcoholism and so on. I got sent to RMA because I missed some homework assignments but was made to continuously feel bad about myself on the same level as others who had just terrible lives. And Raps were the main place where this took place.
So to sum up, Raps for the most part had no positive sides. In some ways it was better than just punching the daylights out of someone for trivial crap, but there was no other outlet allowed. Walking up to someone and just saying, "Hey dude, we're all waiting here, next time could you try and keep your shower down to ten minutes?" didn't happen. Said in a calm voice, most would have just said yes. But it paid off to say it in a rap instead, and at the top of your lungs. You "looked good" in front of staff if you indicted people in raps, so there was a reward of sorts for doing this even when it was for trivial stuff you should have tried to solve out of a rap. Raps were about generating deep emotion and anger in the students and then leaving it undirected. Leaving it undirected might not have been intentional, but it was the usual outcome as there was really no actual therapy, just screaming and yelling. Staff often used bottled terms that had been so over-used they had no real impact. The terms were often vague, so students were left to guess what was said and what it all meant. At the end of a rap, people either pretended to be elated, having really dug deep and experienced something profound, or they had blank stares, were exhausted and had no clue what to do next except stagger down to dorms for dorm time glad they had a day off before doing another rap.
Do they work? No. They claim they helped save thousand of druggies over the years. But I could walk up to a druggie every day of their life and ask in a calm and serious voice, "You ready to do something else with your life, or are drugs working for you still?" Unless the druggie really wants to stop and do something else, they won't. Yelling and screaming aren't going to work. And if I also say, "And if you do decide to change, I am here for you," I think this is far more positive and would have a better chance of getting through to the person. Showing them that not everyone has given up on them. But it has to be said with truth and some amount of care and love so the druggie can know that is there. That they might not have to do it alone. But ultimately, unless they want to change and quit, nothing will happen.
Using raps on teens who have no power to walk out or defend themselves, who might not have actually done anything horrible... it is useless. Raps were rarely used to deal with the issues related to why the student was sent there by their parents. It was usually just anger management for trivial shit that happens when 120 people live in close quarters, unable to leave in an environment that is foreign, far from home, scary and full of fear. Not once while I was there did anyone ever ask me about missed homework assignments. But they did spend a lot of months trying to determine if I had ever used drugs or had sex, because that shit they loved to talk about. Why? Because all of the staff had done it. And not in a good way. Staff had been known to have raped people before becoming staff. Of having been prostitutes. Of having serious alcohol and drug abuse problems. And they figured since they had been weak once, everyone else must be lying because they must have done it too. And this is where making all of the students feel equally horrible about themselves winds up being the whole purpose of raps.
Hope this description helped.
