"Concentration camp" run by GOP ex-Romney fundraiser

Yeah, Romney's out of the race. But Robert Lichfield, a Republican bigshot from Utah who was his most controversial fundraiser, remains in serious need of scrutiny for what he's doing to American kids, even if this particular Red State horror is no longer part of the 2008 election.

Lichfield runs an extremely profitable network of "tough love" private schools for American teenagers. He's based in Utah, but his dungeon-like punishment center, Tranquility Bay, is run in Jamaica, beyond the reach of U.S. law. He had to leave the Romney campaign after it emerged that he was facing hundreds of child abuse complaints, including stories of children locked in dog cages.

The latest: An Orthodox Jewish family whose teen was sent to Tranquility Bay is now, aptly, accusing him of running a "modern-day concentration camp" for profit.

Children have been beaten, forced to eat their vomit and made to stand in painful contortions for hours, according to a separate suit filed in Utah by former students against private boot camps, including Tranquility Bay.

The case has so riled up members of the normally insular Orthodox community that several are taking the rare step of publicizing Isaac's situation.

[...] They claim he was lured to Brooklyn with the promise of a job, handcuffed and thrown into a van that took him to the boot camp as he cried and begged to be released, the suit says.

There've been hundreds of other stories like this about Lichfield's company, so it's not very far-fetched.

When I was writing about Mike Huckabee for AlterNet, I discovered he had his own teenage tough love scandal involving a private plane and a questionable facility known as "Lord's Ranch." Haven't seen any ties between the "troubled teen" industry and the present candidates, but thought I'd throw this out there, as it would be a shame for this issue to sink out of sight just because it's an election year...

Rep. George Miller, from my part of the world in California, has been trying forever to regulate this destructive industry, which has claimed a number of lives--not long ago, that of a Florida teen, Martin Lee Anderson. (His alleged killers, guards at one of these schools, were last year found not guilty.)

I missed this one, but a long-awaited GAO report (requested by Miller) finally came out in October, claiming "thousands of allegations of child abuse and neglect" at these private discipline schools. Hope something comes of it.

•  This kind of treatment creates manchurian

  candidates..this is how killers are programmed...they discovered this in the Third Reich..wonder how many graduates of these horror chambers are working for Blackwater USA..??

  by RubyGal on Tue Mar 25, 2008 at 03:33:33 PM PDT

  •  and what explains their parents?

    What sort of people can do this to their children?

    by Marcion on Tue Mar 25, 2008 at 03:37:55 PM PDT

    •  Well, the parents

      who screwed their kids up so badly with their dysfunctional home life that the option of involuntary commission would even be on the table. That's who.

      by karmsy on Tue Mar 25, 2008 at 04:15:26 PM PDT

    •  How would they know? NT

      by NotablyZen on Tue Mar 25, 2008 at 04:15:49 PM PDT

      •  Eminently fair point,

        no matter what I said above.

        by karmsy on Tue Mar 25, 2008 at 04:17:06 PM PDT

      •  parents sometimes don't know...

        saw a report on a boy who died because of the "treatment" he got at a religions camp.

        He was getting unruly at home, though nothing I thought a good old fashioned home-delivered punishment wouldn't  handle. His parents had him taken away to the horifying place where they starved him (among other things) to death.

        His parents are so grief stricken that they fell for the BS. These operators are truly criminal.

        by third Party please on Tue Mar 25, 2008 at 04:46:31 PM PDT

        •  I think they are conducting studies

          I know that there were pain threshold tests done on little kids in the Bay Area at an elementary school without the knowledge of the parents..

          poor kids from Emeryville in the East Bay..

          by RubyGal on Tue Mar 25, 2008 at 05:05:16 PM PDT

    •  Parents who get desperate over drug abuse

      truancy, promiscuity, alcoholism, and any number of other dumbass things that teenage children have been known to do.

