Issue #2 Fall '98
Current Issue: #3
Youth Liberation: A Call to Action
 View My Guestbook
|
Picture yourself on a tropical island, with palm trees and a warm sun, and tourists on vacation. Now picture yourself looking at those things through a barbed wire fence, and an armed guard at your back.
This is the fate faced by hundreds of youths per year that are sent to prison camps overseas by their parents. It seems like a movie script, but it happens with a frequency that is all too real. Parents who disapprove of their child's behavior, for any reason, can pay a company called Adolescent Services International (ASI) to abduct their child, smuggle them overseas, and then put them in prison camps where any form of brutality can - and is - used to force the child to conform to the parent's wishes. In remote facilities far from the public eye, in countries with little or no laws on human rights, young people are threatened, illegally restrained, and beaten, all to get them to submit to the will of the parents.
These facilities are not legitimate juvenile detention centers or mental health institutions, and not overseen by any form of regulation or licensing. They are not apart governmental justice system, regulatory body, or psychiatric organization. They are, in effect, "rogue prisons", setting themselves up in corners of the world where human rights laws are lax and moving on to a new location when their abuses are discovered.
Prison "schools" run by ASI are found in such places as Western Samoa, Jamaica, and the Czech republic there is little law enforcement to investigate prisoner's allegations of abuse. These facilities locate themselves in far corners of the globe so they can avoid United States human rights laws.
Evem ASI's website name shows its true aims, DefiantTeen.com They specialize in breaking the spirit of headstrong youth through force and make them accept authority out of fear. Like a horse trainer who must break the spirit of a horse to make it rideable, these facilities crush the will to stand strong in youth make them servile. Human beings are treated as animals.
These prison camps claim they teach "morals" and "values". But whose morals? There are no checks on why youths are admitted. They can be put in for torture for things as small as choosing a different religion than their parents, or for "reeducation" of their sexual orientation. The consequences for refusing treatment are severe. Parents hand over the money for whatever cause and then the youths are at the mercy of the guards. Even if the youths have serious problems with either drugs or violence, they have the right to legitimate treatment instead of a quack foreign organization. Parents may send their children to prison schools because normal mental health facilities are not "strong enough". Once outside of the United States, parents have nearly carte blanche to inflict any abuses necessary.
Even as you read this article a youths are locked up in prison schools, being beaten or locked in solitary confinement. Yet in the isolated corners of the world where these camps are located their cries of pain too often go unheard.
Fortunately of late this issue has attracted significant media attentionto these institutions. Articles have appeared in magazines such as the New York Times and Forbes. People magazine did an
expose on one of the most notorious prison schools -Tranquility Bay in Jamaica, also known as "Camp Fear".
Intrepid Net Reporter , a group of independent investigative reporters, have done an excellent series bringing the secrets of the camps to light.
The typical process of a youth arriving at a camp goes somewhat like this. A parent calls ASI and sends them a check for $30,000. No questions asked. A group of thugs (referred to as "escorts") show up at the child's home late and night and drag them kicking and screaming to a car, where they are driven to a small local airport that has a chartered flight to the prison school. They are flown overseas to an isolated location such as Western Samoa. They then arrive at the prison camp and pass through the barbed wire walls and security, then are strip-searched. Adult male guards frisk teenage girl prisoners. They are given rigid orders and any infraction causes solitary confinement. The only way out it to rise through the ranks of the camp by getting "merits" for obedience. Students with low merits are subject to abuse by older students. So much for stopping violence - this is a militaristic atmosphere where violence and abuse are the solution to any infraction. Days are filled with meetings in which students are told over and over again to unquestioningly accept authority. This nightmare continues indefinately as long as parents continue to pay.
To these accusations the camps have retorted that they do nothing of the sort , that they are helpful places that change lives for the better . Yet their responses are reactionary, with the tone of one discovered at a crime. Even if no abuse occurs, the gulag schools still violate essential human rights. No one has the right to kidnap a child against his will and take him forcibly to another country, then deny him contact and legal representation, no matter how nice the place or how bad their behavior. Our government should do a full and impartial investigation into the calls the gulag schools and the return of the captives within to safety, before any further damage is done to their body and spirit.
By James Russell
6/27 State Department Issues Advisory on "Behavior Modification" Schools
The promotional literature and web pages of these camps show smiling youth in the tropics. Photos show them standing perfectly in military regimentation, in contrived posed shots. But beyond the cameras lens survivors report being locked up in filthy buildings, in a prison utterly unlike the resort the ads claims to portray. Advertisements brag that ASI can take an alienated teenager and turn them into a good, perfect one. But in the end the original person isn't lost, just buried under the fear and scar tissue. And how are the youths not supposed to be angry and alienated, when they know that their human rights are being violated and no one will come to their defense?
Sources and further information
Box 1487, WNEC, 1215 Wilbraham Road, Springfield MA, 01119
jrussell@wnec.edu
This issue Last Updated 6/27/99
