"Since you have sent me here, I will take care of my issues so that I can come home soon and be a better, happier and nicer and smarter person than when I came here. The water is so blue, the beach looks so sandy, the hills are so green, the weather is so nice--and the chain link so high." --Letter from David van Blarigan, Tranquility Bay, Jamaica, to his parents, Dec. 15, 1997
Just past midnight, David van Blarigan, 16, woke up in his Oakland, Calif., home to find his parents at his bedside with the two burly strangers they had called to take him away. "Why are you doing this?" the teenager cried out. "Because you're unhappy here," his mother replied. "If you don't cooperate," one of his escorts said, "we'll have to put you in handcuffs." David's first stop was Brightway Adolescent Hospital, a mental facility 700 miles away in St. George, Utah. Although David had no criminal record, was not violent and hadn't been abusing drugs or alcohol, a Brightway psychiatrist determined that the boy required prolonged treatment. He prescribed a one-year stay at Tranquility Bay, a "behavior modification school."
That is David's account of how he ended up at Tranquility Bay, and it's at the heart of a lawsuit asking a court to order him returned to California over his parents' objections. David's case, on which a superior-court judge in Oakland is expected to rule this week, pits the civil liberties of a teenager against the right of a parent to decide how to raise a child. It also shines a spotlight on the shadowy world of for-profit "attitude adjustment" camps and schools. Some parents who have resorted to such programs say their intensive boot camp-style approach has been the crucial factor in turning around their troubled children's lives. But critics charge that many of the camps hold children prisoner, inflict what they consider to be physical and mental abuse--and sometimes cause death.
Behavior modification schools advertise in the back of mainstream magazines like Sunset, and their slogans are as no-nonsense as a five-mile run at sunrise. "Attitudes adjusted here," says an ad for the Ascent Program. Sea Hawk Academy promises "the wake-up call your teenager needs." Many offer to arrange the kind of "escort service" David van Blarigan found at his bedside. The schools and camps are often isolated, either in rural America (Thompson Falls, Mont.) or in faraway locales (Western Samoa). They number as many as 2,000, estimates Alexia Parks, author of a new online report on the subject, An American Gulag, and they come in many varieties: religious, military-style, and some focused on special issues, like drug abuse. A few try to "shock" gay children back to heterosexuality.