His Own Private Abu Ghraib
By John Gorenfeld
March 23, 2005
Source: http://www.nospank.net/sembler.htm

He created a system to reprogram bad kids. Delete the bad code in their personalities. Break the will of sullen stoner boys, make bad girls confess to whorish secrets and reverse-engineer the minds of heavy metal kids. And rebuild all of them into an anti-drug army. Such were the works of Melvin Sembler and the feats that STRAIGHT, the ultimate in teen drug rehab programs, attempted during the Totally Awesome Eighties.

Melvin Sembler's clinics might have seemed like a good idea at the time, when teen drug use was high and New Age thinking seemed to offer new and hopeful therapies for pressing the RESET button on human beings.

There were major problems, though. He modeled STRAIGHT after another program, creepily named "The Seed," shut down after the U.S. Congress literally issued a report in 1974 comparing it to "the highly refined 'brainwashing' techniques employed by the North Koreans." Sembler's imitation wasn't shut down until 1993 for illegal child abuse: beatings and sexual humiliation. Kids were thrown against walls. Or forced to sit in their own menstrual blood. Unless, of course, they were ready to cooperate, confess, and chant "I'm at STRAIGHT, feeling great" with the others. In that case they got to be the enforcers. Dozens of lawsuits exposed a similar picture in 12 clinics across America.

Fast forward to 2005. Sembler, 75, is the United States Ambassador to Italy. The enforcers have turned into Sembler's enemies and one man is out for payback.

On a balmy recent Florida day I drove around St. Petersburg with former STRAIGHT teen Richard Bradbury, 39. The bleach-haired vigilante was dressed in shiny white baller gear and earrings, and calm for now under the spell of Xanax. He's been living on a disability check and even had to sell his beloved boat. He landed himself in a whole heap of lawsuit in 2003 by trying to humiliate the ambassador.

Bradbury knows his actions are not to be taken lightly. He is meddling with a man so powerful that Gov. Jeb Bush once named a "Betty Sembler Day" in Florida to honor his wife's ongoing, taxpayer-funded campaigns on behalf of workplace urine tests. And he has raised so much money for Republicans that men named George Bush make him an ambassador every time they become president. The Florida drug crusader and businessman was also the boss of the Bush campaign war chest in 2000, and now - improbably - the U.S. representative to Italy, where he has been in the news this month over the Iraq mess.

"He's way at the top of the world," Bradbury said as he cruised to dance music he described as "bumpin'," over the Tampa Bay causeway and then past the shopping centers built by Sembler Co, the local firm that made Sembler rich. "I'm at the bottom of it. He's got a long way to fall, but where else am I gonna go?"

Bradbury began harassing Sembler after leaving the program in the mid-1980s and deciding that what happened to him was illegal. He helped bring down STRAIGHT in Florida by playing whistleblower, turning over documents that triggered an investigation and exposed a politically-motivated cover-up. As a result, the warehouse-like building near Burger King in St. Pete is no longer a teen hell, but a cable company. For years parents would trick their kids into entering that place. A typical ploy: "Yeah, we're still goin' to Disney World, let's just duck into this unmarked building for a second. . ."

Says Bradbury of what happened inside: "You don't understand what they did to these kids. . . . They put stuff up my butt."

That part is over now. And yet Bradbury fights on. But when will Bradbury or other Sembler-bashers - like Wes Fager, a programmer who says his son suffered a mental collapse after attending a Virginia STRAIGHT - drop their grudges over lifelong psychological problems and so forth?

No time soon, perhaps. For the past two years, Bradbury has dug through Sembler's trash outside his St. Petersburg home. Set off by the story of an ongoing Death Row case involving a STRAIGHT teen who murdered a gay man after being spat on as a "faggot" in the program, Bradbury lashed out. He used eBay to post something he'd found on Sembler's sidewalk: a penis pump.

When a lawyer demanded he give it back, he demanded $700,000 instead. Bradbury, accused of stalking and intentional infliction of emotional damage, is still in court. He's hoping the ambassador will be forced to testify about STRAIGHT and be held accountable, though how likely that is remains unclear.

Why the ambassador has such determined enemies may have something to do with his high-rolling lifestyle in the face of past trauma. The Semblers live in a palace-like walled estate in Rome, featuring the city's largest private garden. They jokingly call it "The Magic Kingdom" - like Disney World, the real one as opposed to the unmarked building near Burger King. The wealth that brought him here stems from his accomplishments as shopping center developer in St. Petersburg. He was also Bush I's Ambassador to Australia. And he is founder of St. Pete's Holocaust museum.

Then there is his public cheerfulness about STRAIGHT. His Web site brags of saving 12,000 kids from drugs. George H.W. Bush awarded it one of the "thousand points of light" awards.

His influence, according to a 1993 audit by the State of Florida, kept STRAIGHT open despite the facts. Phone calls from politicians in 1989 warned health inspectors that it didn't matter what abuse they reported, the clinics would stay open. After all, they were run by a personal friend of the President. "A persistent foul odor," the St. Petersburg Times editorialized.

Then there is the survival of STRAIGHT's ideas. By 1994 the clinics were closed in name, but offshoots continue today - with names like SAFE of Orlando.

With a legacy like this, it's almost enough to make you wonder if potential ambassadors are not chosen for their awesome diplomatic skills but their generosity in giving money to political parties. Italians have taken notice; Sembler earned attention this month during a diplomatic crisis over a March 4 incident when trigger-happy American GIs shot an Italian journalist and killed her rescuer. The Christian news site Reta Della Pace has just published an article on Sembler's past, quoting STRAIGHT parent Fager as saying that 40 STRAIGHT graduates killed themselves.

It's no wonder Italians are bewildered. Prison abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay have Europeans wondering if their once-admired ally, the U.S., is O.K. in the head. And now we're leaving the impression that it's O.K. - heroic, even - to treat young Americans like Guantanamo Bay inmates.

Meanwhile, the children of the Eighties continue to disagree with Sembler's claim that he saved thousands from drugs.

"It's never left my head even after 17 years!!!" posts 1988 graduate Becky Wright, one unsatisfied Straight client. Also typical is Kelly Caputo's post: "I was abused on a daily basis, and have silently suffered for years as a result. I don't think I will ever be the same. My every thought has been violated, confused, degraded, and warped. . . . When my book comes out, God knows when, and I become famous, LOL, Sembler will be sorry."

The same day as the Iraq killing, the Washington Post awarded Sembler the "Narcissism Run Amok" award. He'd made history by convincing a friend of his in Congress to quietly insert a line into an appropriations bill, renaming an $83 million building 'The Mel Sembler Building.'

"We don't do that, do we?" George W. Bush reportedly told the congressman. "We don't name buildings for ambassadors where they have served."

"Mr. President," the Post quoted the congressman as saying, "I introduced the bill and you signed it."

Zany fun. It was a first - even Ben Franklin never arranged for something like this, and he was full of himself.

Unimpressed by the Mel Sembler Building, a tribute to a man who doesn't speak Italian, the Italians decided several days later to leave Iraq.

Why should you care about the STRAIGHT story? Because there's been a national debate over whether torture is worth it if it gets terrorists to reveal their secrets. Some worry we've opened Pandora's Box, inviting torture and ends-define-the-means abuse into the rest of the American way of life. But it's old news. Turns out that in some states we've been using it on teenagers for years. [Emphasis added.] See Flogging for God.

(The ambassador has declined an interview request, has said he won't answer questions about STRAIGHT, and his attorney did not return my e-mail.)

Ambassador de Sade
By John Gorenfeld, AlterNet.
Posted November 8, 2005.
http://alternet.org/story/27725/

Bush rewarded one of his loyalists with the ambassadorship to Italy -- despite his past as the founder of an cult-like teen rehab clinic. Eugenia Chien, Pacific News Service

Among our president's appointments of GOP activists to important posts, we've done worse than Melvin Sembler, the Ambassador to Italy who couldn't speak Italian. Unlike the FEMA chief, who had real responsibilities, Sembler sometimes found himself a fifth wheel around his own embassy. As the Washington Monthly has reported, the scandal that claimed Scooter Libby's job last month may have sprung from secret Rome meetings between neocons, an Iran-Contra figure and an Italian intelligence boss who later pushed phony WMD documents -- all behind Sembler's back.

But where Melvin Sembler, 74, demands attention is as an object lesson in how cruelty can be redeemed by the transformative power of political donations. For 16 years, Sembler, with his wife Betty, directed the leading juvenile rehab business in America, STRAIGHT, Inc., before seeing it dismantled by a breathtaking array of institutional abuse claims by mid-1993. Just one of many survivors is Samantha Monroe, now a travel agent in Pennsylvania, who told The Montel Williams show this year about overcoming beatings, rape by a counselor, forced hunger, and the confinement to a janitor's closet in "humble pants" -- which contained weeks of her own urine, feces and menstrual blood. During this "timeout," she gnawed her cheek and spat blood at her overseers. "I refused to let them take my mind," she says of the program. The abuse took years to overcome.

"It sticks inside you," she told Williams, "it eats at your soul." She told AlterNet that she was committed at 12, in 1980, for nothing more than being caught with a mini-bar-sized liquor bottle, handed out by a classmate whose mother was a flight attendant. Samantha's mother suspected more, and a STRAIGHT expert reassured her fears. The small blonde junior high-schooler was tricked into being taken to the warehouse-like STRAIGHT building. Her mother, told by counselors that her daughter was a liar, was encouraged to trick the girl for her own good.

Overcome by dread in the lobby, Samantha tried to run but was hauled into the back by older girls. Inside, as was standard operating procedure, she began the atonement process that cost over $12,000 a year: all-day re-education rituals in which flapping the arms ("motivating") and chanting signaled submission to "staying straight." She was coerced, she says, into confessing to being a "druggie whore" who went down on truckers for drugs. "You're forced to confess crimes you never committed." (Some survivors call it extortion.)

Melvin Sembler stepped down earlier this year as Our Man In Rome -- he also served under the first Bush as Ambassador to Australia. Were Monroe's story unique, his STRAIGHT clinics might still be in business. Instead, his creation, which he stubbornly defends, closed under a breathtaking array of institutional abuse claims by 1993, ranging from sexual abuse, beating and stomping to boys called "faggots" for hours while being spat upon -- humiliation so bad that a Pennsylvania judge recently ruled it potentially mitigating of a Death Row sentence for a former STRAIGHT teen who committed a homophobic murder.

Although prosecutors closed the clinics, six-figure settlements sucked it dry, and state health officials yanked its licenses after media reports of teen torture and cover-up, Sembler himself escaped punishment. As one of the preeminent and hardest-working GOP fundraisers, Sembler has received the honor of living during the George W. Bush presidency at the Villa Taverna, the official residence for the U.S. ambassador, which has the largest private garden in Rome. One night in May at "The Magic Kingdom" (as Mel and Betty call it), the dining room filled with smoke from fine cigars, as the ambassador entertained Bush Sr. and an entourage -- until Betty complained that the old friends were stinking up "my house," the Washington Post reported.

