In May of 1993 I was sent to a girls home called Cross Creek Manor (CCM) in southern Utah where I lived for four and a half months. This facility is owned and operated by a notorious umbrella organization called World Wide Association of Specialty Programs (WWASP). While attending I was physically attacked, suffocated, tormented, and put in isolation on a regular basis for three day periods at a time.
I was denied all access to communicate with the outside. Once a staff member (while invading my privacy) told me I wipe the wrong way after using the toilet. In addition, I was put on unprescribed and inappropriate medication that created physical side-effects, essentially I was drugged.
I was kept in isolation on and off during my stay, including my final day, right up until being transferred into the college dorms at Seattle Pacific U (a Bible college I had been pre-accepted to prior to my incarceration). I had no contact with the outside world prior to this other than brief visits at a “hospital” called Brightway.
Brightway was more of a packaging center, than a hospital. It was a detainment center, but also the UPS for the herds of lost (or rather abandoned) children, a branding center for human cattle that decided who went where. They apparently mixed up so many “packages” and caused so much damage, they had to close; however, there are plenty of other places like it still operating.
I mention my attendance at a Bible college because the youth at Cross Creek Manor (CCM) were meant to feel like they were criminals or that they were somehow mentally disturbed, and I certainly was not; nonetheless, that’s how we were treated during our incarceration. The primary difference between prison and residential centers today is that prisoners are allowed a lawyer and a phone call.
While attending I was deprived of an education, lied to, and my mail was confiscated. I was denied appropriate exercise, sanitary conditions, and emotional/medical attention. I also slept on a floor in the isolation room where I peed to avoid staff monitoring me in the bathroom and making sick remarks.
Originally, back in California, I was told I was going to an in-state, nature focused boarding school to obtain emotional support in response to childhood abuse, something that had been obfuscated from some time.
I had two months left of high school and couldn’t finish because I was sent to a Charter Hospital for a month after having a breakdown. While attending Charter I found myself near my community in a safe therapeutic environment that offered virtually everything I needed except for a longer stay and a regular therapist that I knew well enough to confide in. They had many other specialists, therapists, and diverse forms of expressive therapy that were wonderful. I was willing to do anything to overcome what was setting me back.
Cross Creek promised to offer a high school diploma. Had the truth of their dubious unaccredited “diplomas” been revealed I might not have missed out on graduating from Catholic school.
When I got to Cross Creek what I found was that I was out of state, in Utah in a basement across the street from a cemetery. From the beginning I found myself forced into writing essays about how I was “bad” that took several hours to complete per essay. The first one was about being a liar because I showered at the wrong time (having not been informed there was a shower schedule). That incident landed me a three-day stay in isolation, a room with white walls not much larger than a twin bed.
After that I wrote a letter to friends asking them to come and get me even though I had no real idea where I was (we traveled through the night). That was a turning point for the worse, and staff repeatedly put me in isolation. One time I sat down on the bed and the frame gave way, they added three more days to my solitary confinement. I speculate the bed was already broken because the other isolation room had no bed. Despite the innocent nature of the incident it was termed “destruction of property” and “malicious mischief.” As for the cause of the latter accusation, I had to put the bed upright so I could find enough space to sleep on the floor. Both resulted in essays and more isolation.
Some girls seemed sympathetic knowing of the length of time I was spending in there and others used it as leverage to advance in the program. Many ganged up, telling me I just wasn’t working with the program. This occurred in my first group therapy session which I was quite excited about attending having just come out of isolation, but I soon learned “group therapy” for the most part was simply attack therapy.
Attack therapy involves people confronting each other in a verbally abusive way. I am yet to learn of any studies that demonstrate that it is therapeutic or helpful in any way. An example of attack therapy is telling a rape victim that the abuse was her fault, suggesting that she is a slut and that the rape was simply a reaction to her style of dress or emotional state.
Girls living in the basement with me who had less privileges than the others and little to lose began to demonstrate sympathy towards me verbally and almost unanimously towards the abuse I was being subjected to. I don’t know if staff felt intimidated by this, but either way it just became a game for them to use me as an example. Maybe they feared an uprising.
My independent education packets never came and I later learned that the organization was caught up in one of the biggest education scams having issued 113 fake diplomas just at one school alone in New York. In regards to Ivy Ridge, John Sullivan Jr. NY Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Watertown district office stated in the August 19, 2005 Watertown Daily Times “people assume there’s oversight of these programs, there’s more government oversight of dog kennels than there are of these school, and that’s not right.”
http://imgur.com/4VrKa Image of Youth in A Dog Cage (High Impact Tecate, Mexico)
http://imgur.com/aLngq Image of More Youth in Dog Cages (High Impact Tecate, Mexico)
See One of Our Great Documentaries and See Parents and Staff Testimony: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=057_1200885881
HOW TO HELP: http://www.cafety.org/volunteer Donating is a good way to help support the hiring of a volunteer coordinator. Join my STARP (Stop Teen Abuse in Residential Programs) fb site directory.
