Wasted Youth: The Coming of Age in a For-Profit Prison

By Jerika L.H.

It was about 4am when Samantha was jolted from sleep – the liminal threshold of time between January 4 and January 5  of 2005. Roused from dreaming, she awoke into a real life nightmare that would forever change the trajectory of her being. A kidnapping in the most unique sense of the word. As her mother shook her to coherence, she suddenly realized they were not alone. Two strangers stood at the door. They had been summoned to take Samantha away. Tears swelled in her eyes as her parents explained that she would be leaving. She had fallen short of their traditional Christian standards. The house she grew up in was no longer to be regarded as home. She managed to grab a few belongings before swiftly being transported off to an unknown fate, leaving behind the violin she had spent all her life mastering and the friends she had held so dear.  Her childhood ended there.

“I remember my parents standing at the top of the stairs. They could barely look me in the eyes. I gave them this look of ultimate betrayal as these people led me away and put me in the back of their car. It had child locks on the door so that I couldn’t get away. It really was a true kidnapping, but with my parents’ consent. It was unbelievable. I couldn’t stop crying. We got to the airport and one of the guards in the security line asked me if everything was OK. I wanted to scream that I had been kidnapped, but all of this was legal.”

Samantha was a Stockton high school junior at the time. As most of us have done, she was living out her rebellious stage. Her strict, Christian upbringing forbade much of the self-experimentation that naturally accompanies the coming of age.  The sneaking out, the secret phone calls to your boyfriend, the weekly hair dying, the weekend spats of drunken youth that offered the first glimpses of unchaperoned freedom. Her gothic esthetic and amorous relationship raised fear in her family that eventually culminated into the intervention they hoped would “set her on the right track.”

She soon came to realize the price she would pay for her turbulent and restless formative years.  Samantha has lived with the trauma of their well-intended misstep for over a decade now. The teenage gulag where she was deposited as “damaged goods” would later be shut down for unethical treatment and abuse. Her story, however, does not start there.

After being taken from her home in the middle of the night, she was flown to Utah. Upon being stripped, searched and subjected to other humiliating tasks administered by strangers – which she cannot bring herself to recount in detail, she was driven miles out into the desert. Her final destination was a wilderness retreat.

It was a stark change from the normalcy of home life. There was no privacy and friendships were brief. As soon as Samantha got close to others, she was ripped away and placed in another block. For a teenager, social isolation can be one of the worst forms of emotional torment. That was just the beginning.

While it may be difficult to believe, she recounts this portion of her journey as the most ‘pleasant,’ the most bearable, given what she had in store. She achieved some self-reflection in the wilderness and felt she was ready to return home to try and mend things. At that time, there was still light at the end of the tunnel. Her parents had promised that six weeks of wilderness camp and she would be back home, with a new outlook and a collection of survival skills to boot. But the passing of time delivered another gut-wrenching blow. Samantha would be going to boarding school. The wilderness camp was just the holding center until she was admitted into the real program.

Soon she was off to Montana. Her ‘therapy’ came in the form of manual labor with the occasional psychological evaluation. More intensive rounds of traumatizing group therapy sessions, coupled with backbreaking grunt work. Her slender frame did not render her exempt from the grueling physical punishments. Cutting down pine trees, stripping bark, and moving rock piles from one corner of the grounds to another – all while being told it was good for her. It was what she needed. That she was sick and this was her second chance. Her old self must be buried so her new improved version would emerge in between cementing bricks and bucking down lumber. A version of herself that her parents would like – the product they paid for. But Samantha did not want to die. She did not want to transform. She was just misunderstood; a teenager, after all.

She exercised a short-lived hunger strike in civil disobedience. She even tried running away, risking the unknown of the vast Montana wilderness in a desperate attempt to save her old self from destruction. Always being dragged back through the entrance – met with more and more demerits and endless, arbitrary labor. Dig up a tree stump. Reposition boulders. While the manual tasks may have toughened her muscles, the verbal abuse only broke her down more. “You’re a piece of shit – no wonder your parents didn’t want you.” The public humiliation, the spiritual debasement. No one ever asked why she was rebelling or what from. Death started to look like sweet release.