He's come home, but still wafting across national drug policy is the influence of his STRAIGHT, which has legally changed its identity to the Drug Free America Foundation (director Calvina Fay denies it's the same organization but the name change is listed in Florida corporate filings). Subsidized by tax dollars, it lobbies for severe narcotics policies and workplace drug testing, with an advisory board that includes the like of Gov. Jeb Bush and his wife Columba, and Homeland Security Director of Public Safety Christy McCampbell. A more pressing issue is that former overseers of Sembler's company, true believers in the STRAIGHT model, are still running spin-off businesses that treat teens with the old methods.

Starting out STRAIGHT

The story begins in 1976 when Sembler, who'd made his fortune in Florida real estate, founded STRAIGHT from the ashes of The Seed -- an earlier program suspended by the U.S. Senate for tactics reminiscent, said a senator, of Communist POW camps. But as the Reagan years rolled into view, and a climate of fear nurtured a Shock and Awe approach to teens, the Semblers found a new world of acceptance for an anything-goes treatment business, meting out punishment in privately run warehouses. Endorsers from Nancy Reagan to George H.W. Bush lent their names to the program, celebrating a role model weapon in the "war on drugs."

Nine years before the elder Bush took office, Sembler was a faithful political supporter, and raising millions beginning in '79 for the Bushes' clash with Reagan for the Republican nomination. In 1988, as Bush finally accepted the GOP's nomination for president, Sembler sat in the front row. With his man in the White House, STRAIGHT would become a vehicle for purchasing eminence as a Drug War thinker. By 1988, Sembler wasn't just running the Vice President's "Team 100" soft money campaign and enjoying steak dinners with him -- he was sojourning in George and Barbara Bush's living room, briefing the candidate on drug policy. As a token of his friendship, he gave Bush a new tennis racket, receiving this note in return: "Maybe we can play at Camp David someday."

And Sembler's success grew and grew as the Clinton era spooled out. The slickly dressed go-getter smashed records as RNC Finance Chairman from 1997 to 2000, chairing the "Regents" club that accommodated such super donors as Enron's Ken Lay to fund George W. Bush's campaign machine.

Meanwhile, a coast-to-coast trail of human wreckage had ensued during STRAIGHT's reign from 1976 to 1993 -- its survivors claimed physical, sexual and psychological trauma. The Web sites Fornits.com and TheStraights.com have collected many of their stories. Posts Kelly Caputo, an '88 alumna: "I don't think I will ever be the same. My every thought has been violated, confused, degraded and warped."

"My best guess is that at least half of the kids were abused," says Dr. Arnold Trebach, a professor emeritus at American University who created the Drug Policy Foundation to find alternatives to harsh laws. He has singled out STRAIGHT in his book "The Great Drug War" as among drug warriors' worst mistakes.

But today, Sembler's trail of purchased political friendships has led him through the opulent doors of the $83 million "Mel Sembler Building" in Rome, christened this year with help from a longtime ally in Congress, Rep. C.W. Bill Young (R-FL). Not the palace where Sembler worked as ambassador, but another of the Eternal City's architectural treasures, built in 1927 and now dedicated as an annex to the U.S. Embassy in a $30 million renovation at taxpayer expense. "Narcissus is now Greek and Roman," said the Washington Post of the monument. No one could remember any other diplomat receiving such honors, not even Benjamin Franklin.

"We don't do that, do we?" George W. Bush reportedly told the congressman, according to Congressman C.W. Bill Young 's (R-Florida) speech during the ceremony. "We don't name buildings for ambassadors where they have served."

"Mr. President," the politician replied, "I introduced the bill and you signed it." Bush may have missed the Sembler Building provision, tucked as it was into an appropriations bill. But he owed much to the longtime family friend, whom he thanked on "The Jim Lehrer Report" [RealAudio] in 2000 for raising $21.3 million at a single dinner in April, a new record. Asked what favors the money paid for, Bush professed wonderment at the premise: "I know there's this kind of sentiment now -- I heard it during the primaries ... [that] if someone contributes to a person's campaign, there's this great sense of being beholden."

At the Sembler Building, visitors can stroll among the Italian frescoes of cherubs and heavens, and marvel at the spoils of Bush family loyalty, and meditate on the human costs that made Sembler's paradise possible.

STRAIGHT's practices

Melvin Sembler's Jekyll-and-Hyde empire appealed to parents with cheery pamphlets bearing pictures of happy and reunited families that had put their horrible pasts behind them.

Even Princess Diana had graced the clinics with a visit, celebrating STRAIGHT as a humanitarian institution. George H.W. Bush named the program among his "thousand points of light." But many called it Hell.

Taking in new kids without much discrimination -- many addiction-free -- STRAIGHT staff assured parents that a variety of troubled teens could benefit from their brand of discipline.

Vanished from home and school, the newcomer would enter the care of a "host home" overseen, at night, by the same counselors up in her face by day. Over the months, patients like Samantha Monroe earned back basic privileges like speaking or, in the distant future, going to the bathroom alone, without an ever-present minder's thumb in the belt loop -- literally. The counselors were themselves STRAIGHT kids, who had been molded into drug warriors in the heat of humiliation. They'd learned to play along and join the winning side, becoming the hall monitors and the muscle that enforced the rules.

From the outset, STRAIGHT's method was on thin ice with regulators. The underpinnings had long struck critics as more Pyongyang than Pinellas County. Sembler took his blueprint from another St. Petersburg program, The Seed, in which his son had enrolled in the 1970s. The Senate was less impressed than Sembler with The Seed. Senator Sam Ervin, who'd brought down Richard Nixon, killed the program's federal subsidies for funding a method "similar to the highly refined 'brainwashing' techniques employed by the North Koreans." Ervin's 1974 probe into the rise of treatment abuse articulated an admirable American ideal: that "if our society is to remain free, one man must not be empowered to change another's personality and dictate the values, thoughts and feelings of another." Sembler had other ideals in mind, as hundreds of STRAIGHT victims would later attest.

Finally, one by one, the 12 clinics, which had once formed a nine-state empire, went dark. Much of the money was lost in settlements, but jury verdicts offered a peek into the regularity of the abuses. Florida patient Karen Norton was awarded $721,000 by a jury after being thrown against a wall in 1982 by the Semblers' treatment guru of choice: Dr. Miller Newton, whose unaccredited Ph.D was in public administration, but was tapped by the Semblers as STRAIGHT National Clinical Director. He's emblematic of how the creature Sembler built just won't stop sprouting heads, having personally launched spinoff businesses with names like KIDS. As a result, Newton has paid out over $12 million to his victims. Having moved back to Florida, he now calls himself "Friar Cassian," a priest in the non-Catholic Antiochian Orthodox church.

But just last month, Betty Sembler testified in a case against a STRAIGHT critic that Miller Newton, the dark cleric of rehab, is "a very close and dear friend and a valued one," and an "outstanding individual." Had he committed outrageous acts? "Absolutely not," she said, adding that it was incomprehensible that ex-STRAIGHT teen Richard Bradbury was picketing Newton. Thanks to her judgment of character, Newton has been given a voice in national drug policy, listed as a participant in a Drug Free America Foundation "International Scientific and Medical Forum."

From the beginning, critics were shocked to find that the keepers freely acknowledged many of the tactics -- yet insisted they were necessary. Mel Sembler even seems to have been emboldened by painful questions about his clinics. "We've got nothing to hide -- we're saving lives," he said in 1977 after six directors quit over practices that included kicking a restrained youth. He remained closely involved in personnel management. Almost two decades later, recalling how the ACLU was furious about STRAIGHT's practices, Sembler told Florida Trend Magazine in 1997 -- "with a grin," the reporter wrote -- that "it just shows that we must have been doing things right."

And rather than clean up Florida's program, he apparently leaned on health inspectors in 1989 to go easy on it. Reports of a cover-up wouldn't emerge for four more years -- long years, for the teenagers committed to a program that wouldn't lose its license until 1993. STRAIGHT foe Bradbury, believing he'd been "brainwashed" into becoming an abusive counselor, brought the clinics to the attention of the state after years of protest. Inspector Lowell Clary of the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services found that reports of illegally restrained and stomped-on teens had been swept under the rug, likely with help from Republican state senators, who went unnamed, but made phone calls urging the clinic stayed open. A "persistent foul odor" hung over this use of power, said a St. Petersburg Times Op-Ed applauding the death of STRAIGHT.

"While at the facility," wrote Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services Acting Inspector General Lowell Clary on May 19, 1993, "the team [of inspectors in 1989] received a phone call informing them that no matter what they found, STRAIGHT would receive their license." "If you do anything other than what I tell you on this issue, I will fire you on the spot," an HRS official was told. Clary wasn't positive, but evidence suggested that "pressure may have been generated by Ambassador Sembler and other state senators."

By now, Clinton was in office. Four years earlier, while young "druggies" were still being restrained to chairs for 12 hours, denied medication and sent to the hospital with injuries, the 1989 report would have tarnished President George H.W. Bush's "points of light." Bush had designated STRAIGHT an American treasure. On that fragile premise, not one but two STRAIGHT presidents had been named ambassadors in 1989, the year of the Florida inspection. Sembler got the Australian assignment. The other post sent co-founder Joseph Zappala to Spain armed for diplomacy with a high school education. The two were mocked in People as "too hick to hack it." They'd clowned around during the nomination process, turning in nearly identical answers on Senate disclosure forms. In the "languages spoken" box Sembler had written, humorously, "English (fluent)."

That took real cheek. These two pranksters had been leaders of a group characterized as a destructive cult by top authorities on cult abuse ranging from Steve Hassan of the Freedom Of Mind Center to the late Dr. Margaret Singer of UC Berkeley, an expert on the abuse of American servicemen in the Korean War whose expert testimony was used to close a facility in Cincinnati. Bradbury, the whistleblower, concurs, saying the program modified his personality into something monstrous. Bradbury attended the St. Petersburg, Florida clinic. "You don't understand what they did to these kids," Bradbury told AlterNet. "They put stuff up my butt."

But you wouldn't know from Sembler's State Department biography that his claim to fame has such a shoddy legal record. The program has the honor of being described as a "remarkable program" in his bio, and it credits STRAIGHT with saving 12,000 kids. The ambassador did not return attempts to contact him during the reporting for this story, and declined the author's interview requests last year through a U.S. Embassy spokesman.

