Original subtitles

[man] Where would you all be if you weren't here?

Where would you end up?

You'd either be in jail, in a hospital or dead, okay?

It's time to take your life seriously.

Get your feelings off.

You worthless piece of shit!

You're nobody to me!

I'll fucking slay you, you foreign motherfucker!

You piece of shit!

I'll tear your fucking limb off and beat you fucking with it!

Piece of shit asshole, I'll fucking kill you!

I don't give a fuck who you are, you're nobody!

You're stuck here for good, and I'll makes sure of that!

Fuck you!

My parents tell me, they're like,

"Well, next week we're going to look at boarding schools

and just packing up stuff for a week or whatever,

and we're just going to go look at two or three different schools."

So I was like, "Okay, cool."

Called my friends, I was like, "Oh, I'm going to be gone for a week.

I'll see you in like a week, da da da da."

Packed a bag, took all my music with me

because I ain't go anywhere without my music.

Left everything else behind, and I'm like,

"Well, I thought we were going to Massachusetts."

And my parents were like, "The plane is going to Maine."

[woman] I did not want to go up to Maine.

I'd already heard a little bit about it ahead of time,

and I knew it was going to be very strict, though I didn't know just how strict.

It used to be that we had bad kids who were locked away in reform schools,

and sick kids who were locked away in mental hospitals,

but in the past decade we've been seeking an alternative.

Instead of simply punishing unacceptable behavior,

we've been looking for ways to change that behavior.

This facility called Elan claims to be able to do that.

Why was I sent there?

That's heavy, man.

Why was I in Elan?

[man] From a very young age

things went very badly for me.

[woman] I was pretty angry and confused about a lot of things,

and I was just constantly trying to distract myself.

So yeah, I was... whatever drugs I can get a hold of.

If that was what it was, or just not going to school.

Freshman year I'm trying to think, I put roaches in a girl's purse as a prank.

Pre-lunch, so she'd open them and whatever.

The school charged me with assault for that.

[Peter] Well, I was always in trouble with the law

when I was eight or nine years old.

If you had something that I wanted I'd break in your house

when you weren't there and take it.

I got jumped by a couple juniors.

I beat the fuck out of one kid who started it,

and they charged me with assault and battery for that.

And then just a whole litany of bullshit like that pretty much.

It was all the same like instigating a fight or being involved in this.

Me, I could get laid,

smoke a lot of bud, enjoy myself,

have good music like the Gifts of the Grateful Dead.

I know for me it was pretty much about getting as fucked up as you could,

dancing as hard as you could for as long as you could and listening to music.

[man] Or I could go home be in bed at 10 o'clock, get up at 6:00, go to school.

You know.

It was a no-brainer,

it was just when you start at 12 they get kind of a little pissy about it.

[woman] I started using drugs when I was 13.

If you consider marijuana a drug, I was 13.

I snorted coke when I was 14 at some house party I was at.

Prior to me going to Elan,

I was mostly smoking pot and eating acid, drinking occasionally.

Drinking was getting really dangerous and out of control.

About a month before I went to Elan,

I ran away off a home pass from a psych hospital

and stole a bunch of beer out of the back of a restaurant,

and they found me on a friend's driveway.

I...

While on lithium and Prozac I drank all this beer

and just basically passed out on their lawn. They thought I was dead.

When I found out about Peter's heroin use, I was very scared for him.

[Peter] My mother came in my room, and my friend and I were shooting up.

[Liz] I ratted him out because I was that scared.

[Alec] I was going to buy Bud for my girlfriend,

and I was getting me Adderall for tests and shit.

I got pinched with that, it was like a quarter of weed and a couple of pills.

And I was on probation at the time,

so my mother called my probation officer,

and I woke up the next morning

and he was standing at the foot of my bed with a urine cup.

[Alec] Possession, intent to distribute in a school zone.

Fucking horrible, at 15 caught like a class whatever and whenever,

possession intent to distribute charge. That's what ruined me.

It started when I was a kid at about eight when my dad died,

and I got slightly out of control with mom,

and couldn't handle me and all that I guess.

And I ended up in one home.

[woman] When they started sending me to group homes

and foster homes and things like that

is where I learned how to misbehave, and I learned about drugs.

Because I didn't know any of that stuff living with my mother and my stepfather.

I didn't run the streets, I didn't get in trouble, I wasn't truant,

any of that. It took me getting into the system to learn how to do those things.

Back then they really didn't have too many rules

about what you could and couldn't do to kids, so I was rather abusive.

[man] I was in the Connecticut Junior Republic, it was a boy's home.

I was little, I was from Bridgeport, I didn't know them, they didn't want to know me.

They wanted to rape me, they wanted to beat the shit out of me.

And I escaped from there.

Then I got into some trouble with the law and I was sent to Long Lane.

So a lot of bruises are showing up on me. What do you think?

They didn't do anything. So you take matters in your own hand.

You just get them all, get them all at once.

I barricaded the room, I let them all go, and that was the end of that.

I was institutionalized from when I was 13 until I was 18.

There was a three-week break that I did come home,

but that's when I took that overdose of alcohol and Prozac.

After I had been in the hospital for an overdose

I tried to kill myself in the hospital.

I had broken a light bulb and actually cut my wrists, and then I had also run away.

I'd been hospitalized several times

and pretty much ran away from every place my parents put me in.

The Dead were always on tour, so there was always somewhere else to go.

[Dave] The more I escaped from another place then I went to a worse place and a worse place.

Until I finally found myself in places

that were more brutal than I wanted to deal with, put it that way.

Adolescents are very shrewd.

If you go into a hospital and you don't want to stay there,

all you have to do is make an aggressive gesture at a nurse and you're kicked out.

All you have to do is light your bed on fire and you're kicked out.

So consequently, kids learn how to get out of treatment.

They were trying to find a school that would keep me

no matter how many times I ran away.

Finally in August when I was 12 they shipped me up to Elan

because Elan said that they kept runaways.

At Elan the first thing they learn is you're not going to get out of here.

If you burn the place down we'll sleep in a tent together.

No matter how many times you run away, we will go and get you.

Why? Because we have a commitment to you and to ourselves.

What I did was wrong, they did CAT scans on me and all that.

And so...

They're saying I know I went before a judge.

Instead of me going to Leahy in Worcester,

which is like the juvenile facility they have out here,

they offered up a plea for me to go to Elan instead.

I was 12. They said you're going away until you turn 18.

[Alec] They were explaining that it would be

more intense than juvie pretty much.

I got on a plane, I went to Elan.

The court officers

took me to an airport where Dr. Davidson came down on the plane.

I had never had a driver's license,

so I had never paid attention to where we were going,

and all of a sudden I was in the middle of the woods in Maine.

[woman] I was like I'm in the fucking boondocks. This is nuts.

[man] Some of the kids have mentioned that they or their peers were snatched.

What does that mean?

Yeah, I remember that night.

Well, it's usually in the morning you see.

When four residents

and generally big people or taller and heavier,

will show up at someone's house

and go into a new resident's bedroom and say,

"Hi Johnny, we're from Elan and we'd like you to come with us."

And they talk very nicely,

but they're big and they're strong and they're insistent and there are four of them.

And so it happens.

[Todd] I was sleeping in my bed, and probably at about 4:00 AM

two guys came into my room, woke me up.

One of the guys said, "We're taking you to your new school."

My mom was telling me this was for the best.

I tried to run, they grabbed me,

and they threw me in a van and drove me up to Poland Springs, Maine.

So I get off the plane, and there's two kids,

just gigantic huge kids,

maybe a year older or maybe two years older than me, and two adults.

They're like, "We're taking you to the school."

They didn't really tell me too much about where I was going.

So all of a sudden we're going up this dusty dirt road.

I just remember thinking, "God, this place is out in the middle of nowhere."

[Tracy] And there's these scattered house I feel like I'm going to summer camp.

And after you're in Long Lane for six months anything looks better.

And a couple staff came with really pretty pictures of the lake and the property,

and it looked really nice.

And they were talking about the horseback riding

and canoeing and hiking and house trips.

I thought that I was going from complete lockup

to summer camp paradise.

I'm like, "Where's the swimming pool, the horses and the tennis courts?"

So now when I arrived in August of '73,

V-J Day as a matter of fact, I saw this white Victorian house sitting up on the hill.

And my parents brought me in,

and I was taken right in to the director's office, Joe Ricci.

[Joseph] We don't bullshit kids.

We don't tell kids that this is some kind of utopia,

that everything is going to work out for you.

And so they bring me into this trailer, and we were being told about the program.

Looked my mother straight dead in the eye and said, "This is the last stop on the bus."

Not one time did anybody say, even hinted at what I was about to go through.

If you don't send your son here he's going to be dead, you can count on it.

You have six minutes to say goodbye to your parents,

and if you say anything disrespectful to them I'm going to put you in a corner.

And I just looked at my dad and I just was shaking my head, I started crying.

I was like... just looked at him, because me and my dad were closer.

Me and my mom always had issues, me and my dad were very close.

So I was getting my search to get inside and my dad started crying,

and my mom was just like, "I can't." And they left.

[Mary] I couldn't believe they were going to leave me there,

but after a while they did, you know.

When I brought my kid today I just cried.

I know, and the people in school knew that he was coming up here to stay.

You know that if he doesn't change he's going to get arrested.

You know that sooner or later he's going to steal something to get money.

I worried them a lot.

The phone rings at 10 o'clock at night, three o'clock in the morning.

They were getting calls 2:00, 3:00 in the morning from the cops.

You're shaking, you're wondering, what's this call going to mean?

Your son's run away again. We don't know where he is.

And that's the fear that we live in. We're ready to--

-[woman] Crack. -Just an example, ready to crack.

I love him so much. I wouldn't want to lose him.

It's important for parents to know that we understand all of that.

We're going to help your child go through all of that

so that you can have the kid back that you remember, and the one that you love.

[Mary] I was raised by adopted parents

who were very devout Catholics, my mother in particular.

And she had a bad temper, she wasn't able to forgive me

because I had bonded with one of the nuns at the infant home,

and preferred her over my adopted parents.

