by BJW Nashe
In early 1994, Aaron Bacon was a 16 year-old living with his parents in Phoenix, Arizona. Aaron was described as a compassionate, highly intelligent kid, but his parents found his recent behavior alarming. He was smoking marijuana and experimenting with psychedelics. He was listening to death metal and writing dark, angry poetry. His grades began to suffer, and he got into some minor accidents with the family car. His parents were worried that he was associating with gang members (hanging around with non-whites?) Confused and afraid, the Bacons decided to look outside the family for help.
The North Star Boot Camp was marketed as a “wilderness-adventure experience” with trained therapists who knew how to get “troubled teens” back on track through survival skills and self-discipline. They convinced Aaron’s folks to try their special brand of therapy, characterized as “tough love” in a professional, caring environment with a quasi-spiritual, outward bound twist. The glossy North Star brochure showed a young man with a backpack standing tall on a desert mountaintop at sunset, pointing up to a shining star. Aaron’s mother thought her son might enjoy his stay at the camp as a kind of extended timeout, a break from his normal routine, a chance to sober up, clear his head, and refocus. She could picture Aaron proudly reaching out to that shining star.
So one morning at 6:00 a.m., two men — one a 280-pound former military policeman — stormed into Aaron’s bedroom. He had no idea what was going on. Hopefully he wasn’t still tripping on some mind-altering substance ingested the night before. His parents were standing nearby, assuring him everything would be fine and telling him they loved him, but insisting that he had to leave with these strangers. Aaron had no choice. His parents had legally released him into the care of North Star staff, who would take him away by force if necessary. The two gorillas made this perfectly clear.
So Aaron was whisked away to North Star’s boot camp in Utah, where he joined a group of other teenage boys. There were no professional therapists. Instead, the boys were placed under the care of untrained survival guides whose job was to “break them down” or “scare them straight” through a regimen of abuse. Nutrition was substandard or nonexistent. The guides would only let the boys eat cooked food if they started a campfire on their own, from scratch. They gave Aaron boots that were too small, a sleeping bag, and a backpack. Food and clothing were withheld as punishment for non-compliant behavior. For three weeks, the boys were starved and beaten and frozen during forced marches through the canyons of Escalante, Utah. In a matter of days, Aaron had lost more than 20 pounds. Soon he was so weak he could barely stand on his own. He became incontinent and complained of abdominal pains. The guides laughed at him. They said he was “gay” and called him a “faker.” To punish him for “whining,” the guides withheld his food and took away his sleeping bag.
Aaron didn’t survive his “wilderness-adventure experience.” He collapsed on the trail on March 31, 1994, and then died while lying in the bed of a pickup truck parked on Hole in the Rock Road, 15 miles southeast of Escalante. By the time an emergency helicopter arrived, it was too late. The cause of Aaron’s death was listed as acute peritonitis and perforated ulcers. These were treatable conditions, yet no medical assistance had been provided during his nightmare journey into-the-wild. When Aaron’s parents went to identify their son at the morgue, they barely recognized him. He looked like a concentration camp victim.
“Tough Love” on Trial
Aaron’s tragic death was well-publicized. North Star was investigated and its business license was temporarily revoked. Eight North Star employees were charged with felony neglect and abuse of a disabled child. During the ensuing trials held in the small town of Panguitch, Utah, prosecutors argued that North Star staffers ignored the 16-year-old boy’s pleas for medical help and starved him during his 21-day forced march in the canyons. The defense argued that Aaron’s death was an accident, and that North Star employees were being demonized unfairly. Several boys who survived the camp were called to testify as 
witnesses. Aaron’s journal from the trip was included as evidence. In it, he described several nights spent trying to sleep in freezing temperatures without a sleeping bag or blankets. He told of having no food to eat on 11 out of 21 days. He wrote about the day when he had to eat lizards and scorpions. He mentioned other days when all he had to eat was prickly pear cactus and pine needle tea. He described the punishments meted out for various “infractions.” He detailed the verbal abuse and humiliation. Aaron’s journal is a heartbreaking litany and pain and suffering — none of which was necessary or justified.
The North Star field instructor who led the way during Aaron’s ordeal, 22-year-old Craig Fisher, was found guilty as charged. His third-degree felony conviction carried a maximum sentence of five years in prison. Fisher’s colleagues received little more than a slap on the wrist. Six North Star employees were found guilty of negligent homicide — a misdemeanor in Utah — for which they received three years’ probation, community service, and restitution for legal fees. A seventh employee was able to avoid prosecution through a probation agreement.
