Part Two: Elan School: The Worst 'Troubled Teen' Facility

Robert is joined again by Miles Gray to continue to discuss The Elan School.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The zoom Lady has commanded us, and we are back.
This is behind the bastard, the podcast that exists entirely
to glorify, elevate, and worship the zoom Lady are only
God and Master, and in fact the only thing sacred
in our entire cosmology of universal ethics. My guest today,
Archbishop of the zoom Lady, Miles Gray, Miles, praise her, Oh,

(00:25):
praise be to the z l the zoom Lady, that is,
for without her contributions to our mortal galaxy, we would
have nothing. Thank you for having me, Thank you for
being on, Miles, and thank you for creating the first
religious schism in our new cult that will eventually turn
into a war that kills billions. Which is of course,
whether or not we can abbreviate the zoom Lady's name

(00:45):
to za Zo. Yeah, I know, and we've talked about
this off Mike, and like I said, you come with
your people, I'll come with mine, And well, I guess
we'll see who's alive in the end. Yes, I am
excited for when we both gain access to nuclear silos
and can really really take this, this this disagreement over
theology to an apocalyptic level. I mean, I think that's

(01:07):
the one thing we both agree on and we're excited for.
Secretly we are. It's just about the joy of starting
a nuclear war, Miles. It's just about doing that thing
we saw during a mushroom trip or were like, dude,
what if you saw a mushroom cloud right in front
of you, though, wouldn't that be look at us our zoom,
Lady Colt, Now, praise be, praise be so Miles. When

(01:32):
we were talking last time, if you remember, you might
have forgotten. That's right. Kids spank to girls so badly
she lost control of her bowels and had to be hospitalized.
Because everything in a Lane was done communally, including physical punishments,
which we're going to talk about a lot more today.
There's a lot. It gets so much worse, Miles, so
much worse. So. By the mid seventies, Allon had moved

(01:57):
to the facility would occupy for the majority of its
existence in Poland Springs. Most of its residents lived on
the five acre facility, which included a lawn, one an
administrative trailer, and six other numbered buildings that acted as dormitories,
classroom space, etcetera. There were two other ALLAWAN facilities, including
one in parson Field, Maine that had once been a
TV sanitarium. The space for all these facilities was necessary,

(02:20):
or all of this space was necessary because in the
early seventies alone got a bunch of positive press reports
which brought hundreds of new residents to the program. So again,
what are positive press what's a positive press resort for this?
That this is saving kids who whose lives are completely
out of control, That this will give you back your kids,

(02:41):
this will get them off of drugs. You know, nothing
is worse than having a kid who's drug addict. So
anything ALON does is just and the idea that this
is this is like the best kind of treatment for them.
Like this specific program is Joe Richie builded as the
Rolls Royce of teen treatment programs. Okay, and I remember
even like because this is even like with Kellogg right,
like although just wacky remedies that were you know, just

(03:05):
essentially ways to funk people up where there at least
success stories that they would be like, oh and then
check out this kid who means stopped neighing like a horse. Yes,
throughout the throughout the existence of the program, there are
kids who will claim it will save their life. There's
even some kids who hated it but also will say like,
it's saved my life because I was like really into

(03:26):
heroin and I probably would have o'deed without it. It
also has permanently damaged my brain like like that, like
the positive stories tend to be like I would have
died without it. Also, I am forever like changed because
of this program in ways that are profoundly like negative
and complex. Right, I feel deeply disconnected to who I

(03:46):
used to be. This is not to say there are
some positive stories and we can speculate on some of
those people, um, sure, but when you go through reports
of people who were there, the overwhelming warts are not positive.
Now that said, this is the early seventies. Nobody is
talking about this place online. You don't have a lot
of former kids coming out and a lot of these kids.

(04:08):
It's a mix of rich kids who go there and um,
and generally if you're rich, you do get some kind
of special treatment right and wards of the state, and
so nobody cares what the wards of the states say. UM,
and nobody is really able to check up on them
to tell whether or not they actually have a high
success rate. UM, which we're gonna talk about in a bit.

(04:28):
So it was certainly the popular perception that the Allan
School was like again the Rolls Roy's, like this is
the nicest place you can send a kid for this
kind of intense rehab facility. It's that this this beautiful
compound in the woods in Maine, like it's like a
summer camp, you know. That was kind of the way
this was marketed. UM. Now, nineteen seventy five was a

(04:50):
key year in the evolution of the Alan School. It's
the year where a number of the most questionable aspects
of early along procedures started to turn toxic, and one
possible catalyst for the growing toxicity of the Allan School
UM maybe the fact that Joe Richie had an increasingly
severe drug addiction of his own. So Joe's friends seemed

(05:12):
to be pretty consistent that he was not a heroin
addict as a kid. But whatever the truth was, his
old injuries from his car accident started bothering him while
he worked prior to opening the Allan School. UM and
a number of his colleagues they're mentioned to his wife
that they were worried about how many pills he was
taking Sherry confronted him, and he told her that he
needed the pills because his pain was unbearable. Now, once

(05:34):
the Allan School started, Joe kept using. Sherry eventually realized
that Dr Davidson, their business partner, was prescribing her husband opiates,
which again very ethical doctor. Here. She went to the
doctor saying, hey, Joe is an addict and you should
probably not give him a blank check for drugs, and
he told her, Hey, I know what I'm doing. Don't
tell me how to do my job. I'm a psychiatrist.

(05:57):
Back off, lady, I'm running the Rolls Royce of abuse underdomes.
And one of the things that's about this is that
later on, in like the late nineties, when Joe Richie
stops being on working there most of the time, like
he he eventually like the school is still running, but
he's not really there most of the time, not involved
in the day to day. The guy who replaces him

(06:18):
running the program is also a heroin addict um and
is using actively while he's running the school. Um. It's interesting.
So Joe had a problem. Dr Davidson did not know
what he was doing. Um. And although Joe didn't really
drink much, his pill usage caused wild mood swings, irritable
and abusive behavior. When he would have a mood swing,

(06:38):
the easiest people for him to take it out on
with the patients at his school. So by nineteen seventy five,
this was becoming a serious problem. And that same year,
his fifty four year old father bamboo shot one of
his friends during a bar fight when his friend tried
to de escalate things after he called another patron the
in word. So Joe's dad goes to prison for shooting

(06:58):
a dude. Um, And yeah, this is a So this
is a bad year. Seventy a bad year for Joe.
Richie's the point I'm building towards. And on July it
got even worse. The state of Illinois sent a team
of five investigators, a psychiatrist, and four social workers to
Ellen for a surprise evaluation. This was standard procedure when
more than ten wards of the state had been placed

(07:19):
in a facility. So more than ten kids from Illinois
gets sent to the law school, and they say like, oh,
we have to send a team up there to make
sure that it's like a good school, you know, very
reasonable idea, right, Um, the team, Yeah, the team stayed
for two days. They talked with staff and residents, and
they observed daily activities. Now, this was the first inspection

(07:40):
a law school had, um and so it came as
a surprise and as a result, they hadn't prepared ahead
of time. Um, they didn't cleaned anything down. We gotta
stop hitting the kids until they ship themselves. Turns out
a psychiatrist don't usually like that. Guys, we've been to in.
This all wrong, according to them, so we can just return.

