The Shadow Penal System for Struggling Kids

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/10/18/the-shadow-penal-system-for-struggling-kids

91 51 5 years ago

For her first six weeks, she would be a Little Sister. She had to stay six feet away from people, including staff. She was not allowed to speak, except to her two Big Sisters

I feel like they're somehow violating Margaret Atwood's copyrights with the naming, nevermind the religious oppression.

0xcde4c3db• 5 years ago

I think if anything, it's the other way around. Atwood didn't invent the ideology or the practices; she was speculating about what it would be like if these people actually ran society instead of just being in the orbit of real power.

ngngngng2• 5 years ago

Semi related: As an adopted person, I was dumbfounded upon meeting my biological parents as an adult to discover how much of ME was genetic. I'm best case scenario adoption. I was 4 days old, no fetal alcohol syndrome, well nourished in the womb etc, placed with a stable educated family. Even with all that going for us, my parents had a rough time with me because of how different I was from them.

Now tweak any of those variables, and the situation just gets more difficult. Adoption is really hard.

mordechai9000• 5 years ago

My situation is similar. My adopted parents were nice people, but nothing like me. I felt I little alienated growing up, and I attribute at least some of it to this. Of course, there are plenty of biological children that feel that way, too. My brother, who was my adopted mother's biological child, no doubt had a harder time then me because of a learning disability. And I recall a friend who grew up sensitive, artistic, and gay, much to the horror of his macho race-car-driving biological father.

gruez• 5 years ago

I was dumbfounded upon meeting my biological parents as an adult to discover how much of ME was genetic. [...] my parents had a rough time with me because of how different I was from them.

What differences are you talking about? In behavior? In intelligence?

CapitalistCartr• 5 years ago

My son (adopted) was born highly dependent and high. He spent the first two months of his life in NICU, the first nine months on strong narcotics to survive. And yet, by some happy miracle, so far, at age 3, he's doing wonderful. He is in a healthy, supportive, educational environment. But most of his success seems to be him. He seems to have won the genetic lottery.

ngngngng2• 5 years ago

Thank you so much for adopting, and glad to hear it working so well even with a rough start!

andai• 5 years ago

I grew up separated from my father and his side of the family, and when I finally met them as an adult it blew my mind -- so that's where I get it from! My mannerisms, my sense of humor... I had always felt like an alien, and getting to know that side of the family was the most validating experience of my entire life.

SQueeeeeL• 5 years ago

"Deanna Doucette was the first pregnant girl to attend the home after Teen Challenge took over. She arrived in 2001, when she was fourteen. A few weeks from her due date, she snuck out of a window and ran away to a gas station, where she called her boyfriend, the father of her child. But before help arrived the police showed up and returned her to Teen Challenge. In the car, she told the officers, “Don’t take me back—they’re forcing me to give away my baby.” Five months were added to her program at Teen Challenge, for running away."

Damn, this is some demonic shit. I love all the political connections they talked about in the article which keep this legal

suifbwish• 5 years ago

Why is it that everyone seems to be okay with someone having no human rights until they are 18? In the USA people under 18 are viewed as property. What they need is for an entire fraternity of law students to show up and demand to tour their facility.

JumpCrisscross• 5 years ago

Why is it that everyone seems to be okay with someone having no human rights until they are 18? In the USA people under 18 are viewed as property.

For starters, because these statements are not true [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_young_people%27s_r...

pjc504• 5 years ago

Similar to the Irish "magdalene laundries" of the 20th century. Or the Canadian "residential schools". Both of which have their mass graves of babies.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/03/mass-grave-of-...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-57592243

Perhaps someone should go round the American institutions with ground-penetrating radar and a shovel.

jonny_eh• 5 years ago

Perhaps someone should go round the American institutions with ground-penetrating radar and a shovel.

No matter how bad the scandal is in Canada, I'm positive that the crimes in the US are magnitudes worse.

floor2• 5 years ago

From the HN guidelines: "Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." and "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle"

You seem to be commenting a lot of unrelated, tangential things to create a narrative aligned to your political beliefs. Something to consider.

Avshalom• 5 years ago

It's been proposed, we'll see how far it gets

https://www.krqe.com/news/politics-government/haaland-leads-...

on a local note: https://sourcenm.com/2021/09/03/indigenous-leaders-seek-an-a...

javajosh2• 5 years ago

Can't help but feel there's got to be a connection to school shootings here. Perhaps American teens are canaries in a coal mine, where the 'coal mine' is American culture at home, at school, and on the 'net, and the dangerous gasses are those of cruelty, hatred, anger, violence, and fear. Teens are going through a lot, individuating and becoming adults, yet they live in the same confusing stew we all do now, and do not have the tools to deal with these unprecedented cultural toxins.