Aaron’s parents were stunned that just one of the defendants received jail time. His mother, Sally Bacon, was especially critical of the light sentence handed down to Georgette Costigan, a licensed medical technician who saw Aaron the day before he died, gave him a piece of cheese, and told him to work harder. “She killed my son as surely as she put a gun to his head,” Ms. Bacon told reporters.
It is interesting to note that both of Aaron’s parents had their own history with drug and alcohol abuse. Sally had survived her own battles with drugs during the 1960s and 70s. Aaron’s father, Bob, was a recovering alcoholic who had been sober for nearly a decade. No doubt they thought they were doing the right 
thing for their son, and felt they were deceived by North Star — which they were. Yet this scenario demonstrates that parents need to beware of foisting their own notions of ”illness” and “recovery” onto their teenage kids. Two years earlier, the Bacons had sent Aaron’s older brother Jarid to the Hazeldon clinic in Minnesota. The treatment there hadn’t worked out that well — which isn’t surprising, because rehabs in fact are rarely effective. (Dr. Drew Pinsky’s whole career inadvertently proves this.) Jarid did manage to turn his life around at a later date, outside of any institutional framework. In any case, the Bacons saw that Hazeldon failed to help Jarid, so they were eager to seek an alternative for Aaron. They were willing to go out on a limb. They lost sight of the fact that just because certain institutions — whether it’s Hazeldon or North Star — claim to be successful at recovery is no guarantee at all. Failure to scrutinize a particular rehab or “boot camp” before sending your kid away is a serious mistake, no matter how worried or desperate you might feel about your kid smoking pot or listening to death-metal.
I am not blaming the Bacons for Aaron’s death. Rather, I am pointing out that the Bacon’s tragic loss is something that other parents might learn valuable lessons from. Perhaps that is the best way, at this point, for us to remember Aaron Bacon.
Exposing the Truth of a Twisted Industry
The most important lesson we can learn from Aaron Bacon’s death is to not trust businesses that seek to profit from human fear, ignorance, and misery by promising amazing solutions. These businesses need to be critically examined, regulated, and monitored. What we now know is that Aaron’s treatment in Utah was not an isolated event or a freak occurrence. It is part of a disturbing pattern running through a “troubled teen” industry that is still burgeoning. In many ways, this industry functions as a group of criminal enterprises. There have been many instances of death, with thousands of young people left traumatized.
During the past few decades — coinciding with the growth of the U.S. prison industrial complex — a new model withing the multi-billion dollar recovery industry has emerged to meet the demand for “rehabilitation” of “troubled teens.” This new industry consists of privately owned and largely unregulated companies bearing catchy names such as Straight, Inc., KIDS, Diamond Ranch Academy, and Turnabout Teens. They all have glossy brochures and gleaming web sites strewn with recovery cliches, self-help slogans, and all sorts of psychobabble. Pleasing graphics are presented along with the crucial pricing information. These places are not cheap. The Bacons had to take out a second mortgage on their home to pay for Aaron’s fatal “adventure.”
Those seeking to turn a profit from the “troubled teen” racket find a ready-made client-base among hordes of fearful and ignorant American parents — mostly middle class or affluent folks (who else can afford it?) worried that their teenagers are “at risk” because they are not conforming to certain standards of behavior. Their teenagers might be smoking marijuana or experimenting with other drugs, listening to weird music, dressing in strange clothes, getting tattooed and/or pierced, running around at night with wild friends. They might be (gasp) having sex. They might be exhibiting signs of (gasp) homosexuality. Perhaps they have an undiagnosed mental illness. Parents are willing to pay exorbitant fees and sign legal release forms to have their troubled teens hauled off to shady behavior modification programs or boot camps that promise a miraculous turnaround.
The obvious question is who are these people running these programs, and what is going on there? Journalists who have investigated the troubled teen industry have discovered widespread and shocking violations of human rights by unskilled and untrained staff — often people simply hired off the street. Programs supposedly committed to helping people are riddled with the type of cruelty and abuse that one associates with Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay, rather than therapy or rehab. The word “torture” is not out of place in this context. Many of these organizations fail to meet Geneva Convention standards for treatment of prisoners of war.
The most in-depth research was conducted by Maia Szalavitz, who published a landmark book in 2006 called Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids. Szalavitz estimates that between ten and twenty thousand American teens are forced into boot camps, emotional-growth centers, and behavior-modification programs each year. The industry is unregulated, and some programs owned and operated by U.S. companies place children in facilities outside the country. What these programs all have in common, Szalavitz points out, is the misguided belief that teens should be made to conform to the expectations of parents and society, by whatever means necessary. Techniques widely used in these programs include beatings, extended isolation and restraint, public humiliation, food deprivation, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, forced exercise to the point of exhaustion, and lengthy maintenance of “stress positions.” Sexual abuse also factors into the equation, although we can assume this is a result of a hazardous environment, rather than an official technique. But who knows, with these folks? Szalavitz points to a wealth of research demonstrating that the tough love treatment, far from being effective, is actually quite harmful. Common sense would indicate as much.