The shackles that bound her were no longer symbolic. After her third attempt to run away, she was chained and taken to the holding jail for dereliction. Her short stint in the lobby of the police station afforded her the gift of simple pleasures long negated: the taste of real food, the ability to speak freely, the kind demeanor of an old-timey sheriff. She was even allowed reading material. But the brief reminder that she was actually a real person was short lived. She was quickly reclaimed by the juvenile institution and recollected as property. Once again, two strangers stood in wait. Once again, she drove off to an unknown destination. The agents became incrementally harsher with every new encounter – in this instance, bitterly shushing and mocking her as she cried herself to sleep in a backwoods motel. By this time, Samantha had learned to weep in silence.

The journey halted briefly about 20 minutes outside of Salt Lake City. Unsure of what to do with “the problem,” the juvenile detention agents locked Samantha in a basement for a week while they awaited orders from her parents. Finally, a decision was made. A payment was processed. Receipts were faxed over for her family’s accountant to make things easy during tax season.

The end of the road was Conroe, Texas.

Once she arrived in Conroe, all her experiences leading up to then soon became mere child’s play in comparison. Her orientation included the same humiliating repertoire as before: the cavity searches, the scared-straight tactics. She was accosted with rules and verbally excoriated as she entered, being told she would be shot if she tried to run away again. Pelted with insinuations that the institution’s rural neighbors would gladly rape the beautiful 15-year-old if she was found unaccompanied, Samantha got her first taste of the correctional facility ironically named Excel. A place that would become synonymous for what she remembers as “a sea of the child abuse and misery.”

Children who were daring enough to talk back were met with corporal punishment. The most common exhibition was what Samantha calls “the dog pile.”

“One staff member would be at each limb and usually someone sitting on top of their chest and the kid would be screaming and screaming –sometimes cussing sometimes crying out from the pain they were in from having five adults crushing them. The rest of us would be sitting around doing homework – or at least pretending to do homework. You don’t watch. You pretend like it’s not happening. I can’t even count the amount of times that I just sat there staring blankly at my book while things like this were going on.”

Like a Marine boot camp brigade, the group was often punished in mass for the infractions of one.  The children were often sent into impromptu worship groups to shield them from particularly harsh punishments that could become questionable if done with an audience. She would be forced to write God’s prayers continuously. “God have mercy on [the name of the inmate]’ over and over again, a thousand times in silence as they listened to the isolated student’s punishment. When it was all over, they were called back to formation.

Samantha’s memories bleed together. There is simply too much for her to recount in one sitting. Trauma has taken its toll. Energy must now be spent on rebuilding. But even so, some images still stick with her.

“There was a time when they punished an entire group of kids and forced them to stand next to their beds all night long. Sleep deprivation was definitely a favorite tactic of theirs. There were a couple of times that a girl tried to commit suicide. One girl tried to drink the bleach water that we cleaned up with. It was so watered down, though, that nothing happened. She ended up hanging herself some years later. Another girl tried to strangle herself with a scarf she had knitted. The staff would blame us for one of our fellow students going astray like this and would punish everyone. The girl who either tried to commit suicide, or sometimes it was a runaway case, would sleep in the middle of the room and we would all have to take shifts staying up through the night to watch her. They also had an isolation room where kids would just disappear for sometimes weeks. I saw it once. It had nothing in it except a flimsy mattress and a big Alcoholics Anonymous book. They would make us do calisthenics in the blistering Texas heat, and we would do them till we puked.”

Samantha describes the institution as a fanatically religious cult, a distorted spin-off of AA. The visceral recollections are still with her. She gags whenever she smells canned tuna. Regimented eating was commonplace at Excel, where she was hungry all the time.  But what difference did her biological needs make? She was scum. Unwanted. Completely alone, surrounded by other empty human vessels that Excel sought to mold. A place where young ladies were constantly labelled “whores” and non-alpha males were ridiculed as “fa–ots.” Sexually degrading verbal assaults were the daily bread and butter. Bodies were to remain 10 feet apart. McCarthyism was rewarded. Friendship was forbidden. There was only the Bible.

