On 2005-08-26 17:14:00, Anonymous wrote:
Let me try to explain my confusion. Truly the last time I thought in depth about Straight had to have been over twenty years ago until yesterday when I stumbled onto this site. When I left Straight I had no inkling that things of this nature were happening or were about to begin happening. In my mind I left a treatment center getting my life back on track to finish school and along the way helping some people by relating my experiences. Naive? Apparently.
You were too young to have formed an adult personality and a real definition of right and wrong. Naive, in your words. You had no adult frame of reference to filter the Straight experience through, so you accepted them as normal or at least justified and acceptable. The fact that you were engaging in normal adolescent rebellious behavior is not justifiable to the "treatment" you were subjected to. You were easily indoctrinated. There is no shame in this fact, you were a child and succumbed to methods that have broken trained military personnel. A child, having no adult experiences, is more easily moldeable, which is why Pol Pot used children as his executioners during the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia.
I do recall times of my own humiliation by staff but I guess I chalked it up to a part of the learning process in the program.
Accepting the humiliation and abuse of Straight indicates that you were indoctrinated into the cult. Again, no shame or guilt on your part, you were a child and could not recognize what was going on. The idea that our lives in Straight were anything approaching normal or even "therapeutic" is patently ridiculous, and to accept them as 'part of the learning process' indicates the extent to which you were deceived by Straight, Inc.'s indoctrination and brainwashing methods.
All I know is I came into Straight doing drugs, skipping school, stealing, etc. When I finally left, those things were no longer a part of my life. So that was my perception of Straight as a part of my life until yesterday. Does that make any sense? Now I?m trying to sort things out based on the things I?m reading here.
You were engaging in adolescent behavior that, while not the most desirable, hardly warranted incarceration in a teen torture facility that was Straight, Inc. Most likely you would have figured things out and outgrown behaviors that were not productive and beneficial. There was nothing remotely therapeutic or beneficial about Straight, Inc., it was a 24/7, 365-day a year (366 during leap years) physical, emotional, and psychological abuse machine that has damaged many people's lives. The fact that we accepted abuses such as Straight, Inc.'s as normal or appropriate was indicative of the process they used to dehumanize us by calling us "druggies", implying that we were somehow defective and that only Straight, Inc. could "restore us to sanity".
I never heard anything even in the news about Straight and had no idea it had expanded across the country.
Obviously, some sort of notion inspired you to come here in the first place. Kinda freaky that all these people find these sites after 20+ years.
Now I'm in a position questioning whether what I thought was being helpful was actually causing trauma. In my heart I still believe people were helped because I know some of those people to this day. And I do believe I was helped at that particular time in my life. Had it been a year or two later it seems obvious that things would be completely different.
Straight may have changed your behavior, but at what price? And who is to say you would not have matured out of your behavior? I was in Straight from 82-83, so I was there during the Newton Regime, and it most definitely was a Reign of Terror. However, I think if you are "searching and fearless" enough, you will realize that the methods Straight used were ineffective, inappropriate, and abusive, Newton or no Newton. Straight did not go from being great before Miller Newton showed up to being shitty when he took control. He made an abusive situation worse. He is the Dr. Mengele of the Straight Holocaust, the one where children labeled as "druggies" were somehow transformed into subhuman objects to be abused at the whims of power-crazed sickos, but the nightmare factories were up and running before he showed up.
I understand your anger and others too. The things described here are inexcusable and barbaric. In a lot of ways I wish I never stumbled across this website, but I suppose it was meant to be. I just need to keep sifting through this website.
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Kudos to you for having the balls to post here. I hold no animosity toward you personally, but I hold lots of it towards people just like you, people who were Staff members. I reserve the depths of my hatred for Executive Staff, particularly Miller Newton. I think it's good that you came here, I think you can provide an interesting perspective, but I believe that if you practice "the first and most important rule", you will realize that Straight, Inc. was a fucked-up, weird place that did far more damage than good to the inmates held there. If you had some sort of problem before Straight, short of killing people randomly in cold blood, going to Straight to be "treated" for it was like cutiing off your hand for having a hangnail.
Again, thanks for posting, and for your courage to post here.