Teen facilities: Young teen crouches in garden bed wearing heavy overcoat and garden gloves prepping soil.

Lawmakers, federal investigators target teen facilities billed as therapeutic but accused of abuse

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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.

Isolation, hogties, handcuffs and Velcro

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By Ken Watts

Their voices cracked with emotion as they recalled a devastating loss. Don and Tina King's 13-year old son Jonathan hanged himself after a teacher locked him in a windowless 8X8 closet called a "seclusion room." Jonathan was a student in the Alpine Program, a public school in Gainesville, Ga. for students with emotional and behavioral problems.  A few weeks before his death in 2004, Jonathan told his parents that teachers had put him in "time out." "After he died, we found out that Jonathan wasn't in there for minutes," Don King said.