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East Bay parents are sending their out-of-control teens to behavioral boot camps for a little R & R--reform and reality check. The jury's still out on whether they help more than hurt the young lives hanging in the balance.
by Mark MacNamara
Diablo Magazine
February 1999
The abductions often occur between midnight and 4 a.m. Two or three burly men driving a large car pull up to a house. This always happens in nice, safe neighborhoods. In places like Castro Valley or Concord. Or even in a sleepy little place like Middletown up in Lake County. But always in neighborhoods in which people take good care of what they own, have succeeded in their careers, and desire the best for their children. "People like us" who just want to be liked and respected for hard-won success and security. People who, if something breaks down, want to be reassured that there'll be no disruption of expectation, that whatever it is can be fixed. Whether a car or an errant child.
So along come three burly men, and sometimes a woman. They arrive at the front door. They don't ring the bell, because this is all part of a schedule. If you don't like this idea, you'd say they've come for the family jewels and the family has arranged the heist.
Often, it's a single mother who answers the door, and she shows the men the way to the room where her son or daughter is sleeping. The child is awakened and is trying to figure out what's going on and who the hell this is. Sometimes, the parent will be in the room and will say, "It's okay, we're sending you to a very nice school." Or, sometimes the parent or parents will be in another room, huddled in a corner.
Someday perhaps the child will see this act as lifesaving--there are kids who honestly believe that--but right now, when the burly men are getting you up and then down the stairs and into the car--and maybe they'll have to handcuff you, which they do like the ex-cops they usually are--in those first moments it's a tremendous betrayal.
The "transporting," as it's called, is not always from a home. There's the case of a child taken from a piano lesson, another from her job, another from a police station. Still another was taken out of his home on Christmas Eve.
In Stanley Goold III's case, he was taken out of his home. In November 1996, Stanley was living with his mother in Middletown, up in Lake County. His parents were divorced, and, suffice it to say, he and his mother began to have profound differences, which led to ever more intense arguments. Gradually, Stanley's behavior began to change. In sum, a little dope, a little mischief, and some other things that he'd prefer to forget. Nothing, however, that drew him into a court. Also, he sometimes slept at his girlfriend's house. But on this particular night when the three burly men came at 3:46 a.m. and forcibly took him away, he was asleep in his mother's house.
"That's it? No 'I love yous'?" he said to his mother as he disappeared, and off the burly men drove him to a place called Brightway Adolescent Hospital in St. George, Utah.
Stanley was there a week. He asked to telephone his father, who shared joint custody. But, no, that wasn't possible. At the end of his stay at Brightway, he was shown his new passport, which he signed, because by then he had realized that to endure he needed to go along. Not submit, but go along.
With the passport they shot him down to Vegas, where they put him on a plane to Los Angeles. Another unlucky gambler, no doubt, judging by his expression, and still with his escorts. Then from LAX to Hawaii and then another five hours to Western Samoa, and from there by small plane to the island of Upolu, and then an hour or so by car on an asphalt road to a place known in the brochure as Paradise Cove.
Stanley was there almost exactly a year, from November 30, 1996, to November 17, 1997. A year in an "American gulag," as they've been called by critics, these tough-love boot-camp prisons for the defiant, the "at risk," the ADDs, the addicted and syndromed, and all those who, in the lingo of child psychologists, exhibit, "oppositional behavior."
In the complaint of his lawsuit, Goold describes a world in which teenage boys sleep on mats in a common room; are kicked, punched, choked, and hog-tied; punished arbitrarily; sometimes kept in a small isolation box for days, even weeks at a time; underfed to the point of malnutrition; left to suffer boils and scabies as well as sexual attacks from the staff; continuously fed antidepressants; and over time degraded and humiliated to the point where they're finally willing to accept the theology that they should love themselves and their parents, and that in the great woolly world it's not what's right or wrong, it is what works.
Meanwhile, Goold's parents were in court each fighting for full custody. Eventually, a judge ruled for the father, who immediately got his son out. But the truth is that when Stanley finally got to walk out of Paradise, it was with some ambiguity and guilt, because he was leaving others behind.
Now, a year later, Goold lives with his father in Fremont. He's going to college, wants to write a book about his experience, and is suing the program he was in. It's called the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs (WASP) but is better known as Teen Help. The CBS news program 48 Hours did a segment on it last year in which Goold was portrayed. Afterward he was badly disappointed that the producers had used so little of what he'd told them. It seemed as though the press hadn't grasped all the horrors that were going on in Samoa, as though they didn't believe his tales of abuse. So now he's shut up altogether.
