There is a long history of horrific shit going down in these sorts of environments.<p>&quot;At-risk students&quot; who volunteer to be there and are cherrypicked from the top of a list of applicants are... not exactly the best statistical environment in which to judge success or failure of the teaching method.  Even if such an approach were genuinely successful, the downsides to a slightly higher graduation rate may be considerable.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;troubledteens" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;troubledteens</a><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;astartforteens.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;astartforteens.org&#x2F;</a><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wwaspsurvivors.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wwaspsurvivors.com&#x2F;</a><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.imdb.com&#x2F;title&#x2F;tt2198956&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.imdb.com&#x2F;title&#x2F;tt2198956&#x2F;</a><p>My experience in the industry is limited to a six week summer camp.  I went through a program wherein we were provided insufficient food &amp; water and subjected to forced march in the wilderness, with constant entreaties to conform to their weird cultlike conflict resolution framework.  To get us to behave they frequently threatened us with forced admission to their sister camp, which was marketed as an alternative to juvie, and ran on a level system (a more carceral aspect up to and including stress positions).  I became suicidal after about two days on this regime;  I &#x27;gave up&#x27; and sat down on the trail half a dozen times, but eventually gave in to their insistence was that this was self-defeating and threaten my campmates because I would merely be prolonging the time to the next resupply, and that no authority figure would do anything but try to help them.  I lost 40 pounds of bodyweight in 21 days, developed open pressure sores &amp; lost the ability to walk without pain for a while.  I staged a breakdown in front of the nurse when we got back to basecamp, to try and get my parents on the phone (I failed). They put me in a subprogram for kids three or four years my junior for the second session.  The abuse there was tame, limited to escalating penalties when we did something judged disruptive, like make a disappointed face, until we gave in and apologized in the proper form.  Two children that year ran away, despite threats to have the neighbor turn his dogs loose on them; One ended up back with her parents, one in the prison camp.  Another (a naive and very Mormon little 10-year-old) was taken to a North Carolina state police station where the counselors got an officer to threaten him verbally with 24hrs of lockup, because his crying was getting out of hand.<p>I count myself lucky that I didn&#x27;t face anything harsher, but never in my wildest dreams would I test some child by admission to this largely unregulated the-beatings-will-stop-when-morale-improves BS.  Many of them <i>brag</i> about adopting coercive tactics invented by cults to keep people in the program, get them to conform, and &#x27;get your child under control&#x27;.  Some of these involve things a prison warden would not be permitted to do.  Mine seems to have been marketted in parallel as a disciplinary aid (one camp-mate was there on court order) and as a &quot;treatment&quot; for things from ADHD (my ticket) to autism.  The deaths that sometimes occur pale in comparison to the amount of PTSD that comes out of these places.