“There is no way that you can know what a place is really like. My parents had no idea for a long time what they were really doing to us at Excel. All of our phone calls were listened to and all of your visits, until you were there for six months, were chaperoned. It took a very long time for me to communicate that I needed to get out of there, mostly because I was scared they wouldn’t believe me. I had seen it happen before where kids tell their parents about what was happening. Outraged, the parents would confront staff and obviously the staff would say we were lying and manipulating our way out of there. That’s why we were there in the first place, right? We were bad, lying kids. Then the kid would lose all of their phone calls and visits for however long they thought was appropriate. A month? Two months? I never even tried until my first or second visit that I had alone with them. So I was there like seven months before I even started easing them into it.”

Soon enough, or should I say ghastly overdue, Excel was publically exposed. The county sheriff’s deputy who had been moonlighting at Excel was indicted on charges of official oppression in 2008. The physical wounds of a sexual assault perpetrated on a male ‘inmate’ could not be explained away – it was the final nail in Excel’s coffin. It is now permanently closed.

Since 2008, scores of former prisoners have come forward with their stories of abuse. Frequently gathering on an online forum called HEAL, their testimonials of survival are affirmed and corroborated by young adults from all over the nation. Survivors are now getting the group therapy they were promised so many years ago in the rehabilitation brochures that convinced their parents to ship them of “for their own good.” Even former employees have taken to the website to voice regret and sorrow over their actions or to speak to the things they witnessed. While each story is similarly unique, they all resolve with the same plea. “Please put a stop to abusive juvenile detention centers.” “This is more common than people think. It forever changed me.” “Never send your child to a correctional facility – it will only damage them.” “If your child is acting out, figure out the core of their pain instead of shipping them off to be spiritually destroyed and abused.”

Samantha’s story is testament enough. After years of being beaten in the head with the idea that it was all her fault, the aftermath of her ordeal has stimulated reflection on where exactly things went wrong for her. “I just should have been raised differently. I was in a really oppressive, sheltered environment. If they felt like they needed to stage an intervention (which I don’t feel like I needed one), I wish they would have tried something less drastic than sending me away. Get me together with my whole family and a therapist… Intervention TV show style. Scaring someone into submission doesn’t really fix the problem and that’s really all these places do. Its partially a power thing. Parents don’t feel like they have control over their kids anymore so they prove otherwise. It’s more than that but it’s definitely part of it. They wanted to get rid of the burden, basically. My parents found the institutions through a special school counselor. There are for-profit companies that deal specifically with troubled teens and place them in schools.”

In the end, Excel did nothing to mend the relationship Samantha’s parents sought to rekindle. After all, how effective is fighting trauma with trauma. “My parents ended up kicking me out of the house shortly after I came back – or rather, I left because they threatened to send me back and I couldn’t live with that over my head all the time. I barely graduated high school. I mostly only did because my teachers knew what I was going through and just let me pass. I was living with my best friend and her mom. If I wasn’t a drug user before, I certainly became one after I was back. I had no one to talk to, and no one understood what I was going through or cared. I had no way to cope with the PTSD that I didn’t even realize I had. It could have been worse, though. I am grateful to my friend’s mom for taking me in. My parents and I didn’t really speak much for a few years. I’ve tried to tell them how damaging it was for me, but they just can’t hear it. Its guilt, I’m sure. We get along fine now, but things get pretty tense if Excel is ever brought up.”

It has been 10 years now since Samantha left Excel. She prides herself in being somewhat healed at present – no small feat for the parentally-financed abuse that overshadowed her for a decade. Even still, debilitating panic attacks come and go. Sometimes it’s hard to breathe.  The room begins to spin as the “trapped” feeling sets in. Angst intermittently peppers the quotidian life of the young lady now in her mid-twenties. Samantha no longer relies on drugs to self-medicate and numb. She is a new mother, married now with a beautiful family of her own. She has slowly worked her way towards a concept that was once so foreign: happiness.