Treating teen behavioral problems has become one of the great growth industries of the era. "'At-risk youth care' has become a $60 billion annual business," notes Brian Ruttenbur, an analyst with Suntrust Equitable Securities in Nashville, "and it's growing at about 25 percent a year."
The number of residential treatment centers like Teen Help is unknown, but according to Alexia Parks, author of An American Gulag, a book about boot camps for kids, there are between 1,500 and 2,000 across the country and literally hundreds in California. It's all part of the prevailing approach to juvenile delinquency, which is, roughly speaking, "tough love." Not to be confused with Tough Love International, a parent support group started in the 1970s, which doesn't endorse any so-called tough-love schools.
Nevertheless, programs like Teen Help serve families who've reached their wits' end and conclude that what's needed is a radical change in environment and a much more disciplined approach to child raising than they're able to provide. In the old days, upper-middle-class parents who faced this problem sent their sons off to the local military academy, and daughters went to a school for the wayward and sometimes impregnated. But in the last 15 years there's been a trend toward boot camps of one kind or another, and toward much tougher punishment for both sexes. Over the years these programs have drawn intermittent press scrutiny and government investigation because of the harshness of their methods. And because, quite frankly, it's not clear whether these methods result in any positive, long-term changes in behavior.
There may be more than 200 families in the Bay Area that have used Teen Help services and seminars since the program started in 1993. In the East Bay, seminars are held every few months in Concord and Livermore, and a Teen Help parent support group meets regularly at a Kaiser Permanente hospital in Oakland.
Teen Help first attracted bad press nationally from David Van Blarigan, the boy who just after midnight on November 10, 1997, was escorted out of his Oakland home and flown to a Teen Help school in Jamaica known as Tranquility Bay. He was 16, had never been in trouble with police, and was a good student, albeit in subjects he liked. His departure set off a court battle between his fundamentalist Christian parents and his grandparents, who sought to bring the boy back. It also attracted national press from the likes of People magazine. Despite declarations to the court from teachers and friends describing the boy's good behavior, an Oakland judge ruled in favor of the parents. The boy was recently transferred from Tranquility Bay to a Teen Help program in Mexico. No one in the family will comment.
There have been a growing number of similar cases around the country. A high-profile case may go to trial just this month involving a boy in Columbus, Ohio, named Justin Goen. He was also forcibly escorted to Tranquility Bay, and save for a call from the airport to his girlfriend, his departure might have gone unnoticed. The local department of children's services was notified, and last December a juvenile-court judge gave it supervision of the boy, pending further investigation.
While the courts are beginning to address allegations of child abuse and the issue of parental rights, lawsuits are being filed and government agencies are becoming involved. The U.S. State Department has asked the government of Western Samoa to investigate Paradise Cove.
"So much of the problem here is in the way these things are advertised," notes Congressman George Miller (D-Martinez), speaking about "at risk" youth-care programs in general. "It's the promise of the cured child, but in the end the program has the money, the parents have the satisfaction of having tried to solve the problem, but so often the child is stuck with the same problems he had before."
A number of parents have taken their children out of Teen Help programs. Other parents have been very dismayed following visits. "I've been to Jamaica twice," says Donna Burke, who lives in Houston and whose ex-husband sent their two sons to Tranquility Bay. "The school is run through fear and intimidation. They don't want any opposition, either from kids or parents. These are mostly rich white kids who've had relatively minor problems and have been dumped by their parents.
"In our case, I think my younger son may have benefited from it, but it destroyed my older son. He should never have been sent. For example, he knew nothing about drugs before he went; when he came home, he explained to me in great detail how to make drugs in a microwave.
"The lasting image I will always have of that place is when I arrived one day around dusk. The lights were on in the school, and there were about a hundred boys standing inside a room the size of a large classroom. They were all dressed in khaki shorts and khaki shirts, and their heads were shaved. In the center of this dirt courtyard, which is surrounded by a high fence and a security gate, there was a boy, he was maybe 15, standing there playing the violin. He does this every night. What a sight. All I could think of was that it looked like a concentration camp."
Teen Help and Adolescent Services Inc. are among the marketing arms of the World Wide Association of Specialty Schools (WASP), which oversees a collection of residential treatment programs both in this country and abroad. The programs are independently owned, limited-liability corporations, which in turn are owned by other corporations or individuals. It's all under the very strict control of Robert Lichfield, a former director of group living at Provo Canyon School in Provo, Utah. In 1987 he transformed a former inn into a residential treatment center for girls called Cross Creek Manor.