Several top government officials completely failed to respond to Congressman Miller’s extensive requests for an investigation despite the widespread incidences of kids being abused, tortured, and placed in dog cages. Dog kennels wasn’t the worst of it and yet, when it came down to small isolation cells in WWASPS’ Samoan program called Paradise Cove, we still couldn’t and haven’t received any oversight or intervention to hold the residential industry to any substantial standards.
The worst incident I experienced in Utah began was when I was put face-first against a wall for over ten hours and then told to stand on my tip-toes to reach a dot taped to the wall with my nose. The verbal taunting, enjoyment of this staff member, and the aggravation of not being able to do anything but stare at a wall led me to turn the corner and there I had two men that grabbed me and threw me in the isolation room again. This time they jumped me, put me in a painful police like lock position with my arms behind my back while they bashed my head into the floor causing significant and a large visible facial laceration.
They then proceeded to sit on me to so I couldn’t breathe and after gasping several times for air and pleading for my life, I became speechless. I was certain they would kill me, and they could get away with it. No one would of known about it because they were able to do all this other abuse, why wouldn’t they get away with killing me? There was no one there to stop them, and maybe no one cared. It wasn’t like I received any mail except a postcard from Bali at the time and a letter from my future college roommate that I couldn’t respond to.
So as I became asphyxiated and unable to save myself, the young staff member they had put in charge of me to make sure I didn’t try to leave looked completely shocked, and it was perhaps that look of shock that saved my life. Not all kids are that fortunate. About a dozen kids die every year in programs from abuse or torture like compression suffocation.
When I came out of isolation my face would twitch oddly, not like an eye twitch, but a full muscle spasm. It continued so much that I became worried that people would see and think I was weird. I also frequently lost control of my bladder; unfortunately, we had to ask permission to use the bathroom and only use it at designated times. Since some of the staff was annoyed we needed to use the restrooms they started to limit the amount of water we could drink.
Later I read an account by a parent saying her daughter was given Haldol, a medication given to people with schizophrenia, which wasn’t prescribed to her. I looked up the medication to see if there were any side effects such as facial twitching, and sure enough this was one of the major side effects. A girl with schizophrenia, named Emily, had left the program not much earlier than when I got there. She later committed suicide after being subjected to more frequent, but similar types of abuse including sexual abuse.
In my case, the Haldol could easily have been slipped into food before I received it in isolation. The side effects would explain my difficulty focusing and facial twitches. When Emily was part of the program her and another friend were woken up frequently in the middle of the night. It’s something that occurred in other WWASPS programs in order to sleep deprive and break the subject into submission.
A highlight of WWASPS programs is behavior modification. For parents who don’t really know what that means, it sound great; however, if they had done more research about what was really involved and the results of such experimentation I suspect many parents may not have signed their kids up. As a result of various abuses many kids have suffered from borderline personality disorder and PTSD. In the worst cases some kids are disabled for life and there have been suicides.
There are still staff currently at CCM that were employed when I attended. One, employed shortly before my departure seemed neither harmful nor helpful, but complacent. The other, the manager, sent my mom away when she came to investigate why my school packets never arrived. It so happened that her visit was the same day I received serious lacerations to my face, she was told that visiting me would interrupt the process. The manager, and many employees were talented at manipulating people, often through emotion, especially guilt.
Keeping this story short has been trying, and forcing myself not to live these things over and over has proven vexing. I’ve realized I was suffering most of the symptoms of post trauma and have since overcome my fear of therapists and received several years of ongoing therapy. I’ve been active in advocating for community issues and have found CAFETY, the Community Alliance for the Ethical Treatment of Youth, a resource of inspiration.
In my professional life and personal life, I create prevention and help people deal with trauma. The great thing I’ve found through the process of my own recovery is that people don’t think fighting for human rights and protection is crazy, but rather something that has a rich cultural history of its own called “advocacy.”
I’ve met a lot of survivors online and in person from different programs. One even moved in and became a part of my family. However, survivors really struggle with relationship issues. Some of them experienced being raped at WWASP facilities. Others witnessed children being raped and sodomized. I guess you could say being in these programs is such a strange experience that it can leave people feeling mixed up and isolated whether in their professional lives they’ve become lawyers or raised families.
Survivors often feel an instant connection; it’s refreshing to speak to someone else about these facilities without parrying assumptions that we were “out of control”. A lot of people never trust therapists again, never seek help, or share their story with other people because of the embarrassment, distrust, and initial pressure they feel to fit in, but there are several thousand of us just within a small percentage of online social groups. I’d imagine there are easily hundreds of thousands of people that have experienced some form of residential abuse.
The real issue lies within the lack of oversight and false marketing that exists in thousands of programs across the States and beyond. Politicians for years have rallied against any legislation that could interfere with their “Cash for Kids” profits. In some states, they won’t even require faith based programs to be licensed, which doesn’t even begin to make people eligible to work with kids in the first place; it simply allows there to have been some initial form of contact with a state department. It’s known too that the faith based programs tend to be also very abusive taking parts of the Bible literally into beating children with rods and pipes. This practice has resulted in kids being beaten to death.
