Part One: Elan School: The Worst 'Troubled Teen' Facility

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Uh, I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards, a
podcast that I just started with a tonal yelling. I guess, um,
oh boy, we are already behind the eight ball normally.

(00:23):
This I mean, this is a podcast where we talk
about bad people, the worst people in all of history,
and the bad things that they do. Um. One of
those bad people is me for not knowing how to
start my show, despite this being my only job to help.
I don't. I don't think that you were bad. Why
would you say you were bad? Thank you? Thank you?

(00:44):
But it's your job to keep me from spiraling into
into being unprofessional than you know. Who's great at being professional?
Is my guest today, Mr Miles W. Gray. Uh see

(01:04):
that's how you. That's the kind of a tonal shrieking
thank you for having me. You should use to start
a podcast. God damn it. Why can't I do it
that way you did? I mean, I merely just did
my own rendition of the the W and your name
stand for a winner? He hed W in my name Gray?

(01:28):
What where's W come from? Well? I'm just trying to
set you up for success in your future political career.
Oh wow, thank you so much. I mean, like, we know,
I'm not going to be well, I maybe I probably
eventually would it up as a politician, but first, you know,
I'm going to be a motivational speaker. We talked about
this university into Yeah, I will first create a fucking,

(01:48):
you know, gaggle of mindless stooges uh, and just turned
them into my political base. That's very appropriate, Miles, that
you're talking about creating a gaggle of my listooges kind
of a cult because we're talking about a cult today,
but we're also talking about a school. We're talking about
a cult that's a school, Miles. How do you feel

(02:10):
about kids? Man? Dude? Last time it was so fucking brutal? Okay, yeah,
how do I feel about I think kids are our
future and we need to nurture them and protect them
at all costs. Now, when you say nurture and protect,
does that mean bring them to operate an internal police

(02:31):
state based on violence and sexual assault in order to
control their own behavior and behavior of their peers. The
h we have fun, we do have fun. Um, We're
not going to have fun today. Today's a horrible episode.
Have you ever heard of the Alan School? No? How

(02:52):
do you spell it e l a in like the
French word, you know, alan. No, I feel like it's
maybe sounds familiar. Are there ones in l A at all? Good? God, No, No,
they're not any of these anywhere anymore. But existed. This
was the kind of school that could only exist in
the middle of nowhere Maine. And if you've ever been

(03:14):
to Maine, middle of nowhere, Maine is about as middle
of nowhere as you get, right. I've been up there
for hockey, m yeah, but the middle of nowhere. Yeah,
Like that's like for people that are trying to be like, dude,
get the funk away from me. Yeah, and people who
don't want too many prying eyes over the school that
they're running, because it's actually just a series of horrible crimes. Now, miles,

(03:36):
a series of horrible crimes. I think we can all agree.
Kids are can be problematic, right, you know, their little
brains are still developing. All kids are gonna do shitty,
harmful things to themselves and to other people because they're
just kind of learning how to be functional human beings.
Pretty normal process of growing up. You're gonna say things
that hurt your parents. You know, you're probably gonna punch
your little brother or sister. You're gonna do something shitty, right,

(03:58):
every kid does just hard of being a kid, um,
and it gets you know, kind of taken up a
level when you're a teenager. Right. Teens lash out, say
horrible things. They maybe get involved with substances that are
that are going to be bad form. They they you know, uh,
steal a car. Kids do dumb shit, right, Um, teenagers do.
And I think any reasonable person or organization that's trying

(04:20):
to like take care of teenagers in particular will acknowledge that, like,
they're going to make mistakes because their brains aren't finished.
And so even if those mistakes are pretty serious, right,
things that might normally land an adult in prison, if
it's a child, you have to approach them with an
added level of compassion and understanding because their their brains
aren't done yet. Now, I think reasonable people can admit

(04:42):
that some kids have behavioral issues that make them dangerous
to themselves and others. I've had to work with some
of those kids. Um, I've had colleagues who got their
bones broken from some of those kids. There's a necessity
for specialists and even special facilities to help kids that
have behavioral problems that make them a danger to be around. Right, Um,
that's just a thing that is going to occur, and

(05:02):
of course people in the country. Yeah. Now, unfortunately, Miles,
this is the United States of America. And when you
start with the firmace that yeah, okay, maybe sometimes we
need a special facility for troubled kids, you open the
door for a whole new industry. And because capitalism is
what it is, when you have an industry for taking
care of troubled kids, you also have an industry that
has affected financial interest in making sure as many children

(05:24):
as possible are placed in those facilities, whether they need
the help or not. So where things get off the
rails here. So when you attach the profit motive to
dealing with absolutely problem, Okay, now we need a side
business mislabeling these kids so we can turn them into customers. Yeah,
we're gonna start having to bribe some judges and bribe
some healthcare workers to force more kids into our Yeah. Um,

(05:47):
So the best way, if you're in the business of
running the facility for troubled kids, the best way to
improve your business is to convince parents, judges, the legal
system in the mental health system that a wide variety
behaviors um from talking back and smoking weed to getting
into fistfights at school justify incarceration and such facilities. Like
the kid I know who got sent to a facility

(06:10):
and it wasn't one of these facilities because he was
there was other stuff going on, but it was a
facility where he was in full time residential care. Uh.
He broke his his one of his parents arms. He
broke one of my colleagues jaws. He gave me a concussion.
Like it was like a the kid needed really dedicated help, right,
you can just eventually the school was like, we cannot

(06:30):
take care of this kid. It's not it's not it's
like he just farts at the wrong time class, Like no,
this is this is what we're talking something different. And
I want to make it clear when I talked about like, yeah,
I think there is a need for special facilities for
certain guts. That's the kind of kids. Like so you
know you're you're fucking stabbing people with like scissors or stuff.
I understanding, Yeah, And that has nothing to do with
the thing you're telling about this new business you were

(06:51):
opening that was like a facility for which I think
if I was going to tell you I could turn
in ten thousand dollar investment and do a hundred thousand
dollars of profit as long as you're able to get
two or three judges to just to just shutgun some
children my way. See my idea, Miles, is what helps
improve your character is an adult operating a rare earth

(07:15):
magnet mineral mind. So what if we take troubled children
and we forced them to mind in order to produce
the materials needed for our cell phones. The instri already
works off of slavery. This is slightly better than slavery.
I go, go on now, and how much do I
need to invest? Now? I just need to create some
compromat for these judges. Miles. Well, well, well, I'll send

(07:39):
you the prospectus later. But yeah, So the problem with
this is, right, there's a need for some facility like this,
but when it the profit motives gets attached to it,
you have these people who decide who like the there's
a vested interest in convincing parents and the legal system
that like, no, no, kids don't just need to be
put in special facilities if they're a danger to the

(08:01):
life and limb of other people. If they're smoking weed.
That's dangerous enough. You know. If they punched a kid
in school one time, that's bad enough. Let's get him
in the program. You know. That's that's how it happens
with all of these troubled team facilities. Now, at the
same time, if it's your business to treat kids in
this kind of a facility, the reality of capitalism means