Advertising is done mostly through magazines, including Sunset and Southern Living. It's also done through a highly sophisticated approach to attracting Internet users, called "spamdexing." This involves the use of dozens of "metatags" that steer people to the Teen Help site. For example, use a search engine to explore such topics as "acute care" or "private schools," and somewhere on your hit list you'll probably find Teen Help.
Ben DeLong, a web-development consultant in Boston, has done an investigation of the WASP Internet setup for critics of the program and says, "I've never seen spamdexing to this degree, except in the pornography industry and in some money-making pyramid schemes."
Besides the youth programs, WASP uses a company called Resource Realizations Inc. to host a series of seminars called TASKS, which stands for Teen Accountability, Self-Esteem, and Keys to Success. The seminars are mandatory for kids and highly encouraged for parents. The program director is a former trainer at LifeSpring, a popular Colorado-based facilitator of large-group awareness training.
The Teen Help approach to youth care is based on a form of behavior modification that punishes bad behavior with demerits, essays, fines, demotion, and sometimes isolation, and rewards good behavior with merits and gradual independence. Rule violations fall under five categories. At Tranquility Bay, for example, Category 1 includes 18 violations from "rude manners" to an "unsatisfactory effort" and "horseplay." Consequences for each include 50-cent fines and 4 demerits. At the top end, Category 5 violations include running away and self-inflicted injuries and result in a $50 fine and lessened privileges.
The daily schedule, which is divided into half-hour segments from 7:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m., includes morning inspection, then listening to motivational tapes by self-improvement experts such as Zig Zigler, John E. Bradshaw, Stephen Covey, and Tony Robbins. Then there's a group reading of booklets on topics such as honesty, gratitude, hope, and accepting criticism. Then PE and afterward "leisure education," in which students play cards or board games, which are assigned by staff.
After lunch, the "inductees" work around the facilities and afterward watch educational videos. Then movies with a "positive message." After that, group reading. Then "bed and shutdown." According to a February 1997 Tranquility Bay student handbook, parents are warned that physical restraint may occur, but that the preferred means of dealing with highly confrontational situations is pepper spray. If a student has a grievance, the appeals process includes a review board and ultimately, the "Corporate Quality Assurance Manager."
WASP handles approximately 950 adolescents from preteen to 18 in its various programs. Most are white. Rates vary depending on the facility, from a base price of $1,990 to $3,490 per month, and include various psychological and physical evaluations and educational assessments. However, as at other similar facilities, airfare, "escort services," and additional service fees, such as the fines, are not included.
One mother, who asked not to be identified, is suing Teen Help and says she was billed for $802 in fines: "These were fines for the very things that I thought the program was supposed to correct. It was as though I was being charged twice for the same service."
In Utah, there are two programs: Cross Creek Manor, a center for girls, and Red Rock Springs, which has replaced Brightway Adolescent Hospital as an evaluation center. Other programs are in Oregon, Montana, and South Carolina, as well as Samoa, Mexico, Jamaica, and--until last November--the Czech Republic.
That facility, known as Morava Academy, housed 57 teenagers between 15 and 18. It was closed down after a local staff member named Hana Simonova went to local police in the nearby town of Brno. She alleged that some children were being badly mistreated and brainwashed. She was also quoted in a local Czech paper saying that staff members were encouraged to punish students as often as possible, in part because the school charged parents for each infraction.
Police arrested the two directors of the program, Glenda and Steven Roach, who both have a background in law enforcement in Utah. Simonova described Glenda Roach as "very aggressive" and someone who enjoyed punishing the children.
The Roaches had worked at other Teen Help facilities, including one near Cancun, Mexico, which was closed in 1996 after government charges of abuse. In response to the closing of the Morava Academy, Karr Farnsworth, president of WASP, denied all charges and suggested that the children had made up the stories in the Czech paper.
The U.S. embassy in Prague later issued a statement saying that it had looked into the school before this incident and "found no evidence that the welfare of any of the U.S. citizens had been endangered." The children have since been removed to other Teen Help facilities.
Nevertheless, Steven Roach was jailed and then released on his own recognizance and on the condition he would remain in the area. His wife was allowed to return to the States. Both face trial and a possible sentence of eight years in prison, but in late December Steven disappeared. Czech authorities have been in the process of issuing a warrant for his arrest. According to Karr Farnsworth, Steven Roach is now back in America.
