"Tough love"--or torture?(Martin Lee Anderson died in a boot camp)

Martin Lee Anderson was sent to a "boot camp" for delinquents in Bay County, Florida, on January 5 for violating the terms of his probation. The slender, rangy 14-year-old collapsed during the camp's introductory calisthenics program. Evacuated by helicopter to Pensacola hospital, Anderson died the next day.

The Bay County coroner concluded that Anderson died from natural causes related to sickle cell trait. The young man's family, and others who reviewed an hour and 20 minute videotape taken by security cameras, believe that Anderson died as the result of being beaten for a half hour by guards.

State representative Gustavo Barreiro, the Republican chair of the legislature's Criminal Justice Appropriations Committee, reports that the video depicted the unresisting teenager being repeatedly hit, kicked, and kneed by a swarm of large adult males. "When you see stuff like that," Rep. Barreiro observed, "you want to go through the TV and say, 'Enough is enough.'"

The episode offers a terrifying glimpse of the "behavior modification" (BM) industry, of which teen boot camps are merely one example.

BM programs are advertised as a variety of "tough love." This concept appeals to the reasonable belief that some adolescents inclined toward violent crime or self-destructive behavior need both strong discipline (toughness) and compassion (love). This approach, when built on a foundation of biblical principles, can and does yield positive results, since it is designed to cultivate within each participant a sense of responsibility--to others and to himself--within the framework of God's law.

BM programs, however, are secular exercises in tearing down willful personalities and re-casting them as conformists. Where the approach typified by Father Flanagan and his legendary "Boys Town" is motivated by Christian charity, the motives of many involved in the BM industry are mercenary and ideological.

The boot camp where Anderson died, notes the February 27 Naples News, was one of roughly 50 camps established in 30 states beginning in the late 1980s. Studies on recidivism rates of boot camp graduates, including a 2004 report from the National Institutes of Health, have documented "little if any improvement from more traditional juvenile justice programs."