In addition to receiving a second Ambassadorship from the second Bush president, his Governor Jeb Bush named August 8, 2000, "Betty Sembler Day" for her "work protecting children from the dangers of drugs," labeling her "ambassadorable." The next year, at a drug policy conference in Florida, a writer from the Canadian legalization magazine Cannibis Culture asked her about the STRAIGHT victims. "They should get a life," he quotes her as replying. "There's nothing to apologize for. The [drug] legalizers are the ones who should be apologizing."

The ambassador's wife is an outspoken critic of what she calls "medical excuse marijuana," and serves on the boards of such mighty anti-legalization campaigns as the International Task Force On Strategic Drug Policy, which works with Latin American countries to lobby for harsh drug laws. Mel himself used his Rome ambassadorial pulpit for a global conference in 2003, appealing to the "moral imperatives" of the drug war and urging a "culture of disapproval of drug abuse." DFAF, founded by the Semblers, receives hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants from the Small Business Association to advance workplace drug testing in businesses -- for example, a handout in 2000 of $314,000. Betty Sembler is president and Melvin has served as chairman.

STRAIGHT's Spin-offs

Though Sembler's clinics were shuttered, the spirit of STRAIGHT lives on as a flourishing model for drug rehabilitation. That includes offshoots run by former STRAIGHT staff, such as the Orlando STRAIGHT spin-off, SAFE, which was described by 16-year-old Leah Marchessault in 2000 as "something from the Twilight Zone" in a report by Florida's WAMI TV station.

Leah had gone to visit her sister, in for heroin abuse, only to be told she herself was a "druggie" -- sound familiar? And when Leah fled, she was pinned against a wall and assaulted by a pack of nine women members who forced her to undergo a full-body search. Another girl told WAMI of being "forced to stand for about an hour and a half, the attention being focused on me, and about every 10 minutes I was told how I was full of crap, how I needed to be flushed out."

Despite their cheery names -- SAFE in Orlando, Florida; Kids Helping Kids of Cincinnati, Ohio; Growing Together of Lake Worth, Florida -- these barely regulated warehouses cry out for oversight. Hungry for recruits, they appeal to the fears of parents by warning a child will die on the streets if uncorrected by their methods.

In the TV report, the presence of a spokeswoman named Loretta Parrish was evidence that SAFE was the child of STRAIGHT -- she'd been the local STRAIGHT's marketing director until 1992, when the old company closed under state scrutiny, and SAFE, a new company, almost immediately sprang up to replace it. A new head for the hydra: Parrish didn't dispute the visiting sister's horrifying experience, but called it necessary, as if explaining something something obvious to her since the '80s.

"Yes we do require that," said Parrish. "And if they don't, then they have to remove the other child. This is a family treatment program. And unless the entire family is in treatment, it doesn't work."

"We do not do a strip search that is different from any other treatment program," she adds, and later described the teens and moms attacking SAFE as "a coalition of cockroaches." Gov. Jeb Bush even endorsed SAFE in a letter he wrote as "a valuable tool."

And so with the former STRAIGHT bosses rich in Republican honors, and insulated in a political Xanadu not unlike the alternate reality field engulfing the White House, a new generation of teenagers is going under the hammer, as an old generation of victims finds cold comfort for their own suffering. If this is the compassionate kind of conservatism, how harsh the other variety must be.

John Gorenfeld, a freelance writer in San Francisco, will be blogging further details of this story at gorenfeld.net/john.

US: Students protest juvenile’s death in Florida ‘boot camp’
By Jeff Lincoln
25 April 2006
wsws.org

On April 21, thousands of students and other young people from around Florida descended on the state capitol building to protest the death of Martin Lee Anderson, a 14-year-old African-American boy who died in a Florida Boot camp one day after being beaten and choked by guards. The march on the capitol was the culmination of weeklong protests that included an overnight sit-in outside Florida Governor Jeb Bush's office.

The protesters chanted, ‘Justice delayed is justice denied’ and carried pictures of Anderson in his funeral casket with captions that read, ‘'This is what democracy looks like.’

Martin Lee Anderson was sent to a boot camp in the Florida panhandle after he was caught joyriding in his grandmother's car and then violated the terms of his probation. This boot camp was run by the Bay County sheriff's office and operated under contract with Florida's Department of Juvenile Justice. A January 11 article in the Miami Herald reports that the DJJ operates about six such camps throughout the state of Florida, all run by county sheriffs' offices.

The events surrounding Martin Anderson's death give a glimpse into what occurs in these 'correctional' facilities. A mere three hours after being admitted into the Bay City boot camp, Anderson was 'disciplined' after he became exhausted during an orientation drill and stopped running. He was not even at the facility long enough to eat lunch before being subjected to a merciless beating that was caught on the camp's security cameras. The footage, which received widespread publicity, shows numerous guards'up to eight at one point'punching Anderson with closed fists, applying wristlocks and other holds, and kicking or kneeing him repeatedly. The tape shows that this continued for a period of over 40 minutes. Anderson appears limp throughout the tape.

After Anderson complained of breathing difficulties, he collapsed and was taken to a hospital where he died the next day.

Outrage over the event only increased after the initial autopsy results were made public. Dr. Charles Siebert, the Bay County medical examiner, performed the first autopsy on Martin Anderson and concluded that the death occurred by natural causes related to a sickle cell trait, a usually benign blood disorder. This seemingly absurd conclusion prompted accusations of a cover-up.

A second autopsy, performed by Dr. Michael Baden at the request of the Anderson family, concluded that Martin Anderson likely asphyxiated, pointing to a section of the videotape where it appears that the guard's hands were covering Anderson's mouth and his nose was blocked by ammonia.

The death of Martin Anderson is not an isolated occurrence. There have been 35 deaths in boot camps since 1983 in addition to thousands of injuries inflicted by guards, ranging from broken bones to heat exhaustion.

As the WSWS reported in July 2001, 'Juvenile boot camps first came into existence in the mid-1980s, during the Reagan years, when officials in Georgia and Louisiana experimented with placing teenage boys in military-type settings. The practice caught on with politicians anxious to appear 'tough on crime.''

These camps, designed to 'break the spirit' of troubled teens so that they return home a 'good soldier,' are symptomatic of the growing brutalization and militarization of American society.

An article by the Miami Herald (April 2, 2006) discloses the contents of a Florida Department of Juvenile Justice report documenting use-of-force incidents at the Panama City boot camp where Anderson died. Since January 2003, force was used against juveniles 180 times; only eight of these instances were for hitting guards, fighting or trying to escape. In fact, the article states that 'the overwhelming majority of the youths were subjected to takedowns, hammer-fist blows and knee strikes for: being unwilling or unable to perform rigorous exercises, exercising without sufficient 'motivation,' being 'insolent' with guards, speaking without permission, breathing heavily, or 'tensing' themselves.' The article also states that 'on Christmas Day 2004, one boy was disciplined for smiling.'

The Miami Herald has also documented the ineffectiveness of such programs. In a January 11, 2006 article, the Herald exposes the track record of the boot camps, stating that 'DJJ's records show about 62 percent of the youth who graduate from one of the state's boot camps are arrested again for some type of offense'a recidivism rate experts call very high.' On January 29, 2006, the Washington Post cited a 2004 statement by the National Institutes of Health that concludes boot camp programs 'do not work and there is some evidence that they may make the problem worse. Indeed, some young people leave these programs with post-traumatic stress disorder and exacerbations of their original problems.'

With the attention that the Anderson tragedy has brought to Florida's juvenile justice system, there have been calls from legislators to shut down all of the state's remaining boot camp facilities. Governor Jeb Bush has so far refused to do so, stating on April 20 that the boot camp programs have 'yielded a good result.' The next day, Bush's juvenile justice secretary, Anthony Schembri, confirmed the administration's position, saying about the five remaining boot camps, 'I think the remainder are good options that we can use for certain kids.'

The reaction among layers of students and workers has been one of outrage. Protests began Wednesday morning when a group of students took over the foyer of Governor Jeb Bush's office demanding a meeting with the governor, who was on a trip in the Middle East at the time. The students, who came from Florida State University, Florida A&M University and Tallahassee Community College, refused to meet with the lieutenant governor and instead stayed overnight at the governor's office. They advanced a list of demands that included revoking the license of the medical examiner that performed the first autopsy, arresting the guards caught on the tape beating Anderson, and giving an apology to Anderson's family.

Governor Bush refused the student's demands, saying that 'the list of demands were [sic] asking for things that I don't have the constitutional power to carry out.' This excuse stands in stark contrast to the actions taken by Jeb Bush during the Terri Schiavo incident. In that case, he showed no hesitancy in intervening to authorize the resumption of life-support measures, including inserting a feeding tube into Terri Schiavo's body; violating such constitutional principles such as the separation of church and state, separation of powers and Terri's due process rights. One fundamental difference here is that the death of Anderson, who came from a black working class family, is not being promoted by the religious right as a so-called 'pro-life' issue.

The student sit-in continued throughout the day on Thursday, with many students skipping final exams to stay at the governor's office. On Friday, thousands showed up for a student-organized march from the civic center to the capitol building. The march came just a few hours after the resignation of Florida Department of Law Enforcement Commissioner Guy Tunnell following revelations by the Miami Herald that he had compared Illinois Senator Barack Obama to Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and Jesse Jackson to the outlaw Jesse James at a department head meeting. Tunnell was the former Bay County Sheriff and had started the boot camp where Anderson died in. He was in charge of investigating the death until Governor Bush appointed a special prosecutor to replace him.

The protesters assembled on the steps of the capitol building, demanding that the results of the second autopsy be released, and shouted,"we'll be back if you don't act."

Legislature set to dismantle juvenile boot camps
By Dara Kam
Palm Beach Post Capital Bureau
Wednesday, April 26, 2006

TALLAHASSEE — Nearly four months after a Panhandle teen died after a beating by boot camp guards that was videotaped, lawmakers agreed Tuesday to do away with the military-style detention facilities altogether.

"Boot camps for juveniles are going to be deleted from the state of Florida and they are not going to exist in the state of Florida," Sen. Rod Smith, D-Alachua, said during budget negotiations between the House and Senate Tuesday evening. "They are going to be replaced with programs that we have more confidence in and programs that we think will result in success for our juveniles."

The boot camps will be replaced with Sheriffs Training and Respect facilities, based largely on the acclaimed Martin County Juvenile Offender Training Center, that focus on self-esteem and after-care and prohibit physical interaction of any kind between guards and detainees. Guards at the revamped camps will also be prohibited from using psychological intimidation on the youths.

The act doing away with the boot camps, at which at least seven youths have died in the past six years, is named after Martin Lee Anderson, a 14-year-old honor student who died after being beaten by Bay County Sheriff's Boot Camp guards on Jan. 5, the day he entered the facility.

No one has been charged in the case, and the sheriff's office has said the guards were trying to get Anderson to participate after he became uncooperative in doing exercises that were part of his admission to the camp. He was placed there for taking his grandmother's car on a joy ride.

