Taking the mile.
BoingBoing has totally ruined my morning. Though I suppose I should blame Decca Aitkenhead, the first journalist to visit Tranquility Bay since 1998. Part one of her report is here; part two is here.
Tranquility Bay is a boot camp in Jamaica for recalcitrant teens. Parents who can afford the tuition send misbehaving kids here to be reprogrammed. The overwhelming majority of the kids at Tranquility Bay come from the States, but the program overseeing the facility, WWASP, sees a potential new market in Britain’s misbehaving adolescents. Which is why they asked a reporter from the Observer to visit. —Also, Tranquility Bay hasn’t been too happy with coverage by the US media. From Aitkenhead’s piece, “The Last Resort”:
The owner is an American called Jay Kay. He doesn’t trust the media, because ‘they go for sensationalist stuff. Nothing has really presented things in a way that is factual.’ On the other hand, he believes anyone who saw inside Tranquility would support and admire it, and blames criticism on ignorance. So Kay has been in a dilemma. His business is expanding, and he is turning his attention to the UK, for he believes there is a large untapped market of British parents who would ship their children straight off to Jamaica if only they knew about Tranquility. The British government, too, he hopes, might send him children in its care. ‘If social services was interested, at $2,400 a month I bet they can’t offer our services for that.’
This spring he decided to grant me and a photographer unprecedented, exclusive access. If he didn’t like the result, ‘Hell will freeze over before anyone gets in here again.’
Oh, well.
Here’s Teen Advocates USA, “a private non-profit watch dog group focused on monitoring the care and treatment of youth by the privatized behavioral healthcare industry.” And here’s a site which focuses on Straight, Inc., but includes (a lot) of links to websites and resources dealing with the overall phenomenon of this nasty little front in the war on kids, including these scans of transcripts of testimony given by former Tranquility Bay residents Aaron Kravig, Lindsey Wise, and Nick Volante in the matter of Gina Farmer vs. William Mitchell. It also includes this January, 2003 US State Department advisory about offshore boot camps like Tranquility Bay:
The Department of State has no direct knowledge of the corporate or legal structure of these enterprises or of their precise relationship to each other, including ties to organizations in the United States. Though these facilities may be operated and staffed by U.S. citizens and populated primarily by U.S. citizen minors, the host country where the facility is located is solely responsible for compliance with local safety, health, sanitation, and educational laws and regulations, including all licensing requirements of the staff in that country. These standards, if any, may not be strictly enforced or meet the standards of similar facilities in the United States.
What sort of standards are we talking about, then?
Here’s a summary of some of Kravig’s testimony, as posted to this message board for graduates of such programs:
On July 6, 2001, the day after my 18th birthday, there was an incident involving (name withheld, staff member) and myself. The staff member talking to another student had seen me. The staff member had called me up to where he was sitting in the classroom and he asked me why I was talking. Before I could respond to him he told me that I was on “talking restriction” and that if I were seen talking I would be given a Category Three consequence. My one and only response to him was, “Yes sir, I will not talk anymore.”
The staff member then told me to go get my water bottle because I was going to “Observation Placement (OP)”. He took me to the room which held observation placement, made me lay on the filthy, bare tile floor and sat on my back. He then told the staff overseeing observation placement that if I were to speak that I should be “restrained”. I stayed in observation placement for twenty-one days for saying “Yes sir, I will not talk anymore.” For this whole period of twenty-one days I, being a legal adult, had the right to leave, and my parents would not make the arrangements for me to leave because they wanted to come down to the facility in Jamaica to try and convince me to stay. While in observation placement (op) you must lay down on the floor for the majority of the day, only getting up to shower, use the restroom, or for a five minute break every two hours. You were made to lie flat on your stomach with your head to the side, hands at your side, and legs flat on the floor. You could not have any padding under your head, or you would be given a consequence. You could not get up without the permission of the staff or you would be given a consequence. One day, we were threatened with five thousand jumping jacks if we were caught sleeping, and two people in the room were made to do this. The conditions of the room were horrendous. It was hot and humid enough, being July in Jamaica, and the “privilege” of having the windows was determined on the student’s behavior, which basically consisted of not speaking. The floor in the room crawled with what could only be described as pubic hairs, and we had to lie face down on the floor. We could not read any books at any time, and we were never allowed to do any school at all. The bathroom of the room was even worse. I have seen leeches swimming in the pool of water on the floor of the bathroom during my time in op. We were not allowed to close the door while we were showering or using the toilet. One night during my time in op, all the students in op were given the privilege of sitting up and because I had asked the staff who was supervising us a question and he told me to lay down. I asked him why and he called staff to come and restrain me. These staff took me to the next room, there were five in all, but I can only remember two of them (name withheld), and (name withheld). In the next room I was told to lie on the floor. When I did one staff pulled my feet together so my inner anklebones were flat on the floor and got sat on them using his knees, grinding my ankles into the tile floor. Two other staff grabbed my arms, put them straight out from my body and sat on them. It was like this for nearly fifteen minutes. These are methods used to control someone who is going out of control and may hurt themselves or others, not for asking a question. I had told the staff who restrained me before we had even gone into the room that I am eighteen and that they cannot touch me. They laughed at this. Every night in OP we were made to do fitness. This was led by the staff who supervised OP. Every night, the usual fitness routine would start with 3000 to 5000 jumping jacks, with a 30 second break to drink water after 1000 jumping jacks were completed. After this we were made to do about 1000 sit-ups, with a 30 second break after 100 had been done. The finale was to do anywhere from 300 to 1000 pushups, with breaks at every 100. Before we began fitness, the staff supervising the room would close all the windows and turn off the fan. The humidity and heat generated in the room would turn into a cloud of steam that only dispersed when all fitness was done, when the staff would open the windows once more. In the spot that I would do fitness at there would be a puddle of my own sweat where I was standing before fitness was done. While doing pushups, I would slip on my own sweat onto the tile floor, and have to get up and go on. My clothes would be drenched in my own sweat by the end. I had to do this for twenty-one days because I said, “Yes sir, I will not talk anymore.”
