Carlie Sherman shoved her hand into the cow’s birthing canal, reaching for something she had not been quite taught to find. She was three months into treatment at Trinity Teen Solutions, sent to that residential program in Wyoming by her Illinois parents for being a defiant teenager. She pulled the newborn out of its mother and placed the calf on a pre-laid bundle of hay. This, she was told, was part of her therapy.
A November 2020 federal class-action lawsuit, with Sherman among the plaintiffs, lists delivering calves among other Trinity requirements that, since last year, have been under investigation by federal agencies broadly probing teen facilities whose regimens critics argue are damaging and scientifically unproven to change adolescent behavior.
The Trinity plaintiffs also said they were required, as then 13- to 17-year-old girls, to dig irrigation ditches; fix fencing posts and barbed wire on that property and nearby ranches; clean feeders, corrals, troughs and animal barns; groom cows, sheep, pigs, horses, goats, chickens, dogs and cats; split firewood and build fires; cook all meals; and, nightly, wash the feet of that facility’s staff and its clients.
“You can never trust that you’re OK,” said Sherman, now 23, of her 14 months at Trinity. “It was solitary confinement but you were around other people.”
Via email to the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange, Angie Woodward, Trinity’s owner and director, wrote that she never witnessed any abuse or questionable tactics against teens in Trinity’s charge: “I have seen our program change lives. We are a family business that has and continues to prioritize the health, safety, and wellbeing of our residents.”
The court has denied two motions for dismissal, filed on Woodward's behalf, and that class-action suit is slated for trial in 2023.
Meanwhile, separate investigations by the federal Government Accountability Office and Department of Health and Human Services' inspector general that were launched in 2021 are the first inquiries of their kind in more than a dozen years. Those probes target farms, boot camps and similar residential programs whose proprietors claim are therapeutic. Critics call many of those business owners profiteers, operating under the guise of treating teens with mental and/or behavioral disorders and those at-risk for involvement in the juvenile justice system.
“This is a multibillion dollar industry that doesn’t only impact the so-called troubled teens, but our public school system, our foster care system, our churches, through referral and placement in these therapeutic communities,” said Jodi Hobbs, president of Survivors of Institutional Abuse, which has been lobbying since 2010 for stricter laws governing those programs. “Through the years, we have seen — without federal oversight — there's a high potential for abuse."
Nevertheless, directors and supporters of those programs, including some parents, are pushing back against a growing number of federal lawmakers and state legislators seeking heightened oversight of places like Trinity that, with parental consent, sometimes transport across state lines youth who are whisked away involuntarily.
Disability rights group cited abuses in 18 states
In a report released last October, the National Disability Rights Network cited sexual, emotional and physical abuse, including used of restraints and seclusion, at residential programs in 18 states.
For at least the last 30 years, several iterations of those programs have operated nationwide. Many have employed what some researchers suggest are questionable, sometimes risky techniques. In a high-profile tragedy last May at a Michigan residential facility for kids ordered there by their parents or foster-care workers, 16-year-old Cornelius Fredericks died of cardiac arrest after begin restrained. The three staff members who subdued him for throwing a sandwich in a dining hall have been charged with involuntary manslaughter in connection with that death. That facility, Lakeside Academy in Kalamazoo, is part of a network that researchers estimate handles 50,000 kids annually.
There have been other deaths, including ones noted in the GAO’s 2008 report, “Residential Programs: Selected Cases of Death, Abuse, and Deceptive Marketing.”
The lawsuit that Sherman and four other plaintiffs have filed against Trinity is one of the most recent against adolescent facilities whose treatment methods have yet to be subjected to a randomized controlled trial, the gold standard in scientific research.
Larger companies with programs similar to smaller, family-owned Trinity, that often receive state and federal funding also have come under greater scrutiny in recent years.
For example, in Alabama, one of the state’s examined by the National Disabiliy Rights Network, Sequel Youth & Family Services promotes itself as a behavioral health company, overseeing roughly 55 programs nationwide. In 2020, its reported revenues totaled about $154 million, according to public records. Of that amount, $68 million was from Alabama’s Department of Human Resources, which sent between 500 and 600 children to those programs, according to data the agency released to Alabama news reporters.
In a July 2020 letter to state officials, the Alabama Disabilities Advocacy Center alleged that “Sequel Owens Cross Roads, Sequel Courtland, Sequel Tuskegee, and Sequel Montgomery ... [were] violent and chaotic places where youth are physically and emotionally abused by staff and peers, subjected to wretched living conditions, provided inadequate supervision and medical care, and subjected to illegal seclusion and restraint, all in violation of their Fourteenth Amendment constitutional right to protection from harm, and of state and federal laws and regulations.”
Lawmakers from Utah, where there are more than 100 programs for troubled teens, have said that since the late 2000s, companies like Sequel, and the transportation, education consultancies and other industries supporting those firms, have grown substantially.
Among other inquires, the GAO is seeking data on maltreatment in residential facilities; exploring strategies to prevent and address maltreatment in federally funded facilities; and reviewing federal and state oversight of such facilities. The GAO has not yet published its findings on the residential programs. The watchdog organization was able only to interview former clients at the programs and not current residents, an issue it faced in a previous investigation into client care at adolescent treatment facilities.
“Since private programs do not have to respond to us or talk to us, we don’t have access,” Kathryn Larin, the director of the GAO’s education, workforce and income security team, told JJIE.
In Oregon, State Sen. Sara Gesler has introduced three bills aimed at regulating the physical subduing or restraining of children, and licensing for transportation companies and education consultants who critics argue feed a problem-riddled industry. “Whether or not this is a state or federal responsibility, it is unconscionable that we've left this industry unregulated,” Gessler said last June from the Oregon Statehouse floor.
Despite the developments in Oregon and Utah, individual states have had limited power to regulate the programs. Some legislators have bemoaned the lax federal oversight. And U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) has said he plans to reintroduce his 2017 bill proposing the Stop Child Abuse in Residential Programs for Teens Act, which never was voted out of a House of Representatives committee.
“While there are quality residential treatment programs that provide critical services and care for at-risk youth, without stronger federal regulation and oversight, programs that engage in abusive practices will continue to slip through the cracks,” he wrote JJIE in an email. “Each story is more gut-wrenching than the last, as children are abused both psychologically and physically by those charged with their care, leaving them with scars, both seen and unseen, for the rest of their lives.”
To buttress those legislative initiatives, former residents of treatment programs continue to share their stories through such social media campaigns as #troubledteenindustry and #iseeyousurvivor.
Sherman, the Trinity Teen Solutions critic and former resident, said she believes there now is enough attention on failed residential programs and the abuse experienced by those who’ve attended some of them.
“We’ve never had adults treat us like we deserved support,” she said.
Journalist Kenneth R. Rosen's book, "Troubled: The Failed Promise of America’s Behavioral Treatment Programs,” tracks four residential-facility enrollees.