The Troubled Teen Industry: The Politics of Abuse Within Therapeutic Boarding Schools
Adam Beckler, 20, cannot escape his past. He still has the visible scars from self-inflicted cuts stretching across his abdomen to remind him of the four months he spent at Diamond Ranch Academy. As if his demons believe those markings are not a strong enough reminder, he is also haunted by recurring nightmares and flashbacks of the time a teacher stapled his own hands with an industrial staple gun in order to get the class to quiet down.
Diamond Ranch Academy is a behavioral modification boarding school located in Hurricane, Utah aimed towards rehabilitating ‘at risk’, or ‘troubled teens’. DRA’s mission statement promises to “treat adolescents who struggle with addiction and behavioral abnormality” by way of aversion therapy. Beckler’s parents sent him to DRA on the recommendation of his therapist to treat depression and anxiety. Unbeknownst to Beckler’s mother, DRA is one of many residential programs located in Utah with a history of abuse and negligence. Beckler endured physical abuse and now suffers from severe post traumatic stress disorder. He is one of over 10,000 survivors of the troubled teen industry.
Diamond Ranch Academy is one of over 100 adolescent residential facilities in Utah alone. DRA, like the majority of behavior modification schools around the world, operates within the Worldwide Association of Specialty Schools and programs (WWASPS) guidelines. WWASPS was founded in 1998 by Robert Lichfield as an umbrella organization of independent institutions geared towards troubled teenagers. While WWASPS was a non-profit, the Lichfield family also owns multiple for-profit companies that work in tandem with WWASPS. These include Teen Help LLC, the marketing arm of WWASPS and the entity that processes admissions paperwork; Teen Escort Service, a teen escort company that transports teenagers from their homes to WWASPS facilities; R&B Billing, which does tuition billing and payment processing; and Premier Educational Systems, LLC (also called Premier Educational Seminars), which conducts orientation and training workshops for parents whose children are in WWASPS facilities. Virtually no outside companies work with WWASPS institutions. Politicians like Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum have previously endorsed WWASPS, during the time in which Lichfield was one of six co-chairs of the Utah state fundraising committee for Romney’s campaign. The Lichfield family has donated over 1 million dollars to the Republican Party.
WWASPS has faced widespread allegations of physical and psychological abuse of the teenagers sent into its programs resulting in multiple lawsuits filed against the organization. WWASPS officials report that the organization is no longer in business, and the facilities originally under it no longer associate with the name, although the organization has not been dissolved and currently shares an official address with the Diamond Ranch Academy administration office. Former presidents and relatives of WWASPS do still own and operate newer facilities in Utah and abroad that uses the same therapeutic methods as WWASPS programs have, leading many to believe that WWASPS is still indirectly working with programs.
When a child first arrives to a WWASPS facility like Diamond Ranch Academy, they are stripped of their belongings and subjected to a cavity search. For men, their hair is shaved off. Their clothes are then exchanged for a uniform of tan khakis, a tee-shirt, and either slippers or sandals. Shoe laces, hoodies with strings, and belts are prohibited. Street clothes are prohibited. They are forbidden to talk unless authorized by staff members. Beckler recalls having to ask permission to sit down, use the bathroom, and sneeze. “I didn’t realize that we had to ask to do anything at first and I went to the bathroom once without asking during my lunch period and a guard jumped on me and pushed me to the ground screaming at me asking what I was doing and telling me I couldn’t just get up He dug his elbow into my back so hard I couldn’t breathe” Beckler said. He laid on the floor crying and gasping for air, wishing to leave and wishing for the safety of his parents house. Beckler was put in solitary confinement for three days after the incident. Before his 4 month stay was over, he’d find himself violently restrained a guard eight more times. His back covered in faded bruises from elbows being pushed against his spine.
For the first week at DRA, students are not allowed to participate in schooling and instead are forced to complete remedial tasks like digging holes and carrying buckets of water used to wash dishes. “I was so scared”, he said. “I wanted to call my mom, but I wasn’t allowed. I cried in silence every night after lights-out. Scared I would be punished if someone heard me sob”. At WWASPS schools, a student is forbidden from contacting their parents via phone for the first three months of their stay. They are allowed to send handwritten letters home, but they are first reviewed by faculty members and thrown out if the faculty decides it is not a beneficial letter, causing students to be weary and fearful of depicting abuse or complaints in their letters. After three months, they are allowed a single phone call home per month, overseen by their therapist.
While Beckler was enrolled in Diamond Ranch Academy a student named Jake Spencer hanged himself. “I remember that an ambulance came and everyone was put on lockdown and forced to stay in their rooms. The showers were closed for three days and when we were finally allowed to shower again they had installed collapsible shower rods so no one else could hang themselves”. Beckler never received counseling to cope with the death of his classmate.
In 2007, Brendan Blum, 14, likely experienced a “violent and painful” death at DRA, after he was put in solitary confinement and his bowel twisted during the night and overnight staffers did not notify an on-call nurse. In 2009, James Shirey, also 14, died of a sudden and unknown illness at the school. In 2015, one of the on staff teachers at DRA was charged with two first-degree felony counts of aggravated child sexual abuse and 10 second-degree felony counts of sexual exploitation of a minor and again in 2017, DRA was sued because a therapist allegedly sexually assaulted a 16 year old student.
