One of the primary goals of President George W. Bush's new White House Officeof Faith-Based and Community Initiatives is "to eliminate unnecessarylegislative, regulatory, and other bureaucratic barriers that impede effectivefaith-based and other community efforts to solve social problems." Bush has saidthat America needs more "faith-based treatment" for addiction and juveniledelinquency and that he would like to "promote alternative licensing regimes torecognize religious training as an alternative form of qualification."
Bad idea. Even leaving aside the dubious constitutionality of governmentfinancial support for religious services, deregulation is a recipe for disaster.Recent experience shows why.
Over the last 10 years, more than two dozen teenagers have died in so-called"tough love" rehabilitation facilities that use violent confrontation andexposure to primitive living conditions as a means to a cure. At least threegirls in different facilities died from dehydration or hyperthermia followingforced exercise; a 16-year-old California boy died of an infection after stafflaughed at him and forced him to carry a basket filled with his vomit- andexcrement-covered clothes; a 12-year-old Florida boy died in 2000 when a320-pound counselor physically restrained him (the counselor said he thought theboy's complaints that he was unable to breathe were "fake"). Not all victims ofsuch "treatment" die, of course: Many just end up with posttraumatic stressdisorder or in a coma, or are discovered tied up in closets. Some of the programswhere these incidents occurred were explicitly faith-based; some were not. None,however, were properly regulated.
Yet despite these cautionary examples--and despite the testimony of numerousexperts who say that what is needed to prevent them from recurring is more federal oversight, not less--Bush's enthusiasm for these programs has not waned. In 1997, after Texas regulators had tried to shut down a Christian rehabilitation program called Teen Challenge because its staff failed to meet educational requirements, then-Governor Bush responded by scuttling all the state's training and safety regulations for such facilities. And in a speech two years later, Bush praised the fact that at Teen Challenge, "if you don't work, you don't eat." Now that he's ensconced in the White House, Bush intends to deregulate Teen Challenge-type programs nationwide.
Our new president's enthusiasm for deregulation of faith-based services is nothard to figure. As a onetime heavy drinker who says Jesus saved him as well as aRepublican with classic antipathy toward government, Bush sees in faith-basedservices the opportunity both to trumpet his faith and to shrink the size ofgovernment. (Why have taxpayers funded government programs when religious groupswill do the job cheaper?) But is there even more to his support of faith-basedprograms than meets the eye?
Mel Sembler, who made his fortune as a shopping mall magnate, is a longtimeBush-family supporter and friend. He was also the Republican Party's campaignfinance from 1997 to 2001. Sembler's the man who devised the term "RepublicanRegents" for contributors of more than $250,000 to the GOP during W.'s 2000campaign.
He is also the founder of Straight, Inc. Started in 1976, Straight, Inc., wasbased on the "therapeutic community" approach pioneered several years earlier,which involved addicts forcing harsh discipline and a surrender to God on oneanother. (The first "therapeutic community" program, called Synanon, went on tobecome a violent cult, some of whose members placed snakes in their detractors'mailboxes.)
Whether Sembler has used his fundraising prowess as leverage to pressurePresident Bush into funding faith-based programs is impossible to determine. Buthe's clearly got the Bush family's ear--and claims to have been responsible forformer first lady Nancy Reagan's interest in the drug fight. In any case, thestory of Straight, Inc., is a cautionary tale for anyone who believes thatderegulating youth services facilities is a good idea.
Accounts by former patients depict a grim routine at Straight. "Newcomers"were required to be trailed at all times by a series of "oldcomers," wholiterally were to keep a finger through the newcomer's belt loop at alltimes--even when the newcomer went to the bathroom. "Therapy" consisted of mainlysitting straight for 10 hours a day, confessing sins. A teen who wasn'tsufficiently enthusiastic in his or her confession would be thrown to the floorand immobilized, often for hours.
Immobilization was also the punishment for other infractions--such as eyecontact between a boy and a girl, or slouching. Television, music, and readingwere frequently forbidden. So was unsupervised contact with parents or otheroutsiders. The program had a, shall we say, fundamentalist view of sexuality.Girls were made to confess sexual transgressions in detail, while boys yelled"Slut!" and "Whore!" at them. Boys were sometimes forced to dress in drag aspunishment for transgressions.
Yet Straight grew rapidly as the war on drugs escalated. Nancy Reagan visitedthe organization twice and called it her "favorite." At its peak, it operatednine centers in seven states. On average, teens stayed a year at a cost of$14,000. Since "counselors" were former patients whose only training had beentreatment, costs were low and profits high.
The lawsuits began almost immediately. In 1981 the American Civil LibertiesUnion sued the Atlanta-based branch of Straight, Inc., but dropped litigation inreturn for an independent investigation. (Sembler told a Florida businesspublication that the ACLU's opposition "just shows that we have been doing thingsright.") In 1983 a former patient won $220,000 from a jury for unlawfulimprisonment that involved regular beatings at the Straight, Inc., facility inSt. Petersburg, Florida. Another Florida patient won a $721,000 jury award in1990. Dozens--if not hundreds--of other suits were settled out of court.
State regulatory agencies, fueled by media accounts, were concerned aboutStraight from the start. In 1983 60 Minutes focused on reports of abuse at the St. Petersburg program. In 1991 the Springfield, Virginia, facility visited by Mrs. Reagan was shut down by state authorities--and was immediately reopened in Columbia, Maryland, until state regulators there cracked down the following year.
Soon thereafter, the Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Texas facilitieswere all shuttered, either by government regulators or as the result of criminalinvestigations. By 1993 Straight, Inc., itself was dead--all the regulation,investigation, and bad publicity had finally led to terminal attrition. ButStraight's ethos lives on: In 1999 a patient won $4.5 million in a suit against asimilar program--shut down by New Jersey regulators in 1998--that was run byMiller Newton, Straight's former national clinical director.
Meanwhile, after Straight, Inc., closed its last facility in Florida in 1993,an internal state audit concluded that officials had renewed its license despiteknowledge of its abuses for years. Why? Political reasons, according to theaudit. A St. Petersburg Times editorial entitled "A Persistent Foul Odor" noted the connections between Mel Sembler and George Bush the elder.
Now that deregulation has been under way in Texas for a few years, familiarabuses are being reported. A Christian counselor was arrested after teens claimedthey were beaten and bound at the Roloff Homes, a church-run shelter in CorpusChristi. One boy had to be hospitalized with broken bones after being forced tojump over a pit. Earlier, state regulators had closed the program when they founda girl restrained with duct tape--but they had been compelled to let the facilityreopen once Governor Bush ditched the regulations.
One final example. In Florida last July, juvenile justice stopped sending kidsto a center run by a faith-based group called Lutheran Services--whosespokesperson is former Straight, Inc., official Joy Margolis--when investigatorsdiscovered that a 15-year-old boy who hung himself had been left danglingunconscious because the staff didn't know how to help. He died after lying in acoma for several months. The program had operated without a license since 1996,in part because staffers hadn't completed resuscitation training. Underderegulation, such training wouldn't be required.
The irony is that even if you believe faith-based, tough-love addictionprograms are especially effective--and for the record, they aren't (researchshows that kindness works better than confrontation)--they don't need to bederegulated in order to prosper. More than 90 percent of American rehab centersalready rely on "the 12-step" system, which requires belief in a "higher power"or "God as you understand him," and most do use significant confrontation as partof their treatment programs. The National Institute on Drug Abuse has just begunan effort to push research-based treatments--but Bush's approach moves in theopposite direction. What's needed is not less regulation and more religion butthe reverse.