      You don't have any teenagers, do you?

      by Andrew Lazarus on Tue Mar 25, 2008 at 05:30:36 PM PDT

      •  I wasn't raised in America

        In my culture, you dont' turn your family in, you dont' turn your family over, you don't narc on your family, you don't let any stranger put a hand on your family. Pure and simple. If you let somebody take your kid, you don't deserve to ever see them again.

        by Marcion on Tue Mar 25, 2008 at 06:12:11 PM PDT

•  this country is turning into a concentration camp

  You gotta love these parents. No longer content to push for every tougher sentences and fudn the bulidng of the biggest gulag in the world, they are now sending in their own children for a little of the same brutal treatment. This society is sick. These are the same people that would applaud it if their troubled teen signed up to be an occupation soldier. Come on, Billy, go kill like a good boy. What, you don't want to go? Then to the camps with your unAmerican ass, and later I will testify at your sentencing to make sure the government puts you away for good.

  by Marcion on Tue Mar 25, 2008 at 03:37:10 PM PDT

•  Here is an article about GW Bush and

  whether or not he is a manchurian candidate..a mind control subject which is not far off the mark since his father has a long history in the CIA...

  There have been experiments done with children in the Bay Area of San Francisco that were pain threshold tests .. little kids..

  Sounds kind of strange..but nothing should surprise anyone any longer...these people, Hillary included, are capable of just about anything..

  http://www.commondreams.org/...

  by RubyGal on Tue Mar 25, 2008 at 03:43:03 PM PDT

•  This gets to the definition of a "cult."

  When is a controlling, absolutist, authoritarian, conformist religious organization a "cult"? It's important to emphasize that not every such organization is. I walked away from the creed I was born into--a conservative, hardline church, to be sure, but no cult. People COULD walk away from it, and in my late teens, I did.

  Well, at the point it deprives followers/detainees of choice, a religious  organization IS a cult. That's what you're describing here, and it's scary.

  Thanks for the diary.

  by karmsy on Tue Mar 25, 2008 at 04:11:10 PM PDT

•  This crap is cropping up

  all over this Country. And the thing we need to do if we win the WH, is to run these republicans out of power completely.  If we don't, they will lay low until the next election. And it will all start over again.

  by Owllwoman on Tue Mar 25, 2008 at 04:23:02 PM PDT

•  Unfortunately in Oregon we had these too

  I doubt they were run by the same guy but almost like clockwork every three to five years the media out here report some story about an abusive teenage boot camp in rural Oregon.  The fact that it doesn't go away tells you that some people are just sick.  Don't even get me started on the old Indian schools out here....

  by skywaker9 on Tue Mar 25, 2008 at 04:33:40 PM PDT

•  Not just discipline

  I have read about camps to "fix" gay teens that many churches encourage their parishioners to send their suspect children to.  The kids don't even have to have cause trouble, they just have to be suspected of being gay.  The parents are told the children won't live past 30 in the gay lifestyle, so this is the only chance to save the kid's life.  Weird stuff!  I saw an online documentary about one kid being rescued from such a place by protests generated online by his friends.  People showed up outside the walls of his terrible prison with signs, folks came from all over.  It was a beautiful story of people coming together to free an innocent person from a cruel, mentally abusive prison, but to have the need for freeing the innocent in this country is terrifying.  Abuse is abuse and should always be illegal.

  by get the red out on Tue Mar 25, 2008 at 05:04:22 PM PDT

  •  How did I get out?

    I was subjected to this kind of garbage, certainly, in the course of early religious programming I received. Homosexuals were evil and deserved AIDS; provocatively dressed women were responsible for men's eternal damnation (sic), over their lustful thoughts and impulses. All this was dinned into my ears, hour upon hour, by perfectly straight-faced Sunday school teachers and other religious leaders.

    I don't credit myself with anything special. I don't think I have an unusual intellect, or character, or energy, that would have powered my escape from the nutty religion I was raised in. Plenty of other people in my situation got out, too.

    Rather, I think the escape routes in my environment were open, and I inevitably found them. I was lucky indeed. Not only wasn't I physically detained, I was actually allowed to go away to a secular college, rather than a church-run school. While I was at that secular college, I went to the student health service, and connected with a counselor who wasn't a part of the religion I was raised in. She opened my eyes, got me to examine my relationship to the church clear-headedly, and I really saw its influence on my life for the first time. I walked away for good.

    The thing that's so scary about fanatical religious groups these days is that, besides the physical coercion the diarist describes, they restrict contact to the outside world. Devotees/detainees can't form a healthy frame of reference, and they remain trapped for much longer than I was, if they get away at all.

    by karmsy on Tue Mar 25, 2008 at 05:58:51 PM PDT