The local backlash against Teen Help actually has roots in the late 1980s, when several teenagers died in wilderness camps. One of those children was 15-year-old Michelle Sutton. In the late 1980s Michelle lived in Pleasanton and went to Amador Valley High School. She followed the dark arc of drugs, the wrong crowd, and sexual experimentation. Her mother and father, who are Mormon, heard about a wilderness camp in Utah called Summit Quest. The program was represented by a Mormon. "It was on that basis that we trusted them," says Cathy Sutton.
Michelle was actually glad to try it, thinking it might be a chance to get away for a while. The program involved a 63-day hike through Zion National Park. During the hike, Michelle was berated by counselors for her slow pace. On the seventh day, she died of dehydration.
At her daughter's funeral, Cathy Sutton was pleased to see her old friend, an attorney and former Mormon bishop in Pleasanton named Tom Burton. He listened to her story and was immediately struck by the fact that Michelle had died at the hands of a Mormon-run organization. Eventually, he filed a lawsuit against Summit Quest, which was settled for $350,000.
In fact, Burton had some behavioral problems with his own children, including his daughter. "I'm sure that had I known of such a place [as a tough-love camp], I might have been very tempted to send her. At 14 she went into promiscuity and drugs and a long, dark period of addiction. But here's the danger. About five years ago we found out that our pediatrician had sexually abused her for years. And so it all made sense. But if we'd sent her to one of these schools, no doubt she'd have construed that we were heaping abuse on abuse.
"You know I hate to tell parents this, especially when they've been through something so traumatic, but the truth is, people grow up. And often it doesn't seem to matter what you do as parents. That's the nature of maturation. The problem is, you just have to hope that by sending them to some of these facilities you haven't irrevocably damaged them."
Burton estimates there are roughly 5,000 Mormons in Pleasanton, and he is defensive on the point that often Utah-based programs are assumed to be linked to some teaching in the Book of Mormon. "There is nothing in the Book of Mormon that condones corporal punishment or the harsh treatment of children. As it's written, change in behavior comes through persuasion, long-suffering, gentleness, and sustained kindness," says Burton.
After she won her lawsuit, Cathy Sutton started her own for-profit corporation. It was named after her daughter and has focused on gaining support for legislation to regulate wilderness camps. Now, the backfire lit by Sutton has expanded, and she's joined an Internet force of two dozen parents from California to Maine, aligned with a handful of prosecutors and child advocates.
"Our greatest objection is that the programs seem more concerned with making money than with making positive changes in children."
Among this group of active critics is a local parent named Karen Lile. She and her husband run a small piano-finding business in Walnut Creek. In fact, it was Karen Lile who found Margaret Lesher her famous Plexiglas grand. In 1995, after their daughter had run away for more than five months, the Liles enrolled her in Tranquility Bay. Afterward, as they had been instructed, Karen and her husband, Kendall Bean, attended aTeen Help seminar. They were immediately appalled, left the seminar at the end of the second day, and promptly withdrew their daughter from the program.
"The seminars led us to look into Teen Help a lot more carefully than we did at first," says Karen, who, incidentally, is a Mormon. She insists she's not opposed to these kinds of programs in principle but believes they should be highly regulated.
"The seminars are billed as awareness exercises, but the awareness they want you to focus on is your own guilt, weaknesses, and inadequacies," says Lile. "But after analyzing the experience, our greatest objection is the idea that both the seminars and the programs seem to be more concerned with making money than with making positive and lasting changes in the lives of children. There are some real questions to be asked about the background and training of some of these facilitators and directors."
Karen has complained to virtually every relevant agency in the county and in Sacramento, including the Board of Behavioral Sciences, which oversees the licensing of therapists and psychologists. A board spokesperson refused to comment on whether they are investigating the seminars or even whether they've received any complaints.
"If this is consumer fraud," says Contra Costa County Deputy DA Lon Wixson, "then in order to establish that, we need to send someone to investigate one of these programs. The problem is, we simply don't have the resources to do it."
Still, opposition is growing. Dr. Paul Lewis has been a marriage and family counselor in Walnut Creek for ten years. He estimates he has treated at least a dozen Teen Help enrollees in recent years and has had contact with at least 40 to 50 more through Teen Help seminars and support meetings. He's quick to praise Teen Help's practice of involving the entire family. Yet he also says, "I would probably not choose to participate in many of the facilities for any length of time." Late last summer, he sent a letter to Teen Help execs voicing his concerns.