(08:22):
that your priority is never, ever, not one single solitary
time as a business, at least to say that every
individual who works there field this way. But as a business,
your priority is never going to be rehabilitation, or education
or even basic health and safety. It will always be
maximizing profit. And one way to do that is to
hire people who will work for less money than such
a complicated job should rightly pay. And the people who

(08:44):
are willing to take that pay cut generally find other
than financial motives for the work, like the opportunity to
beat Moleste children. This is how the troubled team industry works, right,
This is what it's colloquially called troubled team facilities, the
troubled team industry, and these different facilities they run the
gamut from like wilderness facilities where you're dropping kids in
like the woods, basically ranch style offerings with like working

(09:08):
on a farm, military school style things, and institutions that
are harder to easily quantify, like the Allon School, which
we'll talk about in a minute now. When she was
a teen, Paris Hilton was sent to one such institution
called Provo Canyon, UM, which I think was more kind
of on the wilderness side of things, might have been
more of a ranch. But Provo Canyon is in Utah, UM,

(09:29):
and Utah, by the way, is like mecca for schools
that can legally abuse children. That's where most of these
facilities are. Utah makes a lot of money off of
systematically abusing children for profit UM, which is why the
legal system in Utah is set up to enable these schools.
So her Paris Hilton credits Provo Canyon, the school she

(09:50):
was sent to as a team for quote the most
vivid and traumatizing memories I've ever experienced in my entire life.
One particular memory helped fuel what has become a side
career for Paris Hilton and exposing the team treatment industry. Quote.
I continually experienced a nightmare where two men come into
my room in the middle of the night and kidnapped me.
It has caused me severe trauma, and I know it
is a tinpole of this industry that has caused millions

(10:12):
of survivors to suffer the same nightmares throughout their adult life. Now,
that experience that she had of people coming into her
house in the middle of the the night and kidnapping her, um,
that's really common. It happens to conservatively tens of thousands
of kids a year, some numbers of fifty all of
them get kidnapped, but a lot of them do. That's
the standard, right, Because you decide as a parent, I'm
going to send my kid to this horrible facility where

(10:34):
they'll be isolated and like abused until they stopped misbehaving. Well,
I don't want to like sit down and say, because
I caught you with weed, I'm sending you to the woods. Right,
So how do you avoid that awkward conversation you hire
men to abduct your child in the night, the night
because you're already such a good parent. I mean, I'm
guessing in the cases for kids whom, yeah, like for

(10:58):
the normal trouble teams that sort of people who actually
need it. Like you're saying a special care facility. But like,
let's say just a kid are smoking me. They're like,
that's it. We're having people disappear him in the middle
of the night because we as parents aren't willing to
have a conversation at all that will go through all
these lengths to just avoid any form of being an
adult in this situation. Like holy sh it. Yeah, it's

(11:20):
it's outrageous and horror and it's just horrific. Um. Yeah. So,
and there's there's companies that the service the company provides
is like they'll send a handful of psychopaths to kidnap
your child and like handcuff them or tied them up
and throw them in the back of a van and drive.
Like industry like, hey some kids dedicated guys. But yes,

(11:42):
there's companies that just snatch kids for profit then their parents.
It's it's very legal. You're like, as the parent, you
sign away permission for this. Um. So if they get
pulled over by the cops, they can say no, no, no no,
we're not abducting this we are abducting this child. But
the parents said, okay, oh no, here's the permission slip,
here's my bad, I'm a licensed child snatcher. No, I'm

(12:04):
a professional child abductor officer, like, and that's terrible bar
chat too when you meet somebody like children in the dead.
There's actually a kid tied up in the back of
my van right now, so the front seat though, Oh
that's okay, I was, I just need to take your order. Uh. So,

(12:26):
it is a crime, thankfully in twenty states, to send
children to gay conversion therapy, but it is perfectly legal
to send your child to a treatment sitter center for
anything else a parent regards as a flaw. So gay
conversion therapy is legal in a bunch of states. It's
not illegal really anywhere to send your child to a
treatment center. And the treatment center doesn't have to be

(12:47):
for like an actual problem that like I don't know
a psychiatrist someone say like, oh yeah, this kid has
this serious problem that needs special treatment. Anything you're not
happy with that your kid does counts right because as
a parent, you're the dictator of your child, because children
have no rights, like effectively not if the parent like
wants to do. Parents can do a lot of fund

(13:09):
up ship to their kids perfectly legally. There's a lot
of people who will fight in Congress for their right
to abuse their children systematically because this nation was I
don't know, a large chunk of the population of this
country believes that parents are the biblical sovereigns of their
children should be able to do anything they want to them. Um,
it's good ship. Uh. Now, as a parent, you have

(13:29):
the power to sign over physical control of your child
to an organization one of these teen treatment facilities, and
every year parents have around fifty kids do so. If
you listen to our two parter on Sinnnon with American
hero Paul Left Tompkins, you know that the troubled teen
industry got its start with that particular cult. Um have
you did you listen to those episodes? Miles, No, I

(13:51):
haven't heard that one. Cinnanon was a This will be
useful people who haven't listened to it yet all though
it's a pretty good two parter. Sinnon was a drug
the first drug rehab program like in the nation, like
focused on like dope as opposed to alcohol, and it
was kind of based initially off alcoholics anonymous like Sinning
s y in. Uh. Yeah, I thought it was like
super Christian like first Sinner Sinning. It wasn't, and it

(14:15):
was was founded by this guy Charles de Ork who
was UM an alcoholic and not a drug addict himself,
and he was he became a cult leader. This this
thing went from like people kind of living together in
this compound and like doing hard labor and UM. You know,
they had all these different things that they thought would
help keep you off drugs. One of them was called
the game, which was this therapeutic tool invented by Charles

(14:36):
Dedrick where everyone would sit around in a room, all
these addicts and they would scream abuse at each other.
They would just like insult each other, talk about what
they hated about each other. And it was this. The
idea was that like, oh, addicts need extra accountability because
they're so good at lying. So you you have this,
you know, this regular thing where you get to like
you get abused for things that you do. Yeah, and
it's a way to blow off steam to um it

(15:00):
it was. Sent it on was hugely popular for a while.
UM judges were so enthusiastic about the practice that they
started sending children who have been caught with dope to
sent it on UM. And because these kids, most of
the people who went to sinning on and got involved,
like wanted help, like, we're addicts, but these kids didn't
like it generally weren't serious addicts, but also didn't want

(15:20):
to be there, so they had to develop these really
brutal rules for like punishing them and cracking down and
stopping them from escaping and keeping them in line. Um.
And it became physically abusive too, and mentally abusive obviously. Um.
But that was not why Sentnon got in trouble, right.
Send it On eventually got in trouble because they tried
to assassinate a lawyer with a rattlesnake after building their

(15:41):
own army in California. Um, that was quite a story, miles,
I mean, so passe. And assassinating a lawyer with the
arm I mean, come on. So sent it On is
where the troubled teen industry gets a start, right. This
is the first time that judges are like, oh, we
don't have to just throw these kids in prison, which

