"Anything goes" at kids boot camps

They make the headlines when something goes terribly wrong: a child dies at the hands of guards administering "tough love" or a youngster collapses from dehydration during an outing of "character building." These are America's throw-away children--predominantly boys--consigned by families or courts to facilities that purport to offer alternatives to "straighten out" kids who seem to be in a downward spiral, from first-time offenders to incorrigible truants.

While this new breed of facilities for dealing with troubled children has been making news, the underlying philosophy is an old one, reports Richard B. Johnson, author of Abominable Firebug: A Memoir. Accused of arson as a child and imprisoned without trial at the notorious Roslindale Juvenile Detention Center in Massachusetts, he subsequently spent years at the nation's first reform school, the Lyman School for Boys, in the 1950s. While the institution became infamous for hatching Albert DeSalvo, an adolescent inmate who "graduated" to become the Boston Strangler, Johnson tells unflinchingly not only of the many weaknesses of that institution, but of the rare opportunities and occasional mentors that allowed him to become, in later life, an accomplished engineer, pilot, and inventor.

However, many children who have survived, and even thrived, in adulthood rarely publicly admit a troubled past; staff members who have found ways to make a difference are reluctant to risk being linked with institutions whose names are synonymous with abuse. Thus, valuable experience that could bring about meaningful change usually is hidden.

Throughout the 20th century, there were various vogues for dealing with "incorrigible" children, including forced labor camps and reform schools. Over time, horror stories surfaced that attracted the attention of reformers, creating a public outcry that shut them down. "What has never been resolved, however, are the underlying issues: a willingness to ignore the rights of the children in order to protect society from potential miscreants, and a culture of closed ranks combined with generally low pay for staff that results in an unfortunate percentage of brutal or simply untrained staff," laments Johnson. "Many people don't really care what happens to the nation's youth when they get in trouble with the law, and many people who are in the 'juvenile corrections' industry deny that there remain any problems at all. The juvenile court system does not use the same protocols or rules of evidence they would when trying adults.

"Children are simply second-class citizens and, if the child is nonwhite, he is even further removed from true citizenship. An extremely damaging environment is suffered by [kids] when they are not considered to have any rights, and we are failing our [youth] by not creating more of a public outcry."

COPYRIGHT 2007 Society for the Advancement of Education
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning