Have you or someone you know ever been sent to a "boot camp for troubled teens"? If so, what are your experiences?

1. My brother got sent to a very strict boarding school for troubled youth. You started with nothing, not even shoes, and you can level up for more privileges. The first one he went to was near Mexico but it was shut down once they found they were beating the kids. Then he went to one in one of the middle-of-the-country states. That combined with my parents' efforts to keep him out of legal trouble, he lives a good life but he's no longer in contact with the family. Very bitter about it, but the family is still abusive so I don't blame him.
   — ShutUpAndEatWithMe


2. My best friend got sent away. She came home after being gone about two years. She was broken. She turned to drugs (hardcore), and she basically became a prostitute. She ended up committing suicide before she turned 21. I am in my mid-thirties now, and I think about it almost everyday still. I absolutely think programs like this are predatory most of the time. Tell someone they're a piece of shit enough times, and they're going to start becoming one. Edit: Yes, it was one of the ones in Utah for girls only.
   — Madermis


3. My older brother had a friend who was sent to some summer camp for troubled teens, it was out in a Nevada desert somewhere so they had no options or escape from the place. Apparently, it did nothing but make him hate his parents even more and he left the house at 18 and cut off all ties to his parents. The last my brother or I heard of him was around 3 years after he left his parents house, still wasn't talking to them and was working full time at a sandwich shop.
   — TheLastSpoonBender






4. I was sent to one in Sheridan, WY called Normative Services when I was 13. Both of my parents were in prison and my 75 year old grandmother has custody of me and 2 of my siblings. I was a little shit head who didn’t listen to her, skipped school, drank and smoked with the rest of my hoodlum friends and basically lived life as if there were no consequences (mostly because there weren’t any up until I was sent there). I was there for 13 months and it fucking sucked. It was all about “confronting negative behaviors” of my peers and they tried to brain wash us into thinking that shit would fly in the real world. The first time I tried to do that when I was released I was teased and mocked mercilessly by my classmates, so I never did it again. I will say that they did teach me healthier coping mechanisms, I was your typical emo girl that felt like cutting was the only “release” that worked for me. But mostly I just learned that I didn’t want to end up back there or in jail or prison because I don’t like people telling me what to do, so now I’m a contributing member of society and not such a little shit. Edit to add: I was court ordered to go there, Wyoming has this thing called ACHINS (a child in need of supervision) and I was in trouble for truancy so they labeled me ACHINS, took custody of me from my grandma, and sent me there. By the time I got out my dad was out of prison so he was able to regain custody after jumping through a bunch of hoops the state set up because they were determined to keep custody of me until I was 18. He finally got fed up of jumping through their hoops and basically told them that if they wanted to do that they needed to take me out of his home and send me to another facility because he wasn’t going to have the state breathing down his neck for the next 3 years. From my understanding they had exhausted their budget when it came to my care, so it was cheaper and easier for them to return custody to him.
   — pooooopthrwway6569


5. I had a friend from church who was sent to one of those "Pray Away the Gay" camps after he came out to his folks. Luckily for him it wasn't one of the bad ones; a lot of focus on living a godly life and he told me there was very little discussion of homosexuality. Mostly it was just outdoors stuff and bible study. It sounded more like the church camps we had been to together growing up. He did say it was pretty stupid to send a gay horny teenager to a camp filled with other gay horny teenagers. He seemed pretty unperturbed by the whole thing although he was mad at his folks for a long time and went to live with his brother for the rest of high school. Thanks to his experience, I didn't think the "anti-gay" camps sounded so bad until I was informed of just how awful they can be.
   — SalemScout


6. My friend was sent to one her senior year of high school. It seemed to be good for her, she seemed to be clean for the first time in years. When she returned, her aunt (who raised her) told her she could only choose between enlisting and moving back with her prostitute, drug addict mother. She wanted to go to college, not enlist so she was forced to move back with her Mom. We don’t talk much any more but from Facebook and news stories I know she’s addicted to meth, was an accomplice in a bank robbery and is dating a man 20 years older than her.
   — Shelnb