(08:03):
We don't do so. The team found a number of
horrifying things. One staff member, in charge of a house
where seven Illinois residents lived, admitted he had a criminal
history of assaulting women. His third such assault had seriously
injured his victim, which is why he'd been sent to
a lawn before graduating and being hired as staff there.
He admitted to investigators that he had difficulty relating to

(08:24):
women and was monitored by other staff to make sure
that he didn't assault any female residence. Um My god,
now that might be a mark against you. You know,
maybe you shouldn't be in charge of a house full
of teenagers, including teenage girls, if you have a history
of repeatedly criminally assaulting women. Perhaps not right, maybe yeah, yes,
I don't you're not. I don't think you that's a

(08:48):
part of the evaluation that most people realize in general,
that you you don't want to be Well, I guess
I don't know whose fault that is. I mean, honestly, Like,
they hired him, so they did hire him. Here's my truth.
And they're like, oh, I love criminally assaulting women. Well,

(09:08):
good news about this job. So do we Yeah, you
know what, and and that's their fault for hiring you, honestly. Now.
The investigators were also horrified by general meetings, the constant
pattern of verbal abuse in a LAN, and the frequency
of spankings. They eventually found out that the resident director
with a history of assaulting women had spanked numerous residents.

(09:30):
So the staff had claimed like, well, we make sure
he doesn't assault women, even though he has a history
of it, And then they were like, well, but yeah,
but he gets to spank them. He's using a paddle, Okay,
it's professional, Like what the funk are the team. Members
of this Illinois monitoring team overheard constant verbal assaults from
staffers to residents, including lines like you motherfucking whore, you

(09:53):
cock sucking, titty sucking, motherfucking asshole, and other things that
did not seem like therapeutic criticism. Oh my god, how
this is so wild to me though, like you know
how bad this is where outside observers come in and
it's become so normal that they're like, yeah, okay, back
to our regular scheduled programming, which is just tearing people

(10:15):
down verbally and like with the worst language. Now. When
they interviewed the nurse, she revealed that she had gotten
vaginal smears and rectal exams from female residents before they
started class, as well as semen samples from male residents.
She said this was to test for v D. Semen
samples were obtained by giving boys a small cup, directing

(10:35):
them to a private room, and ordering them to masturbate.
So the team from Illinois was like, this seems not
like the way you'd test for STDs, And they reached
out to several doctors to be like, is it normal
to get a cum sample from kids to test for STDs?
And all of the doctors that's exactly right. All the
doctors are like, what the funk are you talking about?

(10:57):
You don't need this loud, Yeah, you need to get
this person away from children immediately. What the funk are
you talking about? Almost fainted, Oh my god, what's so
funked up? So the team from Yeah the Nurse also
admitted to handing out controlled substances without prescriptions to kids,

(11:20):
um and for what for whatever, mainly birth control pills,
which were given upon request and without carrying out a
physical exam first. Now, none of that's great, but what
really freaked the investigators out was learning about the ring.
Now the ring has become one of the most infamous

(11:41):
facts about a lawn. The ring was a boxing ring
where two people would beat each other up with gloves,
but it was also a literal ring of people miles.
The individual being punished would be forced to fight everyone
in the ring, sometimes more than ten people, so that
even if they were good at fighting and big, they
would eventually be overwhelm by sheer exhaustion and beaten bloody.

(12:02):
In interviews when this became widely known later, Joe Richie
claimed that the ring was only given his punishment to
bully's who had used your threatened physical violence against others.
His argument was that you had to show these people
that there was always someone bigger than them. So that's
what Joe claimed. Yeah, either way, you teach children. Yeah,

(12:23):
I'm like, okay, just shut up right there, you're still
so you do admit you're making them fight each child format,
Hold on, hold on, hold on the point isn't No,
there's no point care about your reasoning, these kids doing it. Yeah,
I don't care about your reasoning. You're making children fighting

(12:46):
a ring. Oh God, here we go. Okay, so what
do you suggest? So here's the reality the team from
Illinois saw. I'm going to quote from Duck in a
raincoat again. Those used to defeat the person being punished
were mostly large, well built boys fighting, both male and
female residents. Two residents independent, Oh what's she's already? Yeah,

(13:10):
they picked the big kids for it. Two residents independently
independently talked about a young female being forced into the ring.
When she resisted, she was held down while residents attempted
to tie boxing gloves on her hands. When that failed,
she was sent into the ring bare fisted and without headgear.
Investigators also cited an incident where a pregnant girl was
put in the wing and defeat it. Evaluators observed that

(13:34):
it's pretty bad what The evaluators observed that residents could
be sent into the ring for any infraction, including not
sharing and discussion groups. So no, not just bullys. If
you don't want to talk in the group about who
you have a crush on, you're going to get beaten
up by large teenage boys in a circle because you're
not forthcoming with your pain in a fucking environment that

(13:58):
is only meant to like exploit it and make you
feel worse. And then you have to fucking yeah, beating
your pregnant girl. This is I mean, this is happening.
This is happening in the nineties, Miles, This evaluation seventy five,
but the ring goes on for decades. The ring goes,
Oh my god, what the fuck? Yeah, please tell me,
like just better have a good ending, man. It doesn't motherfucker.

(14:22):
I mean, elements of it are good. So we'll talk more.
We'll talk more about the ring later. Another punishment the investigator, Yeah, Miles,
so buddy, Oh yeah, I mean, yeah, we've got to
talk about the kid it killer. Um. But first we're
going to talk about another punishment the investigators discovered, which

(14:45):
might actually be worse. Now. This was called electric sauce.
You want to know what what again? Take a guess
as to what electric sauce was? Miles, Dude, No, I know,
really bad, yeah, Miles, No, I don't even I can't
even don't do their brains like short circuiting, even trying

(15:08):
to combine. It's it's a really bad school. Like we've
covered some Like honestly, elements of this sound not as
bad as the German school that raped all those kids,
like Waldorf School, right, No, No, that was just that
was the weird cult school. Um. Yeah, so I'm gonna
here's I mean, we've covered we've covered some bad schools

(15:32):
between the residents. Definitely not as bad as the residential
schools um Ireland. But I guess the residential schools like
killed thousands, right, so much worse. There's a there's a
it's this is there's an element of this that is
more disturbing just because of in those schools they're killing
kids systematically through neglect and through just a lack of

(15:55):
caring about their health. This is what this is obviously
less horrible, it's not an act of genocide, um, but
the level of thought Joe Richie put into how to
craft this engine of child abuse. There's something like uniquely
unsettling about it in a way that I hasn't been
present before in any of these other schools. It's just

(16:16):
such an intricately crafted machinery of child abuse, That's what's like,
so like the funk about this to me, Yeah, not
trying to like play like which is worse than the
obviously like again the genocide schools are worse, But there's
something about this that's like primarily unsettling, like the level
of thought this man spent decades designing an engine to

(16:38):
abuse children. Again, like like so many of these like
stories that it's just repeating cycles of abuse because he
went to some who knows what the funk happened to
the place he went. Yeah, Um, so you're ready to
finally learn about what the electric sauce was, Miles, Oh god,
I had forgotten about the Yeah, we still haven't gotten
into the electric sauce quote. Electric sauce was term used

(17:00):
to describe a mixture of garbage, catchup, mustard, cigarette butts,
and other refuse which was poured over a person's head
as a form of punishment. The report indicated that human
feces was sometimes included in this sauce. What. Yeah, they're
they're shipping and coming into buckets and throwing in trash
and pouring it on people's heads when they're bad. And
again and if you're this is therapy, by the way,

(17:21):
what is what is Richie saying? Yeah, And I'm sorry, Richie,
electric fucking sauce do Richie denies that this is a
part of the school, right, Like, this is not the
kind of he'll defend, like the ring and stuff. And
they do stop you in the electric sauce eventually, Yeah,
because there's no defensively electric sauce than I would the ring.