(16:02):
is admittedly the wrong thing to do with the kid
who you've caught with weed or something. But instead of like,
we just hand them over to this weird cult and
the cult will abuse them until they don't smoke pot anymore,
and this will solve our problems. Forever okayament out of them. Yeah.
By the yearly sixties, sent Anon was a bona fide phenomenon,
and they inspired a dizzy variety of imitators who used

(16:24):
variations of their methods. One of these imitators was the
day Top Village in New York, which is actually the
second ever drug rehab program in the United States. It
was created in nineteen sixty three, just five years after
Sentnon started UM, and the day Top Village followed what
they called a therapeutic community style of treatment UM, which
is where the actual work of rehabilitation is done by

(16:46):
other addicts, counseling and holding each other accountable. This is
the same thing sent Anon dead, and part of what
they mean by that is again you all sit in
a room together and yell abuse at each other. UM.
Some people said this helps, but I've never gone, I've
never been addicted to hair owen. Maybe maybe a mean
don't try it, I guess yeah, um, and it's worth
a day Toop Village has not been accused of the

(17:08):
same kind of abuse of Centnon, and they never tried
to build their own marine corps or assassinate a lawyer
with a Rattlesnake, So a lot of problematic things about
day Top. They didn't go as over the goddamn top
as a cent Anon did. For our purposes. Day Top
Village in New York is noteworthy because in the late
nineteen sixties a troubled eighteen year old named Joe Ritchie

(17:28):
was sent there. Joe would go on to create the
Alan School, which might be the most abuse of troubled
teen institution who ever exist. But to properly tell that story,
we've got to go back in time again and give
Joe's back story. So I had to talk about where
the troubled teen industry starts. Let's talk about Joe a
little bit. He was born in port Chester, New York,
in nineteen forty five to parents who were deeply troubled.

(17:49):
They split up and we don't know why, but a
hint as to why may come from the fact that
his father, Frank, was nicknamed Bamboo because he was so
good at bouncing back after getting punched in the face
during the near constant bar fights he had at local bombs.
Like his nickname in town was because like that guy
could get wow, He's really good to get the ship bunched.
Out of a fus bamboo bamboo called bamboo because he's

(18:13):
so good to get punched and what do I mean,
that's a weird for those the vibe of those people
who just take shots like and are like kind of
sad and like bar fight immortals. I can't imagine the
energy sorting around that kind of person. I'm not surprised
his marriage didn't last. Yeah, he's like, yeah, I don't

(18:35):
even know how to respond to physical stimulus, no less
verbal to adjust any kind of great emotions. Guy. He
was a day laborer and known locally as quote a
kingpin of bar fights. Um. He was violent but also charming,
which is probably how he snared in Santro Joe Richie's mother. Now,
the sant Toro's and the Richies were both Italian American families,

(18:58):
but the Santorro family did the Ritchie family because the
Richie family was newer to the country and didn't speak
English very well. Um. When Anne and Frank split up,
she signed over custody of her son, Joe to her parents,
Michael and Angela, and Joe was raised by his maternal
grandparents and several other relatives. Um. So from the beginning
this kid doesn't have you know, his mom when she

(19:20):
splits up with his husband, like signs over custody to
his grandparents, which is kind of an odd move as well. Um,
but this is also a period in which single motherhood
is really in some cases, like even legally penalized. So like,
I guess it makes a degree of sense as to
why this happened. Um. The Santaro family where Joe was
raised was They were poor but proud, and they regularly

(19:42):
attended Mass at the Holy Rosary Church. As a young child,
Joe was an altar boy. He spent time at the
community center, where he learned to box and play basketball.
One of his friends at the time, Victornato, remembered him
this way quote. We called him Joe Rich. He was
a good guy, but I've never seen anyone as wild.
Joe was really tough. If he were nice to him,
he'd be your friend, but you didn't want to mess

(20:02):
with him. He was always looking over his shoulder, and
if you did something to cross him, he'd never let
you forget it. Joe Rich was sharp, knew how to survive.
I used to think he had nine lives. If he
did something really wrong, he'd get out of it, someone
else would take the heat. He always had himself covered.
It seems Joe rich knew where to go. He was
definitely ahead of his time. When we were involved in
basketball games, he was thinking about stealing cars. I really

(20:23):
figured he'd eventually be successful, either that or debt. Wow,
that's a wild thing to say. He's also got a
little bit bamboo DNA too to him with the Nine Lives.
I just like when you first said it's like while
we were playing basketball, I thought you were saying like
he was like he like in the middle of the
basketball game, he's like checked out. He's like, how are
you going to steal these cars? And he gets hit

(20:45):
in ahead of the basketball I think that's come on,
Sorry man, you think about stealing cars again? Fuck dude,
we're gonna lose. Yeah, yeah, sorry? Uh now, Miles, you
know who else likes to steal cars? Uh? These average tisers? Yep.
We are entirely sponsored by a ring of car thieves

(21:05):
and shop chop shops. If you're looking for a nice
new stolen car, checking out one of these pacers. If
you're looking for that catalytic converter that I took out,
check out one of these ads. I mean, look, we're
podcast host so when we're not recording, we're both actively
out and about stealing the catalytic converters. Were just like,

(21:26):
when well some people are thinking about podcasts, all you
and I are thinking about is how we're getting more
catalytic converters out of Honda's. Yeah, that's that's that's my
whole life. Man. You should have seen me, man, it was.
It was the twenties. I was podcasting ceiling catalytic convert
converters at it made out of catalytic converters. Down the street.

(21:51):
People said, oh, that's the cat King of Portlands. There
he is. Catman. Uh, here's some adsh we're back and
we're thinking about stealing catalytic converters. The new business for

(22:14):
the new Furby. Yeah, it's the new Ferby. Look, the
economy is heading for another downturn. Can you afford not
to learn how to steal catalytic converters? That's all sphening
catalytic converters. Oh yeah, you gotta know how to siphon. Now.
The good thing about siphoning is the sucking skills that
you use while siphoning are useful in a variety of

(22:34):
other endeavors, especially other quasi legal endeavors you're going to
have to engage in to make a living when the
economy collapses, which is unclogging toilets with a hose. I
don't know what you're thinking, folks, Come on, don't be filthy,
you you, you don't be filthy. Picture someone sucking ship
through a hose from a toilet. Where Why did you

(22:56):
have me back, Miles, because we got to talk about
some really profound child See I always do this. I'm like, yeah,
it's a little bit of a good time. Really wait
wait wait, wait, wait wait now remember the show I
had you on ONTs to talk about the Trump University
and after that it's just been bleaker and bleaker. Yeah,
but you know, I like, I like, yeah, that's good.