I'd always had an active imagination and a fantasy life,

but it became more intense when I was around her.

My father, he wasn't much help.

Our father was never present,

and our mother drank too much.

Way too much.

[Jaela] I was taken away from my mother when I was 13.

My mother had issues with alcoholism, and she married an extremely abusive man.

Not only was he abusing my mother, but he was hitting me.

[Julie] I was in an abusive home environment.

My mother was physically abusive, emotionally abusive.

My mother used to tie me to the radiator and beat the shit out of me.

She beat the crap out of me on several occasions.

Threw me in tubs with hot scalding water.

When I was 11 years old she told me get the fuck out of the house and not come back.

I went to grab some cookie,

she kicked the chair from underneath me, split my head open.

I ran into my bedroom and tried to hide.

My eye right here above my eye, the bone is fractured.

My mom came in with a belt and beat the crap out of me.

[Doug] Had it not been for Mr. Bright,

the people who live next door, I probably would have been dead.

That's when the state removed me from her.

My dad from as early as I can remember he was physically abusive,

mentally abusive, sexually abusive.

And no one knew about it.

My mother didn't know, it was only my brother and I who really knew,

and that wasn't found out until Elan.

In my 17 years at Elan I've seen a lot of kids come through the program

who had had some horrible relationships with family members.

Who all still love each other very dearly, but had really hurt each other,

and had really done some pretty self-destructive

and destructive things to other people in their family.

And it all got twisted, and it all got confused.

I think the trouble then is where do you release this?

The hurt or this stuff.

Where do you then take this?

Because the perpetrators aren't going to talk to you about it.

Okay, so where do you take it?

And I think for a lot of us

that went through Elan that I know,

some things happened and the parents needed to dump.

That was their solution.

So for me the first day was one of extreme bewilderment,

and an ultimate realization that I was in for a new kind of life.

[man] I said goodbye to my parents and Mark Rosenberg took me down to Elan VIII.

[man] I went to Elan III.

[man] They sent me to Parsonsfield.

[Jaela] I went... of course you go straight to the dorm

and then you have your Kwell shower, the famous Kwell.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

The louse shampoo and all that shit. Going up there for your indoctrination.

You have to change your clothes and remove your jewelry and your shoelaces and all of that.

Take your fucking hat off, tuck your shirt...

I'm like, just the regular emotions

of never hearing anything like this before in your life.

[Peter] They asked me, why'd you run away from your last place?

Being 16 and you know, I was like, "I wanted to get laid."

I took a girl with me.

And Marty said to me, "Well, you can't get laid here.

You can't even flirt here."

My jaw kind of dropped, it was like,

"Yeah, you say that, but the students will say something else."

[Tracy] So some kid that was my SP in Clara walks me up to Elan VII, which wasn't far.

But as I'm walking up there I'm hearing screaming.

[Peter] So I walked in the door and the first thing they told me

was "You get to leave when you change."

[Tracy] So I get in Elan, and I'm looking around, in Elan VII, and I'm like,

"Okay, this kid is scrubbing the corner.

This kid is wearing a fucking piece of poster board around their neck,

this kid is in the corner,

and there's a bunch of other kids just sitting around looking miserable.

[people shouting over each other]

[Tracy] I'd never seen anything like that in my life.

Stand right there!

[man] I just remember looking around seeing people with signs and shaved heads

and somebody wearing a clown outfit.

[man] I thought everybody was out of their minds.

I didn't have relatives. I was brought in during lunch time, and I sat down at the table.

Immediately I turned to the girl next to me, I'm like, "This shit is fucking crazy.

Where am I?"

Where the fuck am I?

And apparently she was a non-strength.

Immediately I got pulled into another room and I got dealt with.

[Tracy] So I started crying, like profusely crying.

Threw a tantrum, I was like, "I'm not staying here.

I don't want to be here. You made a mistake, this is not me.

I don't know what the fuck is going on, but you all are fucking crazy."

I was almost begging to go back to the detention center.

It was surreal, to say the least. It was unreal.

[Peter] It was as if we were in a parallel universe

and for some reason the kids were all acting like they liked it.

Very bizarre.

So I'm continuing to cry, and people are trying to tell me like, "Tighten up."

Using these terms that I've never heard like,

"We're not going to placate you."

At 16, I had no idea what placate meant.

"We're not going to placate you.

You need to tighten up, you're causing a scene.

You're disrupting the community."

[Dave] The first day at Elan

I had taken in the lunch line two milks instead of one milk.

Next thing I know.

General fucking meeting.

Get in front of your house.

Oh fuck.

And all the kids are like, "Go, go. Stand up there. Stand up there."

[Dave] I find myself up against the wall

with about, easy, 150 people in that place.

[Tracy] So I'm standing up there and I'm still bawling my eyes out crying.

When you got a GM, they break you down, man.

And Tanya just starts ripping me like, "You fucking are manipulative.

You're a fucking lying brat. You fucking destroyed your family."

You couldn't do nothing but cry.

[Tracy] "You destroyed your family. You made everybody around you miserable."

They would talk about what you'd done wrong in these terms like you'd murdered somebody.

[Tracy] The house is worked up into such a feeding frenzy, and into such a battle mode.

It's like the gladiators in the fucking Coliseum man.

You could feel the house tremble.

[Alec] Someone's thrown up there in chains and they let all the tigers out.

[Tracy] So then she's like, "Does anybody else have feelings about this?"

"Does anybody have any feelings about it?"

"Who's got feelings for him? Get him."

"Get his ass."

[Tracy] Next thing I know, I have 50 fucking kids rushing at me.

People rush, I mean chairs flung...

as they get out of their chair it falls on the floor behind them.

They would bum-rush you.

They were this far away from your face.

Screaming at--

The top of their lungs.

[people screaming]

"You fucking asshole. How can you do this? I can't stand...

I'm going to kick your motherfucking ass.

If I knew you on the street, you're a little mama's boy,

you'd be sucking my dick, blah, blah, blah."

Spitting in your face the whole time and you have to stand there like this.

When they finished with you, you were completely degraded,

humiliated, you wasn't worth damn.

[gavel banging]

[woman] Thank you very much everybody, great to hear all of you.

Last week two judges in Pennsylvania plead guilty

to taking over 2.5 million dollars in kickbacks

for placing over 5000 teens in private wilderness program in a juvenile detention center.

What's shocking here is not just the judge's horrific misconduct,

but the fact that the same thing takes place all the time legally

in the private placements we've just heard about.

Like the private prison business,

this industry is about making money by locking up children.

It is not about helping them.

The treatment they sell is abuse. The abuse is not...

[Maia] When I was in college and in high school, I had a drug problem.

I became addicted to cocaine and heroin.

And I was afraid to get treatment

because what I'd read about addiction treatment

was that the whole idea was to humiliate and break and attack you.

And I thought that's exactly the opposite of what I need

because the reason I'm using drugs

is because I feel uncomfortable and unsafe around other people.

And so when I got into recovery eventually

I wanted to understand where did this idea come from

that we should break addicts to fix them?

[man] Throughout the 1960s many new treatment programs

had been launched in and out of government.

Perhaps the most publicized is Synanon,

a private organization founded and managed by ex-addicts.

Best thing for people is people,

and Synanon provides the environment to bring together people from all walks of life.

[man] Synanon was founded by a man named Charles Dederich,

an ex-alcoholic and frequent speaker at alcoholics anonymous.

It was his answer to the dilemma drug addicts were facing during the early '60s.

There was nowhere they could go for help.

During that time, drug addiction was seen as much more severe than alcohol addiction.

So Dederich came up with a solution

using the 12 steps made famous in Alcoholics Anonymous, but with a new twist.

[Maia] He thought that AA wasn't tough enough.

He thought that the 12 steps were all well and good,

but they really wouldn't work unless you forced people to do them.

[man] At the core of Synanon were group sessions that relied

on highly intense confrontation between group members.

-You're a little baby. -Really?

-I want, I want, I want. -[talking a the same time]

When I want to go, I go.

[man] The idea was to break down their defenses

to make them reveal their innermost deepest troubles.

Only then would they be able to help themselves towards sobriety.

In Synanon, this ideology was known as The Game.

Today it's more commonly known as--

Attack therapy is basically the idea that you've developed this horrible bad personality,

and we need to attack you and break you

entirely in order to eliminate it and to rebuild you as a good person.

[man] Synanon achieved massive success.

However, it wasn't long before stories of abuse and cult-like behavior

began to emerge, and after a lengthy legal battle with the IRS,

Synanon would eventually shutdown.

But not without leaving behind a legacy that is still being felt to this day.

After getting massive amounts of publicity,

a major motion picture, all the evening news,

all the big media was saying how this is this wonderful cure.

It spread to New York where Phoenix House and Daytop were founded.

[man] Daytop Village is typical of the halfway house concept.

Where the addict is slowly eased back into society, one step at a time.

Synanon evolved into Daytop and other therapeutic communities.

And Joe Ricci went to Daytop.

[man] The man who runs Elan is Joe Ricci, himself a former delinquent and heroin addict.

[Daniel] Joe came out of Daytop in '67 or '68.

He went through the program then he worked for it.

[man] And ultimately wanted to found his own therapeutic version of Daytop.

[Daniel] And then he was introduced to Gerald Davidson.

Dr. Davidson was a Harvard educated psychiatrist.

[man] And they went up to Maine.

What I understand, Maine had less stringent laws

on who could operate and what kind of permits you needed.

[man] In 1970 Joe Ricci and Gerald Davidson opened the first facility

in the small town of Sebago, Maine.

They called it Elan I,

and like Daytop, the program mainly focused on rehabilitating hardened drug addicts.

It started out early, it started out drunks,

and most of the people were 18 and over.

As a matter of fact they were well within their 20s.

Most of them were junkies,

and Elan truly was their last stop before prison or death.

And then they were convinced that they could take on other people.

Runaways, a lot of runaways.

Running away or being truant from school.

Promiscuity.

Girls that had gotten pregnant as teenagers.

Your very violent offenders.

[Tracy] Stealing cars, breaking into houses.

Marty Maxwell was there, he was there for robbing banks.

