All language subtitles for The Last Stop (2017).English

[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.