IMO these re-education camps are problematic, even when done "correctly", because they don't address the underlying cause of teen misery. And in fact they do more harm than good, for the simple reason that the teen is held accountable for our systemic failures. It is the parents' philosophy of rugged individualism acted out for profit using children as guinea pigs.

bsanr• 5 years ago

Another post in the thread questioned why this happens in otherwise "civilized and enlightened" societies. My personal response - because we're not - lead me down a train of thought to Adam Lanza, the Newtown shooter. The common thread is a lack of mutual oversight, accountability, and responsibility for others in our communities. Civilization is a wonderful thing that enables any number of deep and extensive value-adds to quality of life for any given individual member of our species, but the specialization inherent in a free society means that people are trusted to attend to their own affairs (and in the case of hierarchy, the affairs of their charges).

As a society, we share responsibility and consequences for the outcomes determined by the actions of individuals. This is the reason that the limits of individual freedom are somewhere in between the capacity and the demonstrated ability to infringe on the rights of others.

What seems to have happened is dereliction of the duty to shape those limits in response to demonstrated infringement in the past. We know - we know - what the status quo wrt, as examples, the penal system and firearms has meant for individual and collective suffering. What you're feeling is the same sense that we're not learning from the past and dooming ourselves to gory, nightmarish repetition.

javajosh2• 5 years ago

It's hard to grow your own patch of peace and wisdom when everyone around you is growing nettles and brambles. Even if others don't directly interfere, it's only easy to acquire the supplies that the majority is buying. And life is already a lot of work, and it's so damn tempting to just give up and go with the flow - not only is it less work, but you get a sense of community. Even if it is a community of shared dysfunction, it's better than being alone.

It seems there's got to be a threshold, a critical mass of people who want to live differently than the rest before you can weather the challenges inherent in making non-mainstream choices. This is widely applicable; AA comes to mind, as does things like vegetarianism, homosexuality, Judaism, etc. There should be an -ism for the people who reject authoritarianism blind conformism, and who have a well-defined set of coping mechanisms to deal with misinformation, bullying, cruelty, and dehumanization. And ways to deal with people that embrace such techniques, especially those in power.

Red_Leaves_Flyy2• 5 years ago

the teen is held accountable for our systemic failures

That is the crux of the matter.

Anecdotally, I know a lot of former victims of the juvenile Justice system. On the one hand they’ve all demonstrated serious antisocial behaviors. On the other hand they’ve all been severely neglected (or worse) by all the people responsible for their wellbeing: parents, teachers, relatives, siblings, peers, social workers, religious leaders, etc. how can hold a Child accountable for their actions if we are unable ( read: unwilling) to hold the adults who’ve hurt them accountable for their failures?

The children are not mere Guinea pigs, they’re scapegoats for their caregivers failures.

locallost• 5 years ago

Systematically ruining people's lives for misguided attempts in preserving a society that only exists in their heads. And for fun and profit of course. I truly believe almost all kinds of bad things happening have had their seeds planted in this type of abuse a long time ago.

Shame.

“I still think about it every day,” she told me. “My child was stolen from me.”

NoGravitas3• 5 years ago

This is part of a bigger penal-industrial complex in the US. Besides private for-profit prisons, you also have things like this, and a very similar system for drug rehab, where minor drug offenders may be sent to a privately-run religious "charity", which, rather than providing any kind of counseling or treatment, resells them as indentured labor to various industries, including meat-processing plants.

https://revealnews.org/article/they-thought-they-were-going-...

https://revealnews.org/article/they-worked-in-sweltering-hea...

maybelsyrup4• 5 years ago

This is another related and terrifying article:

https://www.propublica.org/article/black-children-were-jaile...

A judge in a Tennessee county, Donna Scott Davenport, locks up elementary school children (as young as 7) basically at whim for crimes that don't exist. They're given a "perp walk": handcuffed in front of their classmates and teachers, paraded through the school, and off to jail in the back of a police car. She has them put in solitary confinement. She failed the bar exam four times before passing. The children cry and throw up as they're sent away.

I was never sure why we only got all worried about fascism when Donald Trump came around. Articles like all these show that, if you're poor enough or black enough, it's always been here. I wish I felt like I was exaggerating in saying that, but I don't think it's much of a stretch.

pjc504• 5 years ago

why we got all worried about fascism when Donald Trump came around

It was the transition from fringe to mainstream, along with the acquisition of power. Things like this might go from "isolated incidents" to more widespread to national policy. But yes, it's a change in degree not a change in kind.