(23:18):
So Joe Richie is one of the kinds of guys
we deal with from time to time on this show.
He's famous enough that we have pretty good texture on
his early life, but he's obscure enough that there's also
a lot of unanswered questions because, like you're talking about
a guy like Hitler, there's like a bunch of really
good biographers who have all covered his child and you
can get different. You can find the answer to pretty
much every factual question about his early life. And one

(23:40):
of those books, if you read enough biography. We only
have one biography of Joe Ritchie, and pretty much all
of my info about his early life comes from the
book Duck in a Raincoat by Mara Curley, and I
think it's a very good book. But there are moments
like the one I'm about to quote, where you know
there's a deeper story lurking quote. Donano said, Richie dated
his social science teacher in junior high, a tall, dark

(24:02):
haired beauty just out of college. Now that sounds like
statutory rape to me, right, what the fuck? Junior high? Yeah? Yeah,
and his friends just like, oh yeah, he was dating
one of the teachers. And it's like thirteen year old. Yeah,
that's thirteen, fourteen and two, Like that's the youngest she

(24:26):
could be is twenty two, and it's like taking him.
I guess it's fine, Um, but I didn't think that
was the case. Jesus, And that's it. It's just merely
like he was really cool. He was also a teacher
when he was like fourteen. Yeah, no, that's how it
was going. I don't know. I don't know. Did you
have a lot of weird abandonment issues because of the

(24:47):
thing with his mom and older women? I don't know.
I mean, we could talk about that, but it like
one of the and it seems like his friends it
was one of the stereotypic things, Well she's hot, it's cool, right,
Like I think that's the attitude the other kids had
about it. Um, Obviously this is rape, even if it
is something that he went to his grave thinking was
like fine, like it's that doesn't make it. That's why
it's statutory, right, that's what that is. UM. Now, hearing that,

(25:12):
hearing that he had this like relationship with a teacher
much older than him, that he thought nothing, apparently didn't
think anything about I can't help but wonder if like,
well he's an altar boy too, did anything like you know, like,
you can't not consider that given the prevalence of abuse
in the Catholic Church. Um And I actually did look

(25:32):
up a comprehensive report on sexual assault allegations against priests
in the Archdiocese of New York. It's a hundred and
twenty five pages. Because the Catholic Church, um And, while
there are four molester priests who were stationed in port Chester,
where Joe lived. The earliest left in nineteen forty four,
and the others didn't start doing their thing until the
late sixties, seventies and early eighties, so there's not even

(25:54):
circumstantial evidence to suggest anything happened about this. Um, I
just wanted to let you guys know I did canto
it because I wanted to say whatever the truth. Joe
grew up into a troubled adolescent. He skipped school constantly.
He and his friends would regularly steel pies from a
neighbor for pie fights, which is an adorable sort of
child crying right, yes, like that still cooling? Yeah, that's

(26:19):
how it sounds, right. It sounds like some Andy Griffith level.
It sounds like the kind of crime you'd said Bartie
fifout to deal with, right exactly. It's steal and pies, barn,
what's that guy? Like a Norman Rockwell painting of like
you know, future cult leader steal and pies for pie fights. Unfortunately,
it didn't stay cool cute. When he was fifteen, Joe

(26:39):
went joy riding with some of his friends. You have
to assume they were drunk, but we're not. We don't
know that. Um, they crashed and he was flung from
the car seatbelts were just a fever dream in nineteen
sixty and he spent months in the hospital and then
more months in physical therapy, had to learn how to
walk again, Like, which is like, that's like a level
of injury severity is you have to relearn how to walk, Like, Yeah,

(27:02):
it's a bad accident. Scrambled a little bit, Yeah, yeah,
I got I got a little bit. Yeah, scrambled was
a good word for it. So some of Joe's family
later told Maura Curley that this accident was a negative
turning point in his life, possibly because he was given
a lot of drugs while he was recovering and he
got addicted to the drugs. Um, there's debate over this.

(27:24):
That would make sense, right, A lot of people's pain
killer addiction starts because they are in some sort of
horrible accident where they get pain killers. Now, about a
year after he got out of the hospital, his family
sent him to a residential treatment facility for difficult boys
called p i n S, or Persons in need of Treatment.
So and again, we don't have a we don't have
as much texture about why, as I would like to have.

(27:45):
But it seems like he recovers from this and his
parents decide he needs to go to a facility. And
it may have been just because like, oh, he's been
joy writing. He was like stealing guards or whatever with
his friends. They were joy writing. This is clearly a problem.
Once he recovers, let's send him to a treatment facil
That may as soon as he recovers from a horrific
car wreck that rendered him unable to walk, that he
had to relearn it, then let's just send him away,

(28:08):
send him which questionable parenting, I would say, Um, at
that point, are his parents? You're saying his parents are
his maternal grandparents? Are so not making following along? Ye,
but they're the ones who raise him. Um. So he
stays in this treatment facility for two years and then
returns to high school in nineteen sixty three, where he
stayed until he left without graduating in nineteen sixty six

(28:29):
at age twenty one. So he's in high school at
age twenty one, which sounds like a nightmare. He shit,
which also shouldn't be allowed. What's the what's the how
does the time work? He was fifteen when he got
on the car wreck. Yeah, fifteen, and then he's like
seventeen or eighteen when he gets back from the treatment program.

(28:51):
And then he stays in high school for three more years,
so he was like starting sophomore year at like eighteen
or something. I think, so I think he like he
what A that's a weird vibe. That's weird, especially since
at fourteen he's fucking a teacher. And then at twenty
one he's still in the school, Like that's real hungover

(29:12):
and then they're like, well, what, it's not illegal, and
this is this is a school in the sixties, so
I have to assume all of the kids were drunk
a hundred percent of the time, as were the teachers,
as were the teachers God willing um, and everyone was
chain smoking. So it's less weird than it would be today. Now,
the same year in the nineteen sixties six when he

(29:34):
leaves high school. So he leaves. He doesn't leave high
school because he's like I'm done with school. He leaves
because he hijacks and mail truck um, or at least
tries to rob it. The details around the crime are
a little bit uncertain, but as best as I can determine.
It seems like he and his lawyer decided to claim
that he'd done it because he was a heroin addict
and was desperate for money. Some sources, some of his friends,

(29:56):
well some of not his friends. Some sources like usually
when you find his life reported on an articles, they'll
say he was a heroin addict and that's why he
robs this mail truck and gets sent to the facility
he's sent to. That's not what Mara Curly, his only biographer, thinks,
And that because and she doesn't think that because people
she talked to who were friends of Joe Richie's during

(30:17):
this period of time don't think he was a heroin addict.
Like he did a little bit of heroin, but he
wasn't like a hardcore addict. He wasn't like he was
robbing ship. But he wasn't robbing ship because his heroin
addiction was so bad. That's what some of his friends.
He liked the thrill of the robbery. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
he wanted ship. Um. I don't know, I didn't know
the guy. Um, but this was a really good time

(30:39):
in American history to try to to go to a
judge and say, hey, I did it because I'm a
drug addict and I need to go to a treatment
facility rather than prison. Because, as we just talked about,
sinning On was at the peak of its fame in
the late sixties, and so it had just become popular
for judges to send people to programs like this rather
than sending them to prison straight. It's funny how we