It was a common practice in the Roloff schools that President Bush helped to stay afloat. Bush as Governor of Texas at the time, overturned legislation allowing the Roloff schools to not have to be licensed despite, the apparent severe abuse coming out in court cases. Pastor Roloff in turn, helped his campaign financially as well as through his evangelical radio shows. Roloff eventually killed a bunch of orphans flying his plane into the ground while ignoring the weather warnings.
Where the industry is huge in the fundamentally religious state of Utah, Mitt Romney also profited off these programs and chose Bob Litchfield, the owner of WWASPS, as his financial co-chairman for his presidential candidacy in 08. Romney wanted Double the Guanatanamo, so he picked, Mel Sembler as another financial co-chairman, the owner of the abusive Straight programs.
I leave you with this from a Mother Jones article “Horror Stories from Tough Love Teen Homes,” “ In March 2010, the House passed the Keeping All Students Safe Act, a bill that would have banned the use of seclusion and physical or chemical restraints by any school that benefits from federal education money. (It, too, died in the Senate.) Andy Kopsa, who covers abusive homes in her blog, Off the Record, noted that GOP members whose districts host tough-love schools rallied against the act. They included former Indiana Rep. Mark Souder (Hephzibah House), Alabama Rep. Robert Aderholt (Reclamation Ranch, Rachel Academy), and North Carolina Rep. Virginia Foxx (King Family Ministries), who testified: “This bill is not needed…The states and the localities can handle these situations. They will look after the children.”
Limited Images of Abuse and Settings Youth Were In at WWASPS
http://imgur.com/sES7w (Tranquility Bay, Jamaica)
http://imgur.com/NM6rM (Tranquility Bay, Jamaica youth in picture killed himself after being abused there, another after being pepper sprayed numerously on a daily basis by American staff owners)
http://imgur.com/a/M3tBU (Cross Creek Manor now Cross Creek Academy, isolation rooms)
http://imgur.com/SSDMr (The Hobbit Spring Creek Lodge, Montana)
http://imgur.com/8T2EU (High Impact Tecate, Mexico)
One OF Our Great Documentaries: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=057_1200885881
Other related articles:
Read more: http://www.wyff4.com/news/24956710/detail.html#ixzz1W4worVr6 The remains of more than 70 animal remains were found on the Due West property in varying states of decay on Lichfield’s property where the abusive and now closed Carolina Springs academy existed.
Read more: “Child welfare has evolved over the last four centuries. It finds its roots in empirical systems based on property and material value, not human values.”Roch Longueepee
http://restoringdignitycampaign.blogspot.com/2007/02/systems-of-control-global-legacy-of.html
Sources:
Sunday, November 11, 2012
Sunday, November 4, 2012
The truth about peninsula village- An absolute nitemare....
This testimony was found on the message board, which belonged to Fighting Institutional Child Abuse Network. All rights goes to the original author "August"
An absolute nightmare. If you want your child to become a lab rat for psychiatric drugs, and abused on every level, physical, mental, emotional, spiritual and I am rarely at a loss for words, it is an absolute nitemare! I have never before or since witnessed and experienced such abuse as the hell that was that year so long ago. I'm going to break it down for you as quickly and simply as I can. I remember my Mother driving me to the office where I was officially admitted. The moment that we exited the car and entered the PV office was the last time for a solid year that I would be able to openly or freely communicate with any of my family. It's almost like cult tactics, well, no almost about it...Everything from that point on is coached and controlled by peninsula village. I was driven from admissions to the STU stabelization unit- sky blue walls, fear, and sadness.
Staff members wearing alarm buzzers around their necks to push for assistance in tackling teenagers, stripping them down and locking them in a freezing cold "time out" room because perhaps after hours of sitting on their bed with their arm raised and no acknowldgement they really had to piss so got up without permission- tackled, stripped and locked away- for their own safety of course. We would sit on those dreaded beds for twenty three hours a day. No going outside, no anything really. You may raise your hand for hours on end and the staff would only ignore you unless you got up, then prepare to be tackled. I was told to write a twenty page biography of my issues, and had this ripped up in my face three times by my counselor who told me that I was full of shit and a manipulative liar minimizing and all that good shit...so what does one do, make up issues when the truth is not working its about survival at that point. Truly. Then they "accepted" my bio, what irony. A couple of years ago I was visiting my family and found a video from a family therapy session from when I was at the village. Damn. I broke down, flooded with the pain of that year. I was on so much lithium and extremely high doses of prozac that on the video my speech was terribly slurred and I almost seemed retarded. Scary.
After about six weeks to three months one "graduates" out of the stabelization with the grand priveledge of moving into a cabin in the woods with no electricity or running water. Of course there is a bath house that is used for showers and everything is timed short. The winter is cold, and often as a punishment for something or another the bath house "priveledge" would be revoked in the mornings and if you wanted to wash your face and brush your teeth then you you had five minutes at an outside spigot for the entire group in thirty degree temps, and it is an absolute nitemare. There is a cosequence for everything. It seems to break ones spirit is a concrete goal of the all powerful treatment team. There is verbal abuse by the counselors, and the limited and always supervised contact with family is always coached. Some other consequences pusing a wheelbarrow full of rocks, walking holding a ten foot piece of rope stepping all over one another for miles on end. Slepp deprivation. They work you like a slave doing physical labor and the school is inadequate at best...I don't know.