[Tracy] Mugging people.

There were a lot of gang members.

-We had manslaughter. -[Tracy] Held people at knife point.

Pedophilia.

Some kids I remember I had heard had raped people.

Maybe half the people there had been sexually abused consistently.

[Daniel] People that had very serious emotional and psychological problems.

[Tracy] There were a lot of kids there

that had been put in every kind of placement center or treatment

or whatever you want to call it that their state could possible send them to.

They come from mental institutions or juvenile detention centers.

And Elan was the last place that they would send these kids.

We started to move into autism, we started to move into Asperger's.

After I'd been at Elan for a few years and I was receiving a general meeting,

the director suddenly turned to everybody and said,

"Did you know that before she came to Elan, she had been diagnosed as semi-autistic?"

We started to move into--

[man speaking]

[Daniel] Murder.

[man] It was the night before Halloween 27 years ago

when 15-year old Martha Moxley was found beaten to death

outside her home in upscale Greenwich, Connecticut.

Among the suspects, her next door neighbor Michael Skakel.

- [woman] Michael Skakel. - Michael Skakel.

Michael Skakel.

A Kennedy cousin serving 20 years to life--

For a murder that shocked the nation,

Skakel was convicted in a 1975 murder

of his 15-year-old neighbor in Greenwich.

[man] It was at Elan during group therapy

that Michael would allegedly confess to killing Martha Moxley.

We got way out of our purview there, way out.

[Julie] There were kids there who talked to boys,

and that was their only problem.

They talked to boys, they came from a religious family.

Some kids just acted badly

and I think their parents had the money to send them there, so Elan took them.

For the most part these troubled teen programs,

the evaluation they do is what I call a wallet biopsy.

Do you have enough money to afford it?

Then yes, your problem is severe enough. That's it.

[cashier dinging]

[man] By 2011, the annual tuition for one-year stay at Elan, over $54,000.

[interviewer] That's far more expensive than even the most expensive university education.

Do you still think it's worth it?

Yes, indeed.

Could you tell me why?

Well, what's the worth of a life?

[Mary] In January of '74 there was a major fire.

Up in the attic this boy named Burt set a fire because he hated the place,

and he knew that a lot of us hated it too.

He knew that the neighbors hated us and wanted us out.

So he set a fire and because the old house

consisted of wood it just burned fast.

[man] After Elan I burned down, operations were moved to the facility in Waterford.

This would be Elan II.

Soon the main campus in Poland Springs was opened,

and then a maximum security facility was established in Parsonsfield

to house state wards and kids that were facing severe criminal charges.

Yes, Elan certainly was Joe Ricci's big success,

and like any good businessman he diversified his investments.

He bought the Scarborough Downs race track.

[man] Scarborough Downs still a cut above the best.

[man] And ran for governor.

Hi, I'm Joseph Ricci, Democratic candidate for governor.

[man] Joe's empire was expanding and so was the new troubled teen industry.

Parents, psychologists and courts from all over the world

were sending their troubled kids to Elan for treatment.

The troubled teen industry has become connected.

Sometimes a drug rehab will recommend a wilderness program,

and sometimes a psychiatrist will recommend these things,

largely because they're ignorant of what actually goes on,

and also because unfortunately

professional treatment is not always so professional either.

[man screaming]

[man] You won't get out of doing it!

You and everybody else has to!

[man screaming]

[woman screaming] You know this lack of quality,

you know this crap, you know it just will not be tolerated!

[man] Yeah, you're the first one to do it!

[man] Day in day out, life at Elan is constant confrontation.

[inaudible].

[man] Unrelenting pressure.

I couldn't believe all the shit that was left on those things!

[man] Your feelings, your negative attitudes are broken down, dissected, torn apart.

The idea is to change your behavior.

[man] The Elan program was two-fold. In one sense there were therapeutic groups.

[woman] Primal groups.

-[woman] Encounter groups. -[man] A parent group.

The other side of Elan

was a functional working microcosm of the work world.

Everybody had a job around the house,

and everybody had to make the house,

the society of sorts, to function.

It was very Lord of the Flies.

Yes. I've actually explained it that way to people I've known several times.

That's the best part, it's the most ingenious fucking thing ever.

You have the prisoners run the prison.

It seemed like patients therapeutatized the other patients.

It's great because everybody wants to move up.

We all know we want to get out of this place.

That's the only way you can convince people to,

I don't know, shut off their real human convictions.

[man] You're disgusting.

Because everyone here's trying to be the exact opposite of what you are now,

and you want to hold on to it.

That's the disgusting part of it.

You just better start being honest with us man,

because everyone's getting pretty hostile.

[Peter] And I bought into the whole thing.

I am going to do whatever they tell me to do, okay?

I am going to hurt anybody they want me to because I want to get out of here.

Elan does things a little differently,

more of an emphasis on integrity honesty, accountability.

Wellness kind of a model rather than a psychiatric or illness model.

And the kids often don't know they're being therapized, if I can use that word.

[man] Each Elan house functioned through the collective work of five offices.

The service crew were the janitors, the kitchen crew handled the food,

the business office filed paperwork,

the communications office brought news from the outside world,

and the expediters enforced security.

Each office was managed by a specific hierarchy of positions

that each resident had to work through in order to graduate the program.

[woman] I remember when you came in you were non-strength and you were a worker.

Everybody went into service crew first, and you were a worker.

[man] Elan residents are taught to obey authority.

They're made to work at menial jobs, to do what they're told to do.

You just cleaned floors, you'd do this, you'd do that, you'd dust this.

And then you had a ramrod.

Then you got some dudes coming around with a white glove checking your work out,

and if it wasn't right, you'd be there half a day again redoing it.

There was worker and ramrod, and those were the two non-strength positions.

And in order to talk to somebody else that wasn't a strength,

you had to have a strength being aware of your conversation.

Monitoring your conversation.

[Jeff] You always had somebody watching you.

You couldn't go to the bathroom on your own.

[man] Each household is a tightly structured community.

New residents do the dirty work under the supervision of more senior residents.

[Tracy] And then you would go to expediter.

Once you hit expediter, that was the first time that you were a strength.

Expediters were responsible for security.

[Joseph] The expediter is a police man.

They're the line of defense between the normal people and the lunatics.

[Gillian] The expediters had clipboards,

and they would be put on certain designated spots throughout the houses called zones.

The expediters would watch the doors to make sure nobody ran, and then at the dorm.

The night owl made sure that you didn't run in the middle of the night.

[man] In the households,

discipline is maintained by an elite group called the expediters.

They relay orders, keep track of every resident, and report negative behavior.

Some call them spies.

[Gillian] They would watch and write down all the things

that people have done wrong throughout the day.

[man] They record the names, the actions of everyone in every room continuously.

I'll have to tell you, this is probably not very... something I should be proud of.

Nobody ever ran away on my time.

[man] At Elan there is no privacy.

Incoming mail is open, outgoing mail is read and censored.

Telephone calls are monitored.

Every conversation is subject to eavesdropping and informing.

And then was it department head from there? And then it was department head.

A department head

was basically when you first became a manager.

Department head of the kitchen crew.

And then you would go to shingle. Shingle was the head of the expediters.

Michelle, take dining room zone.

Rachel, go to top zone please.

I'm pretty sure I was a shingle for like a fucking year-and-a-half.

[Gillian] And then you had coordinator.

Coordinator of communications.

I loved being COD.

COD stood for coordinator on duty.

Pretty much you ran the house for that day.

You were the boss, you were in charge,

and you were accountable for everything that went on in your house.

[Peter] Well, first of all there were directors,

and below them there were assistant directors,

and below them were staff.

And the staff members were the people in reentry.

I did reentry staff then I... I never was officially hired.

It was a job for them until they went home

or decided to stay.

You have hundreds of years of expert people up here to walk you through this,

hold your hand, help you, push you through a window,

pull you through a window, and help you change.

So consequently the only thing you have to do here is to be as hardworking as you can,

and to be totally as honest as you can.

[Julie] I don't know a lot about the staff in Elan,

I do know that a lot of them were former residents who had graduated the program.

And I don't know if there actually were any staff there

with formal psych training or anything.

I don't think so. I never saw a psychiatrist while I was there,

I never saw a psychologist.

[Peter] These were all people who had no training, no psychology classes.

Their only qualification was that they themselves had been through the program.

They thought that because they had been through experiences

that, that qualified them to handle disturbed kids.

[man] There are no national standards nor even a consensus of expert opinion

on how much formal training should be required

of person involved in treating troubled kids.

But both Dr. Davidson, a trained psychiatrist,

and Joe Ricci, who did not graduate from college,

believe that experience is the best teacher

when it comes to helping the type of kids who come to Elan.

...if you ask for help.

Now, when you get shot down you lose your position.

Yeah, I was shot down. I got shot down three times for having sex.

[Julie] If you're going to be shot down you have to scrub floors,

you have to GI the toilets.

No, no, no, no. They didn't scrub it, they had toothbrushes.

[man] It doesn't matter if the floor is brand new.

You've got to sit there and scrub it for 18 hours.

And God forbid you were fucking shot down and you had to pee,

because you would have to go through a worker, a ramrod,

a department head, a coordinator, senior coordinator, and then to staff.

So it had to go through 11 different people for you to get permission to pee.

And then you had to find somebody to be aware of you while you peed

because you couldn't go in the bathroom alone.

[man] Throughout the day residents functioned within their departments,

only breaking for meals, meetings, a few hours of school at night, and of course, groups.

[Julie] I remember there was a box at the front of the house,

and there was a little slip of paper.

Encounter groups.

You couldn't swear at somebody or tell them you hated them

unless you were in a general meeting or group therapy.

If you were to make me angry, you told me to do something I didn't want to do,

I'd write, "To Todd from Gillian, anger." I'd circle that, drop it in the box.

Everybody would sit in a circle in one of the rooms,

and then the staff or the director who was running it would say,

"Okay, get your feelings off."

And you would commence to basically cursing each other out one at a time,

at the top of your fucking lungs.

[man screaming and gasping for air].

And that was supposed to be how you dealt with your feelings.

[man] In so-called encounter groups,

residents are encouraged to express their hostile feelings.