The Panama City camp has since closed.

Rep. Gus Barreiro, chairman of the House Criminal Justice Appropriations Committee, has spearheaded efforts to close the camps.

On Tuesday, Senate budget negotiators agreed with Barreiro, allocating $10.5 million to convert the current camps to the new system.

That's about $500,000 more than lawmakers spent on seven boot camps last year, but the money will now be divided among four STAR camps. Although Martin County Sheriff Robert Crowder has said he plans to close his camp this year and not reopen it because the legislature's proposed funding is inadequate, Barreiro, R-Miami Beach, said he has promised Crowder he would get Martin County enough money to reopen its camp as one of the STAR camps.

Youths entering the camps will now be told of their right to outside counsel, given abuse hot line telephone numbers and undergo physical exams that will also be performed when they exit the facilities.

"So we will know when you leave you were in the same shape you were in," Smith said. "In the end, today is the beginning of a new day in the sense of juvenile boot camps in Florida. They will not exist."

Barreiro said Tuesday that other sheriffs who operate boot camps in Florida were "alarmed at what happened at the Bay County boot camp."

"They understood that changes had to occur," he said.

In response to Anderson's death, college students last week staged a 33-hour sit-in outside Gov. Jeb Bush's office and 2,000 supporters marched on the Capitol Friday for a rally featuring Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, who demanded the release of a second autopsy report.

The first autopsy by Bay County Medical Examiner Charles Seibert ruled that Anderson died of "natural causes" due to complications associated with sickle cell anemia trait.

Bush appointed Hillsborough County State Attorney Mark Ober to take over the case, and Ober ordered a second autopsy by the Hillsborough County medical examiner. A third medical examiner hired by Anderson's family observed that autopsy and said the teen died of asphyxiation.

Barreiro said that he expects the second autopsy results to be released within two weeks, and that Ober's investigation should be completed sometime shortly after that.

Department of Juvenile Justice chief of staff Christian Caballero told lawmakers on Tuesday that the agency welcomes the changes.

"I do think we can make this better. We have to make this better. Kids' lives are on the line," he said

Gov. Bush opens largest faith-based prison
By Mark Hollis
Tallahassee Bureau
November 24 2005
Sun-Sentinel

CRAWFORDVILLE · Just beyond the razor-wire front gates of Wakulla Correctional Institution, a dozen inmates stood outside a chapel Wednesday morning, playing electric guitars and singing aloud about how they would "rather have Jesus than silver and gold."


Minutes later, Gov. Jeb Bush arrived to dedicate what's being called the nation's largest faith- and character-based prison.

With a large contingent of reporters and state officials watching, Bush told several dozen of the prison's 1,600 inmates that the spiritual training it offers may be the secret to keeping them from returning to prison.

Besides regular prayer sessions, Wakulla is offering religious studies, choir practice, "life skills" and anger-management lessons and other spiritual activities seven days a week.

Wakulla is an all-male prison in a barren spot 20 minutes south of Tallahassee. But it's about to gain national fame as it becomes the third and biggest state prison in Florida to convert entirely to the voluntary faith-based program -- a unique inmate training that the state first began to offer two years ago in anticipation of a lawsuit forcing the issue.

Altogether, more than 3,000 inmates are participating statewide, including almost 300 women at a Tampa-area prison.

Bush, a devout Catholic who has defiantly rejected civil libertarians' criticism of the state's faith-based programs, told the inmates how daily prayer has improved his life. He said he shares their belief in the power of faith.

"My expectation is that you'll be better behaved here, but also better prepared when you get out of here to live a productive life," Bush said.

Most of the volunteers who minister to and teach the inmates come from nearby Christian and evangelical churches, but efforts are made to bring in spiritual leaders of many faiths.

"It's just so difficult to get volunteers of faiths other than Christianity to come here," said Marilyn Nase, a volunteer from a nearby Baptist church in Tallahassee.

Officials say the program aims to serve inmates of all faiths, even those of no faith whatsoever.

Some inmates sing its praises.

"It's a very important initiative. It has the potential to change lives, to change families, and to change entire communities," said Thomas Siebert.

Siebert, 51, said the classes he has attended in prison have helped him develop a "relationship with God" that he considers the reason why he won't return to prison a third time after his expected release in a few months. He is a former newspaper writer and editor from Coral Springs, where he worked at area news organizations, including the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

Siebert went to prison the first time, he said, in 1993, after he left the Sun-Sentinel, and then again in 2001 -- both times because of drug possession charges related to a cocaine habit.

"I could have come to a prison where it's just a matter of survival," he said.

"I don't want to minimize it, there are risks and dangers at this prison, too. But you can come here and grow in God's grace and knowledge."

Opponents predict faith-based programming like what is offered here will someday face major constitutional challenges.

Bush told reporters he is pleased to see the faith-based program expand in the state, although he acknowledges that there is only anecdotal evidence that it's having an effect on reducing inmates' rate of returning to crime.

"I would urge the governor not to get too comfortable with that stance just yet," said Robert Boston, a spokesman for Americans United for Separation of Church and State. "Of course, they [officials] are going to pretend they are abiding by the Constitution," Boston said.

"But how is it running on the ground? Is it state promotion of religion? Are inmates treated unequally because of their religions? These are questions yet unanswered."

Fla. Gets Nation's 1st Faith-Based Prison
December 26, 2003
By: Brendan Farrington
Associated Press

LAWTEY, Fla. - Nearly 800 inmates from 26 faiths attended the dedication ceremony of what Gov. Jeb Bush called the nation's first faith-based prison a facility focused on encouraging the spirituality of inmates of all faiths.

Along with regular prayer sessions, the Lawtey Correctional Institution will offer religious studies, choir practice, religious counseling and other spiritual activities seven days a week. Participation is voluntary and inmates are free to transfer out.

"This is not just fluffy policy, this is serious policy," Bush told the crowd on Wednesday. "For the people who are skeptical about this initiative, I am proud that Florida is the home to the first faith-based prison in the United States."

Marlin Cliburn, inmate No. 575042, recently transferred to Lawtey, where he is serving 6 1/2 years for aggravated assault, auto theft and fleeing officers. "My life was headed down the wrong road," said Cliburn, a Baptist. "I've kind of seen the light. I've been screwing up my whole life. I see this as a turning point in my life."

Other prisons and programs have used religious thinking to try to turn inmates away from crime. The Prison Fellowship Ministries runs its Christ-centered InnerChange Freedom Initiative in prisons in Minnesota, Kansas, Iowa and Texas.

The idea of promoting God behind bars has a long history. From 1829 to 1913, for instance, the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia used a Quaker-inspired system in which prisoners were isolated from each other and made to perform labor in hopes of encouraging spiritual reflection and change.

Inmates at the Lawtey prison in north Florida were told more than a month ago that it would be completely converted to a faith- based institution, prompting 111 to transfer out. But their beds were quickly filled with volunteers from other prisons.

"We've developed a cocoon, a place where they can practice their faith and not have the severe negative pressures and interactions that naturally take place in some of our institutions," said Correction Secretary James Crosby Jr.

Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (news - web sites) of Florida, called the prison part of "a major constitutional showdown" over government funding for religious programs.

The ACLU is weighing the possibility of filing a lawsuit, waiting for the results of a test case challenging a state voucher program that gives students taxpayer money to attend religious schools.

But officials hope the program will lead to fewer repeat offenders.

The governor said about 38 percent of Florida's released inmates will be back in prison at some point.

"Wouldn't it be nice if we could figure out a way to lower that 38 percent closer to zero percent, for your family and your community?" Bush asked to rousing applause Wednesday.

During the dedication ceremony, many prisoners jumped to their feet and clapped in rhythm as a gospel singer sang "His Eye Is on the Sparrow." Some shouted "Sing it!" and "Amen!"

14-year-old dies in Arizona, latest casualty of "boot camps"
By David Walsh
6 July 2001
wsws.org

The death of a 14-year-old boy at a private ?boot camp? for troubled youngsters in Arizona has once again cast light on the horrific conditions at such youth facilities, both private and state-operated, in the US. According to a story in the Arizona Republic, the boy died after vomiting dirt in the desert. Officials at the America?s Buffalo Soldiers Re-enactors Association camp near Buckeye, Arizona told the youth?s mother, Melanie Hudson, that her son had eaten dirt and refused to drink water. The boy was in the first week of a five-week program.

The stated aim of the Buckeye boot camp and similar facilities around the US is to provide ?tough love,? on the theory that previous forms of treatment, that supposedly coddled youngsters, have failed. The camps, organized on a regimented, paramilitary basis, make the claim that through various forms of intimidation they can instill self-discipline, self-confidence and self-esteem.

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio told the press he was treating the death as suspicious and was awaiting the results of an autopsy. Noting that, ?There have been some serious allegations of abuse at that boot camp,? Arpaio shut down the camp on Monday, returning about 50 children to their parents. Former drill instructors at the camp have said that youths were regularly subjected to corporal punishment and forced to swallow mud.

Bill Lanford, chief of the Buckeye Valley Fire District, told reporters that when paramedics arrived at the camp Sunday, camp counselors were telling children, some of whom were crying, to lie down on concrete slabs. ?It was very disturbing,? he commented. ?We were working ... and the counselors were more interested in disciplining the kids and telling them to lie down.?

The regimen at the camp included forced marches, black uniforms, ?in-your-face? discipline and a daily diet limited to an apple, a carrot and a bowl of beans for the day. The inmates slept outdoors in sleeping bags on concrete slabs.

Allegations of abuse were leveled against the same group a year ago when they operated a camp on the Fort Apache Reservation, also in Arizona. In July 2000, some of the young people claimed they had been kicked, choked and subjected to other cruelties by drill instructors. Fort Apache officials clamped down on the camp operators and the latter moved their operation to Buckeye. A spokesman for the FBI reported that the agency had sent a report on the allegations to the US Attorney?s Office, which had declined to pursue either a criminal case or possible civil rights violations.

Police are investigating the operator of the Buckeye camp, Charles ?Chuck? Long. It was revealed July 5 that this individual, responsible for the care of troubled kids, had been arrested twice for domestic violence and had lied about his academic credentials.

The dead boy had been sent by his parents to the camp after a number of minor scrapes with the law. He had just completed probation in May for shoplifting, had slashed his mother?s tires and was seeing a therapist for anger management and depression. His father, Gettis Haynes, Jr. of Hannibal, Missouri, told the Associated Press he blamed himself for his son?s death. ?I thought it would be better than jail. But jail would have been a better place for my baby. At least there he?d still be alive.?

Juvenile boot camps first came into existence in the mid-1980s, during the Reagan years, when officials in Georgia and Louisiana experimented with placing teenage boys in military-type settings. The practice caught on with politicians anxious to appear ?tough on crime.?