7. My cousin went to one, came back super aggressive and with a major drinking problem. Once he tried to work on that due to a DUI he became overly religious but still very aggressive.
   — dapharaoh


8. When I was a DA, boot camp was an option for younger offenders in the 18-20 range. Word got around between inmates that it was easier to serve jail time. Had multiple defendants request jail over the boot camp, so I guess that says something.
   — Lawbringer7


9. Cousin was sent to a “military academy”, basically a boarding school for kids with discipline problems. He’s in his 40’s now and has been in prison multiple times. So that didn’t really work out.
   — LMac8806






10. I was. It was... intense. I tell people about it as an adult and they don't seem to comprehend or think I'm exaggerating. The whole thing from the day I left my home to the day I was able to return took over 2 years. I have a novel about it lol. It started one night after coming home from a friends house. I snuck in through my bedroom window at about 2am to catch some sleep. I was high on pills and drunk at the time so I conked right out. I was also only 15 years old. The next thing I remember my door fly's open and the light in my room turns on. My mom and dad are standing there and my dad says "We love you very much and we can't see you continue like this anymore", and he's gone. Then I got blinded by a flashlight from the doorway and some voice I don't recognize says "get your shit and get dressed. We're going to Utah". There were two burly looking guys and a female standing there, with flashlights and backpacks waiting for me to get up and dressed. One of the guys moved towards my bedroom window like he thought I was gonna take off. Anyway, they led me through my house, were my family was no where to be seen, and into our garage, where they had parked their Ford Escape (I thought the name was kind of ironic years later). After about an hour or two of driving, and sobering up, I started to ball my eyes out. I think it finally hit me. I remember getting to Utah, showering, being allowed a single cigarette, outfitted with camping equipment (about 50 pounds of it) then driven another 2 hours into the wilderness where I was dropped off in a camp of all boys, maybe about 8. They were filthy, unkempt, pretty miserable, and looked like they'd been there without seeing anyone else for months on end. All of which turned out to be true. There were "therapists" that would stay with us, hike with us, and camp with us in rotating shifts but other than that we saw no one from the outside world. Every couple of weeks an SUV would pull up, seemingly unannounced, and drop off a new kid or call one of us over for a ride, which no one ever returned from. Though one time during a really intense hiking stretch I got trench foot and had to be evacuated to the closest hospital a few hours away, so I think I was the only person to ever return after leaving. We ate cold beans and rice unless we could create a fire from sticks and kindling, we slept in the open elements if we couldn't set up our individual campsite in a satisfactory way, and if we took too long in the morning to pack we had to carry extra during the hours-long hiking sessions. I was there for a few months, then the SUV pulled up to take me off. It just took me to another camp site, where my parents were. We talked, I had to set up our camp and make a fire so they could eat warm food, all things to show them "hey, look how self-sufficient and knowledgeable I am now!". The next day I thought I was going home, but my parents said they were only there to chauffeur me to a "therapeutic boarding school", 2500 miles away, where I would remain until I finished high school. Being 15 or 16, that sounded like a death sentence, or at least like an impossibly long time. I was one of 7 students when I arrived. We had therapy, 3 times a week, for 3 hours at a time. It was intense, and confrontation driven often times. There was no TV, no music, no video games, nothing. We got to watch one movie a week, all together, and it was usually in the G - PG realm. We ran for a few miles every morning, went to bed at 9 every night. During the first month everyone was segregated and given "work duty" which often consisted of moving granite stones from one place to another or clearing out brush from the surrounding forested area. The only good thing was I finally got to see girls again, but if you even looked at one wrong it was punishment, and ridicule, and probably more work duty. I had a friend who got to second base with a girl and they both got banned from talking to anyone else in the school for something like 2 weeks. Just sat in a corner at a desk, and people could say shit to them but they couldn't respond or acknowledge them, or else more work duty. We also did these things called "workshops" every three months, that was just ridiculously intense emotional torture as far as I'm concerned. They made us promise to not ever tell anyone what happened in them, and you had to do these workshops with a group of about 6 of your peers. (I mentioned earlier I was the 7th student, that number grew as I was there, it was just super new when I arrived) One example of a workshop activity was to just completely break down the kids who had been sexually abused as children, by playing them blaring loud songs about such subject matter and asking them to paint a picture of themselves, during the abuse, as if they were a kid with watercolors and shit. Then making them talk at length about it to the rest of us, going into every awful detail. Another example of a workshop activity was once they had us take turns lying down on the ground, while our peers physically picked us up, then they told us to walk. We walked for miles, holding eachother one at a time, and the instructors would wait until you got physically exhausted, irritated and resentful, then ask the group to take turns berating the kid they were carrying. Telling them everything about them they hated and why they were such a burden. Everyone who got carried broke down and cried. It was awful. I saw my parents for the first time after about a year, my brother after about just as long, I went home for a visit once before returning home, and my parents took my to PF Changs to celebrate. I made them take me home because the amount of people was too much for my brain. Then we got home and it was so quiet I could hear the silence for the first time in forever, I started to lose my shit. Eventually I came home, and I made some great friends there, but I'm still bitter with my parents. We've had many a fight about it over the years when it gets brought up. If anything it forced me to finish high school, which is good cause I eventually went on to finish college too. But it made me resentful, it made me mistrustful of people and it made me feel like something essential to me had been stripped away from me without my consent. EDIT: I do not have a novel, that was just a colloquialism for "incoming wall of text" EDIT 2: I actually heard from student number 9 at my school (coincidentally from the same city as me, when he messaged me it blew my mind, I can't believe how small the internet really is) EDIT 3: I do not hate my parents. I think they did they best they could. Regardless of whether or not I agree with what they did I would *not* kill them.
    — roflcyclone