People have problems, and time heals a lot of things...I left home after graduating from the village so upset that my parents put me there and did not speak to my Mother for almost four years. Today, I realize that at the time they were only doing what they thought was best at the time, right or wrong, they never intentionally set out to harm me....now the people at the viallge, there was some serious abuse going on...
I mean I am 34 now, and still tramuatized...anyway...I am tired, and given time could deliver more details and examples, but feel free to e mail me with any questions, and I'm interested in hearing from some other "alumni" from years ago with their own thoughts and opinions....I'm allowed to have those now unlike my time at Peninsula Village. Thanks...August
Source:
An absolute nightmare. If you want your child to become a lab rat for psychiatric drugs, and abused on every level, physical, mental, emotional, spiritual and I am rarely at a loss for words, it is an absolute nitemare! I have never before or since witnessed and experienced such abuse as the hell that was that year so long ago. I'm going to break it down for you as quickly and simply as I can. I remember my Mother driving me to the office where I was officially admitted. The moment that we exited the car and entered the PV office was the last time for a solid year that I would be able to openly or freely communicate with any of my family. It's almost like cult tactics, well, no almost about it...Everything from that point on is coached and controlled by peninsula village. I was driven from admissions to the STU stabelization unit- sky blue walls, fear, and sadness.
Staff members wearing alarm buzzers around their necks to push for assistance in tackling teenagers, stripping them down and locking them in a freezing cold "time out" room because perhaps after hours of sitting on their bed with their arm raised and no acknowldgement they really had to piss so got up without permission- tackled, stripped and locked away- for their own safety of course. We would sit on those dreaded beds for twenty three hours a day. No going outside, no anything really. You may raise your hand for hours on end and the staff would only ignore you unless you got up, then prepare to be tackled. I was told to write a twenty page biography of my issues, and had this ripped up in my face three times by my counselor who told me that I was full of shit and a manipulative liar minimizing and all that good shit...so what does one do, make up issues when the truth is not working its about survival at that point. Truly. Then they "accepted" my bio, what irony. A couple of years ago I was visiting my family and found a video from a family therapy session from when I was at the village. Damn. I broke down, flooded with the pain of that year. I was on so much lithium and extremely high doses of prozac that on the video my speech was terribly slurred and I almost seemed retarded. Scary.
After about six weeks to three months one "graduates" out of the stabelization with the grand priveledge of moving into a cabin in the woods with no electricity or running water. Of course there is a bath house that is used for showers and everything is timed short. The winter is cold, and often as a punishment for something or another the bath house "priveledge" would be revoked in the mornings and if you wanted to wash your face and brush your teeth then you you had five minutes at an outside spigot for the entire group in thirty degree temps, and it is an absolute nitemare. There is a cosequence for everything. It seems to break ones spirit is a concrete goal of the all powerful treatment team. There is verbal abuse by the counselors, and the limited and always supervised contact with family is always coached. Some other consequences pusing a wheelbarrow full of rocks, walking holding a ten foot piece of rope stepping all over one another for miles on end. Slepp deprivation. They work you like a slave doing physical labor and the school is inadequate at best...I don't know.
People have problems, and time heals a lot of things...I left home after graduating from the village so upset that my parents put me there and did not speak to my Mother for almost four years. Today, I realize that at the time they were only doing what they thought was best at the time, right or wrong, they never intentionally set out to harm me....now the people at the viallge, there was some serious abuse going on...
I mean I am 34 now, and still tramuatized...anyway...I am tired, and given time could deliver more details and examples, but feel free to e mail me with any questions, and I'm interested in hearing from some other "alumni" from years ago with their own thoughts and opinions....I'm allowed to have those now unlike my time at Peninsula Village. Thanks...August
Source:
Sunday, October 14, 2012
Survivor Testimony of Bill Boyles (From wwaspsurvivors.com)
Very early one morning, shortly before Halloween 1997, several large men burst into my room, put in handcuffs, and dragged me away right in front of my parents, and they did nothing. They did nothing because they had hired the men and paid them to take me. It was a legal kidnapping, and there was nothing I could do.
The men took almost all the way across the country, from airport to airport, Orlando to Atlanta to Houston to Dallas to Las Vegas…and then we drove. I couldn’t see anything in the night as we drove through the desert that night. The men told me nothing except that we were headed to Utah. And then, in the early morning hours again, almost 24 hours after I had left, I finally arrived.
As they dragged me towards the building, it didn’t look special in any particular way. Just a one-story, nondescript building. The sign out front said “Brightway Adolescent Hospital”. My first idea of what life here was really going to be like was when we paused at the front door. The “escorts” pushed a button and waited til the door buzzed and swung ponderously open.