According to an article by Bruce Selcraig in Mother Jones magazine (December 2000), ?in state after state, public officials have ignored persuasive evidence that most boot camps don?t work. A growing body of research, from private studies to federal investigations, has shown the camps rarely reduce recidivism or save the fortunes their promoters promise, and often permit horrific abuses of kids by underpaid and undertrained staff. ... The National Mental Health Association concluded that ?employing tactics of intimidation and humiliation is counterproductive for most youth? and has led to ?disturbing incidents? of abuse. In Georgia, US Justice Department investigators found kids being forced to crawl on their hands and knees to lunch, clean floors with their T-shirts and run in summer while carrying tires. ?The paramilitary model is not only ineffective, but harmful,? the investigation concluded.?

Accounts of abuse in both private and state-operated camps are widespread.

At the Arizona Boys Ranch, Nicholaus Contreraz, 16, was forced to sleep in soiled underwear, eat meals on the toilet and carry a yellow trash basket filled with his own vomit. He collapsed and died on March 2, 1998. The Boys Ranch had provoked nearly 100 complaints in the previous five years.

In July 1999, 14-year-old Gina Score died in a South Dakota government boot camp for girls after a forced run of several miles. The conditions at the state?s facilities prompted a letter to Governor William Janklow, a staunch defender of boot camps, from Michael Bochenek of the Children?s Rights division of Human Rights Watch. After detailing some of the barbaric practices of the state juvenile facilities (physical restraint, solitary confinement, routine strip-searches of girls by male guards, indeterminate sentencing of youth), Bochenek concluded: ?The serious charges brought by South Dakota?s detained youth amount to a stunning indictment of the state?s juvenile detention system.?

A highly publicized boot camp in Burke County, North Carolina, operated by a former US marine, was closed in June 2000 after social workers substantiated an allegation that a camper was handcuffed for three days and officials determined that the facility was providing foster care without a license.

The camp received nationwide attention thanks to more than ten appearances on the Jenny Jones television talk-show by its founder, former marine Raymond Moses. Kids from as far away as California were sent to the camp. The youngsters slept outside in two-person tents surrounded by a chain-link fence. The girls had bathrooms, but the boys did not. The camp had no license and was subject to no government oversight.

Some children in the summer program now say they were punched, kicked and forced to eat dirt for minor infractions such as failing to stand up straight.
Children’s Gulag

Boot camp director guilty in teen's death
By Michael Kiefer
The Arizona Republic
January 3, 2005

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Charles Long, founder of a summer desert survival camp near Buckeye, was found guilty of reckless manslaughter today in the 2001 death of a 14-year-old camp participant. The jury, which began deliberations on Dec. 14, also convicted him of aggravated assault for threatening another camper with a knife; they were hung on eight counts of child abuse.

“This is wrong,’’ said Carmelina Long, after her husband’s conviction. “They've put an innocent man in jail… All he ever did was dedicate his life to working with kids… He will be vindicated. He's a good man, a soldier for the Lord.''

Each count stems from a different child attending the camp operated by Long’s Buffalo Soldiers Re-Enactors Association. The most serious charge arose from the July 2001 death of Anthony Haynes.

Haynes, who attended the camp, was sitting in a disciplinary line in the July heat when he began acting erratically, eating dirt and possibly hallucinating. A counselor and several youths took him to a hotel and placed him, unconscious, in a shower bath, where he inhaled water.

Then rather than call for medical help, they took him back to the camp, where he died.

Haynes mother, Melanie Hudson, said she was pleased with the jury’s decision. “…What they did is a difficult thing to do. It won’t bring Tony back.” But she added that she was, “thankful this nightmare is over.”

Jurors struggled to reach a decision on Count 1, the homicide charge, among options ranging from second-degree murder to negligence. They settled on reckless manslaughter.

Myrna Lee, the only panelist to speak with a reporter, said: "There was never any doubt as to the guilt on Count 1, it was the level of guilt."

Long, 59, was accused of telling the counselors to bring Haynes back to the camp rather than taking him to a hospital when he wasn’t responding.

Long maintained the allegations against him were false.

The trial began Oct. 6 before Judge Ronald S. Reinstein of Maricopa County Superior Court and lasted through early December.

Former Maricopa County Chief Medical Examiner Philip Keen testified during the trial that Haynes might have been saved if camp counselors had sought medical attention. But he stopped short of saying that counselors should recognize the symptoms, and ruled the death an accident.

Haynes died of complications from near-drowning and dehydration, Keen said. He also told jurors that one of tje boy's sinus cavities was full of fluid -- symptomatic of drowning -- and his lungs were so full that they were twice their normal weight. Also, his electrolyte levels showed that he had become severely dehydrated over the last hours of his life, he said.

"He probably needs water more than he needs medical attention," Keen said.

However, on questioning from Deputy County Attorney Mark Barry, Keen would not pinpoint a time when Long and his associates should have called for help.

"When he's not responding, we need to do something for him," Keen said.

Among key witnesses who helped painted the pictire of what happened at the camp was Troy Hutty, an adult who attended the tough-love boot camp. Hutty pleaded guilty to negligent homicide in Haynes' death, and was promised a sentence of probation if he testified in Long's trial.

But Hutty, 32, had difficulty remembering many details, and in his testy responses to the prosecutor's questions, reinforced the defense's argument that Long was not with Haynes as he was dying nor when other allegations of abuse took place.

Hutty flew to Phoenix from his home in Pennsylvania to testify. During his testimony, he said that he and his two children attended Long's camp as a vacation and so that his children could learn about Buffalo Soldiers, African-Americans who fought in military campaigns against Mexicans and Native Americans in the late 19th century West. Long's association re-enacts those battles.

Many of the other children, who ranged in age from 7 to 18, had been in trouble with the law or with their families.

Anthony Haynes was an overweight boy taking medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. On July 1, 2001, Hutty said, Haynes began acting erratic while sitting in the sun in a "drop on request" or DOR line, because he wanted to leave the camp.

Hutty claimed that Haynes ate dirt and refused to drink or wash out his mouth with water.

Then Haynes ran around the campsite "screaming and making a bunch of crazy sounds" and doing what Hutty called "Three Stooges antics," striking others, hitting himself in the face and smearing dirt on himself.

When Haynes later appeared to go into convulsions, Hutty claimed he went to put a pen in the child's mouth to keep him from swallowing his tongue.

"He cracked a smile as if he was just playing around," Hutty told the court.

According to Hutty, Long then told Hutty to take Haynes and four other boys to a nearby hotel to shower. They carried Haynes to a pickup truck and placed him in the bed, then carried him up to the room. He was now unresponsive and started vomiting dirt and stones in the room. Hutty and the boys undressed him and placed him in the shower.

When Hutty checked on him, the shower drain had clogged with the vomit, though he claimed that Haynes' face was above water. Then he said he used his foot to put pressure on the boy's stomach to force out more dirt and stones.

He called Long, who told him to bring the boy back to camp.

When he got there, Haynes' pupils were dilated, and Hutty and Long began performing CPR, but Haynes died.

N.Y. report denounces shock use at school
Says students are living in fear
By Scott Allen
Globe Staff
boston.com
June 15, 2006

New York education officials issued a scathing report yesterday on a Massachusetts school that punishes troubled and disabled students with electric shocks, finding that they can be shocked for simply nagging the teacher and that some are forced to wear shock devices in the bathtub or shower, posing an electrocution hazard.

The report, based in part on an inspection last month of the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center in Canton, portrayed a school in which most staff lack training to handle the students and seem more focused on punishing bad behavior than encouraging good acts.

The investigators said some forms of discipline, such as a device that delivers shocks at timed intervals, appear to violate federal safety regulations, and students live in an atmosphere of ``pervasive fears and anxieties."

The report, denounced by Rotenberg officials as biased, is expected to play a key role next Monday when education regulators in New York are scheduled to vote on whether to severely restrict the use of painful punishment on students from New York.

Two-thirds of Rotenberg's students are sent from New York. The inspectors said they had notified officials in Massachusetts and at the US Food and Drug Administration about possible violations of state and federal safety rules.
Read the report on the Rotenberg Center

There have been increasing allegations of abuse at the Rotenberg Center in recent months.

They include several assertions that students have been badly burned by the shock devices, known as graduated electronic decelerators. The Massachusetts Disabled Persons Protection Commission has received 22 allegations of abuse at the school since January, including 12 that involve injuries. Rotenberg officials have steadfastly denied the charges, but commission officials say that at least two have been substantiated.

Yesterday, a lawyer for the school, Michael Flammia, said the New York report grossly distorts what goes on at the school, which is often used as a place of last resort for students with autism, mental retardation, or behavioral problems. School districts in several states, including Massachusetts, refer students to Rotenberg after other methods to control their behavior, such as hospitalization or drugs, have failed.

The school has about 250 students, about half of whom wear electric shock devices that teachers can activate around the clock.

``These findings are completely false. They are the product of a biased review team sent by the New York State Education Department for the specific purpose of making derogatory findings" about the center, said Flammia, who denied that students are forced to wear shock devices in the shower.

He also said that New York officials are mistaken in asserting that the school is violating FDA or Massachusetts rules.

Flammia noted that New York inspectors had given the Judge Rotenberg Center high marks for safety last September, but he believes they turned against the school after the publicity surrounding a lawsuit filed this spring by the mother of a New York student.

Some parents of Rotenberg students rallied behind the school, as they have in the past, saying that most people don't understand how serious their children's problems are. The school, which costs states and school districts more than $200,000 a year per student, helps students who have failed everywhere else, they say, and turns to shocks and other punishments only if less painful methods fail.

``This school has saved my daughter's life," said Marcia Shear of Long Island, whose 13-year-old daughter, Samantha, used to punch herself in the head so often that she detached both retinas.

After she received a few high-level shocks, Shear said, the self-abuse stopped. ``I am livid at these people and pieces of garbage who think they know what they're doing. Let them come and sit with my child and go through what I've gone through for 11 years."

The 26-page New York report intensified a debate over the Judge Rotenberg Center's methods that has gone on for much of its 35 years. The latest controversy began in March, when Evelyn Nicholson of Freeport, N.Y., went public with a charge that her son, Antwone, had been mistreated at the school, where he was shocked 79 times over 1 1/2 years. She initially consented to the procedure to curb her son's aggressive behavior, but said she changed her mind after Antwone became increasingly desperate to get away.

``There's no education in what's happening here," said Ken Mollins , a lawyer representing the Nicholson family, which is suing New York for $10 million. ``The head of this institution calls this therapy. I think this is more like a domestic torture chamber."
Read the report on the Rotenberg Center

The New York inspectors found that more than two-thirds of the direct-care providers at the Rotenberg Center have completed only a high school education, which they said ``in many cases . . . is not sufficient to oversee the intensive treatment of children with challenging emotional and behavioral problems."