(17:41):
If we're going to get to know where you're lion
Is smiles, Yeah, I mean I'm like, if I got
to own one, I'm like, well, at least no kids
dying from being in a fist fight ring. And it's
just straight up well, I mean, I don't even actually
like one's better than the other. Again, you get what
this show is done to me. I'm gonna read you
another fun quote about other punishments at the Allan School.

(18:02):
Miles Digging ditches was apparently still another reprimand a day
of digging ditches under surveillance was a common practice. After
each ditch was dug, the resident being punished would be
required to fill it back up again and repeat the
process for the duration of the punishment. The use of
handcuffs was also alleged. One resident explained that he had
been handcuffed for about five hours for striking someone. Another
had been ordered by a staff member to handcuff a

(18:23):
girl to a table by placing the cuffs around her ankles.
One of the Illinois awards had his shoes taken away
during his six weeks at a lawn. He had made
repeated requests for shoes, but the requests were denied because
he was told that if he had shoes he might
run away. When when this child was brought back to Chicago,
he had blood poisoning in one foot, What the fuck? Okay,
So all right, you might expect, Miles that when a

(18:46):
government agency finds all of this ship out and writes
a report on it in nine, the end of the
program would come soon after, as would criminal charges for
a lot of the people involved. Right, this would be
a pretty full episode if this ended in night teen.
Because we've talked about some bad shitt here um, but
this is the United States of America. I need to
remind you of that again, as I did an episode one.

(19:08):
Miles and the Lawn School continue to operate for more
than thirty years after this point. Um, because again, parents
have a sacred right to pay people to torture their
children if they think it's a good idea. That's unbelievable.
So they they were just able to skate under that premise. Well,
we're going to talk about how they got away with it,
but the core of why they got away with it
is there is a widespread idea that is particularly normative

(19:31):
among conservative Americans, that as a parent, you are the
ultimate arbiter of what happens to your child, and they
don't have rights. You have a sacred right to do
whatever the fuck you want to That kid is a punishment, right. Um,
it's a popular refrain. I'm the adult, maybe or the child.
Children should have equivalent rights to adults, even though we

(19:52):
all agree children should not have equivalent responsibilities. Maybe shouldn't
have access to all of the same things that adults do.
For example, I don't think nine year old should be
able to buy cars or guns, but perhaps they are
entitled to the exact same human right. Come on down
to miles as catalytic converter barn where you're walking out
of here too stuff. Maybe I think we should be

(20:12):
teaching kids because kids could get under the car easily.
Their little hands can reach in there. We should range
that's miles. We could start a teen rehab facility when
we get kids off of dope by teaching them to
steal catalytic converse. No, Sophie, you always stomp on my
dreams to create residential schools for children. Is this one

(20:33):
illegal to like the other fifteen ideas you said no to, Sophie, Yeah,
she hates it when I talk about crimes. I like
being able to pay my rent. Well, you could pay
you rent in catalytic converters. Just drop a bag of
them off at the manager's office. Sophie. There you go,
be like, Hey, here's a bag of cats that's going
to take care of me for the rest of the year. Right,

(20:54):
give him a little wink. If he's smart, will take
the deal. So the good news is that the Illinois
instigators did take the kids who are Awards of the
State away from the Allan School. They issued a damning
report that includes these lines quote. Alata will argue that
the evaluation team has taken occurrences out of context, and
that contrary to the findings of the evaluation team, the

(21:14):
incidents were in the best interests of the child, regardless
of the reasons given by Alan excusing your justifying the
instance incidents, Each and every incident reported is directly contrary
to Illinois law and regulations, and under no circumstances can
the agency permit any of its wards to reside at
an institution where such events occur. These practices violate the
child civil rights and liberties and deprive him of his

(21:35):
self respected dignity. Under no circumstances can the Department of
Education and Family Services permit any child to be subjected
to allan which is good. Good on you guys who
tried in the fucking state of Illinois. I don't have
a lot of praise for the State of Illinois, but
they did their best, and so at the very least
that meant no more rewards of the state would be

(21:56):
going to this program. No God, no, no, no, no.
It just means I'll no, I won't send kids for
a while, oh just for all well, and just that
the state won't other kids from Illinois keep getting sent there.
We'll talk about that citizens canal endlessly indulgence. Yeah, very
little actually changes, and I'm gonna talk We're about to
talk about why. So there's a lot of blow about this,
right this becomes very public. The news is like all

(22:18):
the like the fucking electric sauce and the beating pits,
like people are not wild about this, um, But you
know what people are wild about, Miles this the new bottle,
a line of electric sauces from hend exactly Heinz electric
sauce now with eight percent more feces income squirted on

(22:40):
a child's head when they disbehave, misbehave whatever. Shit. We're
back and we're talking about how constant exposure to the
horrors that this show exposes us to may may may
have may cause as me to make some some off

(23:01):
color comments that I ought not. Um, I have editors,
we have these moments, we have these mind. It is
like a real problem we had this with like the
the Irish Schools episode where I think Sophia and I
went a little bit hard on the dark humor because
it's so you just get overwhelmed with this. Eventually there's
nothing to do but like laugh about the electric sauce.
You know, it's like you're like, you're like like someone

(23:24):
who's been on the seas too long, like looking sharks
in the eye, like at a certain time, like you're
just like they're kind of you know, they've seen a
lot of you. Ever looked into you? Ever looked into
an Alan school teacher's eyes? Dead eyes? Like Dollykay sir again,
I'm just here to take your order. Yeah, I do

(23:46):
have fun with the Wendy's girl. Um. So, Miles, Uh,
there's this report comes out right, Uh, it's it's bad.
There's a bunch of bad press for the Alan School,
and this prompts the Governor of Maine to visit the school. Now,
obviously they have warning this time, and they clean up
the school ahead of the governor's uh the Governor's visit,

(24:07):
and he's like, oh, this seems fine. Um, but once
he reads the report from Illinois, he has Mains Department
of Human Services issue a very speedy interim report. And
the purpose of this report was to protect the Allawan School,
which had become a multimillion dollar business, and thus protect
Main's economy as well. Right, his concern is this would
be bad for Mains economy. Of this big business has
to leave so good. Since Richie had warning before this investigation,

(24:32):
he tasked his employees with making everything look squeaky clean.
One teenage staff member later told Mark Curly quote, we
lied through our teeth, but we couldn't cover up we
admitted to is the exception rather than the rule. The
residents were thrilled when the place was overrun with investigators
because they had a real fun time. We laid off
everybody then, but everything the Illinois investigators said was true,
every last word of it. Now, the Illinois investigators found

(24:55):
a bunch of horrible ship and they wrote about it
very unsparingly, like this is a child abuse factory and
should be oosed immediately um. The main investigators, who again
were sent there specifically to exonerate the Allawan school to
keep money in the state of Maine, found this quote.
No evidence of unjustifiable denials of civil liberties, or of mistreatment, brutality,

(25:15):
or anything that could be considered a born to all
accepted standards of childcare. The residents of a law and
interviewed usually expressed Newfounds feelings of dignity, self assurance, and
mental well being. They attributed these feelings to the treatment
they received at a lawan. Responding to the charges of
the rings spankings into physical abuse, Main investigators wrote, one
of the cardinal rules of the Allan program is that
the use of physical violence by either a staff member

(25:37):
or a resident is strictly outlawed. Again, Joe Richie had
admitted to the using the ring like, it's just nonsense.
It's just a report full of lies, paid for by
the government of Maine to keep a business in the state.
Because start Joe Richie's bribing, bribing people. He does that
a lot. He's very involved in politics in Maine because

(25:58):
he's a millionaire. After a sir, point right, oh my. Now,
Since the ring had by this point gone viral as
the most terrifying measure in Alan's arsenal, Main State investigators
had to make a declaration on that too. They defended
it after writing that violence wasn't used by saying, quote,
only acts of repeated physical violence result in a person

(26:19):
being placed in the ring where rounds last about one
minute and where the participants are evenly matched. Again, all
of this is a lie based on hundreds of reports.
Like and now they're acting like, oh, but we've made
that we've made it. The regulations are way better now.
We're seeing a way, we're getting fair ones. Now, we
got kids engaging in fair ones. Even if it was
like a school where it's like, well, we only have

(26:40):
one minute boxing matches for kids, Like why do you
have children fighting? Yeah, but they're but they're matched based
on their weight class. Okay, I mean again, if you
do have a boxing class, that's fine. But boxing is
a punishment I would call child abuse. Yeah. Absolutely, Also,
we should have a conversation about whether kids should be

(27:01):
able to box or play things like football that will
damage their brains when they're too young to make an
informed decision about whether or not they want to damage
their brains. But that's a that's a subject for a
different day. Not that you shouldn't be able to box
or play football, but maybe not as a child. I
don't know. So, since the ring had by this point
gone viral, is the most terrifying measure in Allan's all right,
sorry then, so we'll talk more about the ring later.

