Athena
Buzzkill.
Your teen is mischievous. You've really done your best with him, but for whatever reason, he's got that wild streak, and every couple of months, you get a call from a cop asking you to pick him up and a court date notice in the mail a few days later.
At this point, the judge is tired of seeing you. Community service just hasn't worked for your boy, and now he's violated probation. The judge gives you a choice: Juvenile detention or boot camp. You know your son isn't a bad kid, and you're horrified by the mere thought of him peering out from behind bars, so you choose the natural option - boot camp.
The day has come. You tell him you love him and that this will be good for him. You give him a stern pat on the back and release him into the custody of your local sheriff's boot camp.
Only a few hours in, you're notified that your boy has been taken to the hospital. He's declared dead the next day.
This is what happened to the parents of 14 year old Martin Lee Anderson. When he complained of breathing problems while running the last of 16 laps, guards embarked on a campaign of "discipline" that included beating, ammonia and, eventually, suffocation. A nurse even stood by, interrupting only briefly to check the kid with a stethoscope before allowing the abuse to continue.
It's called "attack therapy". The theory is that, by forcing the child to "break", he or she will become reformable. It's a tactic similar in ideology to military torture programs. Despite the fact that this strategy would not be legal for the parents themselves to use, there are dozens of boot camps employing it, with somewhere between 10,000 - 100,000 kids being subjected to it annually..
This has resulted in roughly three dozen deaths similar to Martins, and thousands of reports of similar abuse.
I implore you to read the article, titled, The Trouble with Troubled Teen Programs - How the boot camp industry tortures and kills kids, which details both the abuse employed by these programs and the startlingly fascist supporters of these programs.
Then ask yourself this: What business does our government have honoring the co-founder of an entire CHAIN of these abuse camps?
While this entirely un-American technique for reform needs to be criminalized, our government is busy applauding it.
At this point, the judge is tired of seeing you. Community service just hasn't worked for your boy, and now he's violated probation. The judge gives you a choice: Juvenile detention or boot camp. You know your son isn't a bad kid, and you're horrified by the mere thought of him peering out from behind bars, so you choose the natural option - boot camp.
The day has come. You tell him you love him and that this will be good for him. You give him a stern pat on the back and release him into the custody of your local sheriff's boot camp.
Only a few hours in, you're notified that your boy has been taken to the hospital. He's declared dead the next day.
This is what happened to the parents of 14 year old Martin Lee Anderson. When he complained of breathing problems while running the last of 16 laps, guards embarked on a campaign of "discipline" that included beating, ammonia and, eventually, suffocation. A nurse even stood by, interrupting only briefly to check the kid with a stethoscope before allowing the abuse to continue.
It's called "attack therapy". The theory is that, by forcing the child to "break", he or she will become reformable. It's a tactic similar in ideology to military torture programs. Despite the fact that this strategy would not be legal for the parents themselves to use, there are dozens of boot camps employing it, with somewhere between 10,000 - 100,000 kids being subjected to it annually..
This has resulted in roughly three dozen deaths similar to Martins, and thousands of reports of similar abuse.
I implore you to read the article, titled, The Trouble with Troubled Teen Programs - How the boot camp industry tortures and kills kids, which details both the abuse employed by these programs and the startlingly fascist supporters of these programs.
Then ask yourself this: What business does our government have honoring the co-founder of an entire CHAIN of these abuse camps?
While this entirely un-American technique for reform needs to be criminalized, our government is busy applauding it.