The result is usually a stream of curses and obscenities.

You would yell at the person, swear at them, degrade them.

-[man] Cunt. -[man] Whore.

-[man] Needle dick. -[woman] Fucking slut.

You could say anything you wanted to.

They'd stomp their feet, and they'd be going like this.

Frothing at the mouth, grabbing their pants like this. Rocking back and forth.

Some people's seats would be popping up off the ground.

[Gillian] Screaming at me, making eye contact.

Calling me a bitch and all this stuff.

Sometimes it was for the dumbest reasons too.

[Peter] Somebody left their tube of shampoo in the shower

because they were coming in after me to use it.

I had no idea, it was right there.

I used the Judy's Secret,

I did it then the guy that went in afterwards, his shampoo was gone.

Well, he dropped a slip on me and took me into an encounter group

and he's sitting there screaming at me how he's going to kill me

because I took his tube of Judy's Secret shampoo.

You know what? I'm sick and tired of your garbage around here.

You know I've got to deal with your--

If you weren't participating in the encounter groups intensely enough,

it was you that would be in trouble.

[Gillian] Most of the time when I was in groups

it was a lot of going through the motions and just yelling because I had to,

but there was one group in particular

where a girl who I thought I was really close to

had gone on her first visit with her mother.

She told her that she shouldn't be there

because there's girls who were raped by their father and stuff like that there,

and she's not like that.

Then I was in a group with her

and that was the first time I ever actually yelled and meant it.

I was crying so hard, I couldn't believe that someone had said something like that.

As if I'm a disease and you are better than me.

I can say that at that moment I was glad that something in this world

was called an encounter group and I wasn't choking her.

Back in the day when I was going through a lot of places

being in institutions, there were no encounter groups.

We would just simply beat each other's ass on the spot if something like that broke out.

[man] After the shouting there is an attempt to resolve hostilities.

With the ultimate goal of not only having peace,

but having a better outcome in your daily interactions.

They taught us that everyone in the world has feelings,

and that's all they are is feelings.

And the difference between a positive person and a negative person

was how they reacted off of those feelings.

[man] We're talking about attempting suicide by eating 15 pills of Antabuse,

and then going out and having a glass of scotch.

We're talking about waking up in the morning

and just because you don't have booze, drinking shaving lotion,

just to get alcohol out of it.

We're talking about going into convulsions,

and going into seizures and going into blackouts that you almost never came out of.

[woman] I was at the point where I was pretty wasted one night,

and I went out and I got a butcher knife and started stabbing myself in my stomach,

which partly because I wanted my father to come and say,

"It's okay Diana. You're going to be all right, you're a very sick little girl.

We'll take you to the hospital and sew you up."

I just wanted to know that he loved me because I felt like he didn't.

I felt like nobody did.

You have to make the decision whether or not it's worth it for you to live.

You have got to do it for yourself.

I want you to think about the times

that you could never sit somebody down and spill your guts out.

And I want you to say, "I'm lonely and it hurts me."

Hold hands and think about that.

Let's get in touch with what you are.

[woman] I'm lonely and it hurts me.

[Peter] You would think about a feeling that you had that made you sad.

I'm lonely and it hurts me.

That you felt bad about.

[man] Think about what goes on inside. "I'm lonely and it hurts me," let's go.

I'm lonely and it hurts me.

I'm scared. I hate my father. This person raped me.

I'm lonely and it hurts me.

[Daniel] It was trying to go to your most inner child.

I'm lonely and it hurts me.

The hurt.

I'm lonely and it hurts me!

[Daniel] The wound's just left unidentified.

[woman] I'm lonely and it hurts me!

[man] Talk about it!

I'm lonely and it hurts me!

I'm lonely and it hurts me!

I'm lonely and it hurts me!

[screaming]

[man] Get it all out. Get it all out. It's okay to cry.

[Peter] And it was supposedly a way of--

-[Liz] Cleansing. -[Peter] ...cleansing out your problems.

[man] You are watching primal scream therapy,

which is intended to release a youngster's deepest fears and emotions.

I had two primal groups surrounding my father's death.

[man] Do you remember what you were screaming?

[Liz] Yeah, why'd you leave me?

When I got into high school I found amphetamines.

Then I found crystal speed,

and I did a lot of amphetamines and a lot of crystal, and I would drink a lot.

Got thrown out of high school and went to night school.

Then I got kicked out of night school for truancy.

I had said to my father, "I need help, I think I'm going crazy."

And he said, "Well,

I would like you to consider going to Elan.

Your brother went there and it seems to have done a world of good for him."

He said, "I'll call you every day to make sure you're doing all right."

And two days later I made this phony suicide attempt

thinking I'd end up in the plush Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, New Jersey,

and instead I ended up on the psych ward.

And my father died the next morning.

He dropped dead jogging on a business trip in Chicago.

They said the heart attack was so massive he was dead before he hit the pavement.

So I felt so guilty about having made that suicide attempt and thinking,

"Well, that probably contributed to my father's heart attack, which killed him."

And my mother wanted me to go to Elan,

and I'm pretty sure Peter at that point was advocating for me to go there as well.

So I went to Elan.

[woman] We are in a structured environment

where these kids may not know how to have things organized.

Don't know how to keep anything on time, how to do something,

and this teaches them to live in an environment where there is actually discipline.

[man] Along with their job, every resident had a set of daily responsibilities.

Dropping slips was one of them, and then there was the incident book.

At Elan there were three cardinal rules.

No drugs, no sex and no violence.

Breaking any of the three cardinal rules meant severe punishment.

But then there were rules for everything else, and this is where the incident book came in.

[Peter] The incident book was something controlled by a shingle expediter.

Someone who you could kind of compare to a police lieutenant or captain.

You had to be careful what you said around everybody

because people were encouraged to tattle on each other all the time for every little thing.

[Peter] Students would book each other

or hold each other accountable for breaking the rules.

They would say to the shingle, "I want to book an incident." They'd say, "On who? For what?"

You'd get booked for goofing.

You could be walking around with a shoelace that's untied.

[Tracy] Not doing your chore correctly.

Let too many cigarette butts collect in an ash tray.

[Jaela] Because I was the house fatty,

I couldn't sit through a meal without being booked by 10 people for eating too much.

This is my favorite, stealing a pencil.

But stealing a pencil isn't stealing a pencil.

Stealing a pencil is like a pencil was on the ground and you picked it up,

and you didn't make a fucking announcement on the pencil

to let everybody know that you were taking the pencil.

Because you didn't want to take those two extra steps

to raise your hand and make an announcement

and find out whose fucking pencil it is before you pocket it,

you have now committed a crime in the kingdom of Elan.

The shingle would come up to you if you were booked and say, "Valid or invalid?"

Your explanation had some weight, but not a whole hell of a lot.

The injustice of it was guilty or innocent, you usually got dealt with.

If it's an injustice, deal with it.

-[man] Knock! -[knocking on door]

[man] Who's out there? Come in.

I was dealt with a lot, on a daily basis.

I mean, God I could knock 20 times a day, 30 times a day.

You say knock, the person knocks.

-They'd say, "Who's there?" And you say Julie, and they'd say-- -Come in.

[Julie] You'd walk in and you'd close the door behind you,

and you'd stand in front of four other residents

with your feet shoulder-width apart and your hands at your sides.

And they would say, "You know why you're standing there?"

For stealing a pencil.

That was your responsibility!

You had to clean the bathroom this morning!

[people screaming over each other]

You can just lay back in the cut,

and it's just everything that goes around here!

[man] In the jargon of Elan, this is a haircut.

The theory is that blowing the most trivial incidents out of proportion

with angry shouting, will lead the supposed offender to take a closer look at himself.

[people screaming over each other]

[woman] You're going to make sure things get done!

So I suggest for the next time you should put more...!

And if you stand there and you react at all like roll your eyes or, "Yeah, right. Whatever."

It would just get worse and worse and worse.

[people moaning]

[man] At Elan you succeed and survive if you accept the program.

If you don't, there are punishments. They're usually called learning experiences.

[Todd] You had to make a choice when you came to Elan.

You can choose to go through the hard way or you can choose the motherfucker way.

From the hottest fire comes the strongest steel.

[Daniel] But I caught on real quick.

I got smart the first day I was there, and a couple of guys came

and asked me come in a room and they just said,

"Hey, we can do this one way or we can do it another way."

And I just went, "Really?"

And they go, "Really."

And I said, "Okay, cool."

I just didn't feel like fighting,

because I intuitively knew I wasn't going to win.

I wasn't buying into their system right away.

[Jaela] My first year in Elan was scrubbing floors and facing corners.

I had almost a general meeting a day for probably six months.

So I was on the service crew for 30 days and then I tried to run away and I got caught.

[Tracy] I wanted to get kicked out.

My first year that's all I wanted to do.

That was my dream. My dream was to get kicked out of Elan.

I had my clothes on all night long in bed,

trying to get the guts to get up and run out the door.

And finally when I did, I ran right into the night man.

[Tracy] But had I known how hard people had tried

for the past 20-something years prior to me getting there to get kicked out,

and the things that they had tried and they had never gotten kicked out,

I would probably have conformed sooner.

[man] Many Elan residents have tried to escape, but they've all failed.

[Jeff] I split from Elan probably about six or seven times.

Made it out of the state of Maine every time, as far as California.

Anybody who tried to run away was usually caught.

[man] When they've managed to get off the grounds, trackers are sent out after them.

[Peter] They send student trackers after you.

[Jeff] Next thing I know I get jumped somewhere, and next thing I'm back.

[Peter] You were brought back and you were basically therapeutically killed.

And you often had security precautions put on you

that were unprecedented for any time in your stay.

[man] When they caught this 15-year-old boy he was put in a rabbit suit and leg shackles.

[Alec] After I ran away, I mean I already had no fucking shoelaces or anything anyway.

So they got me down to a sandal,

I can only wear sandals, pocket, pockets out.

15-foot spread from windows and doors.

A strength and a high strength.

They've got to be with me at all times, and I'm in a pod,

which is each tile is like a foot, one-by-one all right?

So I got nine, that was me.

