You can add to the ever-growing list of shit Cracked can't believe is real but apparently is the "troubled teen rehabilitation industry." For a fee, a parent can have their own child kidnapped by strangers in the dead of night, hauled off to a remote location, and subjected to harsh conditions in the wilderness until he's cured of their bad behavior. It's legal, unregulated, and there's no evidence that it actually works at all.
A while back we talked to a woman who got hauled away to one of these programs when she was 16. So when we recently heard from a man named Dylon Peven who managed to escape from one of these places -- by trekking through the goddamned desert, on foot -- we had to hear his story:
#5. You Can Get Carried Off At Any Time Without Warning
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My parents sent me to a wilderness rehabilitation camp because I was being a stereotypically shitty California teen: selling weed, not coming home at night, failing at school, and generally rebelling without a cause. They'd tried their best to discipline me -- they pulled me out of high school in my junior year after I got suspended for punching another kid, and even tried to get me to open up to a child psychologist, but nothing worked. So one day they asked me if I'd be willing to go to a rehab camp in the woods for two weeks, just to try it out. I agreed to go at the end of the month.
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"Why is it called Stalag Luft III? Is that Navajo or something?"
So you can imagine my surprise when at 4 a.m. that very next morning, two ex-Army-looking guys burst into my room, grabbed me, and shoved me into a car like a CIA abduction of a Taliban lieutenant. They told me that my parents had signed their rights away as my guardians and had given these two A-Team rejects complete authority to get me to Idaho with extreme prejudice. In this case, "extreme prejudice" just meant driving me to Idaho in a van, or maybe flying me there if I didn't put up a fight.
I agreed to cooperate peaceably enough to take a plane and save them a bunch of time, provided they let me make a phone call once we got to Idaho. My kidnappers agreed, and once we landed I borrowed one of their cellphones and called a friend of mine back home to tell him to find my pot stash and get it the hell out of my house before my parents discovered it. Considering I made this call in the middle of the abduction my parents had arranged to cure me of my delinquent behavior, I'm not sure how much more trouble I could've got in if they had found it, but better safe than sorry.
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"Bring him home so I can send him back there a second time!"
To be fair, my kidnapping story went about as well as it could possibly go. The guys who do that sort of thing are called "escorts", and their behavior can range from perfectly civil (like the guys who got me) to "dragging you through the airport like you're on your way to a Corleone family indictment." None of this comes cheap, either: My parents dropped somewhere around $5,000 to have me stolen away in the night like a pair of goblin shoes.
#4. The "Camp" Was An Empty Patch Of Desert
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As Cracked has mentioned before, wilderness rehabilitation camps can be incredibly unpleasant places, and children totally die there sometimes, thanks to a combination of heat stroke, malnutrition, and counselors without any sort of medical training. The goal of these facilities is, ostensibly, to turn troubled kids into productive members of society through lots of "tough love," a phrase which here means "hiking around in the desert drinking water until you detox or build character, whichever comes first" (see "heat stroke," previous sentence).
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"Legal says we're not allowed to call them 'hyperthermia-induced hallucinations' anymore. Now, they're 'vision quests.'"
So my "camp" was just a bunch of empty desert for us to hike around in. There were no walls, no buildings, nothing but blasted desolation as far as the eye could see. And since there are no federal regulations for how these facilities should operate, each individual program gets to make up its own rules and standards. When I arrived at camp, I was issued a set of clothes and a tarp. I was introduced to my group. Each group in the camp was headed by one male and one female counselor, who were completely unhelpful in answering any questions about camping or basic desert survival.
The only answer I kind of succeeded in getting was to the question, "Where's the bathroom?" The guy gave me a shovel. I asked him for TP and he told me to use leaves from a nearby sage plant, which wound up giving me a terrible asshole rash (a "rashole", if you will), so I switched over to rocks from then on. In case you just asked yourself, "Wouldn't that hurt?" the answer is "Not as much as a rash on your goddamned asshole."