They also noted that only six of the 17 clinicians who oversee mental-health care at the school have a license in psychology.

The inspectors said the school appeared to violate FDA regulations in several ways, including a policy that allows the parents of students to administer shocks to students after only minimal training. The New York report also said that the school appears to violate Massachusetts regulations that allow painful punishments only for ``extraordinarily difficult or dangerous behavioral problems," noting that they witnessed one student who was threatened with a shock after sneezing in class. School officials said no shock had been given in this case.

Finally, the report raised concerns about students' nutrition because the Judge Rotenberg Center withholds food as a punishment. The report found that one New York student was in a program where he could be denied up to 25 percent of his normal food intake.

New York Deputy Education Commissioner Rebecca Cort said the report painted a much darker picture of the Rotenberg Center than last year's review, because the state took a more in-depth look, including a surprise inspection that showed the school's practices are a lot different from written treatment plans for students.

Rotenberg's Flammia said the school was never given a chance to review the report before it was made public and he said the school would demand a fair chance to respond. He warned that if New York students are denied access to the Rotenberg Center, the state could be sued by parents of children who hurt themselves as a result.

Supporters of a bill in the Massachusetts Legislature to ban the use of electric shocks on students said they hoped the New York report would give new momentum to their efforts to force the school to change its methods or close. A proposed ban was written into the state budget passed by the Senate, but the House of Representatives has not taken a position.

``It's troubling that it's necessary for New York officials to point out the violations of Massachusetts law taking place at this facility," said state Senator Brian Joyce, the Milton Democrat who has led the effort to ban electric shock.

Scott Allen can be reached at allen@globe.com.

© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.

Police Investigate Camp Cadet's Death
WTVJ-TV
1:54 p.m. EDT August 13, 2006
MIAMI - Investigators want to know how a 13-year-old cadet taking part in a military boot camp died at Oleta State Park. Authorities responding to the scene at 3 a.m. Saturday rushed the child to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

The child was camping with 33 other cadets from the Back to Basics Military Academy in Lauderhill as part of an orientation camping trip at the park.

The retreat provides team building skills, leadership development and physical fitness, said the school's principal, Lynda Brown.

A group called Juvenile Military Training and Leadership Corp., which is contracted through the school, led the retreat. The retreat was held in the park's youth camping area, and the students set up tents in woods near the beach.

The cadets trained with their drill instructors through the rugged trail and shoreline doing exercises such as push-ups and sit-ups, Brown said.

"They run along the beach, and on the last night they had competition on the beach," she said. "These are trained, certified drill sergeants (who) work with our children."

The school's principal said the boy woke up in the middle of the night and said he didn't feel well. He collapsed on the way to the restroom.

Police said the cause of death was undetermined pending a medical examiner's report. No additional information about the investigation has been released.

Boot camps under fire as teenager dies after expedition
Richard Luscombe in Fort Lauderdale
Monday August 14, 2006
The Guardian

Private boot camps in Florida for the children of wealthy parents who want them to attend "character-building" courses were under scrutiny at the weekend after a 13-year-old boy collapsed and died.
The unnamed teenager died hours after taking part in a relay race in a temperature of 34C during a camping expedition with 32 others from a privately run Christian military academy in Fort Lauderdale.

"He got up in the middle of the night and was incoherent, and then he passed out," said Major Ron Simpson of the North Miami police department, which has launched an investigation into the death at the Oleta River state park.

Private camps such as the Back to Basics Military Academy, which employs National Guard-certified drill instructors, are popular with parents looking to instil military-style discipline in their children.
Lynda Browne, the principal of the academy, said the children aged nine to 15 had been on a four-day orientation camp in preparation for today's first day of school.

"The children get the very best of care. Under no circumstances are our students brutalised, nor are they maligned verbally. They are treated with the utmost respect," she said.

She added that all of the children had been fed, watered and well cared for during various leadership exercises which, according to the Miami Herald, include marching in military fatigues.

A classmate of the dead boy, Joanna Miller, 12, was quoted as saying: "He was not eating and when he was supposed to drink water, he didn't want to."

The boy's mother told the principal that her son "wasn't the most physical, strong or athletic child".

An ambulance was called to the camp at 3am after the boy passed out in his tent, and he died later in hospital. A postmortem will take place today.

In January Martin Lee Anderson, 14, died of injuries sustained at a state boot camp when guards at the Bay County sheriff's department boot camp in Panama City beat him, an episode caught on video. The subsequent outcry led to the closure of Florida's five state-run facilities for juvenile offenders in June.

State-run boot camps gained popularity in Florida in the 1990s as alternatives to prison. Supporters point to low rates of repeat offences among graduates but critics say violence against inmates by guards was commonplace.

PLANTATION
Teen's camping death haunts mom. A grieving Plantation mother seeks answers after her 13-year-old son died abruptly while on a camping trip in North Miami.
BY ROBIN M. PEGUERO
Miami.com
rpeguero@MiamiHerald.com

Alex Cullinane was scared.

He had attended Plantation's Community Christian Academy since kindergarten, but after it closed this year, the 13-year-old would have to start anew. And his mother's school of choice, the Back to Basics Military Academy, stressed physical fitness. The history buff, who skipped the seventh grade last year and was supposed to start ninth grade today, was more brain than brawn.

''He likes to do what he's good at,'' said his mother, Dena Cullinane of Plantation.

And that wasn't athletics.

He left for the academy's four-day leadership training camp at Oleta River State Park in North Miami on Wednesday, and never came back.

He died after he awoke with a start at 3 a.m. Saturday, and authorities still don't know why. North Miami police are investigating.

''He wasn't in top shape, but he wasn't a sick child,'' Dena Cullinane said. ``He just wasn't into sports.''

Miami Herald news partner WFOR-CBS 4 quoted other kids at the camp saying Alex had refused to eat or drink.

''Dehydration left him to his death, and that's what I think,'' said Brandon Scott, 15, a squad leader at the camp.

Dena Cullinane said she spoke to camp staff Friday and they said Alex was fine. She had not spoken to him since Wednesday.

The 33 kids at the getaway had completed relays on the park's beach that Friday, said the school's principal and owner, Lynda Browne. They wore military fatigues, engaged in marches and exercised. Physical education had always been a vital component of the Christian, military-style school, she said.

''Kids miss that. We have brought back that side of school,'' Browne said. ``We don't brutalize, curse at, or traumatize children in any way.''

The school, at 5770 W. Oakland Park Blvd., Lauderhill, is heading into its second year. Cullinane said she worried about its military image, but she ultimately felt it was a good school led by good people. She still does.

''I trust them, and I'm not into blame,'' she said. ``Blame is not gonna bring Alex back.''

Browne contracted Fort Lauderdale-based Juvenile Military and Leadership Corp. to run the camping trip. A few of the drill sergeants are national guardsmen, she said.

Although the school often accepts children with behavioral and academic problems, Browne said it serves a diverse group of students.

''We felt a lot of our children needed a strong biblical base. They also needed a strong academic background,'' she said. ``Our teachers teach and our drill sergeants discipline.''

Alex did not need the discipline, according to his mother. He was a straight-A student, she said. The brown-haired, brown-eyed stocky kid won the Christian character award every year at his last school, and had an affinity for knickknacks relating to ancient Egypt. He was a spiritual intellectual, and physical acumen would have helped complete the trifecta, she said. ''He was wonderful, simple, sweet spirited,'' she said. 'He was loving, and always said `I love you.' ''

The academy's answering machine refers to the school as a ''military juvenile boot camp,'' but Browne backed away from the label Sunday afternoon.

''It's not a boot camp. We're Christians,'' she said.

For now, Cullinane awaits the autopsy report that might explain how her child, whose physical examination found him a healthy teen, suddenly died in the middle of the night.

''It's not even going to matter,'' she said. ``Whatever it is, I know I just need to find peace in it.''

Their black cat, Sophie, looks for him. A slew of honors and awards litter his neatly made bed.

''It's a real loss for me,'' said Cullinane of her only child. ``He was my life.''

Miami Herald staff writers Tim Henderson and Diana Moskovitz contributed to this report.

CAMPER'S DEATH
Unlicensed academy closes doors after student death. The principal of a Lauderhill Christian military academy wouldn't discuss the future of her school after city officials found it lacked an occupational license.
By AMY SHERMAN AND TODD WRIGHT
Miami.com

A Christian military academy that has come under scrutiny after a student died shut down Tuesday after Lauderhill officials discovered that it was breaking the law.

Back to Basics Military Academy never applied for an occupational license to start a school inside the Living Word Community Church at 5770 W. Oakland Park Blvd.

''They can't operate,'' said Jim Notarianni, Lauderhill code enforcement supervisor, who gave the academy and the church a notice of violation Tuesday. ``They are done here.''

Principal Lynda Browne would not comment about the school's next steps -- shaking her head when a reporter asked if she wanted to let parents know where they should take their kids today.

''Oh boy. I tell you this is a big mess,'' said one parent who did not want her name used for fear of repercussions for her son who attends the school. ``I don't understand what they are doing.''

Losing its quarters is the latest crisis for the private school, which opened last year.

Early Saturday, a 13-year-old Plantation boy collapsed and died after a day of marching and exercising on a beach with 32 other students attending a school orientation at Oleta River State Park in North Miami.

Although the cause of death won't be known for several days, some students said Alex Cullinane hadn't been eating or drinking.

The school directors have come under scrutiny since Cullinane's death.

In 1991, the state ordered Reginald Browne -- now an academy director and husband of principal Lynda Browne -- to stop referring to himself as a psychologist since he wasn't licensed in Florida.

In 1995, Reginald Browne was fired amid allegations of financial mismanagement from his job as CEO of Family Life Institute for Counseling, Education and Research, an agency that counseled at-risk youths.

GROUP HOME

His wife and son, Reginald Browne Jr., also worked at the institute, which ran a group home in Lauderhill.

Broward County and the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice revoked grants to the institute after investigations concluded that money had been misused.

On Monday, Reginald Browne tried to distance the academy from a subcontractor, Juvenile Military Training and Leadership Corp., which, he said, ran the outdoor camp.

State business records show a Juvenile Military Boot Camp Inc. with the same address as the Brownes' home in Plantation Gardens.

But there was something about the military-style Christian school that appealed to Dena Cullinane, Alex's mother.

School officials told her if a student wouldn't get out of bed in the morning, the academy would send a drill sergeant to the home. Students had to wear military uniforms and shave their heads.

Cullinane planned to have her only child, an ''A'' student, start there this week. But before, she wanted him to get a taste of what it would be like so she sent him to the four-day camp sponsored by the academy.

