Recently I found a study called “Troubled Affluent Youth’s Experiences in a Therapeutic Boarding School: The Elite Arm of the Youth Control Complex and Its Implications for Youth Justice,” which explores the mostly unregulated private troubled teen treatment industry (TTI). Highly recommended.
Authors Mooney and Leighton describe the TTI as a way for the criminal legal system to weed out the wealthy and concentrate the disadvantaged into prison, a conclusion I came to after reading this report from 1974.
Many of the points the authors made confirmed my hunches/ research.
Affluent teens who end up in TTI often come from high demand/ low support environments. Two thirds of those surveyed had disclosed some form of trauma or abuse.
Often there is disagreement among survivors over program efficacy. However survivor bias overlooks those who overdosed or died.
As a whole, those admitted to the TTI are viewed as having anti-authoritarian tendencies, hanging out with the wrong crowd, had parents who were concerned especially about emerging sexuality, had issues with substance abuse, and/or problems with mental health.
The authors discuss how programs focus on compliance and conformity as a measure of success, and how behavior modification is accomplished through interrogation, policing, and a culture of mutual surveillance.
I have more on all that coming out tomorrow in an essay published on Huffington Post. Stay tuned!