Szalavitz has a degree in psychology from Brooklyn College and has worked as a journalist for the Village Voice and as a producer for PBS. She is also an addiction survivor who has studied and evaluated the effectiveness of various treatment models. Many of us who have experienced the wonderful world of addiction have found that the faith-based, 12-step ideology that dominates the recovery community — though helpful to some — is problematic for many, especially when it is used in institutionalized settings at the exclusion of other methodologies. Yet we would be hard-pressed to find adults being tortured in drug rehabs. Why in the hell are teens being subjected to abusive treatment in the name of “rehabilitation?” I suppose if there is money to be made, and there are no legal ramifications involved, certain people will engage in all sorts of inhumane behavior, and then rationalize the behavior with all kinds of nonsense.
Szalavitz traces the roots of the tough-love industry back to the Alcoholics Anonymous offshoot Synanon. It figures there would be an evangelical underpinning to the whole debacle. Synanon was a 1960s treatment program for heroin addicts that evolved into an insane cult and was eventually shut down and discredited. Szalavitz correctly identifies emotional abuse, in the form of incessant verbal attack therapy, as a core component of Synanon. The whole program was geared toward “breaking down” personalities. This is a principle aspect of any organized group or cult that strives for mind and body control. Somehow, this discredited brand of attack therapy was carried over into troubled teen programs. And now the attack therapy has been expanded to include outright physical abuse. Minors are evidently viewed as fair game for control freaks, religious nuts, sadists, and shameless profiteers who get their kicks running a sick and depraved version of teenage Guantanamo.
Why hasn’t the government stepped in to impose some standards? After Szalavitz’s book came out, and following news reports featuring a multitude of scandalous revelations, Congress held hearings on the troubled teen industry in October 2007 and April 2008. No legislation was passed, however. Good luck getting free market-worshipping Republicans who love to grandstand against crime and drugs to agree on any sensible laws that might reign in private, for-profit rehabs.
“Troubled Teens” Speak Truth to Power
Many of the teens who have been brutalized by these twisted programs have spoken out about the sickening boot camps. In a January 15, 2014 post for Cracked.com, Robert Evans described being shipped off to a teen boot camp in Montana. “In short order,” he writes, “I learned some terrifying truths about an industry dedicated to taking America’s at-risk youth and fucking them up in the worst way possible.” Evans then details six shocking realities about the troubled teen programs:
1) Your parents can hire people to take you away
2) Your parents give you up to a private company
3) Kids die in the car of these companies
4) There is no regulation or oversight of these companies
5) The treatment methods are insane and ineffective
6) The brainwashing stays with you forever
The WWASP Survivors website is a solid resource for promoting awareness and raising support for survivors of the troubled teen industry. It also provides a forum for survivors to speak out on the disturbing nature of the programs and camps.
In digesting all of this information, we need to stress an obvious point: human rights extend to everyone, including teenagers — even teenagers who had the misfortune of being born into the most socially rigid and un-enlightened parts of America. Teenage life involves personal growth and exploration, and it includes the right to experiment with various types of nonconforming behavior (as long as this does not include hurting people). In the process, mistakes will be made, and lessons will be learned. New ground will be broken. People will grow up. This is what progress looks like. It can be messy, but it can also be gloriously inventive. Life necessarily involves some degree of risk. To try to eliminate risk is insane. To demand strict adherence to rigid codes of behavior is absurd and unrealistic.
If American parents are too ignorant, fearful, or narrow-minded to effectively deal with the ups and downs of teenage life, then they are the ones who need “tough love” help — not their kids. As for the sadistic creeps who seek to profit from parental ignorance and fear by running deranged troubled teen boot camps, we can only hope that soon they will be driven out of business, and then some day will rot in hell. We need to spread the word that these places are sick — far worse than anything most teenagers ever dream of doing. We need to wise up the marks — and I’m referring to the parents who are being conned into paying for this crap. In the meantime, it would be nice if Congress could take a break from all the fundraising in order to regulate this out-of-control industry that is harming our youth.
We’ll let Aaron Bacon have the last word. In one of his poems, a sonnet, he wrote the following:
“Dreaming with a heart full of wonder
And a mind full of knowledge
Our thirst for life and love
Does not set with the sun behind us.”