From: outlawpoet - (outlawpoet@stealth.hell.com)
Date: Sat Jul 05 2003 - 18:37:24 MDT
I've resisted posting on this subject because my viewpoint is largely anecdotal, and I don't have a great deal of grounding in the real statistics of the situation.
My sister was sent to one of the programs related to Tranquility. It's a member of the WWASP organization that provides their syllabus of behavioral modification. It is a much lower implementation of the same, the children are housed in extra rooms that the inmates parents or guardians provide.
The conditions are little better, however much less isolated it is, though. My sister was stripped of any concievable liberty, forced through an 'educational' program that stressed submitting to an allpowerful God as the only road to betterment. She was taught and forced to memorize an extensive list of 'thinking errors' which stressed the chain of command, the inability of a low-authority figure to have valid ideas, and the absolute dependence upon an authorizing force.
Every opportunity was given to these children to backstab and hurt each other to be raised a level and so gain coveted priviliges. Each level they raised became a mark of seperation between them and the lower cat children. Complaints led to physical abuse, and humiliation. Higher level kids dressed them in bright orange clothes and signs. Level One and below were not allowed to leave physical contact with a level five at least, even while sleeping. I visited my parents house a few times during this, and watched these depressed, ghostly children walk slowly to the laundry room, to do their clothes for the next day(they were only allowed one set) to the kitchen to prepare their food, and to the living room, to read their AA and textbooks, all without ever breaking a link of arms, under the scornful gaze of a level 4 'supervisor'. They weren't allowed to look me in the eyes. I felt guilty, eating my cooked food, with them in the room, looking mournefully at my midsection, until smacked or yelled at by the ringl
eader.
I have never been so insulted in my life as when my parents invited me to comment on the 'positive changes' in my sister. She talked slowly, detailing all the wrongs she had visited on me, without ever taking her eyes off the floor. I read their textbooks, which were a mix of deprecating language on adolescence, and evangelical christian theory. My sister went to 'high school equivalency' classes at their centre with the rest of them, learning sad mockeries of the subjects from guard/teachers that in some cases hadn't graduated high school. I caught one of the higher level kids correcting a teacher on the Niels Bohr model of atoms, and smiled, thinking it was a history class. Later I found that it was the 'advanced physics' for graduating seniors.
I have never been more proud of my younger sister, as the day that my parents told me she had fought her way out of the center, and made good her escape into the blue sky, and left a string of black eyes and clawed guards in her wake. She did not return for a year, after my parents promised to never betray her like that again.
I'm not sure how I would have reacted, had my parents done the same to me. I'm glad I never had to find out(possibly because at the time I was growing up, my parents didn't have the means to do so.) and I don't think that anyone should have to. These 'centers' and 'schools' are nothing but abuse allowed because children can be beaten without cause. As the policeman who handcuffed my sister and led her away early one saturday said 'you're under eighteen, you only have the rights your parents decide to give you'. I didn't know then what she was in for. If I had, maybe I would have spoken up. I'm sorry that I didn't anyway.
Justin Corwin
outlawpoet@hell.com
"Dealing with incompetent programmers is an organizational problem, not a language design problem."
--Steven Taschuk<comp.lang.python>
"...ironically, perhaps, the best organised dissenters in the world today are anarchists, who are busily undermining capitalism while the rest of the left is still trying to form committees."
--Jeremy Hardy, /The Guardian/ (UK)
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