His father died of cancer when Alex was 1 year old.

''My whole life focused around him,'' she said, referring to her son. ``It's like a big hole. My faith is being tested everyday.''

Alex previously attended Plantation's Community Christian Academy, which closed.

The school referred Alex to the military academy.

The for-profit school served 19 students in grades 5 through 10 last year, according to state education records. Most of the children receive vouchers for students with disabilities.

Cullinane, a massage therapist, chose the school because she thought it would help her son improve his physical fitness, but she said her ''husky'' son never took to the idea. Alex was gifted academically but not in athletics, she said.

CHRISTIAN VALUES

The Brownes stressed to Cullinane that the school's core goals were to promote Christian values. They told her a teacher and drill sergeant attended each class.

''I wanted to be there for him,'' Cullinane said. ``I have no regrets as a mother, just that I wish it was a little longer and that he wasn't taken from me.''

Cullinane said Monday she will cremate her son and had no plans for a funeral service.

Miami Herald staff writers Matthew I. Pinzur and Carol Marbin Miller contributed to this article.

Romney, Torture, and Teens

The former governor's connections to abusive "tough love" camps.
Maia Szalavitz | June 27, 2007

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.

According to the L.A. Times, California investigators said that at Straight teens were “subjected to unusual punishment, infliction of pain, humiliation, intimidation, ridicule, coercion, threats, mental abuse… and interference with daily living functions such as eating, sleeping and toileting.”

Through a spokesperson, Lichfield has dismissed the similar charges against WWASPS to The Hill as “ludicrous,” claiming that the teens who sued “have a long history of lying, fabricating and twisting the story around to their own benefit.”

Straight would use virtually identical language in its denials: In the 1990 L.A. Times article cited above, a Straight counselor downplayed the California investigators’ report by saying, “Some kids get very upset and lie and some parents believe them.” Both Straight and WWASPS have repeatedly called their teen participants “liars” and “manipulators” who oppose the programs because they want to continue taking drugs or engage in other bad behavior.

Curiously, however, both programs regularly admitted teens who did not actually have serious problems. In 1982, 18-year-old Fred Collins, a Virginia Tech student with excellent grades, went to visit his brother, who was in treatment for a drug problem at Straight in Orlando, Florida.

A counselor determined that he was high on marijuana because his eyes were red (this would later turn out to have been due to swimming in a pool with contacts on). He did admit to occasional marijuana use, but insisted he was not high at the time, nor was he an addict. Nonetheless, he was barraged with hours of humiliating questions, strip-searched, and held against his will for months until he managed to escape.

He won $220,000 in a lawsuit he filed against the program for false imprisonment, intentional infliction of emotional distress, assault, and battery. Ultimately, Straight would pay out millions in settlements before it finally closed. However, to this day, there are at least eight programs operating that use Straight’s methods, often in former Straight buildings operated by former Straight staff. They include: Alberta Adolescent Recovery Center (Canada), Pathway Family Center (Michigan, Indiana, Ohio), Growing Together (Florida), Possibilities Unlimited (Kentucky), SAFE (Florida), and Phoenix Institute for Adolescents (Georgia).

Sembler has never admitted to the problems with Straight's methods. In fact, when he recently served as Ambassador to Italy, he listed it among his accomplishments on his official State Department profile. Although all of the programs with the Straight name are closed, the nonprofit Straight Foundation that funded them still exists, though under a different name. It's now called the Drug Free America Foundation, and it lobbies for drug testing and in support of tougher policies in the war on drugs.

One of the plaintiffs in the current case against WWASPS, 21-year-old Chelsea Filer, spoke to me when I was researching a TV segment on the industry. She told me that she was forced to walk for miles on a track in scorching desert heat with a 35-pound sandbag on her back. “You were not allowed to scratch your face, move your fingers, lick your lips, move your eyes from the ground,” she said. When she asked for a chapstick, “They put a piece of wood in my mouth and I had to hold it there for two weeks. I was bleeding on my tongue.”

Why was Filer subject to such punishment? “I had less interest in school and more interest in boys and my mom was worried about me,” she says, explaining that her mother believed that the program was nothing more than a strict boarding school.

Because she has attention deficit disorder, Filer was unable to consistently follow the exacting rules, and repeated small violations were seen as ongoing defiance. “It broke my heart that my mom had no belief in me,” she says, describing how, because WWASPS had told her mother to dismiss complaints as “manipulation,” her mother ignored her pleas to come home.

“I’m not a bad kid,” she continued, “I never used drugs, I was never in trouble, I have no criminal record. I know my mom was worried about me—but so many times I told her that this is too much. I would gladly have gone to prison instead.”

WWASPS is linked with facilities Academy at Ivy Ridge (New York), Carolina Springs Academy (South Carolina), Cross Creek Programs (Utah), Darrington Academy (Georgia), Horizon Academy (Nevada), Majestic Ranch Academy (Utah), MidWest Academy (Iowa), Respect Camp (Mississippi), Royal Gorge Academy (Colorado), Spring Creek Lodge (Montana), and Tranquility Bay (Jamaica).

Although it has settled several lawsuits out of court, the organization has never publicly admitted wrong-doing. However, the U.S. State Department spurred Samoa to investigate its Paradise Cove program in 1998 after receiving “credible allegations of physical abuse,” including “beatings, isolation, food and water deprivation, choke-holds, kicking, punching, bondage, spraying with chemical agents, forced medication, verbal abuse and threats of further physical abuse.” Paradise Cove closed shortly thereafter. That same year, the Czech Republic forced the closure of WWASP-linked Morava Academy following employees’ allegations that teens were being abused.

The former director of the Dundee Ranch Academy Program in Costa Rica went to local authorities after seeing medical neglect and other severe abuse, although human rights abuse charges were ultimately dropped against the owner, Robert Lichfield’s brother Narvin. That program closed in 2003.

Police in Mexico have shut down three WWASP-linked facilities: Sunrise Beach (1996), Casa By The Sea (2004) and High Impact (where police videotaped the teens chained in dog cages).

In 2005, New York’s Eliot Spitzer forced WWASP to return over $1 million to the parents of Academy at Ivy Ridge students, because the school had fraudulently claimed to provide legitimate New York high school diplomas. He fined Ivy Ridge $250,000, plus $2000 in court costs. A civil suit has been filed for educational fraud in New York as well, by a different law firm.

Straight's Sembler currently heads the Scooter Libby Defense Fund, in addition to his work for Romney, and has worked tirelessly to keep the Vice President's former Chief of Staff out of prison, even after his conviction on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. After all, if running programs that impose these kinds of "treatments" on American teenagers is not a prison-worthy offense, why should lying to a court be?

The Romney campaign is aware of the WWASP suits, and should be familiar with the Straight suits. If not, it's worth asking: Does Romney support these types of tactics for at-risk youth? Or does he take the line the organizations founded by his fundraisers take—that these dozens of lawsuits are merely from bad kids who make up lies?

Coming from the man who wants to double the size of Guantanamo, these aren't insignificant questions. If Romney doesn't believe the aggressive tactics he supports for use against enemy combatants ought to be used against troubled teens and youth drug users, he should say so, and show he means it by removing these men from his campaign.

Maia Szalavitz is author of Help At Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids (Riverhead, 2006) and a senior fellow at stats.org. Her latest book, co-written with Dr. Bruce D. Perry is The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog and Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook. (Basic Books, 2007).

In God’s Name
Religion for Captive Audiences, With Taxpayers Footing the Bill
By DIANA B. HENRIQUES and ANDREW LEHREN
December 10, 2006

Life was different in Unit E at the state prison outside Newton, Iowa.

The toilets and sinks — white porcelain ones, like at home — were in a separate bathroom with partitions for privacy. In many Iowa prisons, metal toilet-and-sink combinations squat beside the bunks, to be used without privacy, a few feet from cellmates.

The cells in Unit E had real wooden doors and doorknobs, with locks. More books and computers were available, and inmates were kept busy with classes, chores, music practice and discussions. There were occasional movies and events with live bands and real-world food, like pizza or sandwiches from Subway. Best of all, there were opportunities to see loved ones in an environment quieter and more intimate than the typical visiting rooms.

But the only way an inmate could qualify for this kinder mutation of prison life was to enter an intensely religious rehabilitation program and satisfy the evangelical Christians running it that he was making acceptable spiritual progress. The program — which grew from a project started in 1997 at a Texas prison with the support of George W. Bush, who was governor at the time — says on its Web site that it seeks “to ‘cure’ prisoners by identifying sin as the root of their problems” and showing inmates “how God can heal them permanently, if they turn from their sinful past.”

One Roman Catholic inmate, Michael A. Bauer, left the program after a year, mostly because he felt the program staff and volunteers were hostile toward his faith.

“My No. 1 reason for leaving the program was that I personally felt spiritually crushed,” he testified at a court hearing last year. “I just didn’t feel good about where I was and what was going on.”

For Robert W. Pratt, chief judge of the federal courts in the Southern District of Iowa, this all added up to an unconstitutional use of taxpayer money for religious indoctrination, as he ruled in June in a lawsuit challenging the arrangement.

The Iowa prison program is not unique. Since 2000, courts have cited more than a dozen programs for having unconstitutionally used taxpayer money to pay for religious activities or evangelism aimed at prisoners, recovering addicts, job seekers, teenagers and children.

Nevertheless, the programs are proliferating. For example, the Corrections Corporation of America, the nation’s largest prison management company, with 65 facilities and 71,000 inmates under its control, is substantially expanding its religion-based curriculum and now has 22 institutions offering residential programs similar to the one in Iowa. And the federal Bureau of Prisons, which runs at least five multifaith programs at its facilities, is preparing to seek bids for a single-faith prison program as well.

Government agencies have been repeatedly cited by judges and government auditors for not doing enough to guard against taxpayer-financed evangelism. But some constitutional lawyers say new federal rules may bar the government from imposing any special requirements for how faith-based programs are audited.

And, typically, the only penalty imposed when constitutional violations are detected is the cancellation of future financing — with no requirement that money improperly used for religious purposes be repaid.

But in a move that some constitutional lawyers found surprising, Judge Pratt ordered the prison ministry in the Iowa case to repay more than $1.5 million in government money, saying the constitutional violations were serious and clearly foreseeable.

His decision has been appealed by the prison ministry to a federal appeals court and fiercely protested by the attorneys general of nine states and lawyers for a number of groups advocating greater government accommodation of religious groups. The ministry’s allies in court include the Bush administration, which argued that the repayment order could derail its efforts to draw more religious groups into taxpayer-financed programs.

Officials of the Iowa program said that any anti-Catholic comments made to inmates did not reflect the program’s philosophy, and are not condoned by its leadership.