(30:59):
went for like full circle of being like yeah, and
like we want to have some little bit of compassion
even though side to some really funked up organization to
amassing carceration the people again like yeah, let's do some
rehabilitation before incarceration again. Okay, Okay, we're back there again. Yeah,
So it's not the wrong thing from the judge's point
of view. I guess it's also possibility lied about the
addiction because it's a lot better to go to one

(31:21):
of these facilities and fun right now, whatever the truth.
Joe goes to the day Top village in New York
and he thrives there. Um, he's really good at the game.
These sessions that he participates in with other addicts where
you're like telling each other about your faults and flaws
and stuff. He's really good he's very good at it.
Like there's like a break or rankings. It's like have

(31:42):
you seen Joe in the game. It's a social thing,
so everyone is supposed to take turns kind of picking
an individual and like talking about the things they don't
like about that person. That's that's like kind of how
it goes. Some people are good at directing those sort
of group conversations. They're good at controlling them. They're good
at getting other people to get hang up on someone.
They're good at avoiding being the focus of negative attention themselves.

(32:04):
And this is a thing that's been observed by psychologists
and stuff about UM. Sociopaths in particular are very good
at group therapy. Like they they're good. They're they're good
at manipulating people. It's what they do UM and so
they know how to take advantage of these places and
kind of one of the dangers and this is we
talked about this in the Cinnanon episode and I found

(32:26):
a study on this. It's been noted that a number
of cults have come out of different alcoholics anonymous groups.
And this is not like me shipping on a I
know people who swear by it, but it's a problem
that has been noted with a A is that sometimes
these these kind of group therapy sessions, individuals within them
gain a level of mental control of other people in them,

(32:46):
and they turn into cults. It's happened a handful of times.
That's how Sentanon started. Um. So it's like it's the
the material for star more. Formation is present at a cult.
Formation is present and if with the right ingredients, it
may leave in the right and it can happen. Which
is it's more this is again less of a flaw
in a and more of just like this is how
people work a This is one of the things they're

(33:08):
vulnerable to because of the you know, other other things.
Churches are vulnerable to this thing too. Right, it's not
exacting on a here, but it's a known quantity in
these kinds of organizations. And Joe is very good at that.
That's what I mean when I say that he was
good at the game, he's right right reippillating people in
this way. I was being stupid and acting as if
they were like the game at Richie killing it. He

(33:32):
brought up, as you know, his paternal abandonment issues. It's fantastic.
He's like I do kind of now want like football announcers,
like covering therapy. Oh, we just talked about the fact
that his dad used to hit him. He went there,
he went there. You didn't think he's going to go
there this early on. And I think he's going to

(33:53):
counter with something about his mother's inability to say that
she loved him. Yep. Okay, Oh my god, you just
brought up the time he left the gate open and
the dog got out and was hit by a car. Oh,
she's bringing out pictures of the sister. She's bringing out
pictures of the sister. We have not seen this in
a long time. Richard usually doesn't just emailed me. Um,

(34:13):
they're giving us forty two million dollars to make this show.
An algorithm just deemed it, so thank you Netflix algorithm.
So um, yeah, I guess this is what we're this is, Sophie.
Let's U cancel the show for the day. Yeah. Yeah,
I'm pretty sure the eventually they're gonna be like, this
is what we're thinking, Robert, we're noticing how big Pokemon

(34:35):
is and how big your podcast is. What about behind
the Bastard's Man, where it's you got to catch them all? Okay,
and it's this anime series and it's a little bit
of everything. Huh, how do what do you think about that? Huh? Yeah,
the algorithm says it's going to be a fucking hit.
I mean, look, I'll do anything for enough money to
buy an armored vehicle. Now there there's news for you.

(34:56):
Got to just all your bastard mon You gotta catch
them all. Got to catch all of the route clearance vehicles.
Um So, he's really good. He goes to day Top.
He's really good at the game. He learns he starts
this is really when he learns like that he has
a gift for actually kind of like manipulating people. And
at first he's doing in such a way that he's

(35:17):
trying to like I think, I don't know, I don't
know how much he sees it this way. But other
people see it as like he's helping them deal with
their addiction issues, right Like. They don't see it as like, oh,
he's doing cult leadership. They see it's like, oh, this
kid is charismatic and understands people and as good at
getting them to see their own flaws and their faults
and help them work through in process their adding Um
So he gets a lot of praise within day Top,

(35:39):
and pretty soon he becomes like their most prominent member.
He's giving speeches and raising funds for the organization and
becomes their number one fundraiser. So he's like going outside
of the group to like raise money for them and
other and to talk about like how good they are
like stopping people from being addicted and stuff. Um. And
he later recalled that previously quote, I've done the therapy bit,

(36:00):
but this blew my mind. In other words, he'd done
therapy before, but therapy didn't give him the chance to
like manipulate a bunch of people, and he really likes
manipulating a bunch of people. Yeah, it's like in all
you can manipulate buffet in there. I can't believe that's
exactly the case. So he's happy at Day Top. This
is an influential moment for him, but he doesn't agree
with all of their therapy. For one thing, they all

(36:21):
had to shave their heads, which was something that sent
it on dead and he thought that was weird. He
also butted heads with the administrators when they told him
he wasn't ready to graduate, and eventually he ran away
from the program. I think they wanted to keep him
there because he was so good at raising money, right, Like, yeah,
we get that guy up now at the time, like
right around when he runs away from Day Top, he

(36:41):
starts dating a woman named Sherry in New York. Now,
Sherry was working at a travel agency, and she fell
for Joe in part because she was that her parents
were alcoholics, and he understood the issue she faced as
a child of alcoholics. He understands abuse or not abuse,
but drug abuse really well, right, he's just been counseling
people he's actually able to like talk with Obviously, that's
a thing that would like draw you to someone. You

(37:02):
have this horrible experience, He understands. It makes sense why
they why they get together. When Richie left Daytop, he
moves right in with Sherry and her roommate, and at
first she says things were great. He cleaned to the house,
he would bring her little little gifts. He successfully wooed
her so well that she canceled her plans to move
to New York City and train as a stewardess. The
two were engaged to be married, but early on there

(37:23):
were unsettling signs about the man that he might really
be quote and This is from duck in a raincoat.
Richie sued Sherry's insurance company for injuries he said he
sustained during a minor traffic accident. Sherry had run a
stoplight and hadn't thought he was more and hadn't thought
he was even injured, but her insurance company settled the claim.
Richie used the money to buy her an engagement ring.