They dragged me in and I began the process of intake. First they asked me a seemingly endless series of questions about my drug use )none), my sexual experiences (sadly, again none) and so on and so forth ad naseum. Then I was weighed and measured, and after that, I was stripped, then searched.
All my clothes were taken from me, and I was given a cup of foul-smelling liquid. I was told to go take a shower and wash my whole body with it. I asked what it was, and I was told it was flea and lice shampoo. I went into the shower and turned it on. Have I mentioned I’m from FLORIDA? And apparently Utah is freezing cold in October? Well, there was no hot water in that shower. I tried and tried every which way on the handle, I waited and waited.. Eventually I gave up and bit the bullet. I still remember how cold that water was. I shook so hard I could barely lather up with that nasty shampoo. But eventually I got it done. I emerged from the shower and I was given, not my clothes, but a thin hospital gown to wear. Here’s the thing: I’m a big guy, 6’4” or thereabouts, and even at 14 I was around 6’1”. And yet, this was a hospital for kids. The problem quickly became clear: their gowns were sized for kids, and, as one of my friends put it to me, it was like a shirt on me. The thing barely covered my “areas”, and quite frankly they still hung out, if you catch my drift. But all my clothes had been taken, and I was enforced to wear it the way it was. There didn’t seem to be anything I could do about it, so I shrugged and accepted my fate. The tech informed me there wasn’t a bed for me that night, not until someone shipped off to another program in the morning. So he improvised. I was led to a room marked “Seclusion”. The door had a window in it. When he opened that door, and I got a glimpse of the room inside, I was horrified. The room was tiny, so tiny in fact that a small cot had to wedged diagonally to even fit inside. But even worse than that, the cot had seatbelt-like straps across it, clearly intended to tie the bed’s occupant down. (It reminded me of the bed Sarah Connor is strapped down on in the beginning of Terminator 2.) I began to panic thinking of spending the night tied down in those straps. The tech seemed to sense my panic, and informed me as long as I behaved myself I would be spared from that, at least. He told me to lie down and go to sleep, but it was hard, since they didn’t turn the lights off, and I spent the night staring at the very prominent video camera recording my every move.
Early the next morning they came and woke me up. Strangely enough, waking up was when the nightmare truly began. I was led out into a small room and that’s when I realized that Brightway was a co-ed facility. The girls were pretty, and they were around my age, and they were staring at me…and that’s when I remembered my current state of dress. Quite embarrassing. For a socially awkward 14-year old boy, it was devastating. I don’t even think people can imagine. A lot of bad things happened to me in my time in the program: isolation, torture, electrocution, tetanus. I rate this by far the worst. I’m sure I turned red as a beet. I wanted to crawl into a hole, preferably one very far away, and die, but I wouldn’t be let off the hook that easily. My appeals to the staff went on deaf ears, and I began to learn the very first lesson every new child must learn when entering a WWASP school: What must be endured, can be endured. And what cannot be changed (basically everything in the WWASP system), must be endured. That morning I also began my indoctrination into the WWASP rules system. The rules at Brightway were many in number and often complicated in application. Rules included asking for permission for literally everything, such as standing, sitting, talking, going to the bathroom, even burping. Talking to other students was not allowed, and looking out the window, any window, was a rule violation of the most serious kind. That got you put into the straps on that awful little bed that still haunts my memory. The most curious rule involved a restriction of travel. You had to be under the supervision of a staff member at all times, either in person or via the series of security cameras everywhere. The facility was broken into blocks of monitoring, delineated by the placement of pairs of small, round, brightly colored stickers near the floor at every doorway and at various places along halls and in corners. When you got to one of these stickers, you had to stop, and then yell the word “cross”. That would draw the staff’s attention, and once they were monitoring you, they would reply with “cross” and you could safely walk on to the next pair.
The next order of business was for me to be seen and evaluated by some sort of mental health type. I think he was a psychiatrist but I’m not sure and I never caught his name. I think it was Dr. Goates, but I can’t really remember. I mostly remember that we talked, and at the end of it, right in front me he pulled out this tape recorder and started dictating. What he said wasn’t very complimentary, things like that I was clearly in denial about my drug use (I wasn’t) and that I exhibited signs of defiance, and so on. I felt like what he was doing was extremely condescending and rude. I mean, to talk about someone like they aren’t even there, and to say rude and untrue things about them while you’re doing it isn’t exactly the height of good manners. I said something to him, and he blew me off and told me not to interrupt him. That’s when I got pissed. I admit, I blew up a little bit as all the anger, frustration, humiliation, and fear of the last day and a nalf came to a head. I started yelling and got in his face, and frankly, I was bigger than he was. I wasn’t going to hurt him, I just wanted him to stop, and that’s what I told him, but all the blood drained out of his face and he started yelling for help. The tech on duty ran in, quickly took in the situation, grabbed me, and dragged me out. That was the first time I was ever restrained in a WWASP program (it only happened one other time, I mostly kept my head down and toed the line.) I quickly found myself back in the little room marked “Seclusion” with the scary little bed that had the scary little straps and the big brother security camera watching everything.