That was me for nine fucking months.

That's my pen.

That's where I live it's taped.

Taped, outlined, if I went out of it, "Chief!"

[man] What does it do?

Okay, it humiliates him and it restricts his movement.

He's run away from here four times, okay?

He's run away from every place he's been before at least 17 or 18 times.

This boy's been in and out of juvenile detention centers for years,

and faced charges of breaking and entering and assault.

For him, it was either Elan or jail.

[Peter] So, I was shot down for the next 30 days,

and I was a worker for the next 30 days,

and then they transferred me to Waterford.

I met the best friend I've ever had in my life, a guy named Scott Ketchum.

And he had a sign, and I remember exactly what his sign said.

I walked in and I looked over, and the whole room had to be quiet

because he just walked in and he said,

"I'm Scott, the hospital tot. I like to make people laugh a lot.

I find it hard to see that I have guilt and it's killing me."

[man] Residents are made to wear signs for days, sometimes weeks.

Bluntly spelling out their problems and failures.

[Tracy] You would have to stand up every morning at morning meeting and read your sign.

Hickory dickory dock, responsible I am not.

I fell asleep like a little sheep, ask me why I'm a dummy.

[Tracy] And the house would have to confront you on your sign.

"Why are you a dummy?" Because I fell asleep on night duty.

[Jeff] It was a big piece of white poster board

and Elan was so nice that they would let you make your own sign.

You could even put silly flowers and dogs and cats on it.

I'm a lunatic, I totally lose control when things don't go my way.

That's why I've been in and out of hospitals.

Please confront me as to why I have so little self-control

that I've become a blob.

Please ask me why I continue to goof.

I'm a disgusting little coward.

If I continue to take everything as a joke, I'm going to end up dead.

All I have in the future to look forward to is getting raped in prison.

I got a sign as a result of the fact that I broke cardinal rules.

I was kind of flirting with one of the guys from Elan III in classes.

The lights had gone out during school,

and we held hands for probably about five seconds.

And they kept telling me that I had guilt,

and I had no clue what they were talking about.

[Peter] Guilt was basically any behavior you engaged in contrary to Elan policy

that was not found out, but you carried with you.

Elan was very big on making you feel guilty.

[Peter] Every couple of weeks they would say,

"Have you copped to your guilt? When was the last time you copped to your guilt?"

And you'd write it out on a piece of paper, what you did.

[Julian] I couldn't figure out if somebody had seen me in the dark

touch hands with this other guy for five seconds, so I actually copped to that as my guilt.

Two new residents talking to each other without a strength

being aware of the conversation might be a relatively minor form of guilt.

You know.

Kissing someone on the back stairs, you're getting a general meeting.

[Julie] So I got shot down, I got a general meeting,

and I got a sign about, "Ask me why am I whore,"

because I held hands with somebody for about five seconds.

I remember this poor girl named Jennifer.

She liked a kid, and they put a whore costume on her.

Oh, oh. Costumes.

[Dave] Every morning she had to get up in front of the whole house,

dance around and strut like she was a whore, and sing this song.

How do you tell somebody that had been sexually abused

since they were four years old that they're a whore?

♪ They call me Flamin' Jenny 'cause I'm♪

♪ Ha! For many I'm the hottest baby In the house♪

♪ And when it comes to lovin' I'm the human oven♪

♪ I'm the hottest baby In the house♪

Growl!

[Julie] I think I was oversexed because I'd been abused,

so I was sexually provocative.

I was sexually abused when I was younger by someone close to my family,

and it had gone on for a very long time,

a period of eight years and just kind of the backup of dealing with that problems in school.

I'd entrusted to a friend that I was being sexually abused,

and that friend got mad at me and decided to spread it around the school.

So I was known in junior high

as the girl who fucked this person.

I think that I just wanted out.

I just wanted everything to be quiet.

[inaudible].

[Mary] They used to put people in some humiliating costumes.

Me and this girl would dress up as the Bobbsey Twins,

our hair was put up in pig tails.

We were very immature and we used to act up, and they wanted to humiliate us.

The costume would always suit the person who was put into it.

My subject was terrible with the math.

If you didn't do well in it, they'd make you wear this big dunce cap.

[man] If their behavior is deemed infantile,

they're made to wear diapers over their clothes, and to carry rattles.

I don't know how I was being a baby, but I guess I was.

I had the bonnet and the big rattle.

Denise Hubbard, she had syphilis,

and they made her wear tampons in her hair.

I thought that was downright disgusting.

[man] Why would they do that?

Because she has syphilis. That was their way of treating her.

Take my buddy Kevin Hicks for instance.

Rolling.

He pulled a couple stunts, and they put a costume on him.

[Kevin] Oh I was out of control.

And so, I was shot down, I was in Parsonsfield

and we had a morning meeting,

and I said I think that we should get a house dog.

Elan III has a beautiful golden retriever,

and wouldn't it be nice if we could get a dog for the house.

Next thing I knew, I was getting a general meeting

for suggesting that we should have a house dog,

and it was determined that I should be the house dog.

And I was not allowed to speak.

I was only allowed to bark once for yes, bark twice for no.

I had to walk around on fours, for my dinner I was given a dog dish,

plus I had to do tricks.

They would teach me tricks and I would have to do these tricks on command.

Jennifer was mummified, they wrapped this white bandage tape

all round her head,

leaving an opening for her nose so she could breathe.

And then a leash was put around her neck so that she couldn't run off on her PO,

personal overseer.

I drew a picture of that, among a lot of other pictures.

[Mary] It was tough being there as a kid.

My best memories it seems were when I was acting up with somebody else.

Just being silly, goofing on the program or making silly wise cracks,

running around the room.

To my mind, it was merely playing,

but to the directors it was anarchy,

and we had to be dealt with swiftly and forcefully.

[interviewer] Joe, you make no bones about it.

There is corporal punishment here at Elan. Tell us about it.

What are the stages it comes in, who's it administered by?

Well, it's administered by the kids first of all.

Corporal, it's a harsh term.

[man] Do you remember Kim Freehill?

[Liz] Kim was from a wealthy family in Long Island.

After she had only been there a month,

she had lice, and I think that episode really hit her hard.

All the females, we had to wash all our clothes,

put the pillows in plastic bags, and everybody had to get Kwelled again,

and I'm sure it was mortifying for her.

And after that she just started kind of unraveling.

So then they gave her a GM

because she was starting to act a little nuts.

Like mental patient issues,

and during that GM she just let go and peed on the floor.

So they took her and threw her in a cold shower with all her clothes on,

and then brought her back dripping wet

to stand in front of the house again.

But she wasn't cooperating

because she was in the middle of a nervous breakdown.

So they spanked her.

It's one resident spanking another resident, and it's done with a ping-pong paddle.

[woman] For the first two years that I was there, they would spank with a clipboard.

Clipboards, hands,

anything here.

Usually a person won't get spanked more than once or twice.

Usually when they use a paddle

they may have four or five people spank a person

like three to five times each.

[woman] They'd have the students lined up, five or six of them,

and they would each have to take a turn at paddling the wrongdoer.

[Liz] So she was being spanked

repeatedly in wet pants.

When they spanked me they didn't have to spank me so I turned black and blue, simple as that.

And that was just one time after another. I was so sore I couldn't sit down.

[Liz] Kim had scabs

that had to be three quarters of an inch thick on her rear

from being paddled.

[Mary] Oh yes, it was painful.

I had to learn fast to hold back my tears,

because I thought, I'm not going to give them that.

I won't look weak in front of them. Better to look angry.

I would cop an attitude instead, even if that got me in more trouble,

it was better than giving them my tears.

They thought I needed it because I supposedly was a terribly big baby.

If you're going to act like a baby, you should be treated like a baby.

So after hours and hours of this GM, which was horrific,

horrific GM, she was just gone.

Just catatonic.

[Maia] There's no federal regulation on these places,

and the state regulations are very weak.

Nail salons are more regulated than guys

who come and kidnap your kid at 2:00 in the morning.

[woman] The treatment we saw called for isolation.

[Maia] And that they're more regulated than facilities

that lock up kids and are allowed to physically punish them.

[reporter] They couldn't talk to each other.

[Maia] We have had a completely dysfunctional congress for a long time now,

and there has been regulation that has passed the house twice,

but has never really gone anywhere.

So the chances of getting regulation

through this congress are pretty low.

[singing together]

[Doug] I tried to kill myself there.

My biggest punishment was they put me in a corner.

See, I love to talk, I really don't have a problem talking, so I had to sit in the corner.

Everybody's doing whatever they got to do all around me.

This is in Waterford, and I'll never forget,

because I got the scar right here on my finger.

I had a piece of chicken and I made an X on my finger.

I was trying to kill myself.

I was in the corner only a few times.

Each stay was between three to five days,

which I understand is not an extremely long time.

[Jeff] It's exactly what it sounds like.

Like when you're a child and mom or dad says, "Go stand in the corner."

You go stand in the corner, face against the wall.

And you stand, and you stand, and you stand until you cannot stand.

And then you sit.

But it was worse than that for sure.

It's not just like facing... it's not like five-minute fucking like turnaround.

You were fucking in there forever.

You talked about Donovan earlier,

dude they shut him away for I think like four months straight one time.

I've seen people that had been in the corner for six months.

Oh my God, I literally would stare at a spot on the wall

until it would just fuzz out on you.

[Doug] You could count the holes in the wall,

the nooks and cranny, the dots on the curtain.

[Jeff] You were eating standing there, you were sleeping in the corner.

They would bring a mattress, you would sleep right there.

[Tracy] And as soon as the sun came out, you'd go back and face the corner.

[Jeff] You're going to do that for week, after week, after week

until you've been good for days, and then they decide they want to let you out.

Yo, I'd rather take an ass whooping than sit there.

That is just my opinion because I mean, wow, that's torture.

[Tracy] And then the poor person that had to sit there and watch you was another kid,

which was like your support person.

And that was the only person you were allowed to talk to.

[Mary] I had this imaginary friend when I was in the corner too, her name was Emily.

She was a colonial girl a few years younger than me.