Jay Hein, director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, said the Iowa decision was unfair to the ministry and reflects an “overreaching” at odds with legal developments that increasingly “show favor to religion in the public square.”

And while he acknowledged the need for vigilance, he said he did not think the constitutional risks outweighed the benefits of inviting “faith-infused” ministries, like the one in Iowa, to provide government-financed services to “people of faith who seek to be served in this ‘full-person’ concept.”

Crossing a Bright Line

Over the last two decades, legislatures, government agencies and the courts have provided religious organizations with a widening range of regulatory and tax exemptions. And in the last decade religious institutions have also been granted access to public money once denied on constitutional grounds, including historic preservation grants and emergency reconstruction funds.

In 2002, the Supreme Court ruled that public money could be used for religious instruction or indoctrination, but only when the intended beneficiaries made the choice themselves between religious and secular programs — as when parents decide whether to use tuition vouchers at religious schools or secular ones. The court emphasized the difference between such “indirect” financing, in which the money flows through beneficiaries who choose that program, and “direct” funding, where the government chooses the programs that receive money.

But even in today’s more accommodating environment, constitutional scholars agree that one line between church and state has remained fairly bright: The government cannot directly finance or support religious evangelism or indoctrination. That restriction typically has not loomed large when public money goes to religious charities providing essentially secular services, like job training, after-school tutoring, child care or food banks. In such cases, the beneficiaries need not accept the charity’s religious beliefs to get the secular benefits the government is financing.

The courts have taken a different view, however, when public money goes directly to groups, like the Iowa ministry, whose method of helping others is to introduce them to a specific set of religious beliefs — and whose success depends on the beneficiary accepting those core beliefs. In those cases, most of the challenged grants have been struck down as unconstitutional.

Those who see faith-based groups as exceptionally effective allies in the battle against criminal recidivism, teen pregnancy, addiction and other social ills say these cases are rare, compared with the number of programs receiving funds, and should not tarnish the concept of bringing more religious groups into publicly financed programs, so long as any direct financing is used only for secular expenses.

That concept has been embodied most prominently since 2001 in the Bush administration’s Faith-Based and Community Initiative, a high-profile effort to encourage religious and community groups to participate in government programs. More than 100 cities and 33 states have established similar initiatives, according to Mr. Hein.

The basic architecture of these initiatives has so far withstood constitutional challenge, although the Supreme Court agreed on Dec. 1 to consider a case on whether taxpayers have legal standing to bring such challenges against the Bush administration’s program.

Defenders of these initiatives say they are necessary to eliminate longstanding government policies that discriminated against religious groups — to provide a level playing field, as one White House study put it.

But critics say the “level playing field” argument ignores the fact that giving public money directly to ministries that aim at religious conversion poses constitutional problems that simply do not arise when the money goes elsewhere.

Converting Young People

Those constitutional problems sharpen when young people are the intended beneficiaries of these transformational ministries. In recent years, several judges have concluded that children and teenagers, like prisoners, have too few options and too little power to make the voluntary choices the Supreme Court requires when public money flows to programs involving religious instruction or indoctrination.

That was the conclusion last year of a federal judge in Michigan, in a case filed by Teen Ranch, a nonprofit Christian facility that provides residential care for troubled or abused children ages 11 to 17.

In 2003, state officials imposed a moratorium on placements of children there, primarily because of its intensively religious programming. Lawyers for the ranch went to court to challenge that moratorium.

“Teen Ranch acknowledges that it is overtly and unapologetically a Christian facility with a Christian worldview that hopes to touch and improve the lives of the youth served by encouraging their conversion to faith in Christ, or assisting them in deepening their pre-existing Christian faith,” observed a United States District judge, Robert Holmes Bell, in a decision released in September 2005.

Although youngsters in state custody could not choose where to be placed, they could refuse to go to the ranch if they objected to its religious character. As a result, the ranch’s lawyers argued, the state money was constitutionally permissible.

The state contended that the children in its care were “too young, vulnerable and traumatized” to make genuine choices. The ranch disputed that and added that the children had case workers and other adults to guide them. Judge Bell rejected Teen Ranch’s arguments. “Regardless of whether state wards are particularly vulnerable, they are children,” he wrote.

The ranch in Michigan has discontinued operations pending the outcome of its appeal, said Mitchell E. Koster, who was its chief operating officer. “We are confident that our argument will win,” Mr. Koster said. “It’s just a question of at what level.”

In another case early last year, a federal judge struck down a federal grant in 2003 to MentorKids USA, a ministry based in Phoenix, to provide mentors for the children of prisoners. In a case filed by the Freedom From Religion Foundation in Madison, Wis., the judge noted that the exclusively Christian mentors had to regularly assess whether the young people in their care seemed “to be progressing in relationship with God.” In a program newsletter offered as evidence, its director said, “Our goal is to see every young adult choose Christ.”

The federal government had been clearly informed in advance of the nature of the MentorKids ministry, said Jon Gibson, chairman of the group’s board. “The court’s decision meant that there were 50 kids we could have served that we were not able to serve.”


In another case, more than $1 million in federal funds went to the Alaska Christian College in Soldotna, Alaska, which says it provides “a theologically based post-secondary education” to teenage Native Americans from isolated villages. But an investigator from the Education Department who visited the school last year found a first-year curriculum “that is almost entirely religious in nature.”

The Freedom From Religion Foundation sued to block the financing. The school promised to use government money only for secular expenses, and federal financing resumed last May, according to Derek Gaubatz, of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which represents the college.

A number of government grants to finance sexual abstinence education have been successfully challenged. For example, the Louisiana Governor’s Program on Abstinence gave federal money to several religious groups that used it for clearly unconstitutional purposes, a federal judge ruled in 2002, in a case filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.

One grant went to a theater company that toured high schools performing a skit called “Just Say Whoa.” The script contained many religious references including one in which a character called Bible Guy tells teenagers in the cast: “As Christians, our bodies belong to the Lord, not to us.”

The federal judge said the grants were so poorly monitored that the state missed other clear signs of unconstitutional activity — as when one Catholic diocese sent monthly reports showing that it had used federal money “to support prayer at abortion clinics, pro-life marches and pro-life rallies.” Gail Dignam, director of the abstinence program, said that state contracts now emphasize more clearly that no grant money may be used for religious activities.

The Programs in Prisons

Programs like the one at the Iowa prison are a rare ray of hope for American prisoners, and governments should encourage them, their supporters say.

“We have 2.3 million Americans in prison today; 700,000 of them will get out of prison this coming year,” said Mark L. Earley, a former attorney general of Virginia. Many inmates come out of prison “much more antisocial than when they came in,” he added. He said he saw faith-based groups as essential partners in any effective rehabilitation efforts.

Mr. Earley is the president and chief executive of Prison Fellowship Ministries, based in Lansdowne, Va. With almost $56 million a year in revenue, the ministry oversees the InnerChange Freedom Initiative, which operates the Iowa program.

Since its birth in 1976, Prison Fellowship has been most closely associated with one of its founders, Charles W. Colson, who said in a 2002 newsletter that the InnerChange program demonstrates “that Christ changes lives, and that changing prisoners from the inside out is the only crime-prevention program that really works.”

In early 2003, Americans United for Separation of Church and State joined with a group of Iowa taxpayers and inmates to challenge the InnerChange program in federal court.

In ruling on that case, Judge Pratt noted that the born-again Christian staff was the sole judge of an inmate’s spiritual transformation. If an inmate did not join in the religious activities that were part of his “treatment,” the staff could write up disciplinary reports, generating demerits the inmate’s parole board might see. Or they could expel the inmate.

And while the program was supposedly open to all, in practice its content was “a substantial disincentive” for inmates of other faiths to join, the judge noted. Although the ministry itself does not condone hostility toward Catholics, Roman Catholic inmates heard their faith criticized by staff members and volunteers from local evangelical churches, the judge found. And Jews and Muslims in the program would have been required to participate in Christian worship services even if that deeply offended their own religious beliefs.

Mr. Earley said Judge Pratt’s decision was sharply inconsistent with current law and his standard for separating secular from religious expenses was so extreme that it would disqualify almost any faith-based program. He acknowledged that inmates, whatever their own faith, are required to participate in all program activities, including worship, but he insisted that a religious conversion is not required for success. InnerChange uses biblical references only to illustrate a set of universal values, such as integrity and responsibility, and not to exclude those of other faiths, he said, adding that it was “unfortunate” if any inmates felt the program denigrated Catholicism or any other Christian faith. Corrections officials in Iowa declined to comment on the case.

Not all programs in prisons are so narrowly focused. Florida now has three prisons that offer inmates, who must ask to be housed there, more than two dozen offerings ranging from various Christian denominations to Orthodox Judaism to Scientology. But at Newton, Judge Pratt found, there were few options — and no equivalent programs — without religious indoctrination.

“The state has literally established an Evangelical Christian congregation within the walls of one of its penal institutions, giving the leaders of that congregation, i.e., InnerChange employees, authority to control the spiritual, emotional and physical lives of hundreds of Iowa inmates,” Judge Pratt wrote. “There are no adequate safeguards present, nor could there be, to ensure that state funds are not being directly spent to indoctrinate Iowa inmates.”

InnerChange, which has been widely praised by corrections officials and politicians, operates similar programs at prisons in Texas, Minnesota, Kansas, Arkansas and, by next spring, Missouri. Officials in those states are monitoring the Iowa case, but several said they believed their programs were sufficiently different to survive a similar challenge.

A government-financed religious education program at a county jail in Fort Worth was struck down by the Texas Supreme Court more than five years ago, and more lawsuits are pending. Corrections Corporation was among those sued last year by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which is challenging a Christian residential program at a women’s prison in Grant, N.M. The foundation has also sued the federal Bureau of Prisons over its faith-based rehabilitation programs. And Americans United, the Iowa plaintiff, and the American Civil Liberties Union have sued a job-training program run by a religious group at the Bradford County Jail near Troy, Pa.

Prison Fellowship Ministries is one of about a half-dozen Christian groups that operate programs at jails and prisons run by the Corrections Corporation. The company’s lawyers are studying the Iowa decision, said a spokeswoman, Louise Grant. “But we are not, at this time, changing or altering any of our programming based on that, or any other ruling.”

Inadequate Monitoring

Government agencies have been criticized repeatedly for inadequately watching these programs. Besides the criticism in various court decisions, the Government Accountability Office has twice raised questions about cloudy guidelines and inadequate safeguards against government-financed evangelism.

In its most recent audit released in June, the G.A.O., which examined faith-based organizations in four states, found that some were violating federal rules against proselytizing and that government agencies did not have adequate safeguards against such violations.

The problem is not that none of these programs are audited. Every group that gets a federal grant worth more than $500,000 has to pay a private auditor to examine its books and report to the government. Many federal programs, like those that provide Medicaid services o