(27:24):
What's important for now is that hundreds of former students
have come forward, representing decades worth of time at a
law and all claimed that this is bullshit. The report
had a bunch of other frustrating nonsense in it, but
the gist of it was that Joe Richie and his
school get a clean bill of not committing crimes against
humanity from their host state. They used this to a
post back at Illinois, filing a civil complaint and alleging
that the evaluation team had defamed Alan and done six

(27:47):
point one million dollars in actual damages and four million
dollars in punitive damages. Illinois filed suit in response, suing
a district court and is charging that a lot of
employees had abused wards of the state. They requested damage
to A flurry of lawsuits followed, and in the end
both sides settled without any money going anywhere except into
the pockets of lawyers. The state kind of gives up

(28:08):
after a point, because again, these kids are wards of
the state. They don't have anyone behind them. Right, it's
not worth it, right, purely, just yet statistic, because our
legal system is perfect now. Earlier I quoted a teenage
staff member, one of the people who was technically an
inmate but reached a high position within the program. That
person's name was kin Zaretsky. He was part of the
architecture of violence at a lawn, organizing the ring verbally

(28:31):
abusing and physically abusing other children, and making sure it
all ran smoothly. Years later, he told Mark Curly, quote,
but I was brainwashed. I may have abused someone, but
I was a victim too. It can be compared to
a mother in the concentration camps pushing the buttons on
her children in the ovens. How can you falter for that? Now,
this is not a thing that ever happened at concentration camps.
They just didn't work that way. That's nonsense. Ki didn't

(28:53):
have an education though, So yeah, I'm like, what's I'm sorry?
What was that? His His ron point there there, actually
is if he'd known anything about the Holocaust. There's a
better point you can make, which is that a lot
of the actual, the physical work necessary to make the
death camps run was done by Jews who were interned
in the camps, right, And these were Jewish inmates who

(29:14):
got some kindest privileges, more mainly the privileges that they
didn't get killed as quickly. But they were the ones
who are like pushing, shoveling the bodies in, like literally
making the gas chairs. The poison was always put in
by a doctor, but they were necessary to make it work,
and these guys did obviously, even though they're making a
concentration camp work, you can't judge them for it. Like,
he's right about that when you are, yeah, and when

(29:38):
you and at that point, I think he's right about
If you're a child forced into this and you do
horrible things to other kids in order to make your
own experience less terrible, because that's what this place is
designed to do, you're not really at fault, you know.
I think there's a certain point, especially if you grow
up and you come back to as an adult, where
you become culpable, but like a fucking sixteen year old,
like agreeing to beat kids up in the ring, because

(30:00):
like otherwise you're gonna get the ship kicked out if you,
like I can't, it's not you're going to beat out
that yeah, self interest. Yeah. And in the same way, like,
if you're forced into a death camp and your chance
to avoid getting murdered is to help the death camp operate,
you're not morally responsible to that. I would argue, um,
But Zaritsky again received no education, so I don't think

(30:23):
he knows much about the Holocaust, UM heard if he
heard some interesting things along. So Zaretsky provides us with
some interesting context for how the whole system functioned outside
of the school itself. He was a private referral sent
to a lawn by a doctor named Marvin Schwartz. Marvin's
nickname was Mr. Adolescent Illinois, which is one of the

(30:43):
worst nicknames I've heard about in my life. He is
said to have single handedly built a lawn with his
private referrals. Schwartz was a friend and colleague of Dr Davidson,
and he received a kickback for every child he sent
to a lawn. We now know that Dr Zaretsky was
only wrong in his statement that Schwartz built Alan single handedly.
Dr Davidson was also responsible for referrals, and they were

(31:04):
a whole network of other psychiatrists like Dr Schwartz who
knew Dr david He would basically go to his friends
in other states and be like, Hey, I got this school.
Every time you send a kid to us, I'll kick
you a few hundred bucks. You know. That's that's how Yeah,
that's how this place works, Um. And it's just multi
level marketing for you know us. Yeah, it's in the same,

(31:27):
you know, very similar models now And one of the
most funded up things about the work of those Illinois
investigators is that, like, ultimately you could argue it helped
the school because it brought them a lunch of press
and they were able to defend themselves. Journalists went to
them for the state. They were able to make statements
in their defense, and a lot of people decided, oh,
it sounds like this tough love approach works. Like it's

(31:47):
just some weak liberals in the Illinois state don't want
it to keep going. So they got yeah, they got money,
um yeah, and they got to make statements like this
to the press. And this is Dr Davidson speak into
the Corrections magazine in nineteen seventy nine about the Illinois investigation.
What happened was we got some conventional middle aged mental
health workers who saw certain things they did not understand.

(32:09):
The other thing was that the governor of Illinois at
the time was a self righteous guy who was trying
to make political hay by bringing all the juveniles back
to the state. They were disrupting. There were disrupting things,
asking kids, why do you obey Now? In the same interview,
Joe Richie was asked about the Illinois team, and he
claimed it was a raid from the start. They were
very unprofessional. They got drunk at one meal and then
came back to Alan to work. I didn't like that.

(32:32):
Richie would also claim accurately the three of the kids
removed from Alan by Illinois eventually fled back to the
Lawn school. He claimed that this was evidence that the
program helped those kids. I think there was more evidence
that when you abuse someone enough, they can't exist outside
of the system of abuse that you built for them,
which is why so many kids went to work there
as adults. Um, because you break people in such a

(32:55):
way that they can't exist outside of this weird little
society you've built in your Yeah, would be my argument. Now,
this does, however, bring us to a very valid question,
is there any evidence that a Lan's program worked. That
nineteen seventy nine Corrections Magazine article notes that at the
time it was written, Alan had only been doing follow
up checks on former residents for two years. They claimed

(33:18):
that of the five hundred people who had been admitted
to a law at that point, three hundred and twenty
six had been tracked down. Of these hundred, of these,
one hundred and ninety had graduated the program, seventy eight
percent of these people had stayed out of trouble with
the law. On that strength, Alan claimed that nearly eighty
percent of their graduates were successful, right percent success right Basically,

(33:38):
Now that's a lie based on their own data. Um,
because they tracked down three six kids, right, a hundred
ninety graduate and they say seventy eight percent of these
people stayed out of trouble with the law. That makes
it a success. But a hundred and thirty six of
them didn't graduate, and only twenty six percent of those
kids were arrested or jailed again, which means dropouts had
an identical success rate to aduates basically, So number one,

(34:02):
that makes it seem like maybe it had nothing whether
or not you graduate. The allow school didn't have anything
to do about your success um. But Corrections Magazine and
they're right up gave further reasons to doubt that data.
Allan's recidivism figures are so low, especially given the fact
that many of their referrals are from state from state
agencies are hardcore delinquents that most researchers would find them suspicious.