But even her presence didn't help

when people were allowed to come up and swear at me.

They were given open swearing privileges directed at Mary O'Brien.

Anybody who wanted could come up to me while I was in the corner and cuss me out.

Tell me how ugly, stupid and fat I was, and how I was a loser,

how I made them sick.

It was so humiliating that I used to make her go away while they were doing that,

because I didn't want her to hear me being called all those names.

Duck in a Raincoat is full of scandal.

News Center's Sharon Randall tells us about it.

[woman] The book begins in Port Chester, New York, where Ricci grew up,

and takes the reader down the sometimes bumpy road of Ricci's life.

The opening of Elan, his lucrative drug treatment center.

The mysterious fire that destroyed the clubhouse at Scarborough Downs,

a failed run for the 1986 Democratic nomination for governor,

and of course the famous lawsuit against KeyBank.

[Daniel] When you first meet Joe and you're a street kid like me,

and let's make no mistake, I grew up on the street.

I hung out in Providence, and I hung out in Cranston, and it was...

Anyway, there were a lot of Italians yadda yadda yadda.

So Joe, there's no mistaking who he is and what he is.

He was cool, he was confident.

[Daniel] He always had a lot of money.

-[Peter] He had a Rolls Royce. -[Daniel] He was eccentric.

-[Peter] He had a mink coat. -[Daniel] He was extremely grandiose.

If he walked in the room you'd want to stand up to greet him.

-[Peter] He was the man. -He ruled everything.

And so he was Italian.

[woman] KeyBank had cut off Ricci's line of credit

because of rumors he had ties to organized crime.

Ricci sued, and a federal jury awarded him 15 million dollars.

Well, in my simplicity,

I looked up to that.

Joe was my idol. I wanted to be like Joe.

[Daniel] And he bought into me,

and I bought into him, like he did with a lot of other people.

Kind of took me under his wing, buys you a lot of stuff.

He bought me all my clothes, he bought me my first car.

For Christ's sake, he owned the house I lived in.

So I was bought and paid for pretty much.

[woman] He got his major judgment based on the fact that his civil rights were violated.

Yet throughout the book there are accounts of many times

that other people's civil rights were violated

by his treatments center for troubled adolescents.

[reporter] And that's part of the story that Curley contends the media missed.

You'd want to please him, basically for your own survival.

-[Peter] He was mean. -He was paranoid.

[Mary] He'd make you feel like dirt.

[Daniel] He was very concerned about his own image,

and his importance.

If you threatened his power,

he could be quite unfair with the retaliation.

If he wants to act like a criminal, he'll be treated like a criminal.

It's that basic.

I had no really dealings of him, then a few times he ran the general meetings.

And when he ran the general meeting, they stomped the shit out of you.

You got the worst of the worst.

[reporter] Duck in a Raincoat is packed with personal accounts

of brutality and intimidation at Elan,

Ricci's drug treatment center for young people in Poland Spring.

But in 1971, state investigation found no evidence to support such claims.

[interviewer] If Joe is so bad and so dirty,

why hasn't anybody been able to make anything stick to him?

Because he's very good at what he does.

[reporter] What he does according to Curley is cover his tracks and dupe the media.

He has money, which certainly makes people credible in the United States of America,

but how he made that money,

is some of the things that are questioned in this book.

[Maia] It sounds like the founder of Elan was a sociopath,

and there's evidence that sociopaths rise in these places very easily.

There was a study done of using the Synanon kind of method on sociopaths,

and they found that it made them worse

because basically it told them that hurting people,

which they enjoy doing, is good.

So it basically trained people to be better sociopaths,

which is kind of scary when you think about the kids that are sent to these places.

And Elan was definitely among the worst that I have heard of.

I think the difference is the level of violence.

Elan explicitly used the ring.

We have the ring, which everybody misinterprets.

It's not a boxing ring, it's a ring of human people.

[Peter] Elan's boxing ring was used as a last resort therapeutic tool.

I once heard a staff member refer to it as an exercise in futility.

Pretty much to prove that violence will get you nowhere.

The ring was used for bullies.

If you went in the ring, it's because you physically threatened somebody.

Any kind of violent action resulted in the ring.

It occurs within a general meeting.

They have, let's say 10 students,

15 students form a circle.

You would literally form a human circle around someone.

And the bully is introduced as what he is.

In this corner is the bully

who's trying to turn this facility into a detention center.

I got put in the boxing ring a number of times.

I was in the ring for the good, fighting the perpetrator.

[Joseph] And in this corner is the house champion

who's going to show him why it can't be done.

They would put you in the boxing ring with somebody who was sure to kick your ass.

You're supposed to be fighting for the house.

Truth, justice, the Elan way.

You put a pair of gloves on, and the other person put a pair of gloves on.

The director goes ding.

[Doug] And may the best man win.

And you never won.

[Joseph] We never allowed the bully to win.

[man] You might win one or two rounds.

No, I didn't even try. I just went down like this.

You might beat this person, you might beat that person,

but they keep coming, they keep coming.

They keep sending a fresh person.

And when that person got tired, they would send somebody else in.

You were boxing with six, seven fresh people.

[Mary] So if you actually fought, you'd really get beat up.

It was sort of you could say a kill situation.

Violence is ultimately futile in the real world.

Even if you do win a fight, there's always someone bigger than you.

There's always a cop there to arrest you for assault.

No good is really going to come of being violent.

[Julie] I'd always heard before I'd seen one

that the only people who get rings are those who actually are violent and lash out at others.

But I saw people get rings

who did nothing other than sit in the corner and refuse to respond.

And they used the ring almost as if to try to shock them into responding,

to wake them up.

[Liz] I was an expediter,

and I was stationed at the kitchen door POing the shot downs

who were washing dishes and scrubbing the floor.

And one resident put on his coat to take the garbage out,

and I forgot he went out there and shut the door behind him, and he ran away.

So I was shot down for that.

And for me, I felt terribly guilty

because if I had been doing my job,

he wouldn't have run away and come back and be brutalized,

be brutalized.

-[man] Who is this? -[man] This is Michael Skakel.

[man] Do you want anyone at Elan to know you were related to the Kennedys?

Absolutely not.

They gave him a general meeting.

He was being confronted as to whether he murdered some girl,

and he kept saying, "No, no, no."

He was put in the ring, they broke his nose,

and he kept saying, "No, no, no,"

and then would get beat again until he submitted

and said he didn't know if he had done it or not.

[Daniel] Just to say this first.

So much stuff

that you could never imagine,

that you couldn't line it up in your brain,

happened so fast.

[man] Everybody was genuinely scared

of what the next 10 minutes would bring.

[man] You know from the electric sauce to the rings to the spanking to the GMs

where they're slamming you against the wall and then the haircuts.

[man] And you never knew who it was going to happen to. It could be you.

[Liz] And it was going to happen to you.

There was no way to prevent it.

You could be as good as possible,

and then they would deal with you for being a goody two shoes.

Just constant violence is the way I look back on it.

General fucking meeting!

You can't get no lower than watching a person, snot's coming out of their nose.

Stand right there!

People were yelled at right out in the open, right where they stood.

They're throwing up.

70% of my time I was being yelled at.

They pissed and shitted on themselves.

You were basically therapeutically killed.

-They're bleeding from the mouth. -It was a fucking nightmare.

[Doug] Then you take the person,

they throw all that stinking nasty ass electric sauce on them.

[woman] They put cigarette butts in it, leftover food.

[Daniel] God, I watched people going to the toilet one time

to pull out water from the toilet.

[Doug] They roll him around in there.

They would dump my food on me.

Pick the person up.

Thrown at me.

Slam them up against the wall.

Throw somebody against one wall.

[Jeff] And they would kick your ass.

[Mary] Run over and slam them against this wall.

Pshhht! Blood everywhere.

[Mary] All the while screaming at them.

And the only sound that you could hear was the person screaming for his life.

[screaming]

I mean, so fucking noisy.

It's insanity.

[Doug] Everybody runs up there.

[Jaela] Screaming, swear at you.

I'm 16 years old, I have to deal with fucking mental patients.

Breaking light bulbs and cutting themselves.

[Alec] Kids drinking fucking bleach to get fucked up so they can get out of here.

-Students can't escape here. -[Peter] They would break you down.

[Doug] Throw you back in that same shit all over again.

[Peter] You would sit in the corner. Stand in the corner.

Your clothes rip off.

[Peter] And they'll have general meetings where you'll get spit on every day.

Slam you against the wall.

Now if that is robbing him of his dignity.

-[Peter] And that's all you would do. -And robbing him of his freedom.

-[Peter] And repeated a couple of times. -Then yes I'm guilty of it.

-You give. -I'm going to hurt anybody you want me to.

-[talking at the same time] -You stop.

[screaming]

[interviewer] You still think it's worth it?

There was some real life bullshit and turmoil.

There's no way that, that can get sugarcoated at all.

It wasn't every day.

It was like three quarters of the fucking existence,

there was outrageousness

and 15-year-olds should not be hog-tying and zip-tying 17-year-old kids.

Anybody could know that.

Dominic should not have had to break two people's arms

to get attention, you know what I mean?

Like throwing chairs into walls and shit.

And if you are a normal person with enough self-control,

I remember one thing I always did.

I was like, "I will not act out, I will not do that,

because as bad as this sucks, and as bad as it is whatever."

I was like, "These kids are just doing their fucking job

because they want to get out of here."

[Todd] When I was making this film, a lot of people asked me did Elan help me?

And I don't really have an answer to that question.

Maybe it did, I don't know.

Maybe that's why I'm sitting in front of this camera.

What I do know though is that amongst all the day-to-day chaos,

and the day-to-day grind,

there were some truly caring people there that really just wanted to see the best for us.

[woman] I thought you were a shy kid,

and I thought that you are willing...

you expect the world to change around you.

And you really didn't like anything.

You weren't into anything, you just sat.

And you really didn't like yourself,

and I think that you were so lonely

that you probably would have committed suicide if you didn't get some help.

I was lonely, I was depressed.

I was drinking a bottle of cough syrup probably every day to get high.

I didn't really want to be in reality,

because reality was that my parents were getting divorced.