Of course, there’s a simple answer for how upstanding American parents could let their troubled kids get put through such an appalling wringer. They don’t. Back to Aitkenhead:
‘Sure, he complained like hell at first,’ [Jim Mozingo] recalls fondly. ‘Typical case of manipulation, just like they said in the handbook. He said the staff were mean and violent, they beat you, the food is terrible.’ He chuckles, pleased by the neat symmetry of the handbook and letters.
What sorts of things will land a teen in a place like Tranquility Bay? You know, the usual:
Drugs feature high among reasons for choosing Tranquility, although addicts who need detox are not accepted. Running away from home, sleeping around, or being expelled from school are also typical. Some kids have been in trouble with the police. Others had been in court, where their parents persuaded the judge to let them send their child to Tranquility, rather than issue his own punishment. Other students were sent here for wearing inappropriate clothes, using bad language, or hanging around with the wrong sort of friends.
Still, it’s hard to argue with satisfied customers.
While [Mazingo] is talking, Josh hovers nearby, with bright eyes that dance longingly on his father’s face. It took Josh a whole year to reach level 2, some of it spent in OP, but his father feels only awestruck gratitude for the treatment his son has received.
‘Every time I come here I’m just so struck by the love of these people. You can’t fake this kind of love. And this place is just full of love. I challenge anyone to come down and take a look.’
And:
Also striking is the assumption parents make of entitlement to their child’s affection, as though this is a legal right. ‘She’s a neat kid, she really is,’ a former student’s mother says. ‘She just didn’t like us.’ But now, ‘I don’t believe she’s lying to me any more, and that’s a neat feeling.’
Myself, I keep thinking of that note scribbled in pencil on toilet paper that V passes to Evey when Evey thinks she’s been caught and all is lost. It’s not a perfect rejoinder to this squalling, nasty mess, it’s complex and manipulative, and V’s putting Evey through his own nasty, squalling version of behavior modification, and I’m with Vidal on the whole ends/means thing, most days; there are no ends. Only means. And yet. I’m sitting here and I just can’t stop thinking about that damn note—
An inch. It’s small and it’s fragile and it’s the only thing in the world that’s worth having. We must never lose it, or sell it, or give it away. We must never let them take it from us. I don’t know who you are, or whether you’re a man or woman. I may never see you. I will never hug you or cry with you or get drunk with you. But I love you.
Commenting is closed for this article.
Yeah, sounds like an answer to me. Something's not right with the kid you raised, you have an extra five figure sum sitting around, send them to strangers to be tortured outside the protection of the legal system.
Beats the shit out of family therapy.
Every time I hear these parents it reminds me of the Twighlight Zone(?) episode about the couple who had this "perfect" daughter--turned out she was an android. They programmed her to be a perfect normal girl--but when she fell in love and tried to grow into adulthood, they reprogrammed her again into a dutiful daughter. It was chilling because throughout the story they seemed these loving parents, at it wasn't until the last moment that you realized that, having to choose between their daughter and their comfort, they had chosen their comfort...
From a Julian Sanchez piece about Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (link via The Leaky Cauldron):
Someone on another message board I frequent posted a link to the Grauniad articles, and my reply to his post was eight lines of "I must not tell lies". (If you know about detention with Dolores, you know the relevance of that; if you don't, it's in the ellipsis in the Reason quote.) The situations may not be exactly parallel, but they're parallel enough to appall this reporter.
For a while, I kept going back over that post to place those names in the last quote, even while I thought it was familiar.
Now I'm going to have to add V to my list to "must-read-again" comics, which means I have one more thing to dig up out of the archives after watching that superhero documentary on the History Channel.
I will have my revenge for this!!
Fortunately, I have an increased supply of free time. Somewhat unfortunately, I also have TiVo and Netflix.
thank you for showing concern and for posting my story.
sincerely
aaron kravig
Hi,
My name is Kaitlin Lyle and I am doing a radio piece for my youth radio program. I'm 15 years old and need help. I am trying to get in contact with a parent of a child that has been sent to tranquility bay, or a child thats has been. I cant find a way to contact them though and i need an interview. If anybody could help me it would be greatly appriecated. thank you
-kaitlin Lyle