(34:24):
Perhaps one explanation is that most of the follow up
was done by questionnaire without any attempt to confirm the
information the former residents applied through official records. Of the
twelve states who refer children to a lawn, only four
have ever done any follow up, and that was limited
and informal. Maryland, Rhode Island, Oregon, and Vermont surveyed a
total of seventy one former Allowan residents. They found that
twelve seventeen percent of them were in jail, seventeen were

(34:47):
working or in school, and forty two were, in the
words of one official, living marginal lives that included some
petty crime, frequent unemployment, and overuse of alcohol their drugs.
So that doesn't sound like a great success rate to me,
not it. Also, again, they're basing this whole no trouble
with the law. They're basing our students. Went on to have,

(35:07):
you know, law abiding lives based on self reporting from
those students, rather than actually confirming anything. All of their
data is bullshit. Basically, there's no evidence the school helped
any There's no evidence this school helped anyone. Um. Obviously,
individuals will say it helped me, but there's no evidence that,
like as a population, a Laan students were less likely
to commit crimes or have drug abuse problems than any

(35:30):
other group of kids in a similar situation. It's almost
like it's a total crop of sadistic ship that wasn't
intended to do anything that make money, just a child
abuse factory. Rhode Islands sent a team of investigators to Alan,
who were horrified to find that not only did the
business lack a board of directors, it lacked any oversight

(35:51):
mechanism to review tactics or employee behavior. The investigators talked
to Dr Davidson and were shocked to find out that
he spent no time at the facility and was unable
to provide answers about stuff like the ring. There were
three m A psychologists on staff, but all were recent hires, who,
like Dr Davidson, knew nothing about how the school function
on a daily basis. And some students will claim that

(36:12):
like those people were very were protected from knowing anything
about the school. They were brought in to do therapy sessions,
and like you never got to do therapy alone. There
would always be a student watching you, so if you
said anything, you would get punished, so you would only yeah, exactly.
They would do this for every visit. You're talking to
your parents on the phone, someone's listening. They'll disconnect it
if you say anything bad is going on. Um, we'll

(36:35):
talk more about that later. Six of former residents were
found too were later found to have been arrested for
criminal violations. UH. They noted that this was likely to
be a conservative estimate of failure because criminal records did
not reflect child abuse, neglect, mental health, institutionalization, or a
variety of other factors. So Rhode Island finds six former
alt residents go on to be arrested for something, and

(36:58):
that more are probably lee having some sort of issue.
It's just wasn't reflected by the criminal justice system because
they were just beating their own kids, right Like, that's
literally what the state says. Um. None of these investigations
did anything to stop Joe Richier Dr Davidson for becoming millionaires.
Joe and his wife Sherry bought a mansion, They got
all the status symbols of success, a bunch of fancy cars.

(37:20):
But the wealthier Joe gets and the more expansive the
Alan School becomes, the more abusive and deranged he gets
in his own relationship. I'm gonna quote from Duck in
a Raincoat again here. In his marriage, Richie began employing
the techniques he used at a lan. If his wife
annoyed her angered him, she'd be punished. One punishment was
embarrassment and humiliation in the presence of other staff members.

(37:40):
According to one former staffer, he'd shoot her down in
a law term to describe the taking of authority away
from someone who had misused it by humiliating her at
staff meetings, or he'd purposely exclude her from decision making,
instructing people not to tell her something. At first, we
were led to believe that they had the perfect marriage,
a former resident recalled, But after a while it was
apparent to some of us that it was far from it.

(38:01):
Sometimes Richie would disappear, and when Sherry called Alan to
find him, he wouldn't speak to her. Once she was
informed that he'd taken a blonde social worker with him
to Las Vegas. Yeah, there's a lot to say about
like his kind of sexual relationships. It doesn't seem like
he mostly wanted to fuck. It was just kind of
a power thing. He wanted these young women around doing
what he was saying I don't know. Um. Richie would

(38:24):
insist on forcing attractive female residence of Alan to ask
act as babysitters for his children. If Sherry complained, he
would call her neurotic. One of these nannies later admitted
to burning their son with a cigarette. When Sherry complained,
Ricky told Richie told her that the staff member had
changed or the resident had changed, and he wasn't being
fair to her by not giving her another chance. Oh

(38:45):
my god, he's a weird Yeah. Cool. So Sherry had
a number of nervous breakdowns for what she was hospitalized
in nineteen seventy six. While she was in recovery, Joe
should up to present her with a diamond and a
sapphire necklace in full view of the nurses, in order
to like make the nurses so the nurses wouldn't believe
anything she'd say about him being abusive, because look at
this necklace. He's the dream husk. I mean, yeah, this

(39:07):
looks like the husband of the year. I mean those
are chocolate diamonds by Jane Seymour. Yeah, Like, we're mostly
going to focus on the lawn school here and not
Richie's personal life. But he's just a comprehensively abusive person.
So you know, who isn't a comprehensively abusive person unless
it's a Koch Brothers yeah, or I don't know, Volkswagen

(39:28):
kind of gasol at all of us with the like
literally actually with the diesel, with the diesel stuff. So
unless it's one of yeah, everything's fine, we're back. Um.
So Sherry started going to therapy and came to accept

(39:49):
how fucked up Joe Richie was and how unhealthy their
marriage had become. By night, they'd filed for divorce. The
following year, Joe bought a year by race track. The
details of this transaction sketchy as hell, and it seems
like he was involved with the mob. Um. The FBI
certainly thought he was. Um. Also, at one point the
race track burnt down conveniently, and he made a bunch
of money burn a race track down. Yeah, there's some

(40:15):
sort of anyway, we're not going to dwell too much
on that. I want to tell a couple of stories
of other kids who were sent to the A Lawn School. First,
let's talk about Phil Newell. In nineteen eighty one, Phil's
father beat their mother, his ex wife, nearly to death
with a pipe. She spent the next twenty eight years
almost insinsate in a nursing home. Phil and his sister
became wards of the state and were sent first to

(40:35):
a foster home. By nine two, Phil had grown into
a sweet but troubled team. His sister later recalled, he
was beautiful. All the girls liked him, and I remember
I used to get mad because that was my brother
and I didn't want any girls around him. We were close,
we were really close. But he also dealt with fits
of anger, which is very understandable and expected from a
kid whose mom was beaten so badly by his dad

(40:56):
that he had to become Award of the State. Right,
of course, you're going to have some anger issues and
mostly hurt himself. He would slam his head into walls
and such. Migraine seemed to be a trigger for his violence.
He had horrible migraines, and at one point during a migraine,
he swung his foster brother by the ankles into a
couch like he just has a fit, and he attacks
his foster brother. Um not a serious injury, but he

(41:17):
gets sent to a youth center as a result of this,
and when that didn't work, the States sent him to
the Alan School. His sister continues, quote, we were told
Alan was a step up from the Youth Center because
he got transferred, and that he was doing well and
that everything was going good, and that he was going
to come home. He came home in a box. So
at the time when he dies and like I think

(41:40):
it's seventy six, is when he dies. Um, she's told
that it was an aneurysm, Um, which is I mean,
it wasn't Andy, But she was just told that he
had an anears and while he was at the school,
and that's what she believed for thirty three years, that
he had just had a freak aneurism at this normal
school until in two thousand sixteen, a former Alan resident
named Mark Babbitt's tracked her down and I'm gonna quote