College was on its way, life was changing a lot

and I didn't really want to deal with all that.

I didn't grow up in a situation where my parents put responsibility on me.

And in a way Elan taught me a lot of the things I didn't let my parents teach me.

Self-discipline, honesty, integrity,

getting in touch with your feelings.

I always just blocked them out.

But I thought that you're nice, and I thought that, "We'll figure something out.

We'll find something that he enjoys, and we'll build on that."

What'd you think of me?

I thought she was kidding when she said her name was Missy E,

I thought she was making a joke about Missy Elliott, but she was really funny.

I thought I would like her, and I did.

What did George Bush get on his SATs? Drool.

I was honest and funny, and I was straightforward. I call it like I see it.

[Missy] Where are you going, Ben?

[man] The bathroom's always a mess, [inaudible]. All right?

[Missy] Did you hear me ask you a question, Ben?

-Huh? -[Missy] Did you hear me ask you a question?

Yeah. I said [inaudible].

[Missy] What'd you ask me?

Do you have to use the bathroom, is that what you said?

Then find a seat.

Why don't you grab your [inaudible]?

I'm not really afraid. That's why I'm doing this interview.

I really am not afraid.

I do care, that's why I stayed there for 20 years.

I was invested, and I would bring it,

and I would bring individual attention.

I paid attention. My technique is if you talked to me, then I listened.

If you bother to write something, I read it.

And then if I found something that we had in common,

I would sit there and bring it up so we could relate.

And then maybe develop some trust at some point.

Whether it would be you tell me one of your biggest secrets

that you never want to tell anybody.

[man] Were you ever able to confront your dad about what he did?

[Gillian] At the end when they realized that my mom had caught on,

that I'd already graduated high school,

and that I wasn't supposed to be there anymore, she was going to pull me out.

And that's when I was like, listen, this is going to be my last chance to speak to him

with people here to help me out if this doesn't go well.

And so they gave me the phone call and Missy came with me.

I called him, he's from Chile, and I called him there.

I just asked him why.

I just asked him why he lied about me

because he told my mother that I was a drug addict and I was a liar,

and that I was just making things up.

He was just like, "Why would you say that about me?

You know how much I love you. Why would I R-A-P-E-D you?"

He wouldn't say it out loud, he would just spell it out, it was very strange.

And he just pretended to be innocent like he always did.

At that point I just realized, I was like,

"Listen, have a good life." And I just hung up, and I've never spoken to him or seen him since.

[man] How does that feel?

Great. That I was able to walk out of there not bawling my eyes out like he had hurt me.

It was over and I felt better about it.

[Missy] I enjoyed some of the stuff there that went on.

As far as rings and general meetings, they were never fun, you know what I'm saying?

But I think putting things in labels like wrong, right, good and bad is unfair.

Yeah, the ring was wrong, but I was always out [inaudible] a group.

Some of the people, all those people [inaudible] for how horrible,

they got to release a lot of pain too in those rooms,

with a trusted group dealing with really private issues.

That's something many kids never got to do,

and many people will never get to do.

And so I think that some of it was so brilliant it was ridiculous.

My first director didn't believe in the ring, spanking, costumed.

His thing was if it got to a point,

he brought you up to his office, he sat you down.

You could talk for an hour,

or you could go into his office at seven o'clock at night,

not get out of there until seven o'clock in the morning.

[man] So he talked to you.

Oh, Mr. Friedman talked to you, but you wanted to listen.

About two weeks before I left

I was in a special group with my sister who was in Elan VII,

and my sister told me that she thought I'd be successful in the outside world.

And I said, "Well, successful how?

Go through a hard time maybe smoke some pot and come out of it?"

And I got asked by Kate Hawkins, the social worker there, "Is that an option?"

And I didn't say anything.

So clearly it was an option for me to go out there and smoke a little pot and come out of it.

And she said to me, "Pete, you better not pick up a joint out there.

Some people can handle it, you can't.

I'd like to also remind you that alcoholism is a progressive disease,

you pick up where you left off."

Now, I hadn't heard that since AA meetings about three years earlier.

So when I heard that it just brought me back, and I was like,

"Okay, that option's off the table."

And I've been sober since the day I left.

God willing all of 21 years in October.

A diploma in recognition of the growth that she's achieved--

[Todd] There's no doubt that Elan had a role

in changing a lot of people's lives for the better.

It would be unfair for me to say it didn't.

But in the end, when you look at the bigger picture,

the damage that Elan caused far outweighs the good.

[man] Elan claims its graduates are now leading happy productive lives.

That they're staying in school, going to college and working.

The drug use is way down, and criminal involvement cut by more than half.

It claims that two thirds of all its former residents are now leading productive lives.

That figure has not been scientifically verified.

But parents of some former residents dispute these claims.

When Rhode Island parents complained, the state investigated,

and found that of a 117 former Elan residents from that state,

70 had been arrested,

and that one is serving a life sentence for murder in South Carolina.

[Maia] There is absolutely no evidence that this does anything other

than produce post-traumatic stress disorder, depression

and in some cases a brief period of compliance.

A lot of people will tell you it worked for me.

I can't say that 12-step program saved my life

because that's what happened to help when I ended up getting into recovery.

I mean I can say that, but the reality is that I don't know that.

That's an anecdote.

And even if it's my anecdote and I believe it very strongly, it's still an anecdote.

And if we're going to say that addiction and mental illnesses are diseases,

then we have to have medical standards of evidence.

And by the medical standards of evidence,

there is no data that suggests that this helps people,

and there are lots of things suggesting that it does [inaudible] them.

[Alec] I got out right when my class was graduating.

So, it was like being a rock star for a month, because you're out,

you hit every grad party, and you got out of like...

People were like, "We thought you were dead, we thought you were in jail,

we thought you were whatever." Like this incredible high for a month-and-a-half

and then it's just like boom.

Because then you've got to start to figure out how to do things like an adult,

or what the real world is, and everything like that.

And then you get up there and I'm like, "Oh fuck, dude,

I don't have a clue what the fuck I'm doing."

I didn't know what I was doing with anything.

I started going to school, I didn't know a God damn thing.

I didn't know a God damn thing.

I didn't know how to fucking sit in a real class, real homework,

real work, real everything. I don't have a fucking clue dude, I didn't care.

Started seeing one of my best friends when I came home from childhood,

he was all fucked up when I got back.

He was down with oxys, and I remember I never understood it

because I never did anything other than really drink or smoke,

so I didn't understand what shit was. And he was just like--

[man] Why don't you try it?

Did that and then I've been on like an off and on like...

Five years, I've been on an off and on five-year drug bender.

I'm at rock right now.

I'm at rock.

You got me at a great time.

I went basically from Elan to college,

which was totally fucked up for me because I had no social skills.

The education was minimal,

and basically when I went to school all I wanted to do

was do everything that I wasn't allowed to do at Elan.

I partied, I sold drugs, I did drugs and went to concerts.

And I did everything that I felt I lost out on when I was a teenager,

I made up for like tenfold when I left Elan.

And then I got into heroin and I loved it.

I ended up doing it for like 20 years.

It was like the love affair, just started,

and it was like an every day, every time I could get it thing.

And then that started me off stripping because I realized how easy the money was.

So that's what I did for 10 years probably.

And I felt guilty about things I was doing,

but the fact that I felt guilty about it didn't stop me from doing them.

It just made me more miserable.

It just made me want to get high more,

and made me want to do whatever I could do to get away

from the way that I was made to feel about myself while I was there.

Because I was really made to feel like I was

the biggest piece of shit on the face of the Earth,

and I was always just going to be good for nothing.

And that was really what Elan instilled about me to myself.

[Peter] I was into some very dangerous stuff,

and there's a distinct possibility that if I didn't go to Elan I could have died.

There's also the possibility that I could have straightened myself out, I don't know.

But the way that Elan

had taught me how to live my life

worked.

I didn't act off my feelings, I didn't get my feelings get to me.

I went to college, I met my wife, I had a family.

But all of a sudden, I got to be about 33 years old,

which was maybe 15 years after I had left Elan,

and all of a sudden I found myself I couldn't deal with anything.

Something had changed inside me

that my feelings totally overtook me.

I had missed my childhood,

and that bothered me because I knew I could never get it back.

By the time I was 36 I was

shooting 25 bags a day of heroin.

[Liz] I think Elan really fucked up my life.

I hear the negative screaming at me in my head frequently,

and especially when I'm down or I'm feeling insecure about...

instead of giving myself a pep talk, those voices come in my head.

I can't say what would have happened had I not gone there,

and maybe I have a little bit of mental illness besides.

I think that's why most people end up there.

They're acting out in some way, but it really fucked me up.

[Maia] One of the reasons that Elan

and these emotional growth boarding school kind of places

caught on with parents is a lot of parents wanted to avoid psychiatric labels,

and wanted to avoid medications.

And so, they kind of figured,

if I send my kid to a place for bad kids,

it's better than sending them to a place for sick kids.

And they didn't realize how weird that actually is.

These places sort of show that there's still an enormous stigma

on mental illness and addiction,

and we see teenagers

as diseased just for being teenagers.

[Mary] After Elan I was sent to Perkins School for the Blind,

which to me felt exactly like leaving hell and going up to heaven.

I have a condition known as coloboma .

My retinas and my irises didn't form all the way at birth,

so I'm at the line between legally blind and visually impaired.

Not only was the campus so beautiful like I'd never seen before,

but the attitude there among people was so much different.

People were more patient and understanding,

you didn't have people screaming at each other.

See, I was already messed up when I went to Elan, so Elan messed me up further.

I felt bad enough about myself as it was,

but they made me feel even worse about myself.

I left there feeling like this big.

I've been in counseling for years.

I go to the Providence Mental Health Center.

I still draw pictures of people that I like, and I make dolls of them.

I was born with a vivid imagination.

It does help me.

They were trying to take away my fantasy world

and everything connected with it,

but they didn't have anything better to offer me, so why would I have given it up?

When I left Elan, I did not leave on good terms.

My parents would not allow me to come home because I didn't graduate,

and I was hitchhiking around, went to some Dead shows,

but I was homeless for a couple years.