In the end, dreams of happiness may be what motivate overwhelmed, ill-informed parents to send their children away.  The attempt at a perfect relationship like the ones depicted in the rehabilitation center’s website are presented as the perfect prescription. Words like re-education, new beginning, therapeutic resort, and structural awakening are powerful conducers. Excel’s headline was too persuasive for many parents to pass up. “Throughout their stay at Excel, students begin to see their parents in a new light. They become grateful that they have loving parents and want to repair and improve their relationships.”  They never show the orange jump suits.  The verbal assaults are nowhere mentioned in the informational packet. The recruiters are, in fact, sales people playing off the age old exploit of supply and demand.

It is no farfetched exaggeration to say that many kids have died at the hands of juvenile correction agents. Ethical violations, sexual assault, and physical abuse within youth rehabilitation institutions have become a common news headline. The US Justice Department has enacted lawsuits against countless facilities all across the United States for abusive, harmful or negligent treatment of the children in their care. The total control and surveillance that surrounds inmates makes it nearly impossible to tell anyone on the outside what is really going on. Cruel and unusual punishment charges are brought into court for legal judgment on a monthly basis. By the time parents find out, it’s too late. That is presupposing that the parents care. Many young people currently living in lock down have done nothing more than committing the crime of an unwanted presence. They will be released out into the world at 18 without a soul to go home to.

“In a nationally conducted survey, the Associated Press contacted each state agency that oversees juvenile correction centers and asked for information on the numbers of deaths as well as the numbers of allegations and confirmed cases of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse by staff members since January 1, 2004. According to the survey, more than 13,000 claims of abuse were identified in juvenile correction centers around the country from 2004 through 2007—a remarkable total given that the total population of detainees was about 46,000 at the time the states were surveyed in 2007.”

And yet, for-profit correctional facilities still abound. Excel is just one among a sea of others, with many more being built as we speak. Not only have they gotten ahold of desperate parents, but more and more judges have been caught sending children to for-profit prisons in exchange for money and bribe gifts. In the balance sit countless young lives. Children who are still forming, still growing, still learning. Young people who have acted out because of abuse, trauma or neglect. The thought of others going through their nightmare is a secondhand injury for many who endured Excel. Many want to help but are unsure how they can.  Samantha abides. “It breaks my heart knowing that there are kids at those schools right now. I have considered many times getting into some sort of organization that helps kids who went through this stuff or tries to get these places closed down, but I’ve just sort of avoided it because it’s kind of triggering and I wanted to just leave it in the past.”

While Samantha and many others lived it firsthand, for the rest of us it is a lesson that can be partially summed up by the new California ad campaign that has been raising billboards across the state. “School, not prison.” California alone spends $62,300 per year towards every juvenile offender in detention centers. It would cost only $9,100 per year to enroll them in community college and provide them with housing. Self-love based therapy is actually quite effective for troubled youth. Group settings make young people feel like they’re not alone. Hugs are free. Caring adults are oftentimes a first for many young people who were not spared the rod. Most juvenile offenders are willing to dig deep to understand why they are so angry. Some already know why: years of neglect, never having enough, sexual molestation, verbal and physical abuse. The answers are never too hard to find, but, in most cases, no one has ever asked. But Samantha’s story illustrates an important component: soul searching usually does not start in prison for youth who are victims of circumstance.

As we see corporal punishment caught on film in the classroom and videos of police body slamming youth for mouthing off, few among us seems to question why young people have formed such attitudes. Why the anger? What is going on at home? Why the pain? How quickly the roles become reversed when it comes to practicing what we preach to young people.

Samantha reflects. “I feel like if they had tried to accept me for who I was instead of trying to mold me into their version of a perfect child, I wouldn’t have acted out so badly in the first place.” Out of the mouth of babes.

For more information on the #SchoolNotPrison campaign, or for more stories like this, visit http://www.safeandjust.org/schools-not-prisons/case-for-change

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