(42:00):
from the Sun Journal here. He tracked down Newell and
put her on the phone with a witness who said
Phil didn't just collapse one day, as the family had
been told he had been forced into a Lawns infamous
boxing ring and beaten by other teenagers because he complained
of a headache. The witness saw Phil collapse, spasm and
turn blue. Eventually, staff took him away. He was dead
within a day. Now The Sun Journal spoke with that

(42:23):
witness in another and although some of the details differ,
their stories are essentially the same. And it turns out
that stories of Phil's death had begun circulating online and
communities of a lawn survivor starting in two thousand three.
The first reference to his death came from a friend
of his, who said that on Christmas weekend, Phil was
forced to go three rounds in the ring before he
passed out and started vomiting. He lay on the floor

(42:44):
for an hour before being given medical attention. Another former
student and Bowen gave a slightly different story. Um. She
agrees that they thought he was manipulating the system by
pretending to have a headache, so they put him in
the ring. Um. And basically the only difference with her
argument is that, like she think, she doesn't recall him
passing out at first, he was just like walked away
from the ring having like head issues and then a

(43:05):
vantage having a migraine. Yeah, he went to the ring
for having a migraine, was beaten and died soon after. Um. Yeah,
and again possible he would have died without the ring.
But also possible that if, for example, they'd treated his
migraines seriously, he might have gotten medical care or something,
or at least wouldn't have had his last experience before

(43:26):
death getting beaten by a bunch of children in a ring. Um. Yeah.
Uh So there was an investigation into Phil's death, but
it occurred so late h and five years after allan
itself closed that nothing conclusive came of it. Um. It
is worth noting that this network of former students who
are the reason that his sister finds out about this,

(43:47):
were eventually what brings the Alan school down. They start
to organize in like the early two thousand's and whatnot,
and carry out a campaign to to report this place. Um.
It was a long process, like killing the alaw On School,
and it took years and years and years to do. Um. Meanwhile,
throughout the eighties and nineties, a lawn style saw hundreds
and hundreds of new students. Joe Richie ran for governor

(44:10):
of Maine several times. He never quite pulled it off,
but he was very influential in the state. Research for
this episode was actually sparked by a graphic novel I
found online called Joe Versus a law school. It was
written by a former student who goes by Joe Nobody.
He went to a lawn in the nineteen nineties, and
I really recommend his story to everyone. It's a fascinating
graphic novel and it gives a lot of context on

(44:32):
how the school had evolved by that point. The electric
sauce was gone by then, and safety gear in the
ring was at least more common, but the whole experience
was just as brutal. Solitary confinement had been added to
the repertoire, and kids could be sentenced two months of
being forced to live and sleep within the confines of
a space roughly the size of a broom closet. The
goal was to break you, because solitary confinement does that

(44:54):
to people, so you'd be desperate enough to yield to
the program just to get human contact again. In fact,
for the course of the nineteen eighties, the strict hierarchy
of jobs within the law and evolved for a dual purpose.
It existed to police behavior and ensured that everyone was
watching everyone else um and it existed to encourage people
to buy into the system by working for better positions
in order to get more privileges. For more on that,

(45:16):
I want to quote from a Reddit post I found
from a former student. Education was considered a right, but
those of us who earned the right were still robbed
of in education. School was from seven pm to eleven pm.
No homework, no test, no projects. Example, math class consisted
of grabbing a math book and handing the teacher at
least one page of work. You're supposed to read through
the book and like write a page of stuff like.

(45:39):
It was never graded, it was never you didn't learn anything, right, Um,
it was all like basically pantomime. We have to have
these kids in a room with like a teacher who
just I don't know, it's probably an alcoholic living in
the middle of nowhere and isn't going to care. Yeah. Now,
the other twelve hours of the day consisted of constant
conditioning and brainwashing. In the beginning, you obviously rejected it,

(45:59):
but then you would be dealt with. You would not
be able to rise through the ranks of the program
to earn more rights until you could prove yourself to
be a good candidate for more brainwashing. Eventually, it became
your responsibility to begin indoctrinating the new rear residents Basically,
you six months later or six months earlier, you had strength,
and non strength. Non strengths were not allowed to talk, interact,
or communicate in any way with other non strengths. It

(46:20):
took a minimum of six months to earn the title
of strength. It took some kids years to earn strength.
Some kids never did. Alan made money based on the
amount of time it took for you to graduate the program.
You had to have a minimum of seven promotions before
you wear a candidate for graduation. Each promotion took a
minimum of three months, and nine of the kids never
made it past the fifth promotion. These kids had to

(46:41):
wait until they turned eighteen and could legally sign themselves out.
Other kids stayed past their eighteenth birthday, which is a
true testament to the effectiveness of the brainwashing. I remember
one dude was twenty three, and some of them didn't
have a choice. This wasn't all brainwashing. If you're sent
there at seventeen or sixteen because you broke a law,
if you don't graduate, you go to prison, right so

(47:01):
you and they can keep you there as long as
they won, because they decide when you're ready to graduate,
right unless you and then again just like even with
incarcerated people, it's like if you're treated a certain way,
sometimes you know no other way to live except within there.
And and keeping kids after a eighteen wasn't only a

(47:22):
manner of brainwashing. Joe, who wrote that graphic novel, did
eventually yield to the program after escaping. He escaped at
one point and got to as far as New York
City before being captured UM, and he spent months in
solitary after that. So he eventually just buys into the
program because he can't stand how miserable his life is
in solitary right like he has to now. His plan

(47:45):
was to sign himself out when he turned eighteen. He
didn't care about graduating UM. But before that day came,
he had a call with his parents. Now I should
note here that according to Joe and other students, phone
calls and visits with parents were tightly controlled. They would
in the call if you seem to be about to
say anything negative about the Alan school. Alan administrators carefully
choreographed parent visits and coached parents ahead of time, preparing

(48:07):
them for the idea that their child might lie to
get out of a program that they desperately needed to
be in when. Of course, if now students could have
visits back home with their families if they earned them.
But during those visits, how your strength, students were sent
with them to police their behavior, so you're never alone
with your parents and have a chance to convince them
of what's being done to you. So Joe is about

(48:28):
to turn eighteen, and he gets a call from his
parents and they've been talking to the administrator, who says
he's doing great, but that he really needs to graduate
the program. And they tell him if you leave when
you turn eighteen, will cut you off from any financial assistants,
any college funds, whatever. Um, because we love you and
we've been told this is best for you. UM. By
the way, Joe was sent to a lawn because at sixteen,

(48:49):
he and some friends got arrested with weed. Like I'm
gonna talk more about Joe's story in a bit, but
before we get to that, I want to read you
the story of another adult, of another student. Tatiana Karam
attended a lawn from nineteen to nine, and in her case,
the fact that she was sent there by her parents
was the result of a tragic error. From the New

(49:09):
York Times quote ms. Karam a student at the Northeastern
University in Boston, said she was sent to a lawn
from her home in Dubai after her parents, who were
looking for an American school that would shelter her from
Western sexual mores, saw a school brochure featuring idyllic photographs
of the outdoors and students on horseback. At one point,
when her parents sent a fact to the school saying
they planned to pick up their daughter, ms Karam said

(49:31):
she was pressured to call them and ask for more
time at the school. When she refused, a school official
called her parents and told them their daughter was not
ready to leave. It was only after she left her
a lan. Ms Karam said that she was able to
give them the details. My mother, when she found out
what happened, was so disgusted. Ms Karam said. She tells
me she's sorry all the time, like that was just

(49:52):
a freak nightmare accident in her case, Like Jesus, Yeah,
it's like they're not they're not Americans, Like they don't
they can't vet it, maybe as much they don't speak
the Lang that they think they're doing the nice thing
for their kid. She wipes up there. Um, she she
backs up a lot of the details about like phone
calls being monitored and all of that stuff. Um. Now,