Actually just recently I had access to my psychiatrist's recommendation

to send me to Elan,

and the recommendation specifically stated

that I needed a warm psychotherapeutic environment that was structured,

and that anything outside of those would probably lead to me killing myself.

I didn't have a great life,

I was sexually abused, I was physically abused.

I actually was recently diagnosed with PTSD.

I suffer from severe anxiety, I have night terrors,

and most of the time

I'm dreaming about Elan.

My husband wakes me up a lot saying that I was screaming,

and I truly think that if it wasn't for my husband's patience

and love and understanding

that I really think that doctor's report probably would be true.

I probably would have killed myself by now.

[Jaela] I'm intelligent enough

and I've seen enough in the world to know that once you go to a needle,

the only thing after that is death.

So I'm sitting there and I've got my bags lined up, and I'm ready to do my ritual.

Because it's very ritualistic to prepare your stuff and get everything set up.

The process is almost part of the whole addiction,

but I'm thinking to myself

kid, you know better than this.

I threw away so many opportunities,

a college education, a chance to start over.

I didn't know how to handle being social in a normal functional way,

because all I knew about being social was what I'd learned through Elan.

So I struggle, my cousin takes care of me

because I can't even go to the grocery store

without worrying about being caught in a loud place

or in a situation that I'm around a lot of people.

My first instinct is to shrink down.

I never had panic, I never had anxiety before Elan.

I didn't understand what a panic attack was until I got there,

and now I still have them 20 years later.

But I know for a fact

when I'm down shooting up the syringe full of brown shit

that I'm going to feel real nice.

[Dave] When I escaped Elan, I did it third time successful.

They let me out into the house, they made me go scrub a dumpster,

and I popped out of the dumpster and ran like hell.

So I went into the woods where I met a guy named Sticks,

who was an old shell-shocked Vietnam veteran.

And he lived out in the woods, and everything he made was built out of sticks and stones.

I guess that's how he got his name Sticks.

Anyway, he taught me the art of living outside.

So I got pretty good at it, and for a little over a year-and-a-half, two years,

something like that, I never came out of the woods.

I just lived in the woods all that time.

And I guess it turned out to be a good thing because all that,

I ended up really learning the art of survival.

And now that's what I do up north is I teach wilderness survival.

So to me it was quite the learning experience,

and I've learned many things since then

because I've just constantly been on the run.

Elan being the last place I ran from.

[Jeff] One of the times I was on the run, we stole this kid's mother's car.

When I came back the sheriff's in the house saying,

"You're fucking leaving, and there you go straight to jail."

And ended up being sentenced to two years, which sucked,

but I learned my lesson that I wasn't doing that again.

Because as a juvenile I did all kinds of stupid retarded ridiculous shit.

Once they put me in jail I realized that I liked to go to the refrigerator

and get a coke when I want.

I liked pussy, there was no pussy in jail,

and then nobody's chasing me anymore.

Now I'm 18, nobody's trying to tell me what to do.

So once people stopped trying to tell me what to do, I didn't have anywhere to go,

it was on me.

So once they stopped chasing, I didn't have to run anymore.

I was there to be punished, I was there to do five years.

When my five years was up I was gone.

Elan didn't hurt me with words and things like that.

Those have no bearing on my life,

because as far as I was concerned I had no home.

I was already being abused, I was already in the street.

You wasn't hurting me because I couldn't make a phone call,

I had nobody to call.

It didn't hurt me because Christmas I didn't get no present.

I had nobody to give me a present anyway.

I had no one to say Merry Christmas to anyways.

So it didn't hurt me along those lines, it caught me other ways.

It caught me because I got no education.

I didn't learn anything along those lines.

It didn't prepare me for the day when I turned 18

and they sent me to music schoolup in New York.

I was in a school, I couldn't read the books.

What was I going to do?

I started drinking, I got arrested a couple times.

They sent me to [inaudible],

but the next thing you know I started committing assault, I started robbing people.

You do what you have to do to make it.

My stomach growled, I see somebody walk down the street,

you do what you've got to do, that's dinner.

It's nothing to be proud of or anything like that,

a grown ass man has to rob somebody just to eat.

But that's what I did.

[Missy] I'm glad I worked at Elan.

I'm glad I met you all.

It's like you were my children, but I'm not happy with...

I'm sad that other people didn't get

what everybody else could have gotten and whatever else.

And I'm sad if they felt like they were abused or whatever else, for them.

But I'm still going to go to sleep tonight.

[Maia] I can't remember exactly how I found out about Elan.

I probably read an article about the Michael Skakel case.

[man] Throughout the '80s and '90s Elan had gone through many changes.

Due to ongoing pressure from social services

and modern age views on mental health treatment,

many of the humiliation tactics such as costumes and spankings were dropped.

By 2001, Elan no longer used the ring.

However, it really wasn't until the Michael Skakel trial

that Elan's violent past came back to haunt it.

[Maia] I got to do an op-ed for theNew York Times a few years ago,

and I called up the New York State Department of Education

and was horrified to discover that they were sending some learning disabled kids to Elan.

The state went in and did an investigation,

and that's when New York said, "We're not sending any more kids."

What was interesting about that was Maine

had been doing investigations for years and never finding anything.

New York in its first investigation found kids restraining other kids,

sleep deprivation, attack therapy, they found all kinds of bad stuff.

Why? Because Maine always announced when it was coming in advance,

and New York just went in.

And I think it's pathetic that the State of Main for decades

announced when it was going to investigate a place that was known to be abusing children.

[man] However, in the end there was a greater force

that brought about the end of Elan's 40-year reign.

[Peter] Elan wasn't closed because of laws

or because it broke any specific state regulation

or violated any codes.

They were closed because they were hit in the wallet.

The internet closed Elan down.

[man] In the beginning I was like I'll just be me,

but people started coming out of nowhere

and sending me death threats.

These people may just have a vendetta against,

"Oh, that's the guy who closed it? That's the guy who made us go bankrupt?"

So when I started my crusade against Elan,

it was maybe 10 years after I got out, and I just thought,

"I'll just make a blog about it."

But at the time that really wasn't enough.

I went on this website my friend showed me.

He said, "Check out this website, it's called Reddit."

And I made a post, and I already had a long bullet point list.

I was very excited, I hit submit, and let me tell you it went totally viral.

It had 5000 upvotes, it was on front page.

It had thousands of comments.

Maybe 10-15,000 comments.

I can also remember very vividly the first comments, and it was some guy who wrote,

"You know, I didn't believe this when I first read it,

but then I went on Google and I typed in the Elan School,

and I can't believe what I'm reading." That was it.

Once this Reddit community got a hold of it,

which is like hundreds of thousands of people, it just spread like a virus.

It went all over the internet.

We had all said to each other on many, many occasions as residents in the house.

If we could all get together and make somebody listen to us.

But we didn't have social networking,

we didn't have emails,

we didn't have the internet, we didn't have all these things.

[Liz] But now with the internet

and parents who are considering sending their kids there,

they're going online and googling Elan

and seeing all these former residents who have nothing good to say about it,

or most of them don't have anything good to say about the place.

And that was it. That was it for Elan, and a lot of other alumni helped me.

[Jaela] People insisted on being heard,

and people wanted their story told, and people wanted a sense of justice.

So in effect we shut them down.

But again, I wish I had happened years sooner.

[man] So looking back, would you have left Elan when you had the chance?

Oh yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, I would have.

Yeah, with what I know now, yeah I would have ran as far as I could.

[Peter] The people who have been to Elan have been through a very personal war.

They by and large are truly some of the boldest individuals you will ever meet.

Going through hell and getting spat back out will definitely teach you some shit.

The way I look at it anything that doesn't fucking kill you makes you stronger.

You know, as the name you have now, The Last Stop,

minus jail, it really kind of was the last stop for me.

I mean, they wanted to force change.

Sometimes change isn't easy.

And to this day

I believe Elan was the best and worst thing that happened to me.

[Mary] This is a book that I published.

It did help me a lot writing about all of the things that happened,

getting it off my chest, and I designed the picture for the front cover.

It's like an institutional setting with me sitting there daydreaming

about a man who I wish was my father.

That was the way I sometimes was amid the chaos.

Sitting there with the sketchbook and the crayons.

And then on other occasions I was a part of the chaos.

I grew up, I wanted to be a thug,

I wanted to be a gangster because that's all I knew.

But then I might watch TV, I watched the Hallmark channel, want to cry.

Be like, "Wow, this is the perfect family.

What the fuck happened to me? I wish I had that."

But it's not going to happen.

I've definitely spoken to my family about Elan.

On a smaller scale though with my family

because a lot of them wouldn't understand exactly why I got sent there to begin with.

They don't know about my father and the stuff that he had done to me,

so they wouldn't really get why it all happened.

But with my friends I feel very open about talking about everything with Elan,

because we have something to talk about,

we can all relate on such specific things.

It's fun and it's funny, but I would say the relationship that I formed with Jessica,

I would say the same as some of the best friends I've had since childhood.

[Dave] I still think about Elan.

I think about the friends I had there, if they're still around or not.

I know most of them ain't.

It kills me because I know that there's other kids.

I just know there's other kids that left out of there and felt the same way I did,

and they didn't get a chance to find out what I know now.

I don't know why I was spared, I don't know why I'm still alive today.

By all means, I should not even be sitting here.

I just know so many kids killed themselves

and died of overdoses.

And I don't care, we have problems, but we were kids,

you know what I mean? And they took everything.

They took everything away from you.

The people at Elan VI, I would like to say I'm sorry

if I hurt them.

I was doing what I was told.

I was doing what I felt I had to do to get out of there.

It was not a personal thing against them.

If I hurt somebody, I'm sorry,

and I hope that they can find it in their heart to forgive me.

[Maia] Well, I'm hoping that there will not be any more troubled teen industry.

There's always been this sort of thread since Sparta

where we can make tough people by putting them through tough things.

But that doesn't mean that we should traumatize people.

[Missy] I think that everybody wants to be heard, especially teenagers,

but they also need to hear.

[man] Anything else you'd like to say?

That's probably all I'd have to say about that.