(37:46):
So he shoes her insurance company in order to get
money to buy her a ring, which is wow, this guy, Yeah,
this is some for d scumbag ship. That's kind of
a sign this guy might be a little bit that's
that's a little slimy. Yeah, but hey, the rings beautiful.
I mean, it's a it's an insurance company, right, If

(38:06):
that is the only I wouldn't judge a guy for
that necessarily because like, yeah, I get whatever Mon's I
find ways to extract things with very little effort and
I don't care how underhanded it is. Yeah, that's what
this says about him. Now, Sherry seems to have been
fined about this um, but this bit of insurance fraud
would prove to be the beginning of a fairly long

(38:27):
career in insurance fraud. The two were married in December
of nineteen sixty nine. They were both twenty four. Richie
needed a job, and since his only real life experience
was either crimes or manipulating institutions, he decided to get
a job working at the kind of place he'd been
sent as a kid. He heard about a pilot program
being launched for drug addicts in Connecticut. It was called Dartek,

(38:48):
and it was one of the first programs to include
both medical professionals and former addicts working side by side
to counsel people, which seemed like a much better idea
than the synnon method of addicts mentally abusing other addicts
to keep them sober. The founder of the program, doctor
Donald Pett, hired Joe Ritchie after a phone interview because
he seemed persuasive. Quote, Joe had a very unusual way

(39:08):
of getting many of the street people to follow him.
He often got people to rally around him, kind of
see things his way, do his bidding again some cult leadership.
You know, wow, the street people that they said, yeah, yeah,
they're talking about all these people there now. One of
the other staff members at Dartek introduced Ritchie to a
Massachusetts psychiatrist, named Gerald Davidson. The two weren't coworkers long

(39:31):
before Richie and Sherry moved again to another job at
a drug counseling center called Survival Ink. But Joe clearly
made an impact on Dr Davidson, one that was out
of step with his actual skill in treating addiction. Evidence
for this is that Joe brought three Dartek staff members
with him to Survival Link and all three of them
were fired soon after because they were caught using drugs
while working as drug abuse counselors. Well, he may not

(39:54):
be good at anything but manipulating people in reality. Yeah, Now,
Joe is one who fired them, and he made a
statement to the press saying their behavior was unacceptable, and
it seems like the incident had an impact on him.
Not long after that, in nineteen seventy one, the couple
decided to open a therapeutic community of their own. Joe
reached out to Dr Davidson, who he had worked with briefly,

(40:15):
and because he was a smooth son of a bitch,
convinced the older man to be their business partner in
starting a new facility. Because Dr Davidson is a psychiatrist,
Andy has money, you know, you gotta love it, and
you've got a license probably too. Yeah, he's got some licenses.
There's a lot of reasons. It's a good call. Now, Miles,
you know what's an even better call than convincing a

(40:36):
psychiatrist to fund your child abuse company program? Uh? That
this seminar we're given on how to unload catalytic converters
on Craigslist using that's right. Uh, and pick up Miles
and I's new book, The Catalytic Converter Driven Life, which
is all about how stealing catalytic converters called welcome converts.

(41:02):
What a good cult this is gonna be. We're back.
I'm just fondling a couple of cats and catalytic converters.
That is um. That's what we call it around here.
That's that's what we call it around here, in the
in the in the verter biz um. So by nineteen

(41:26):
seventy one, which is when Joe decides to start his
own facility, Sin and On was a full on cult,
but public awareness of that fact was not high. People
were aware that drug abuse rehabilitation centners could save addicts,
and such facilities had exploded in popularity. Now at the time,
new York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts all had very stringent laws
about what kind of professional qualifications you had to have

(41:47):
to work in such a place. Right those states have
like you consider it basically a hospital. If you're trying,
if you're saying, I want to open a residential treatment
facility for addicts, you have to like have medical, serious
medical credentials in order to what if I just really
want to do it, then you moved to Maine. You
do with Shoe Joe Richie and Sarah and Sherry do,

(42:08):
which is you move to Maine because Maine does not
give a funk about anything. Now. At the beginning, the
program was owned by Dr Davidson and another man, David Goldberg,
who actually had the money necessary to start the business.
The Richie's used their money to lease a former summer
camp in Naples, Maine, which they turned into their facility.

(42:28):
From the beginning, Dr Davidson's role in all of this
was to be a doctor, right, not to actually do medicine,
but to be a doctor who was professionally associated with
the organization. Could put his name on advertising material and
they can use it to claim that their facility has
a basis in clinical therapy. And since Dr Davidson was
the associate director of the Drug Clinic at Boston City Hospital,

(42:50):
he had a lot of professional weight to throw around.
But again, he's never there. He's not actually doing anything.
It's he's giving money. He's like funding this, but like, yeah,
So from this start, it was agreed that Dr Davidson
would not work on site. He would stay in Massachusetts,
working at a hospital and using his position as a
psychiatrist to refer patients to the new business he'd started,

(43:12):
which is not at all the conflict of oh my god, Okay,
they're sucking radh it's so good, so good. Yeah, you
need you need some help, you know. Actually I know
this place. Actually, oh yeah, it's a it's out in Maine,
you know. Um yeah, it's run by this guy who
has no qualifications other than being a guy. He really

(43:34):
wants to do it here. He's yeah, he's he's had
no expertise, though all had no expertise. So Richie and
his wife were supervisors, working for free room and board
in a cut of the profits. But when one of
their other partners, a guy who invested with the doctor,
was caught embezzling, Richie and his wife bought their way
into a full partnership by selling eight thousand dollars worth

(43:56):
of stocks that Sherry had inherited from her grandma. So
Richie but comes a partner because of money that his
wife has. Right um. Now, the early years of this
business are hard. The Richies were very poor, and by
all accounts, Joe was obsessed with getting rich from the beginning.
The Alan School, as they came to call it, was
not about helping people. It was about making Joe Richie

(44:16):
a fortune. Still, it does seem to have started as
I don't know, somewhat genuine. It doesn't seem to have
initially been horribly toxic, at least within the standards of
the industry. And I'm gonna quote from Duck in a
Raincoat again. They lived on the top floor of the
rustic building in Naples with residents on the second floor.
Everybody shared the ground level. They seldom had any private time,
never went out to eat or to the movies. Every

(44:38):
activity centered around the therapeutic community and making lots of money.
Sherry center husband would often lie awake in bed thinking
aloud about how they were going to make their first
hundred thousand dollars becoming rich was definitely an obsession that
seemed to drive Joe recalled an early staff member at Alan,
money was extremely important to him, and when when he
was earning ten thousand dollars a year and driving an old,
Oldsmobile and represented the power to be somebody important who

(45:00):
would be accepted by everyone around him, and that meant
a lot. So from the beginning, his motivation here is
to get rich off this not necessarily to determine any
new method of actually helping people right right, And if
even if it wasn't toxic at first, it seems like
he probably felt some kind of momentum beginning with his
ability to grift and manipulate. Yeah, and when I said,

(45:22):
I don't know that it was toxic at first because
we don't have a lot of detailers at the early
times of the school. Now, from the at the beginning,
most of the money that they made was put right
back into the business. But it gradually started to make
a major profit because they started drawing in and Joe
would actually go out and like recruit people to join
the facility, particularly troubled teens from wealthy families. Um so