I begged shamelessly not be strapped down, and they agreed, with the caveat that if I acted up at all not only were they going to come in and beat my ass and strap me down, they would also shoot me full of thorazine, and they told me the thorazine would make me “shit my pants” and then I would have to “lie in it all day.” I don’t know how long they left me in there. It probably wasn’t that long but it felt like years. I had nothing to do, the room was tiny and getting smaller fast, and I was scared out of my mind that any second they would come barging in to make good on their earlier threats.
However long it was, eventually they let me out, and they gave me my real clothes back. I could have kissed the guy. I went back and it was time to finish my indoctrination and training to be a good little WWASP student. I was told to write a letter to my parents, and so I did. It began, “Dear Mom and Dad,
Fuck you for doing this to me…” WWASP heals families….right, sure. I have no idea if that letter made it or not, since they read all our mail. I’m not even sure which I would prefer.
After the letter writing, it was time for school. Of course, in a short-term, transient type program like Brightway, school had little meaning since any work completed didn’t follow the student to their permanent facility. I believe the only point was to start getting kids used to WWASP-style school arrangements, namely working at your own pace, teaching yourself, and having no support from a teacher. So instead of actual schoolwork, we did book reports. I remember both reading The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway and writing the book report in under a day and the “teacher” being amazed. I did a ton of book reports while I was there out of sheer boredom. It was that or just pretend to be doing book reports, and I abhor having nothing to do.
The days gradually began to pass and blur together. They were giving me pills, lots of pills, even waking me up at night to give me more. I have no idea what they were, even to this day. I was never told. I never gave informed consent. They told me to take the pills, and in a WWASP school it is always advisable to do as you’re told, as I was quickly learning, so I took the pills. Besides, all the other kids were on tons of pills, too, so it didn’t seem so weird at the time. I think the pills were sedatives administered in order to keep us in line. I was so out of it the whole time I was there I don’t even know how long I was there.
I do remember Halloween passing, though. It went largely unremarked and uncelebrated except that I think we had to do some dumb arts and craft project that would have bored a 10-year old. Other than that, nothing as far as I remember. No costumes and no candy, no trick or treating. Almost no acknowledgment of the holiday at all. It was a pattern I was going to grow all too used to.
Finally my last day came, and I was to be shipped off to Samoa. There were 6 of us headed there, apparently quite a large group. The last night, they put us all in a room with a TV, which none of us had watched since our arrivals, and threw us a sort-of little party. They showed us movies all night. I remember watching “Stand By Me” and “Red Dawn.” We had to watch. No one was allowed to sleep. If anyone drifted off he was awakened, roughly if necessary. The gaiety began to leak out of the party. The next morning, still very early, they dressed us in our travel clothes: short blue shorts, white t-shirts, and flip-flops with white socks. We all knew the score. Those clothes were designed to make it hard to run, both by making us stand out and by, in the case of the socks and flip-flops, literally making it physically hard to run. They took us all outside, my first time since arriving, and put us in a van to take us to the airport in Las Vegas.
The drive back to the airport, just like the drive in, seemed to take forever, but at least the second time I could see the scenery. Being from Florida, I had never seen a desert before and had rarely seen mountains, cliffs, and hills like the ones I could see. All too soon, though, the drive was over and we were in Las Vegas. There was one more stop, however, and little did I know but involved one of the last acts of kindness I was to experience from the WWASP staff for years.
The van pulled into a gas station with a large convenience store. The staff members with us asked us what we wanted for our “last meals.” I don’t know what anyone else asked for, but I asked for Twizzlers and a Mountain Dew. I got Red Vines and a Dr. Pepper, but it was close enough. That was the last thing I hate in America for almost 2 years. Sometimes I still buy that combo as a snack and reminisce.
After that they got us out the van and into the airport, got our tickets, and took us to the gates, where armed guards awaited to both keep us from running or causing trouble and to thoroughly embarrass us since ever person who walked past just had to stop and gawk at us. Even worse awaited us at LAX, but that’s part of another story, not part of this one.
To sum up, Brightway was nothing more than a stopping-over point, a resting place for WWASP-bound travelers. It was designed to begin the pacification and breaking process while indoctrinating those in its care to WWASP rules, points, and level systems. It had no valid treatment, no teacher, and untrained staff. The rules were strange and harsh. It was not a hospital in any sense of the word. I gained nothing from my time there except a good idea of how to act in WWASP programs: keep your head down and always look busy. Brightway was closed in March 1998, the first WWASP program to be shut down, and in some way that’s fitting to me, since it was also the first WWASP program for so many students.
Sources:
The men took almost all the way across the country, from airport to airport, Orlando to Atlanta to Houston to Dallas to Las Vegas…and then we drove. I couldn’t see anything in the night as we drove through the desert that night. The men told me nothing except that we were headed to Utah. And then, in the early morning hours again, almost 24 hours after I had left, I finally arrived.
