SUBCONTRACTING CHILD ABUSE: “Specialty schools”–discipline farms for wayward youth–are going international to escape increasing US scrutiny and legal liability. This is one of those grim little stories I’ve been following for a while now; there are some truly terrifying stories that come out of these places. Even the ones that aren’t as insane as Straight, Inc. can be foul. NOTE: Not all “tough love”-type programs are bad. But there are so many awful ones out there (kids dying in Arizona desert, etc.) that I would not recommend using one of these programs unless you have done extensive, skeptical investigation of it beforehand. Excerpts from the NYT article:

Ryan Fraidenburgh was 14 when he was brought here shackled, kicking and screaming.

Two men carrying handcuffs and leg irons came for him at his mother’s home in Sacramento, Calif., shoved him into a van and bound him hand and foot. They drove him 12 hours south, over the Mexican border, into a high-walled compound near here called Casa by the Sea.

“It was nighttime,” Ryan recalled. “I look around and I see kids sleeping on cement. I was really, really scared. The big honcho, Mauricio, said, `You don’t speak English here.’ I didn’t know how to speak Spanish.”

Ryan quickly learned the rules: stay silent, be compliant, don’t look up, don’t look out the window, don’t speak unless spoken to. The punishments for breaking the rules included solitary confinement, lying on the floor in a small room, nose to the ground, often for days on end.

Ryan was not a criminal. He was only skipping school, his parents said in telephone interviews. But in August 2000, they said, in the middle of a bitter divorce and custody battle, they decided to send him away to Casa by the Sea, which calls itself a “specialty boarding school” for behavior modification.

Like hundreds of other parents, the Fraidenburghs made their choice largely on the basis of a glossy brochure and a call to a toll-free number in Utah. They came to regret their choice.

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