(45:44):
they would like Joe and dr Davidson would go out
and like talk to rich parents whose kids head like
we're in legal trouble, had like serious problems with addiction.
Like because Davidson is a psychiatrist, he knows which rich
parents have are paying able to pay for serious for
their kids. And Joe will go out and like, because
Joe's good at convincing people of things, will convince them
to send their kid over to a laan and pay

(46:08):
a month for treatment. In nineteen seventies money, you know,
that's a lot of um. So, the Naples Facility relocated
to the former Potter Academy, a landmark in the town
of Sebago, and another secondary style was the site was
established in Waterford, Maine. So they expand very quickly because
going after rich kids is good business. Throughout the mid

(46:28):
nineteen seventies, Joe Richie expanded his methods from you know,
he started off just kind of ripping off the day
top school and sent and on um to to building
something new. And this happens gradually. We don't know the
exact time frame in which this occurs, but it happens,
you know, in the early years of the facility. UM So,
initially all the therapy. You have these group talk sessions

(46:49):
based off the game. You have various forms of labor.
People are asked to, like do physical labor outdoors as
part of like they're they're kind of like a punishment
in a lot of cases. Um and Richie designed Allan's
culture around a series of work crews. Each member started
as a worker and was assigned a job in the kitchen,
the business office, the communications office, or on the grounds

(47:10):
based on what was considered to be their weakest area.
So you get a job doing grunt level labor and
what everything you're worse at. Uh. In a nineteen seventy
nine article for Corrections magazine, Dr Davidson claimed this was
quote to teach them to function under adversity and learn
to accept failure. Now, from worker, which everyone starts as
a worker, you move up to ramrod or foreman, which

(47:32):
is like, you know, in charge of a small group
of workers. After that you move up to department head
and then up to coordinator. Joe felt that structure and
communal living were both necessary in order to treat addicts,
but while he was experimenting with new ways to counsel
drug addiction, he was also experimenting with insurance fraud. So
in January of nineteen seventy four, a fire destroyed his

(47:53):
academy at Sobago. Thankfully no one was there at the time.
Davidson and Richie were in Chicago recruiting residence. The building's
owner told the press that he didn't have much insurance,
but Richie bragged that the Allan School itself was quote
adequately insured due to the extensive remodeling his residence had
done to the building. Now, there was no evidence that
his residence had remodeled anything, because the building had burned down,

(48:16):
but he was able to successfully argue that this increased
the insurance value of the property. Uh, and he makes
a lot of money off of the insurance building that
gets conveniently burned down. Yeah, don't worry about that. Don't
worry about the no insurance, you know, because I'm looking
at about probably four or five six hundred thousand dollars
or the remodel work that I didn't sure anyway, So
it's all. But it's all the insurance coverage. It's really
it's fine, no problem. So Sherry would later claim that

(48:39):
the fire was a turning point for Richie in the
Allan School they purchased a new permanent location in Poland Spring, Maine,
with seven large buildings that would each act as separate
communities within the increasingly complex society Joe Richie was building. Now,
at this point, I haven't given a lot of detail
about what happened at a LAN because we don't really
know about the early seventies all that much. It seems

(49:00):
are to say that early on there was little to
differentiate a LAN from other programs based off of Cynanon
and day Top. They practiced the game, which tended to
be regularly scheduled therapy sessions. Uh and yeah, the idea like,
so it seems like they're kind of doing the same
thing seventy three. At some point, though, it starts to change,

(49:20):
and it changes in part because the LAN is very centralized.
From the beginning, there's the strict hierarchy, these different jobs
everybody has, and you move up or down if your
behavior is bad. That seems to be kind of everything
else is spawned from this idea. So one of the
first things that Joe develops that's different from what other
facilities has done is he takes the game and he changes.

(49:41):
Isn't this something different? So the game two or three
times a week. In these other communities, everyone sits down
to play the game, right, um, and that's the way
the game works. Joe replaces it with something called a
general meeting. Um, And rather than being a regular scheduled
part of the week, a general meeting was unpredictable. Instead
of it being a thing everyone does together, it's often

(50:02):
an unpleasant thing that everyone does it together. A general
meaning is something that's done to you. If your behavior
is bad, Joe or one of the other supervisors will
call the general fucking meeting against you. And it's usually
done because, like Joe or a supervisor decides, this person
has done something bad. So in the game, every individual
pretty much is going to get called out for some

(50:23):
sort of bad behavior. Right. You go around the circle
and everybody spends some time getting you know, ship talked basically, Right,
A general meeting isn't like that. Only one person is
getting yelled at and they're getting yelled at by everybody. Wow,
So it's just like all right, feeding frenzy, here we
go just for this person. Yeah. Um. The frame the

(50:45):
term that we used for this was get your feelings off, right,
So everyone's called It's like get your feelings off on him,
get your like how is he hurt you? Basically, how
is his behavior his he fucked up at this thing?
Like how did it affect you negatively? Um, And obviously
you can't not say something. I found one record of
audio that is purported to have been recorded secretly during
the late nineteen nineties of a general meeting at a

(51:06):
lawn school, and the law graduates have said some people
argue that maybe this was staged, but either way, they say,
this is accurate to how it sounds. So here is
a general meeting at the law school. Back expects. So

(51:51):
the game, it's kind of debatable as to how therapeutically useful.
It was a lot of criticisms of the game, this
is just abuse. Like, I mean, the game was pretty
abusive in a lot of cases, but like this is
just pure abuse. Like great screaming. Yeah, you can argue
even though there's abusive elements to the game, going around
in a circle everybody, like there's elements of that that

(52:12):
could be helpful. This is just this is just abuse, Yeah,
just as screaming meat grinder and like also that that
what the fun. The person's inhalations too, were like so labor.
And this point that former students will make is that
you learn how to yell in a specific way unique
to the Alan school. Because of the way in which

(52:33):
you are trained to yell at people and abuse people,
there's like a specific cadence, specific kinds of terms that
you use. Um, you know, exhaust on a Harley Davidson man.
You know, so you can tell Alan scream Yeah, that's yeah,
that's what what former I don't makes will say. So.
One of the difficulties in preparing this episode is that

(52:56):
the system of abuse that Joe Richie crafted for Alan
was extremely complicated in a way. What he built over
the first few years was like an engine designed to
be self perpetuating and maintaining. We don't have a good
data on the order in which it all came together, um,
but we do have bits and pieces of that story.
One of these comes from the nineteen seventy one interview
with Dr Davidson from News and World Report, in which

(53:17):
he claimed, quote, therapeutic communities largely are run by X
addicts who have become extremely sanctimonious. Like all converted heathens.
They shave their patients heads, make them wear diapers, hang
degrading signs on them, things like that. In our therapeutic community,
we do not do this. Our approach is to build
self esteem and regard for others. Now, this is a
lie um at least it runs counter to what we

(53:39):
know Alan was doing in this same period of time.
But also Dr Davidson was never there, so maybe he
was just didn't know um. That same year, Joe Richie
did an interview with a local TV news station where
he claimed that the goal of a Lawan was to
instill self reliance, self respect, and a capacity for love. Quote.
We tailored the program to fit the individual, not the

(53:59):
individual to fit the program. This was also not in
line with what we know was going on at a LAN,
but it was consistent with Joe Richie's desire to market
his school to the parents of rich kids. In the
early years, he did a lot of direct sales to
these parents, and he would even offer to fly his
private plane out to them to pick kids up. He
called a lawn the Rolls Royce of adolescent treatment centers.