Abuse within WWASPS-affiliated facilities and facilities that operate in the likes of WWASPS guidelines are not a new phenomenon. Tranquility Bay, located in Jamaica, was closed in 2009 by the Government of the Cayman Islands after multiple claims of torture, sexual and physical abuse, unsanitary living conditions, and denial of healthcare came to light. Similarly, Casa by the Sea, located in Mexico, and the Academy at Dundee Ranch, located in Costa Rica, were both closed after random government inspections citing abuse and torture led to student revolt against the administration. High Impact, another WWASP facility located in Mexico was shut down after immigration inspectors found students detained in meter-high cages outside in the midday sun.
In 2001, a student at Tranquility Bay, Valerie Ann Heron, jumped to her death after being placed in solitary confinement, a common punishment at WWASPS facilities where the student is forced to lay on their stomach for extended periods of time without food, water, or access to a toilet. The death was ruled as an accident, though a suicide note was found. The family is still fighting for a proper investigation 16 years later.
“I remember hearing her body hit the floor. We [all of the students at Tranquility Bay] were all forced into our dorms. They used our own towels to clean up the blood. My towel was stained pink for weeks after the incident happened” said Ashley Griffin, who attended Tranquility Bay from 1999–2001.
According to “Locked in Paradise”, a BBC feature documentary about the Heron suicide and eventual closing of Tranquility Bay, some of the older students at the facility were forced to wash the blood out of the towels by hand, filling buckets of blood as there was no running water within the converted hotel that the facility was located in.
While most overseas facilities have been closed by the governments that these facilities operated in, Utah has continued to embrace WWASPS, acting as a safe-haven for behavior modification boarding schools. While some students enrolled in treatment facilities live in Utah beforehand, many more hail from around the country, bringing the local economy hundreds of million dollars annually. The price point of Utah based WWASPS programs are roughly 1,000- 3,000 dollars a week, according to Utah Therapeutic Schools, a database created to direct parents to the best WWASPS-affiliated program based on their child’s needs, and of the over 10,000 adolescents enrolled in a “therapeutic boarding school”, most of them spend an average of one year enrolled in a single WWASPS facility.
Brent Hall, founder of Discovery Academy and director of the National Association of Therapeutic Schools and Programs, told Desert News in 2016 that “Parents prefer Utah as a treatment venue”, explaining that Utah Law allows “Parents to be treated like parents and kids to be treated as kids”. Utah law requires very little governmental oversight for privately-owned schools. Twice a year an investigator employed by the National Association of Therapeutic Schools and Programs stops by the facility to make sure no abuse is happening and that the facilities sanitation is satisfactory. If the investigator doesn’t find any problems to report, the school can continue operating. If the investigator does report a problem, which one rarely does, they are given a warning and a date for a new inspection to make sure the issues have been resolved. The problem however, is that the NATSP board of directors is made up of people who own and operate WWASP affiliated schools, putting the rigor and ethics of these inspections into question. The current president of NATSP, Trina Packard, owns a behavioral modification boarding school called Youth Care herself and recently replaced the previous president, Dane Kay, owner of Ascent Redcliffe, a Provo, Utah based program currently battling a class action lawsuit pertaining to abuse and denial of healthcare. Kay is also the brother of the owner of the now closed Tranquility Bay, Jay Kay.
There are no federal laws governing schools, meaning the US government can not forcibly close a privately owned boarding school or treatment facility — even after people like Ben Trane, who founded and owns Old West Academy, was convicted of rape of a minor. If a WWASP affiliated school decides to close, normally only after public outcry that hurt marketing or class action lawsuits that cause bankruptcy, the owners and perpetrators of abuse are free to reopen a new program under a different name at the same location with the same faculty.
A 2011 Congressional bill that would have banned physical abuse and the withholding of food at such schools died in committee after it was opposed by lawmakers reluctant to impose new federal standards on a matter often regulated by states. Instead, most states in America oversee the facilities variously as camps, boarding schools or residential treatment facilities. State regulators are often hesitant to step in because the programs exist in an ill-defined area of the law. For example, private boarding schools are not regularly inspected and are not required to be licensed or accredited, according to the federal Department of Education. These loopholes within the law on a state and national level make it incredibly difficult to punish the people who are aware of the abuses taking place within these programs.
For survivors, the road to recovery is much harder than the lives they led before being placed into a behavioral modification boarding school. Because these schools are not accredited, the survivor graduates or leaves the program at 18, they are unknowingly leaving without a highschool diploma or a GED certificate. Many survivors of institutionalized abuse struggle to cope with the prolonged trauma and resources and support systems are few and far between.
“I was sent to a Blue Ridge in Utah at 16. It ruined my life. When I got out, I didn’t have a family to turn to, an education, or a place to live. I was arrested for possession of drugs and spent time in prison in Georgia. I still have nightmares about the six months I spent at Blue Ridge. I’m 26 now and finally visited a therapist for the first time and was diagnosed with PTSD. I have a kid now, and I’m working on getting my life together,”Said Darren Patricks, a WWASPS program survivor. “I know six people that were at Blue Ridge when I was there that have killed themselves in the past decade”.