Wishing a very 
on the entire "troubled teens" industry
These places are still common and profitable, especially in the Mormon belt where they have strong ties to government. They'll occasionally get "shut down" after a particularly publicized death or SA charge, meaning they change their name and continue as usual.
I haven't listened to the trueanon series on these camps because it's too triggering, but that might be better than BtB since it's more of a firsthand perspective (and less liberal)
If anyone here hasn't listened to it, the "The Game" series from TrueAnon is a harrowing tour through this industry and its origins. Brace went to one of these and the series gets pretty emotional.
Back in the mid nineties I went to a in-patient outward bound type wilderness based rehabilitation facility. It no longer exists, and aside from some paper records likely in filing boxes in someone’s garage, yellowing away, there really is nothing to tie my IRL identity to this place.
It was called Wilderness Treatment Center, in a small town in northwest Montana, close to Idaho/Canada, population less than 1000.
I was unfortunate enough to be sent there during December. I boarded a plane in south Texas where it was almost 80, and ended up in a place where it was single digits F. My days consisted of being woken up at 430-500 every morning for ‘rock crew’. Being on the rock crew meant you took draw knives/spokeshaves and shaved down tree bark from felled trees until sunrise. The trees we shaved were turned into furniture by others. I fed cattle in a blizzard and got frostnip on my nose, and fingers. I got coerced into spending three weeks backpacking thru the woods in and around Glacier National Park. I ended up being evacuated early because I got frostbite on three of my toes. My punishment for being sent back early? More rock crews and interaction ‘stricts’ (couldn’t talk to others and others were told to not interact with me). I was forced to walk thru nipple deep snow, pulling fallen trees. I got stood outside on a tree stump on my cabin porch in my shorts and a T-shirt for telling the cook his food sucked. While it was snowing. I was isolated multiple times for a week at a time because I spoke up about my aftercare plan which included being shipped to a halfway house in Lousyanna for a year or more. I was ignored by people who were supposed to be helping me to break an addiction that has followed me my entire life. I had trusts violated. They withheld letters I sent to my family. They withheld letters my family sent. They starved me when I balked.
Fuck you Mike, Ernie, Preston, and Mary. I still think about you pieces of shit every now and then. I hope every single one of you die miserable and alone in the throes of a bad crack addiction.
Outward Bound and its ilk do more harm than good. But I did get to see Going to The Sun Road so who can even say if it’s bad or not.
The GULAG Archipelago is real, it's in America, and we do it to children.
must be something to be one of these people who worked at these places and lie awake at night knowing that twenty years later maybe this will be the night that one of the teens you abused will track you down and take a week murdering you
Fuck you Mike, Ernie, Preston, and Mary.
I pray they already dead for you homie that whole abuse camp industry is so fucked.
so sorry you had to go through this comrade. No posting friend of mine deserves that.
I hate it when BtB covers something that I would ideally want covered by someone else >.>
Here is a playlist for @keepcarrot@hexbear.net and anyone else
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7oZ269xU9gKCcWS8meDtrjVO_VtxPWm6
TrueAnon has an entire series on this shit (The Game part 1-5) , Brace was in the system as a kid.
Respect the Dead does basically the same schtick but better and much gayer but they have a lot fewer episodes.
Just listen to the TruAnon series The Game. Brace was personally sent to one of these. I guarantee they do a better job
Listened to it when it came out, it was excellent, if a hard listen. It's definitely where I'd point anyone who listens to podcasts and is interested in learning about this topic.
BtB is usually better on purely domestic stuff I hear, I don't know personally but I would imagine Fedvans still makes terrible jokes that reveal the emptiness inside him
It's been probably a couple of years now, I stopped in the middle of an episode after Robert or the guest or someone (I don't really remember at this point lol) went on an apropos of nothing rant against China, and I haven't listened since. It had been getting on my nerves for a while, but that was the last straw for me. Something about an "anarchist" who makes their living entirely off of corporate sponsorships, enough that they stopped being a journalist and moved into a "compound" (his word, iirc), never sat right with me anyway.
Being an ”anarchist” and being anti-AES and anti-”authoritarian” in a way that aligns perfectly with US state department positions. Many such cases, but Fedvans just has more money and fame plus actually worked with the CIA.
These "institutions" are the inevitable result of that sprouts from the seed of "what if it was possible to severely punish children to fix them and we also used them to make additional money while doing it." That's why they always involve shit like making the teens do unpaid work that feeds some kind of industry.
Fuck anyone that enables or participates in these systems. Real pieces of shit.
I'm not USAmerican so I didn't know about these places until fairly recently
Someone on Hexbear posted a link to this comic a while back which is both really good and really harrowing: (CW all kinds of abuse) https://elan.school/
Honestly I read most of it in the span of a day and I spent most of that day crying my eyes out, it's just all so so cruel
Idk it's late at night and I had some other rambling thoughts but I'm just going to summarise them with death to America and let's make sure the future's better
I found this at 8 am while browsing this morning. It is now 10:30 and I am not even halfway through. Holy shit death to America and death to Elan what the absolute hell is this. Thank you for sharing this website, I'll make sure to inform others who I know will be interested in this
Honestly I read most of it in the span of a day and I spent most of that day crying my eyes out, it’s just all so so cruel
I had just about the same reaction. I couldn't think of anything else for a couple days after learning about that shit. Something about it I think just hits so much more personally than stories about other awful things that go on in the world, when it's the victim's parents doing it to them directly.
Oh god Elan. I've heard fuckin horror stories about that place.
Every time I remember these exist, I'm astounded at just how much Americans hate their own kids.
While I never went to one of these camps, I did spend the entirety of high school at an English style all boys boarding school on a scholarship, with the uniforms, strict rules, boarding houses and day houses, gender segregation, initiation rituals and all. The kind of school that people like British politicians and Elon Musk attended. Trust me, it's not like Harry Potter. Okay maybe it was a little bit like that, but you get the point.
Lots of people come out of boarding school with PTSD. Shit sucks, especially because you would think that if there was one thing people would agree on it's that we should take care of our kids.
Not even going to talk about the "culture" and "socialisation" around woman teachers at these boys only boarding schools. Honestly half of those teachers need a visit from
. That is all I will say for now.It's easy to agree in principle, but various traditions as well as the logic of the system of capitalism weigh extremely heavily on us, so intergenerational abuse like this keeps surviving if left alone.
"Normalcy" is one of the most murderously insidious
of Burgerlanders and they will have their own children killed for the sake of it.They start frothing at the mouth if you suggest that they shouldn’t physically assault their children
"Well I turned out fine" -a guy who really obviously did not turn out fine
