Exploiting & Institutionalizing Teens

For more than 100 years, institutions have been popping up in America promising to put troubled teens back on the right track. But all too often these teens end up being subjected to what can only be described as torture in these institutions. Mike Papantonio is joined by mass torts attorney Caleb Cunningham to talk about what’s happening.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

For more than a hundred years, institutions have been popping up in America promising to put troubled teens in the right track. But all too soon these teens end up being subjected to what can only be described as torture in these institutions. Joining me to talk about that and what's happening is Caleb Cunningham. Caleb, let me ask you right off the bat, people don't even know about this. They hear well, so-and-so was sent to a reformatory of some kind. They have all kinds of words for it. Why don't you lay this story out for me a little bit.

So essentially this stuff has existed for more than a hundred years. I know you did a great show on the Dozier school, and that's not a one-off. You know, you've got 80 dead children in unmarked graves, in Dozier here in Florida and that's happening around the country. These children are being subjected to unimaginable cruelty under the guise of wilderness therapy, of conversion camps, of reformatory schools. They've got a lot of different names, but what they're selling is this miraculous snake oil. That something is wrong with your child and we can fix 'em.

Yeah.

We can fix 'em.

Send them away and just give complete control to us and we're gonna fix 'em. Just like you mentioned Dozier, there's graves everywhere where we don't even know where the children are buried.

Right.

Where they were beat, they were raped, they were murdered and they were put in graves in that Dozier area. Right there in Marianna, Florida. But people don't understand, this is an industry. Okay.

Oh yeah.

This is not just one off. This is an industry. Talk about the industry of this whole idea of, you know, troubled exploited teen industry.

And it's big money in it. You know, there's about $23 billion of public funds going to this because it's not just parents who are being lied to. It's juvenile judges, psychiatric professionals, things like that, that are being lied to by these people. And it's big business. It's for-profit companies running private prisons for children. These, these hell holes. Again, I apologize for the foul language, but that's what these are.

Mm-hmm.

These are terrors that we are allowing to happen in this country and they're profiting off of it.

Well, okay, let's back up on the idea. It started out where, you know, maybe a Catholic church would say, we have a place you can send a troubled teen. We're gonna work with them. That was a disaster. More abuse cases. The Mormon church did the same thing. Anytime you see that lining up, it's usually bad. Has a bad ending to it. But this is even worse because you've got Wall Street.

Right.

Wall Street saying, hey, we can make a lot of money with these troubled kids. It doesn't make any difference what we do to 'em because nobody ever finds out. Basically, they've gotten away with a lot for a long time, haven't they?

They absolutely have. And what, and like we saw with the abuses with the Catholic church or the Boy Scouts of America, these kids, they have a built-in excuse and say, oh, they're troubled. Oh, you can't believe what they say. And so when the abusers get caught, they blame, they blame the victim as we see time and time again. And it's the same abuses, but it's systematic and it's disgusting because you have a culmination of no regulation or little regulation, money and children. So predators are attracted to this. Negligent people are attracted to this. And like you said, Wall Street money is backing a lot of this because they see big money.

And that's important because regulators are nullified. There's no, the regulators.