Sorry to butt in on your run of posts here, Magnificent, but it seems to me that SEKTO is relating his personal experiences at Daytop and his interpretation of the net effect that Daytop has had on him, and that salient fact is well communicated by the nature and tenor of his posts.
With all due respect, your posts, on the other hand, would appear to be attacking the validity and veracity of his experiences. I dunno...were you standing there by his side during each and every day of his time there? Do you have some magical mind-bonding ability by which you were able to get inside of his head and see exactly how events affected him?
I myself would be much more interested in hearing of your personal experiences and how and why you feel that Daytop, or TCs in general, have their place in dealing with various problems and societal issues.
People are affected by events and interactions with others differently. Somewhere early on in this thread, SEKTO did state that he was quite introverted. I would very much like to hear your opinion of how the TC modality affects introverts vs. extroverts, given the very nature of "groups" per se, and the inherent "discomfort" (if not terror) they elicit in some folks.
I will answer your question and psy at the same time. I will not share my experience because that isn't my point in writing here. I was at Daytop the entire time that Setko is speaking of so this is how I would know what went on. I am not saying that he did not have bad experiences or that there weren't some that took their power a bit far. I'm not sure that Leroy didn't smoke with the kids, we never heard of it and we pretty much heard most of what was going on. I personally spent a lot of time with Leroy and I have never known him to smoke pot at that time. Marcy is a lesbian but I never heard her describe herself as a diesel dyke but she was young and the programs were not as regulated. She was not let go because we gave her a going away party you don't do that when you are let go. The Joyce that he speaks of was let go from the Daytop she did not leave on her own.
What I am saying is that he is making some of this stuff up. I too can share experiences that I've had at Daytop, and some not so good, but Sekto has made statements about things he has no knowledge of and has also stated facts that just never happened. I'm not writing here to defend Daytop I'm writing here because, with the understanding that his perceptions are his reality, they are not necessarily the truth. The people who he speaks of are basically good people who were doing what they thought they had to do and not with the intention of abusing or injuring anyone. There isn't one school, hospital, institution in the country that doesn't have bad stuff going on but this guy is way out there.
There were a couple of staff there that were sent from NY to open the program when these individuals were too strong handed they were sent back to NY or let go. By the time that the program closed, which was not due to wrong doing on Daytop's part as Setko stated, there were only a couple of people who were original NY staff, maybe 2. He heard that Mike Gorman died at his daughter's house, he had no children. From my recollections Ed Cinisomo was one of the nicest guys around but the kids had little to no contact with him because he was the executive director. If Ed in fact ever made statements about the kids being statistics it would not have been done in a hateful degrading way.
There were staff who shouldn't have been working with kids and I can see how a young kid can be hurt so I am not saying that Setko shouldn't take issue with Daytop I am only saying that he needs to get his facts straight because some of his perceptions are either straight up fantasies or lies.