"If I sent a kid to Jamaica or Samoa, I'd bring them back [to a stateside program] after a few months. Do I believe it's necessary to have this type of intervention for a certain segment of kids? Yes. Do I think Teen Help is perfect? No. Would I like to see them hiring caseworkers with [master's degrees] and see the level of experienced staffers improve? Yes. Have I seen them work on that improvement? Yes.
"But remember this: I was told by one parent that Provo Canyon [in Utah] costs $7,000 a month, which is twice as much as Teen Help, and yes, they've got a more highly trained staff, but most kids don't need that. You've got to consider what people can afford for what is really a last-ditch alternative."
Dr. Lewis's concerns are primarily with Tranquility Bay. "Cross Creek has a very strong psychological counseling approach; the rest are behavior modification. If the other programs could be more like Cross Creek, the system would be ten times better."
Karr Farnsworth, president of WASP, is 59, a Mormon, and has three children. He once served as a deputy sheriff. He also once appeared on Family Feud. He has dealt with troubled children for nearly 30 years. Farnsworth believes the current backlash against Teen Help is the work of a handful of disgruntled parents, some who have never had their children in the program.
As for the two initial lawsuits filed by Tom Burton last November--one involving Stanley Goold, the other a 17-year-old girl from Castro Valley--he says they are both "ridiculous. Much of the information in the suits is completely erroneous." As for what happened at Morava Academy, he says this was the result of two disgruntled ex-employees and some manipulative kids.
"The little local city guy and the city police had been around the school; they knew what we were about. But then after these charges were made, the state police went and talked to these kids who were trying to manipulate their way out. Other kids told them the charges weren't true, but the police didn't want to listen to them. What they called child abuse involved our time-out room. The door is always open, and there's always a staff person standing outside. We've never used or endorsed corporal punishment of any kind.
"Anyway, it all got out of hand and then the parents of some employees persuaded them not to go to work because of the police investigation. You have to remember that this was a Communist country just a few years ago, and as the state police told us, 'You're in this country; you've got to go by our laws.'"
Farnsworth says that it was a similar situation in Mexico. "It was 100 percent government interference. The Federales got rumors that we were running a house if ill repute and that these kids didn't want to be there. But again it was all nonsense, and a few disgruntled local people were able to stop the program."
Farnsworth admits that there have been problems communicating with parents in some joint-custody cases but says that those problems have been corrected. He's aware of allegations that kids in Samoa have been sniffing Mortien, an insecticide used by the program. Those allegations, he says, have also been addressed.
A boy from Oakland named Justin Bonjourno has been missing from the Tranquility Bay program since before last Thanksgiving. "I've got to find out about that," Farnsworth says. "There have been these rumors that he's living up in the mountains with people. We're working with the local police. Last I checked, he was negotiating to turn himself in. Most runaways are really just efforts to manipulate a way out of the program."
Asked whether it was possible that there have been children put into Teen Help programs who didn't belong, he replied, "I've never found one kid who didn't need to be in the program. Never once. And you know it's been working for ten years and now all of a sudden these suits are being filed.
"Take this case in Ohio. Justin Goen. The CPS people have gone over there and interviewed him. He's told them that he's not being abused, that there is no problem, that he just wants to be left alone. But still they're going after his parents. You have a bureaucracy, I guess, that just has to justify its interference. You know, from a parent's point of view, what's the difference between sending your child to one of our programs and sending your child to Uncle Harry for the summer?"
Terri Mesple serves as the ad hoc leader of Teen Help in Northern California. She and her husband live in Concord and sent their daughter, Andrea, to Teen Help in 1996.
"Nothing was working," says Terri. "She'd been in therapy for two and a half years, and that did nothing, and she'd just become impossible to live with. Lying, verbally abusive, some drugs, drinking. She was a very angry kid and clearly didn't want to be part of the family. Her older sister even told us she was leaving the house unless we did something. Finally, we decided we weren't willing to see her reach rock bottom."
Andrea spent 14 months in Cross Creek Manor and was recommended home a year ago last December. According to Terri, Andrea is applying to college. "She really likes herself, she's got real goals. Before my daughter went into this program, I would trust her as far as I could throw her. Now she's been home for three months and I can honestly say to her, 'I trust you.' I don't believe she's lying to me anymore, and that's a neat feeling. I would do it again in a minute. Even if she had a relapse, it would be worth it, because it wasn't just what she did, it was what we all did, by going to the seminars. The whole philosophy of Teen Help is fixing the family, not just the kid. So we all had to go through the seminars and face our own problems. Yes, in a way you could say she took the fall for this family, but it was worth it because we've all benefited."