11. So I was sent to a place called Mt. Karmel in Wyoming. They have since been shut down for doing a whole bunch of illegal stuff (you can google them). I was there for six months, and the only way I was able to leave is that after six months, one of the staff, during a supervised phone call, allowed me to tell the truth to my parents about what was going on. Prior to that they screened any letters I sent, so I wasn't able to explain to them what was really going on (the parents + the state paid this place per boy per day so it was in their interest to keep us there). Once I explained to my dad what had happened since I got there, he told me he would be there the following Monday to get me (we lived in CA and I was in WY at this place). There's way too much to type here about how that place operated, the stuff that went on, but I am happy to answer questions. One crazy thing is that the week I got there, three boys took shovels to a staff member's head and tried to escape. Each of them are serving life in WY currently (I heard three 80 year sentences each- and rightfully so because that's awful). I was 15 when I went, but I knew guys there who were 18/19 because staff called their parents and said if they parents flew them home/gave them money to get home their kids would end up doing the same stuff. They pretty much exploited the parent's fear of not keeping their kids safe. That being said, these places are certainly not all bad and I'm sure a bunch of them do a lot of good for teenagers/their families. Also if anyone here is familiar with where I was (who knows small word), that staff member was fired right after I left because I'm sure they figured out he let me tell my parents what was going on. I've always wanted to thank him for what he did. He knew shit was not right but told me if he tried to do anything they would fire him instantly. He was a major life saver, I wish I could find him now. I never knew his last name because we called all the staff Mr. (First Name). His name was Mr. Scotty, great guy.
    — SwisherforFisher


12. A friends boyfriend got sent to a religious one junior year, he said it was for weed, but who knows. He came home on a day pass after a few months, and immediately ran away. He hid in his girlfriends barn for a few days, and then hitchhiked out of town, when I left town 10 years later no one had heard from him.
    — Nemocom314






13. my aunt sent my nephew to one for what was supposed to be like 3 months. They sent him back after two weeks because he refused to cooperate. I guess they can handle kids getting violent, but they can't handle a kid saying "no" and refusing to do anything. late edit: He wasn't even a bad kid. He just liked to smoke pot and chase girls instead of studying.
    — NilGobblin