(50:15):
one of the things that's amazing about Joe's story is
that he escaped. For a while. Now, a lot had
an intricate system to stop escape e's. They had men
in the woods waiting for people who might flee. Um.
But Joe got away. He actually he went on a
visit with his parents and another kid, and he maced
his parents and the other kid and fucking ran for it.
Oh my god. Wait, and you're saying they're people just

(50:37):
stationed in the perimeter woods, like in like a hunting
blind kind here to sweep up any runaways. Yeah, holy ship.
So he gets he escapes and he like he's like
in the woods and he finds a guy. And there's
a couple of cases. There's another dude in a documentary
who escaped into the woods and met like like a

(51:00):
crazy hermit out there who had just been living off grid,
and like this guy just adopted him and taught him.
And now that and now that dude, the kid who
escaped is like a wilderness survival instructor. Like he just
like spent years living alone with this guy in the woods.
Of Maine outside of civilization stuff. After escaping. Yeah, he's

(51:21):
in a documentary called The Last Stop. It's fucking amazing.
Like he was just like, yeah, I was just lost
in the woods that I meet this guy who's like
living off the land and he just teaches me how,
which is actually rad. Yeah, and like in my mind,
like that guy had also escaped school and like, but

(51:42):
you and they've got their own civilization, understand young young man.
I'll give you the skills to live out here. What
a story? Now, So Joe gets away and he's in
the woods and he probably would have gotten caught again,
but he found there's this drifter in a van who
drives up and like the way Joe recalls the story
his graphic novel, he's like certain he's going to be
aped um, and this guy like is clearly doing a

(52:04):
drug deal. Like they stop in Boston, pick up a
huge bag of something, and then the guy has a
bunch of cash. But like the guy the guy Like again,
Joe was like really worried about this guy at first
and thinks like something horrible is going to happen, but
the dude just winds up giving him a bunts of cash.
And saying like like good luck, don't get you know,
caught again, like apparently just like a nice man who

(52:24):
was just doing some drug smuggling but realized this kid
is in a bad place and needs some help. So
he made it to New York City. But after a
day or so, he gets spotted by employees of the
day Top school because Joe Richie had put out a
bolow for his missing student, and he gets kidnapped again
and dragged back to Maine. He was literally like trust
up in the back of a van, and at one

(52:45):
point when they get back into Maine, they stopped at
a gas station and he gets the attention of a
cop who immediately assumes this is a kidnapping and like
starts to like try to arrest the guys for kidnapping him,
but Joe claims that the men kidnapping him gave the
gave to call the cop Joe Richie's name, and the
officer's attitude completely changed. Right, because this guy is a millionaire.

(53:06):
He's bought a lot of politicians in the area. Now,
I can't tell you that Joe Richie was bribing the cops,
because I don't know that he was um, but that's
what this kid claims, and that like the cop and
there's there's others. There's at least one story fucked up
story of a cop encountering an a law runaway. And
um is this guy Max Ashburne, this police lieutenant like

(53:29):
picks this kid up, and he'd been hearing fucked up
stories about the Allan School for years, um, from like
former inmates and from just people in the area, and
had been kind of sketched out by it, but like
also couldn't do anything about it, because again, they're a
very powerful force in the community. So he picks this
kid up, this runaway, and he's supposed to hand this
kid back to the Alan school legally, that's his job.

(53:52):
But he's so horrified by this kid's story that he
drives the kid to a truck stop and hands him
off to a random group of truckers. And it's just
like someone here will take you away. That's the best
thing this police lieutenant can fake to do. It's like,
I'm just going to hand the kid to some truckers.
It's better than sending him back to a law in school.

(54:12):
What a fucking binary to choose between. Yeah, which suggests
that this guy assumed there was nothing that law, the
law was going to do about this, like you in
your capacity as a lieutenant. Yeah, my best option is
hand this kid to random truck drivers. Truck drivers seemed
nice enough. So Joe Richie's story does not get a

(54:35):
lot happier after the nineties. At least he does that,
that's I guess. The good thing is he is pretty miserable.
It seems his drug abuse seems to become an increasing problem.
At one point he has like this. He goes on
a rant over the p A system and his horse
track against a main racing official. UM. He suit three
times for sexual harassment and once for threatening to kill

(54:57):
a female employee. He dies in two thousand one at
age fifty four. The harm caused by a lawn lives on,
and it's here I should note that you can find
a number of people again who will say that the
school helped them. UM. More common are people who will
say the program made them into the person they are today,
but also left them with lasting trauma. And Joe's story,
which I really recommend reading, and Joe versus a law

(55:18):
in school, makes it clear that this could teach children
very specific kinds of strength and coping strategies. You get
smart and a very specific way to survive a place
like this um. They're not necessarily good for living in
the rest of the world. Now. I've made a conscious
choice not to read any of the positive stories about
a lawn here for a couple of reasons. They are dwarfed,

(55:38):
absolutely buried by the horror stories. And two, I don't
think the fact that some kids later were like I
think I benefited from this experience makes it less criminal.
I do want to site before we go. The story
of Stephen Smith. He was fifteen years old when a
Connecticut social workers sent him to a lawn. He'd been
a Ward of the States since age six, when his
mom was convicted of armed robbery. Stephen was sent to

(56:00):
a lawn after his neighbor kicked his dog, and he
responded by shooting him in the butt with a pellet gun.
His social worker gave him the choice of jail or Alan,
which she framed as a summer camp in the woods.
From the beginning, he had trouble with the Alan system
and was subjected to numerous haircuts in general meetings. Quote
they asked, they'd asked me if I hated my mother.
They'd read my file in front of everyone in the group,

(56:22):
things about my mother and her criminal record. I didn't
dig that, so I just didn't say anything. Then when
I shut up, they accused me of intimidating the group,
said I was doing some violent act against group members
for not opening up so everyone. Once in a while
they'd set up a general meeting and then throw me
in the boxing ring until I lost. I tried to
run away all the time. It's the only thing I
ever did. Tried to run away every chance I got.

(56:44):
I tried about seven times, but they always caught me
because they had this posse that would go out and
be rewarded by Richie if they caught someone trying to
run away. Now, Stephen Smith said that the first time
he met Joe was at a general meeting called by
a staff member named Jeff Gottlieb. Here's what he said
about that day. Richie came in and I was called out,
along with a girl named Nancy and another girl, Marie,
two guys Ray and Johnny, and another kid named Sean.