Mesple, who receives $1,000 for every child who enrolls in Teen Help through her recommendation, went on to describe how happy she was to get her daughter back before adding, "She's a neat kid, she really is; she just didn't like us."
The merits of the Teen Help programs aside, the legal complaints against it reflect the revival of some old debates. One concerns how best to handle defiant kids. Another is over what constitutes child abuse and the merits, if there are any, of corporal punishment. Still another debate is over whether children, especially errant adolescents, can be believed with their tales of abuse. One wonders how the memories of these children are going to play out over time.
But of all the debates, clearly the one to watch, for its constitutional facets, is over the legal rights of parents. "I can see where people might look for some way to bring a child under control," says Robert Hutchins, Alameda County deputy district attorney for child abduction, who argued on behalf of David Van Blarigan and his grandparents. "But a lot of these parents don't realize that what this involves is a lockdown, that these kids are completely stripped of their civil rights, and that once they're overseas, there are no restrictions, and the handlers can be as abusive as they want to be.
"But as a legal issue I think it all comes down to the kidnapping and the fact that the right to custody cannot be delegated by a parent to an escort service."
These debates in turn lead to other still broader questions, albeit for anthropologists and sociologists. One is about the changing nature of childhood and whether the traditional chronology still applies. Others concern the nature of a generation raging against machines, their parents, and each other.
"I think the trouble began with the hands-off attitude of Dr. Spock," notes Dr. Margaret Singer, a child psychologist in Berkeley for 50 years and professor emeritus at UC Berkeley. "Whether he was misunderstood or not, a lot of parents took that advice, and then when there were problems, they relied on other 'experts,' mostly therapists, often Freudian psychologists who had no more expertise with children than the local dogcatcher. When that didn't work, a new trend began, which was to see ourselves as victims."
Dr. Singer, who is just turning 78, is perhaps best known as an authority on cults and has been a longtime critic of large-group awareness training. She would not comment on Teen Help specifically, but she summed up her approach to boot camps and group awareness training this way: "My argument is that no one has proved to me that 1) these programs are not harmful and 2) that they really help anybody. What they do is tap into the concerns of upper-middle-class parents who are so busy earning money that they just don't have enough time to mind their children. But if we don't teach the rules of society to children at a young age and are forced to address the problem when the child is a teenager, then it's awfully late."
At a Teen Help support group meeting last November at a Kaiser Permanente hospital in Oakland, there was a group of perhaps 40 parents. One mother had recently sent her son to Mexico. She was distressed by his discouraging letters. "I don't know, I'm very worried. But they tell us this is normal to receive these kinds of letters."
Two seats away, another mother said that she'd just learned her daughter was being flown back from Morava Academy in the Czech Republic. "I don't know what's going on. They told us there were some problems with the government, but we don't know more than that."
One purpose of the seminar seemed to be to show the success of the program. The facilitator explained that 97 percent of the parents whose children had completed the entire program were satisfied. But of the families whose children didn't complete the program, only 40 to 50 percent were satisfied. Someone asked about the survey, and the facilitator explained it was based on calls to a number of parents. He didn't know how many were called or whether this was a random sample.
Another purpose of the seminar was to present adolescents who had successfully completed the program. No doubt this was to reassure parents who might be having misgivings. A boy who'd been at one of the overseas facilities spoke up and said it had made a huge difference in his life: "I know I can do anything now. I can be whatever I want to be." He listed all the things he wanted to be, and then he said, "Yeah, one day I know I'm gonna be rich and have everything I want. You know. But right now, I'm just trying to get a job, and that's kinda hard. Maybe I'll go back to school."
Later, his mother told the group that one thing she'd learned from the program about dealing with her son was, "It's not what's right or wrong, it's what works."
A 17-year-old girl who had spent ten months in Cross Creek Manor also gave her testimony, and as she began seemed unusually confident and composed. She explained that she'd been home for three months, was going to junior college, had a job, and had turned away from the bad crowd she'd run with before she'd been sent away. But as she went on she began to falter. She said that the last week had been particularly difficult, that she felt both intensely lonely and at the same so busy she had no time to think. Then one day she'd found some old drug supplies in her room and called her mother at work fearing that perhaps she might fall back into her old patterns. At about that point she broke down and sobbed.
"The one thing you should know," she said, "is that when your kid comes back from one of these places, don't expect they're going to be fixed."
The mother whose son had recently gone to Mexico shook her head. "Oh God," she whispered. The mother whose daughter was returning from the Czech Republic looked troubled but above all, confused.
Mark MacNamara is senior editor of Diablo.