908B64B197• 5 years ago

There was a thread not long ago where a poster was wondering why cities such as Nashville and other in red states didn't have a great tech scene.

I think that sums it up pretty well.

polypodiopsi2• 5 years ago

You can jail children in the US? What kind of country is this?

cbfrench• 5 years ago

Also worth reading in a similar vein: https://elan.school/

It’s astonishing that no one involved with Élan ever went to prison.

lelandfe• 5 years ago

Perhaps more astonishing is that the school wasn’t even shut down - it closed voluntarily.

Frankly, I’ve often wondered if the people involved just reopened under a different name to escape bad press.

Red_Tarsius• 5 years ago

The first lines of the article immediately reminded me of Elan school. I'm glad more people are finding out these horrific programs. Who knows how many are still out there. I was shocked especially since I had never heard of them before stumbling upon that website. I highly recommend other users to check out your link.

TeMPOraL• 5 years ago

Holy hell. I'm speechless. Not even by the article - I'm yet to read it - just by this discussion thread. The links posted here by various commenters - the CAAIR labor camps, Elan school, hundreds of children dumped in hidden, unmarked graves - I've seen most of those stories at one point or another, but to be reminded of all of them together here...

I don't know what to say. How do things like these happen - and keep happening - in otherwise civilized, enlightened countries?

SOMA_BOFH2• 5 years ago

sometimes powerful people in positions of authority are evil. it is heartbreaking.

pc862• 5 years ago

I feel like this is such a cop-out response. It lets you dismiss this people's actions because "they're evil" (whatever that means) and disregard any of the larger systemic, sociological root causes that allow things like this to happen in the first place.

NoGravitas3• 5 years ago

I can't speak for other countries, but for the US, none of these are aberrations. They're the way we've always done things, and no one with access to the levers of power is really all that interested in changing things. A lot of these stories just boil down to people with power being able to use people without in any way they please: use them as unpaid labor, or just dump them in an unmarked grave if they're no use to you. We call that "freedom", because for the people with the power, it is. And to have an impact on the public discourse, you basically have to accept that as the way things should be, plus or minus a little tinkering around the edges.

drnonsense42• 5 years ago

I'm probably going to get downvoted, but this article is nonobjective, which, in my opinion, is standard fare for the New Yorker. In fact, I think it presents a delusional worldview. As an aside, I think it's unfair to compare this article to the slave labor camps mentioned in this thread. They are fundamentally different. Anything with Christian theming, obviously, the New Yorker and most of HN passionately hate.

But, the New Yorker, for all the useless people and vapid criticism it employs, could not come up with an alternative to an organization like this. This is a place where children who have severe drug or other problems, possibly violence, can be sent that essentially functions the same as a juvenile detention center but is patently not as bad. I even empathize with the parents in the article. What would I do if I had four children and one of them is doing drugs, sleeping with numerous guys to the point of getting pregnant, and literally working at a brothel (buried in the hit piece, obviously), and the other children are perhaps younger, currently normal, but exposed to this continually? That is a challenging situation. Many New Yorker columnists surely live in a "post-children world", so perhaps that is not something they'd empathize with. The only evidence I saw that made me question if the parents were horrible was when they refused to let the move to a halfway house with the child.

Although I am not a Christian and empathize with not wanting to be in compulsory Christian brainwashing, I'm sorry, the article provided no evidence these kids are being physically or mentally abused. Citing that 13 of them attempted to commit suicide is more evidence about the type of kids, without judging whether their current mental state is due to genetics or a poor break in life, being placed here. Further, I didn't find other criticisms valid, such as declining to raise children resulting from pregnancies. It is not the organization's responsibility to raise children, and to their credit, again, it looks like they would have allowed the girl to transfer to a halfway house and keep the child, if not for the maligned parents. But, other than that, their "case study" seemed like she belonged in a mental hospital and I am skeptical it is entirely the fault of the "system". After leaving the program, she went on a desperate search to find her drug addict mother, before abandoning a husband and new son to live with friends, while literally repeatedly applying to work at "Teen Challenge" (what?!!?).

It is quite frightening to live in an era where we want to dismantle anything that is remotely Christian because someone had a bad emotional experience. This is the psychotic liberal zeitgeist - where the homeless capitals of the world want to dictate solutions to scenarios like this.

The Shadow Penal System for Struggling Kids

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