Romney, Torture, and Teens

[Lucille]

Romney's last go-round:

Romney, Torture, and Teens
http://reason.com/archives/2007/06/27/romney-torture-and-teens

When Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said he’d support doubling the size of the prison at Guantanamo Bay, he was trying to show voters that he’d be tough on terror. Two of his top fundraisers, however, have long supported using tactics that have been likened to torture for troubled teenagers.

As The Hill noted last week, 133 plaintiffs filed a civil suit against Romney’s Utah finance co-chair, Robert Lichfield, and his various business entities involved in residential treatment programs for adolescents. The umbrella group for his organization is the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools (WWASPS, sometimes known as WWASP) and Lichfield is its founder and is on its board of directors.

The suit alleges that teens were locked in outdoor dog cages, exercised to exhaustion, deprived of food and sleep, exposed to extreme temperatures without adequate clothing or water, severely beaten, emotionally brutalized, and sexually abused and humiliated. Some were even made to eat their own vomit.

But the link to teen abuse goes far higher up in the Romney campaign. Romney’s national finance co-chair is a man named Mel Sembler. A long time friend of the Bushes, Sembler was campaign finance chair for the Republican party during the first election of George W. Bush, and a major fundraiser for his father.

Like Lichfield, Sembler also founded a nationwide network of treatment programs for troubled youth. Known as Straight Inc., from 1976 to 1993, it variously operated nine programs in seven states. At all of Straight’s facilities, state investigators and/or civil lawsuits documented scores of abuses including teens being beaten, deprived of food and sleep for days, restrained by fellow youth for hours, bound, sexually humiliated, abused and spat upon.

The Trouble with Troubled Teen Programs
How the "boot camp" industry tortures and kills kids
http://reason.com/archives/2006/12/28/the-trouble-with-troubled-teen

• GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney has hired Mel Sembler as a top money man for his campaign. Sembler, you may remember, is a fierce drug warrior, and in the 1980s and 90s ran Straight, Inc., the string of "tough love" teen rehab centers frequently accused of child abuse.

This go-round:

Dear Marijuana Reformers: Mitt Romney Thinks You're Stupid, Obama Thinks You're Easy
http://reason.com/blog/2012/09/19/dear-marijuana-reformers-mitt-romney-thi

Yesterday, Lee Fang reported in The Nation that Mel Sembler, Romney's Florida fundraising chair, has bankrolled opponents of Amendment 64, which would legalize recreational use of marijuana, to the tune of $150,000.

Sembler is famous for having co-founded the militant and abusive teenage rehab company STRAIGHT Inc., which closed its doors in 1993 after investigators uncovered a trend of “unusual punishment, infliction of pain, humiliation, intimidation, ridicule, coercion, threats, mental abuse…and interference with daily living functions such as eating, sleeping and toileting.” (Full disclosure: As STRAIGHT was shutting down, my sister was forcefully enrolled in a successor program started by one of Sembler's proteges, called SAFE, Inc. It followed Sembler's playbook to the letter, and closed its doors after a decade under a similar black cloud of civil suits and government scrutiny.)

If Romney's ties to a drug war profiteer suggest to you that he'll be worse on drug policy than Obama, think again: Not only is Sembler fighting for Romney, he's also making bank off Obama's commitment to improving drug testing technology and the Office of National Drug Control Policy's anti-drug PSAs:

We Had to Torture the Children in Order to Save Them
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/we-had-to-torture-the-children-in-order-to-save-them/

Just finished Maia Szalavitz’s powerful 2006 expose Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids.

Szalavitz looks at several networks of “tough love” programs for teens, including networks of residential treatment centers and wilderness programs, and finds truly shocking abuses leading to injury, PTSD, and death. This is a painful read for many reasons. Reading the chapter on the death of Aaron Bacon at the North Star wilderness program came close to making me physically ill, not only because of the horrific injuries he sustained but because of the way he was treated throughout his weeks-long, deadly ordeal: His parents, who had thought they were sending him to a much gentler program, were discouraged from writing him tender letters of love, so the last words he received from them were cold and punitive; the other teens in the program were forbidden from helping him, even from sharing their food with him as he starved; the counselors assumed he was faking and trying to manipulate them. And so he died, after stumbling and falling for days on a forced march even though he was unable to control his bowels. I almost wrote that he died alone, but of course the greater horror is that he died surrounded by other people who watched and even mocked his agony.