As they dragged me towards the building, it didn’t look special in any particular way. Just a one-story, nondescript building. The sign out front said “Brightway Adolescent Hospital”. My first idea of what life here was really going to be like was when we paused at the front door. The “escorts” pushed a button and waited til the door buzzed and swung ponderously open.
They dragged me in and I began the process of intake. First they asked me a seemingly endless series of questions about my drug use )none), my sexual experiences (sadly, again none) and so on and so forth ad naseum. Then I was weighed and measured, and after that, I was stripped, then searched.
All my clothes were taken from me, and I was given a cup of foul-smelling liquid. I was told to go take a shower and wash my whole body with it. I asked what it was, and I was told it was flea and lice shampoo. I went into the shower and turned it on. Have I mentioned I’m from FLORIDA? And apparently Utah is freezing cold in October? Well, there was no hot water in that shower. I tried and tried every which way on the handle, I waited and waited.. Eventually I gave up and bit the bullet. I still remember how cold that water was. I shook so hard I could barely lather up with that nasty shampoo. But eventually I got it done. I emerged from the shower and I was given, not my clothes, but a thin hospital gown to wear. Here’s the thing: I’m a big guy, 6’4” or thereabouts, and even at 14 I was around 6’1”. And yet, this was a hospital for kids. The problem quickly became clear: their gowns were sized for kids, and, as one of my friends put it to me, it was like a shirt on me. The thing barely covered my “areas”, and quite frankly they still hung out, if you catch my drift. But all my clothes had been taken, and I was enforced to wear it the way it was. There didn’t seem to be anything I could do about it, so I shrugged and accepted my fate. The tech informed me there wasn’t a bed for me that night, not until someone shipped off to another program in the morning. So he improvised. I was led to a room marked “Seclusion”. The door had a window in it. When he opened that door, and I got a glimpse of the room inside, I was horrified. The room was tiny, so tiny in fact that a small cot had to wedged diagonally to even fit inside. But even worse than that, the cot had seatbelt-like straps across it, clearly intended to tie the bed’s occupant down. (It reminded me of the bed Sarah Connor is strapped down on in the beginning of Terminator 2.) I began to panic thinking of spending the night tied down in those straps. The tech seemed to sense my panic, and informed me as long as I behaved myself I would be spared from that, at least. He told me to lie down and go to sleep, but it was hard, since they didn’t turn the lights off, and I spent the night staring at the very prominent video camera recording my every move.
Early the next morning they came and woke me up. Strangely enough, waking up was when the nightmare truly began. I was led out into a small room and that’s when I realized that Brightway was a co-ed facility. The girls were pretty, and they were around my age, and they were staring at me…and that’s when I remembered my current state of dress. Quite embarrassing. For a socially awkward 14-year old boy, it was devastating. I don’t even think people can imagine. A lot of bad things happened to me in my time in the program: isolation, torture, electrocution, tetanus. I rate this by far the worst. I’m sure I turned red as a beet. I wanted to crawl into a hole, preferably one very far away, and die, but I wouldn’t be let off the hook that easily. My appeals to the staff went on deaf ears, and I began to learn the very first lesson every new child must learn when entering a WWASP school: What must be endured, can be endured. And what cannot be changed (basically everything in the WWASP system), must be endured. That morning I also began my indoctrination into the WWASP rules system. The rules at Brightway were many in number and often complicated in application. Rules included asking for permission for literally everything, such as standing, sitting, talking, going to the bathroom, even burping. Talking to other students was not allowed, and looking out the window, any window, was a rule violation of the most serious kind. That got you put into the straps on that awful little bed that still haunts my memory. The most curious rule involved a restriction of travel. You had to be under the supervision of a staff member at all times, either in person or via the series of security cameras everywhere. The facility was broken into blocks of monitoring, delineated by the placement of pairs of small, round, brightly colored stickers near the floor at every doorway and at various places along halls and in corners. When you got to one of these stickers, you had to stop, and then yell the word “cross”. That would draw the staff’s attention, and once they were monitoring you, they would reply with “cross” and you could safely walk on to the next pair.
The next order of business was for me to be seen and evaluated by some sort of mental health type. I think he was a psychiatrist but I’m not sure and I never caught his name. I think it was Dr. Goates, but I can’t really remember. I mostly remember that we talked, and at the end of it, right in front me he pulled out this tape recorder and started dictating. What he said wasn’t very complimentary, things like that I was clearly in denial about my drug use (I wasn’t) and that I exhibited signs of defiance, and so on. I felt like what he was doing was extremely condescending and rude. I mean, to talk about someone like they aren’t even there, and to say rude and untrue things about them while you’re doing it isn’t exactly the height of good manners. I said something to him, and he blew me off and told me not to interrupt him. That’s when I got pissed. I admit, I blew up a little bit as all the anger, frustration, humiliation, and fear of the last day and a nalf came to a head. I started yelling and got in his face, and frankly, I was bigger than he was. I wasn’t going to hurt him, I just wanted him to stop, and that’s what I told him, but all the blood drained out of his face and he started yelling for help. The tech on duty ran in, quickly took in the situation, grabbed me, and dragged me out. That was the first time I was ever restrained in a WWASP program (it only happened one other time, I mostly kept my head down and toed the line.) I quickly found myself back in the little room marked “Seclusion” with the scary little bed that had the scary little straps and the big brother security camera watching everything.
