BOOT CAMPS: CHILDREN'S GULAGS or CHILD ABUSE FOR FUN AND PROFIT

A comprehensive indictment of the juvenile abuse industry in America. State abuse of children, systemic fraud, terrorism and destruction, henious crimes so obscene no one can look at it. BUT WE HAVE TO LOOK AT IT. While children are being seized from their homes and school and no one charged with a crime or committed any crime, this kind of abuse is routine and method and operation for this child abuse industry. Criminal abuse is protected in the courts, the foster and adoptive resources protected above the rights of the children or birth families. Attorneys protect it, judges protect it, send the children back to known abusers all the time. Blatantly, the children silenced in the record, in the media.

Now we see it, now we stop it .... we have to start prosecuting the criminals who are operating this scheme everywhere we encounter them. Right now, ONE assessement is all it takes to be dropped through the "no wrong door" in the rendering machine, a commodity in the federal funding streams. Bush just signed TWO bills to make the people undergo "mental health assessments", all children, all pregnant women the goal to database all the people, control the families. THIS is where the children are being warehoused for profit in this industry. More than 2,300 children are missing EVERY DAY in the united states ... and more than that are removed from their homes and no one charged with a crime.... and then the unbelievable parents who VOLUNTEER their children and pay thousands to the abusers to do this to their children.... IT HAS TO BE SHUT DOWN. FAMILIES HAVE TO BE RESTORED AND PARENTAL RIGHTS RESPECTED, FAMILY BODIES SOVEREIGN RIGHTS UPHELD.

So we were very concerned about a program which we looked at as being something of a private jail, utilizing techniques of torture and punishment which even a convicted criminal wouldn't be subject to... and I use their terminology -- restraint techniques, it would be our terminology that it was child abuse and torture -- was directed by Miller Newton.
David Levin, formerly assistant state attorney for Sarasota, Florida commenting on Straight's former national clinical director Reverend Doctor Miller Newton on CBS' West 57th Street (1-21-89)

Straight conducts a program that practices psychological coercion and physical assault against children under the guise of drug and alcohol treatment. I believe there is reason to fear for the physical and mental safety of any child sent to the program.
Dr. Richard Ofshe, author and thought control specialist at the University of California, Berkeley.
(Dr. Richard Ofshe is also a winner of the Pulitzer prize for his work with Dave Mitchell and Cathy Mitchell -- The Light newspaper -- on a series of articles about Synanon's many crimes and abuses.)

Fox TV did a special on Mel Sembler's methods of treating children, which included the story of a girl forced to wear her feces-caked "humble pants" for a month as punishment.
And Melvin Sembler rationalized his crimes with these words:
"People thought we were taking away children's rights. But we saw it just the opposite - giving them back their rights by helping them get off drugs."
Mel Sembler, Straight's founder, Florida Trend Magazine, May 1997
Melvin and Betty Sembler were rewarded for their efforts at "reforming children" and raising funds for the Republican Party with ambassadorships to Australia and Italy. Melvin Sembler is still the U.S. ambassador to Italy now, under George W. Bush. The powers that be have simply ignored the charges of child abuse, and have even participated in covering them up.

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The abuses that we were subjected to in there were beyond belief. Starvation, beatings, sleep deprivation on a DAILY basis, kids being punished with "peanut butter diets" where they got bread with peanut butter on it 3 times a day with a dixie cup full of water.
The emotional abuse was the worst part for me. The whole thing of 'breaking them down and building them back up' was one of the most depraved undertakings that I have come across. The girls were all called sluts, whores, bitches and more... never mind that some of them were 12 or 13 and VIRGINS. There were quite a few of us in there who had been sexually abused as young children and when we tried to talk about it we were told to "focus on yourself and where YOUR responsibility was... how in the HELL does ANYONE come up with a 7 year old having ANY responsibility for something like that?

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It just goes on and on. Running children's gulags is big business. It can be just as profitable as running residential drug and alcohol rehab facilities for children. Sometimes, they are the same thing -- the same places.

...And, if you then give your ill-gotten gains to the Republican National Committee, like Melvin Sembler did, you can become an Ambassador, just like he did. So the money starts traveling in a circular pattern: the Republican politicians give government money -- really, the taxpayers' money -- to Sembler for cruelly "rehabilitating" children, and then he gives the money back to those politicians via the Republican National Committee so that they can get re-elected. After which, they give him more money, and the cycle repeats... Then Sembler even ended up becoming the finance director of the Republican National Committee

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Other forms of behavior modification techniques employ intensive "encounter sessions" in which individuals are required to participate in group therapy discussions where intensive pressure is often placed on the individuals to accept the attitudes of the group... Once the individual is submissive, his personality can begin to be reformed around attitudes determined by the program director to be acceptable. Similar to the highly refined "brainwashing" techniques employed by the North Koreans in the early nineteen fifties, the method is used in the treatment of drug abusers... "The Seed", a drug abuse treatment program in Florida that, until recently, received funding from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, is based on a similar philosophy.
INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS AND THE FEDERAL ROLE IN BEHAVIOR MODIFICATION by the COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY, UNITED STATES SENATE, Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, November, 1974, pp. 15 - 16 describing The Seed.

"It is important [that] you understand that back in the 1970s Senator Irvin was not conducting a study of The Seed, he was studying any programs funded by the federal government which used drugs, psycho surgery or thought control on American citizens in possible violation of their constitutional rights. And it was with that purpose in mind that he found out about The Seed."
In 1975 The Seed closed all of its expansion programs. In 1976 Melvin and Betty Sembler, along with some other former Seed--Saint Petersburg, Florida, parents, opened Straight--Saint Petersburg. Such behavior is commonplace. Often, when one children's-gulag "rehabilitation" facility is shut down for abusing children, the staff will simply open another one under a different name, sometimes even in the same building.