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Failing that, you can just drag your ass on the ground like you're a dog with worms.
Our diets approached prison-levels of monotony: granola for breakfast, pita bread and peanut butter sandwiches with dried apricots for lunch, and dried beans mixed in a zip-close bag bag with water and rice for dinner, heated under the sun for a few hours. If you were good (or if the counselor liked you), you'd get to add a little Tapatio or mustard. Spices were a reward for behaving, sort of like Dune only somehow longer and more painful. My group was the only one in the camp to earn mustard, and that was a big deal. We eventually earned powdered cheese, which basically made us gods unto the eyes of our fellow campers.
Incidentally, that kind of diet makes you fart more or less constantly. You just walk around emitting gas like a pipe in an old building. And there were no showers. Since we also wore the same clothes pretty much daily, we smelled awful. Some administrator lady came by to talk to us a few weeks in, totally unprepared for us or the desert in high heels and a skirt. She was absolutely shocked at how gross we were, which is what happens when you drop a bunch of teenagers in the desert, don't let them bathe, and feed them nothing but beans and mustard for some fucking reason.
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"You were only supposed to order 100! What the hell are we going to do with 100,000 cans of beans?"
Every day we'd sleep in a different place, wake up in the morning, pack up our tarps, and hike from 7 a.m. to noon, when it got too hot to continue. You can already see how the complex social, psychological, and emotional issues that cause kids to lash out would just melt away like magic. And then you realize ...
#3. This Can Go On For Months ... Or Years
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So why did I choose to escape, rather than just sticking it out? Because I was pretty sure I could wind up stuck in this program for years.
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Pictured: not a counselor.
Remember when my parents sold me on the idea of going off to rehab for two weeks? Well, it turned out the whole camp was on an eight-step program, which I guess makes it 33 percent more efficient than Alcoholics Anonymous. We had to make it through each step before we'd be allowed to go back home. Two days into my stay, we were visited by a group of campers on their eighth and final step. These kids had all been there for three or four months, and they did their best to commiserate with our unhappiness. I remember one girl saying "I hated it too, but now that I'm on my final stage I realize how much I've learned. It's been a really great experience."
At the time, I assumed she'd been brainwashed by too many weeks eating beans in the desert, but later I learned that she was just trying to graduate and go home: Part of the program requires you to come back and talk to step one campers and tell them how rewarding the program eventually is if they stick with it. Unfortunately for her and everyone else there, it turns out that whole graduation thing is a lie. Completing Step Eight means you graduate, but it doesn't mean that you get to go home. You just graduate from the "wilderness" portion to a boarding school.
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Think of it like Hogwarts, only not.
My parents were very heavily considering that boarding school. Now, I was about to turn 18 in a few months and transform into a legal adult with the right to ruin his life on his own terms, but there were rumors flying around camp that there was a way your parents could talk to a judge to give the camp custody until you turned 21. I didn't know if this specific rumor was true, but a judge can absolutely place an 18-year-old in state custody until the age of 21 and send them to camps like mine, so the rumors were plausible enough for me to be worried.
So I decided to escape.
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Andy Dufresne ain't got shit on me.
It's not like escaping hadn't occurred to anyone before: One kid fled our group early on, only to get caught two or three days later. It was made clear to us that this was the only way escape attempts ever ended. Anyone caught trying to run off was automatically booted back to step one. They had off-road vehicles to send after escapees, and we even heard rumors of helicopters. They expended less effort chasing Harrison Ford in The Fugitive. On my second or third day there. a counselor asked me, "Are you thinking about running?"
"Yes," I said.
"We've been here 25 years. Know how often kids try to escape? Every day."
"How many kids have successfully escaped?"
"None".
"And if we don't get them, the Sand People do."
"I'm gonna be the first."
"Call me when you get home, then."
I promised I would. On my 24th day in the desert, I went for it ...
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