I begged shamelessly not be strapped down, and they agreed, with the caveat that if I acted up at all not only were they going to come in and beat my ass and strap me down, they would also shoot me full of thorazine, and they told me the thorazine would make me “shit my pants” and then I would have to “lie in it all day.” I don’t know how long they left me in there. It probably wasn’t that long but it felt like years. I had nothing to do, the room was tiny and getting smaller fast, and I was scared out of my mind that any second they would come barging in to make good on their earlier threats.
However long it was, eventually they let me out, and they gave me my real clothes back. I could have kissed the guy. I went back and it was time to finish my indoctrination and training to be a good little WWASP student. I was told to write a letter to my parents, and so I did. It began, “Dear Mom and Dad,
Fuck you for doing this to me…” WWASP heals families….right, sure. I have no idea if that letter made it or not, since they read all our mail. I’m not even sure which I would prefer.
After the letter writing, it was time for school. Of course, in a short-term, transient type program like Brightway, school had little meaning since any work completed didn’t follow the student to their permanent facility. I believe the only point was to start getting kids used to WWASP-style school arrangements, namely working at your own pace, teaching yourself, and having no support from a teacher. So instead of actual schoolwork, we did book reports. I remember both reading The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway and writing the book report in under a day and the “teacher” being amazed. I did a ton of book reports while I was there out of sheer boredom. It was that or just pretend to be doing book reports, and I abhor having nothing to do.
The days gradually began to pass and blur together. They were giving me pills, lots of pills, even waking me up at night to give me more. I have no idea what they were, even to this day. I was never told. I never gave informed consent. They told me to take the pills, and in a WWASP school it is always advisable to do as you’re told, as I was quickly learning, so I took the pills. Besides, all the other kids were on tons of pills, too, so it didn’t seem so weird at the time. I think the pills were sedatives administered in order to keep us in line. I was so out of it the whole time I was there I don’t even know how long I was there.
I do remember Halloween passing, though. It went largely unremarked and uncelebrated except that I think we had to do some dumb arts and craft project that would have bored a 10-year old. Other than that, nothing as far as I remember. No costumes and no candy, no trick or treating. Almost no acknowledgment of the holiday at all. It was a pattern I was going to grow all too used to.
Finally my last day came, and I was to be shipped off to Samoa. There were 6 of us headed there, apparently quite a large group. The last night, they put us all in a room with a TV, which none of us had watched since our arrivals, and threw us a sort-of little party. They showed us movies all night. I remember watching “Stand By Me” and “Red Dawn.” We had to watch. No one was allowed to sleep. If anyone drifted off he was awakened, roughly if necessary. The gaiety began to leak out of the party. The next morning, still very early, they dressed us in our travel clothes: short blue shorts, white t-shirts, and flip-flops with white socks. We all knew the score. Those clothes were designed to make it hard to run, both by making us stand out and by, in the case of the socks and flip-flops, literally making it physically hard to run. They took us all outside, my first time since arriving, and put us in a van to take us to the airport in Las Vegas.
The drive back to the airport, just like the drive in, seemed to take forever, but at least the second time I could see the scenery. Being from Florida, I had never seen a desert before and had rarely seen mountains, cliffs, and hills like the ones I could see. All too soon, though, the drive was over and we were in Las Vegas. There was one more stop, however, and little did I know but involved one of the last acts of kindness I was to experience from the WWASP staff for years.
The van pulled into a gas station with a large convenience store. The staff members with us asked us what we wanted for our “last meals.” I don’t know what anyone else asked for, but I asked for Twizzlers and a Mountain Dew. I got Red Vines and a Dr. Pepper, but it was close enough. That was the last thing I hate in America for almost 2 years. Sometimes I still buy that combo as a snack and reminisce.
After that they got us out the van and into the airport, got our tickets, and took us to the gates, where armed guards awaited to both keep us from running or causing trouble and to thoroughly embarrass us since ever person who walked past just had to stop and gawk at us. Even worse awaited us at LAX, but that’s part of another story, not part of this one.
To sum up, Brightway was nothing more than a stopping-over point, a resting place for WWASP-bound travelers. It was designed to begin the pacification and breaking process while indoctrinating those in its care to WWASP rules, points, and level systems. It had no valid treatment, no teacher, and untrained staff. The rules were strange and harsh. It was not a hospital in any sense of the word. I gained nothing from my time there except a good idea of how to act in WWASP programs: keep your head down and always look busy. Brightway was closed in March 1998, the first WWASP program to be shut down, and in some way that’s fitting to me, since it was also the first WWASP program for so many students.
Sources:
- Survivor Testimony of Bill Boyles (Brightway) (wwwasp survivors)
- The facility on Fornits Wiki
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