Mark Soler, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Youth Law Center, helped investigate the Plankinton, South Dakota, juvenile facility after the death of Gina Score, and was stunned by what he saw: a barbed-wire maximum-security detention center where some kids were shackled and locked in isolation 23 hours a day for 30 days in a row.
"There is not a lot of very serious juvenile crime in South Dakota," says Soler. "These kids were locked up for things like truancy and curfew violations. Yet there was this extremely punitive attitude which was not geared toward helping them."

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The vicious physical abuse like stomping, beating, kicking, starving, and thirsting children isn't the only kind of abuse going on in those children's gulags. Steve Gage and Karen Lee-Gage, Founders of Royal Haven, a residential home for at-risk girls from throughout the country, at Sisters, Oregon, were arrested on June 7, 2000, on 45 or 52 felony counts based on allegations from 7, 8, 10, or 11 ex-residents (depending on which newspaper you read), including several counts each of rape, sexual abuse, and criminal mistreatment.

Pacific Coast Academy is nestled in the mountains of Samoa, more than a thousand miles from any major country. Many parents and former students across the West say the camp is rife with physical, emotional and sexual abuse and has substandard staff members and facilities...
Pacific Coast Academy is not licensed or registered in the United States. The academy's only accreditation is with the Samoan Youth Rehabilitation Agency, Fuller said.

In an editorial in a Samoan newspaper on Feb. 17, 2000, Savea Sano Malifa complained that the good name of Samoa was being tarnished by those criminals from America, and...
... an American who is alleged to have been hounded by authorities in several US cities, has been to Samoa, cashed a string of dud cheques in a bank, then went back home where [he] is said to be in hiding. But before he left, he reportedly created a corporation called "Youth Rehabilitation Administration Agency of Western Samoa" which nobody seems to know about.

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When asked about the deaths at Challenger, North Star, and other programs, Steve Cartisano calmly answers that because wilderness therapy saves the lives of so many children, an occasional fatality is a regrettable but justifiable cost of doing business. He calls it the "window of loss."

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Reverend Jim Jones's People's Temple was in the child rehab business, too. Jones collected other people's children in two ways:

First off, Jim Jones pressured people in his own church to sign their children over to the church as a way of guaranteeing the parents' loyalty -- he could then later use their children to blackmail them into staying in the cult. They could leave, but they wouldn't be able to get their children back. Legally, Jones got away with it by arguing that the parents' prior drug or alcohol habits had impaired them as parents, so the church had to take over guardianship of the children. Jones had a large staff of good lawyers, and never lost a child custody case.

The exact count of wards of the court killed at Jonestown is unknown because the politicians, bureaucrats, and judges who were responsible for such gross bungling and incompetence refused to cooperate with investigators, even with the Congressional GAO investigators. We actually had judges refusing to complete and return questionnaires to Congressional investigators

"It now appears that little has been done either by the state of California or by the federal government since 1986 to assure that these children are not placed in these facilities and financed with inappropriate federal funds. And it is likely that the very same abuse is occurring with both in-state and out-of-state placements by many states at a cost to the federal taxpayers of many millions of dollars a year. We intend to find out if that is the case, to force the states to stop misusing the federal dollars, and force the federal government to more tightly oversee claims for federal reimbursements from the states."
"I find it hard to believe that HHS, after being warned about abuse by California in 1986 and again by GAO in 1990 about 'systematic and ... widespread' abuses, has not properly controlled these improper uses of federal funds. We were told by President Reagan's HHS Secretary that changes were being made; it appears that little ever changed."
-- Congressman George Miller of California, the senior Democrat on the House Resources Committee, 07-30-1998.

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--There's big money in diagnosing kids who only dabbled with drugs a couple of times as hard-core addicts, in need of imprisonment and residential treatment. And once in there, the parents can't even get their children back because the staff "experts" say that the kids need treatment. And it's also a cute way to force either the kids or parents or both to go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

Gordon Gregory, Correspondent, The Oregonian, Deadly discipline? Some say unregulated wilderness schools are a threat to troubled teens' lives, The Oregonian, 02-12-2000.
--Utah officials who cracked down on wilderness schools in the 1990s following the deaths of three teen-agers say Oregon is courting trouble by allowing similar camps free rein.

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One suit alleges that Teen Help's Paradise Cove compound in Western Samoa uses a "secret psychotherapy of threats, intimidation, invasion of privacy, physical abuse, mental abuse, verbal abuse and random punishment to break their captives' will and keep them confined."
Another suit filed in June charges that "homosexual attacks" by the staff at Paradise Cove "were not only tolerated on these two plaintiffs but threats of great bodily harm were made by these staff members if any attempt were ever made by either plaintiff to communicate information on the attacks to the outside world."

Sunrise Beach in Cancun, Mexico, run by Glenda and Steve Roach, was closed by Mexican police for a variety of charges. "After the newspaper Cronica de Cancun reported child abuse allegations at the facility, Mexican authorities staged a surprise raid. Police said they learned that some teens had been held in punishment rooms for as long as four days at a time." Police
Cross Creek staff members used another facility, Brightway Adolescent Hospital in nearby St. George. for Teen Help's intake center,

Jennifer Peltz and Gary Kane, Palm Beach Post Staff Writers, PAHOKEE JUVENILE CENTER IN HOT SEAT, The Palm Beach Post, 07-11-1999.
--Describes the problems at the Pahokee center, run by the for-profit Correctional Services Corp. of Sarasota, Florida. The Pahokee center is the only facility of its kind in Florida. Amid razor wire and surveillance cameras, it houses 350 teens considered "moderate risks" to society.
Also see David Jackson's article.