Szalavitz doesn’t solely recount horror stories, although those stories–based on interviews with program survivors, parents who sent their kids to the programs, and former staffers; medical records; and court records, among other sources–are shocking enough. She explains clearly the ways in which this style of “treatment” program is designed almost like a machine to produce abuse: The teens are consistently characterized as liars and manipulators, and their own parents are urged to reflexively disbelieve anything they say. Then they’re isolated and kept from communicating with anyone in the outside world who hasn’t received this “everything they say is a lie” conditioning. These two practices make reporting abuse basically impossible.
[...]
And there’s one other recurring theme: Republican money men. Although “tough love” programs have penetrated both Democratic and Republican establishments at the local levels, the big donors from these programs seem to favor the GOP. Szalavitz has followed up on this story over the years. Here’s a recent piece she did on Mel Sembler, Romney backer and co-founder of the abusive treatment center Straight Inc.:

Romney Fat Cat's Reefer Madness
Mel Sembler has long been a top advisor on drug policy to Republicans. His creds? Rehabs notorious for teen abuse. Now he's bankrolling the opposition to Colorado's pot-legalization amendment.
http://www.thefix.com/content/sembler-legal-pot-amendment-64-teen-abuse8002

When the national political press writes about Republican financier Mel Sembler—a major Romney donor who formerly chaired the finance committee for the party (and the candidate himself)—it typically fails to mention his involvement in abusive addiction treatment and reactionary drug policy. For example, this recent Daily Beast piece on his fundraising simply notes that the Florida shopping mall magnate switched his political affiliation away from the Democrats in 1979 because of his opposition to marijuana use.

What it doesn’t mention is that he also founded a rehab that “treated” some 50,000 American teens with a dehumanizing daily routine often involving beatings, days on end of sleep deprivation, brutal restraints that often left youth wetting or soiling themselves, public humiliation (including misogynistic and homophobic insults), lack of privacy and other human rights violations including kidnapping and false imprisonment of both adults and youth.

Nor does it detail how that organization—Straight Incorporated—morphed into the Drug Free America Foundation (DFAF), a group that now fights to ensure that drug policy remains harsh and punitive.

 

[kathy88]

Wow. Just wow. What is it with politicians and (alleged) teenage abuse?

 

[Lucille]

It's for the children! Who they obviously hate.

Stop Locking Up So Many Kids
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/stop-locking-up-so-many-kids/

When compared to other nations the number of youth incarcerated in America is stunning. Figures collected from the 2000s show that the U.S. youth incarceration rate was 336 for every 100,000. In England and Wales the figures was 46.8, In Germany 23.1, and in Italy 11.3. Having been to all of the countries just mentioned, I find it impossible to believe that American youths are over four times more in need of incarceration than European youths. Even when compared to countries in Africa and Asia, America’s youth incarceration rate is noticeably high, with South Africa locking up 69 per 100,000 youths, and Japan locking up a very low 0.1. (These figures can be found on page 58 of a study on cross-national comparison of youth justice here.)

Wired recently released photos of American youths in detention. It seems wholly unrealistic to think that these sorts of institutions are conducive to rehabilitation. In fact, if you wanted to raise a criminal, you could not do much better than these juvenile detention centers. Youths are locked up, denied a good education, and resolve disputes through violence. That many of these children come from violent homes in the first place and already resentful of authority should encourage policy makers to find a way to rehabilitate children without fostering behavior that will likely see them ending up in prison.

The sorts of crimes that see children sent to juvenile facilities are predictable. When Richard Ross, the Wired photographer visited an Idaho detention center there were six girls who were there for curfew violations, molestation abuse, burglary and possession of marijuana. Humiliation and social depravation hardly seem the right way to deal with these children, who have not even finished cognitive development—some of these girls were as young as eleven.
[...]
Politicians in this country are betraying America’s children in so many ways. A failing education system, growing government debt, wars abroad, and the increase in surveillance are the legacy America’s children can look forward to. The least we can do is not lock so many of them up, especially when other countries have demonstrated that there are alternatives.