(57:06):
We were all sitting around a table and Richie announced,
we have some cancer in this house, and any good
surgeon knows the way to get rid of cancers, to
cut it out before it spreads. Then he called us
all up in front of the house and asked for
everyone if they had any feelings for us. Then Richie says,
now we're going to put you upstairs in one of
the rooms. It was a room about the size of
a cell. They boarded up the windows in the door
and locked it. Richie said, whatever goes on, and there

(57:29):
goes on. It was July. I know it was in
July because it was my sixteenth birthday. The next day
it was horrible. Six of us all stuck in there together.
The guys, Ray and Johnny would take turns beating each other.
Ray would pound his head until he got tired, and
then they'd take turns having sex with the two girls.
One of them didn't care, but the other girl didn't
want to, but they made her. Sean and Ray would

(57:50):
keep her food, and that's how they got her. The
day I turned sixteen, I mentioned it was my birthday.
Sean picked me up and said, oh, it's your birthday,
I have something to give you. He started to hit
me in the face and stuff, and then well he
raped me in there. Oh my god, yeah, there are
other stories of rape. Um, there are other stories of
rape at the Alan school. I'm not going to just
go through and read them all. What I do want

(58:11):
to read is so Stephen later gets arrested. He goes
to prison as an adult, right, and when he was
interviewed by the author of Duck in a Raincoat, he
was asked how a law in school compared to maximum
security prison, which is where he was incarcerated at the
time of the interview. Quote, Alan is much worse here.
There's a lot of ship. But I get a chance

(58:31):
for some solitude to read, and I'm going to college,
and I've also gotten to learn woodworking and make some
money in the prison store. At a LAN, there was
nothing positive. It was pure hell. You know. The worst
thing is the judge that sentenced me there for ten
years lectured me, uh centured me here for ten years,
lectured to me, telling me I blew the opportunity I
had it a LAN. I don't understand how the courts

(58:51):
can legitimize a guy like Richie who has harmed so
many mixed up kids. What the fuck? Yeah? Now there's
also yeah, I mean it's pretty bad, right, Miles were
not great and he's just fucking out here still No,
he dies in two thousand one. Um yeah, I think,
I think, I think cut out. Yeah, he dies in
two thousand one. The school shuts down in two thousand

(59:14):
eleven after the last ten years or so. It's it's
gradually degrading. Um. There's a campaign from a bunch of
former students to shut it down, and like the State
of New York does uh like goes after them too
for to some extent, Like it's a process, but it
finally closes its doors in two thousand eleven. Um yeah, uh.

(59:37):
And there's you know, there's more, if there's so much more, dude,
Like there's stories that Joe Richie and other staff slept
with teenage girls that were incarcerated at the school, Like
obviously he did ship like that. It's just the bottom,
bottomless well of horror. I think it's best to end
with a quote from Steven Smith, which I think acts
as a fine eulogy both for Joe Richie and for

(59:57):
the Alan School. The most important thing is that the
truth comes out about Richie. He has no business screwing
up kids and making a fortune doing it. The state
takes kids from messed up families, but they put them
in places worse. If I was not messed up before
I got to a lawn, I certainly was afterwards. Good stuff, Yeah,
and I think, yeah, important to keep in mind that
we still have things like this. Oh yeah, there's a

(01:00:19):
ton of other school like now. Yeah, there's still the
team troubled. Team industry is a huge business. Um. Every
year there's a bill thrown into Congress to try to
regulate it, and every year the Republicans make sure that
nobody's going to be voting on that motherfucker um Because yep,
how do you feel, Miles oh Man? Thoroughly fucked, to

(01:00:43):
be honest, But I think I more than anything, I
think it gives some layer of context understanding, like these
schools that exist, like and what that this is part.
It's not just sort of like it doesn't end with
this thing we just talked about, like we're this is
still continuing. Um. So in a way, I'm in a

(01:01:05):
very broad sense, I'm grateful for the awareness that I
have on the subject, but it's doesn't make it any
less completely horrifying. Yep, it's good stuff. I don't know, Miles,
what are you? What do you what do you do
about this industry? Like how do you? Actually, I don't know.
It just feels hopeless because there's there's so many people

(01:01:28):
have vested financial interest and it continued to exist. And
this like culture of like coercion and power that we
exist in, Like it's just allows for that sort of
dimension of our culture, like manifesting like the ugliest fucking
way to I mean, honestly, I feel like, more than
anything people, I think we just need to be comparing

(01:01:49):
everything to this school, so people have an idea of
like truly like what it means to help someone, um,
not in like this sense that you've got from like
your grandparents who were like mainlining like Kellogg books, um
and like that kind of philosophy, and actually like what
it means for someone to develop what you know, cycles

(01:02:11):
and patterns of abuse look like, and how to interrupt
those and end those. But yeah, I don't know. I mean,
I'll just stick to smoking weed and talking about reality TV. Yeah,
And I think I'm I don't know, I don't know,
it's just uh, you know. I started to make kind
of like my bones and journalism. Some of the first

(01:02:32):
stories I did were with like people who had gone
to these these teams back when I was still working
at Cracked, these team troubled team schools, and um, it
just keeps going on right like it's been. It's it's
the central problem. Like the Allon school is fascinating because
you've got this uniquely fucked up guy and he builds
this uniquely fucked up system for abusing children. But the

(01:02:54):
whole reason why it's able to exist at all is
there's this broader remant with a lot of people in
American culture that it would be fundamentally evil to take
away a parent's right to choose absolutely everything for their child,
and that that child doesn't get to say, but the
parent is the sovereign of their child. Um, and I

(01:03:16):
think that's bad. I don't think parents should be the
unquestioned sovereign of children. I don't think the state should
be either. Um. I don't entirely know what the solution
to this is, but clearly there are problems with the
way we do it. Yeah. I mean, at the very least,
you can you can fundamentally create laws or at least
guardrails to what you cannot do or things that we

(01:03:37):
can all agree on that child should not experience no
matter what the prerogative of a parent, Like I mean,
I'm certainly not saying we should give the state more
power over kids instead of the parents. We should we
should limit parents power certainly to do this, right, can
we agree, Like you don't have the right to hire
men to kidnap your children into the woods, right and

(01:03:58):
then turn a blind eye to abuse because for whatever reason,
do you feel that that's the solution to your inability
to do something or whatever? Maybe the Yeah, it's all yeah,
it's it's very complex but so simple at the same time,
because most people can say children do not deserve any
kind of existence like that. Yeah, absolutely, no one does.

(01:04:20):
Like I wouldn't be supportive of this if I thought
we should have prisons, I wouldn't want them to work
this way because this is not rehabilitating people. This is
just hurting them and making them more dangerous to everyone.
I think, because you know, we to to to address this,
we'd fundamentally have to address like a lot of these

(01:04:42):
societal ills that we have, like that are deeply ingrained
in our psyches and our culture. And that's what it takes.
It takes this like tremendous reckoning to have to say, like,
you know, we're still manifesting these cycles of abuse infinitely
in every single way, and like it's weird that we

(01:05:03):
can find these rationalizations in our minds. Whether it's like
you broke the law quote unquote and that's why you
deserve this, or a parent is the one who decides
what's best for their children. You mind your child, I'll
mind my I'll mind mind sort of thing that you know,
will it keeps going on, but yeah, I mean, I

(01:05:25):
keep I think the ultimate solution, Miles, is that we
should adopt nationwide my program of hollowing out the center
of the United States, take all children away from their
parents and make them live in the middle of the
country is a big, open air child prison where they
just grow feral and either survive or you know, thrive
based on their their skillstews, no no internet, nothing but

(01:05:49):
like sharpened sticks and bows and arrows. Uh. That's where
I'm That's where I'm got a little more modern takes. See,
and this is where people are seeing the schism in
the zoom lady called or you believe the massive crater
in the middle should be technologically free, mind should be
technologically advanced in TikTok based. Well, I think TikTok will
come into mine when when they turn eighteen they have

(01:06:09):
to be brought back into society and adults get to
hunt them on helicopters, And you can put that on
TikTok shooting kids with dart guns is and they run
in their feral packs and then dragging them back to
San Bernardino where they work as accountants for four years
before being for the adults. Um, we can talk about dentists,
we can talk Miles, but Miles, it's time for it's

(01:06:31):
time for replicable goodness. Me. Yeah, look, check me out
talking news on Daily's Nightgeist every Day with your former
co worker at Cracked, Jack O'Brien. And you know, if
you like weed and ninety Day Fiance, check out my
reality show podcast four twenty Day Fiance with Sophie Alexandra. Yeah,

(01:06:54):
that's always a good time. That's not the only bummers
we have are maybe some of the bad accents will
do sometimes, but it's times over there. Well that's that's
that's that's that is the episode. H m hm