(54:21):
So again, I can't tell you how this all came
together exactly, but I can tell you that by nineteen
seventy nine, when General when Corrections magazine did a profile
on the Allan School. Uh it had already developed a
number of unsettling characteristics, including an internal secret police force quote.
There are no clinical offices at a LAN, No fifty minutes,
see you next week. Couch sessions six days and nights

(54:42):
a week. Each LAN residence is a hotbed of raw,
supercharged emotion. When the house is functioning, working at therapy,
the expediters are at work keeping a written record of
negative behavior. They have a lot of status like a
secret police force. As one resident, they take attendance all
the time and book incidents like if you Talk Back
or Fight. Each book is a strange collection of names

(55:04):
or narratives, attention seekers, googers, manipulators, nonrelators. At eleven ten today,
Diane was called out for obnoxious behavior. Incidents are collected,
reviewed and dealt with appropriately, and appropriately usually means severely.
You're not dealing with your feelings at all, screams a
dominutive girl to a massive boy in a lawn. Seven
he has talked back to a coordinator. Why don't you

(55:25):
grow some guts and brains instead instead of just balls?
You blockhead and just as quickly as it began, the
confrontation is over. Both peacefully shuffle off to work again.
So you have this, You have these people keeping track
of everyone, writing down in a notebook every bad thing
they do, so that it can be there can be
a meeting at some point in the day where you
yell at this person over it, like where every single

(55:45):
piece of behavior you do is being monitored at all times.
And this is true of everybody, including the people who
are giving out punishment. They're also always being monitors. So anyone,
if you have status, you can lose it for bad behavior. Um.
And if you don't have status, you can report people
who might be above you and get them in trouble.
Like it's this whole it's an assent of abuse, right

(56:08):
and it's not necessarily Like when you said internal police rs,
I felt like they're ordaining people to be these snitches.
But it's just the the ecosystem operates and such that
it self police is to be able to gotcha each
other at the general's that's part of it. There is this.
This is a position. Expediter is a job. There's just
always kids with notebooks taking down what everyone does. Um.

(56:29):
But can you come for an expeditor. Yeah, what you have,
I mean you would have meetings throughat like once a day.
You're going to be like called into a room with
kids above you and to talk about your bad behavior.
And you're also generally asked if you saw anyone else
doing anything. And you also have these slips of paper
that you can write down a bad behavior you saw
from someone else and put it in a little like

(56:52):
basically like a notebox, and it those get read and
people get punished for that snitch suggestion box. Yes, yeah, okay,
so all of this stuff. Like again, the whole goal
here is to create is to make the kids lock
each other down so much that no one can misbehave
that the program runs just based on all of these
kids trying to either get back at each other or

(57:14):
avoid punishment themselves. And any way to do that is
to punish other people like live in some like panopticon
where they all feel like they're also they can never
hide either. Yes, that's a huge part of it now.
In cent and on, people who broke major rules were
given haircuts, which was initially just like a dressing down,
but was turned into literal haircuts, like eventually they would

(57:35):
start shaving your head for bad behavior at a lan.
The haircuts were metaphorical, but somehow much more abusive than
forcibly shaving someone bald. Haircuts were basically lesser general meetings.
They could take the tear the form of a blast
where one person would scream at you for bad behavior,
or a round robin where a dozen people would do it,
or a twenty one gun salute, which involved two dozen

(57:56):
people berating you. These lesser reprimands were called for bike
kids against other kids, rather than being doled out by
any kind of administrator. In nineteen seventy nine, when Corrections
magazine covered a lawn, so called experts touted this is
one of the things that made a law revolutionary. That
article quoted the headmaster of a Montessori school who claimed

(58:16):
it works. The kids disciplined themselves with haircuts. The result
is that there are no discipline problems in school. It
would be more accurate to say that a lawn successfully
transformed most discipline problems into institutionally supported abuse, because the
only way to have any kind of control over your
life at a lawn was to play along and raise
through the ranks, at which point you would be able

(58:37):
to give haircuts, or eventually called general meetings. The system
was built to encourage kids to join it in order
to dish out the abuse they'd had to suffer for months,
and to suffer less abuse themselves. Alan punishments included signs
which listed the perpetrators supposed sins, and again, Davidson has said,
this is one of the things that makes us different
from other We don't hang signs from people's next. They

(58:58):
totally did h Kids are forced to make signs themselves,
but the wording was created by the student students who
are punishing them, and by employees of the school. I
found one example online and I'm gonna my ows. You
want to read the sign that young woman's care is
holding around her neck? Okay, this is my name is
Phyllis Cohen. I behave like an emotional cripple. I consistently

(59:22):
seek people's attention and try to get them to prove
they care about me. I play games and continually usurp
people's emotions in order to make myself feel special. Please
confront me, because if I don't change, this attitude will
always I don't know, it says, we'll always something the
scared and lonely. Yeah, what the fuck? That's pretty bad ship.

(59:48):
This is so this is someone they're like, okay, this, okay,
we figured you out. You're an emotional cripple. That what
the that's not you have around your neck? Yeah? Then
this sign is massive. It's gonna be what two and
have three feet. It's like a poster board. It's it's
bigger than her almost. But also like, like why is

(01:00:09):
it like colorful to like there's like a it. Well,
she had to make it. Somebody get wrote that down
for her. I don't think it's handering. It think those
are like cut stickers or something, cutout stickers. Yeah, but
it's like rainbow. Yeah, unnecessary flair for such an abusive
sign though. Also yeah, they had a lot of flair.

(01:00:30):
They had the whole school. One of the things you
would have to do constantly is like right posters and
stuff that they would put in everywhere. So there's always
these posters with like batshit motivational slogans over all the walls.
It's just the worst cripple. It's like a rainbow and
like a pot of gold. Yeah. I kind of want

(01:00:50):
one of those actually from my own office. So I'm
gonna quote from that Corrections magazine. Right up again, Miles,
where's your sign? Get that sign on all right, will
break it over your head, barks Mark the staff member
running the general meeting at a lawn five or at
a lawn four in Parsonville and parson Field, a lawn
four is the residence for the toughest of the tough.
It is the only locked facility. For over a week now,

(01:01:12):
a lawn four has been in a tight house, all
privileges suspended because of a poorhouse attitude. Mark Zero's in
on a few offenders as sixty pairs of cold eyes
look on in the cafeteria. Paulson, get up here, he
screams in a thirteen year old with a tossal of
brown hair. You know why you're up here, don't you? Well,
after this morning, you're never gonna not do your homework again.
You're gonna want to be dead. Where is your dunce cap?

(01:01:33):
Get him a dunce cap that will touch the ceiling,
he says. And again. They would like give these people
like dunce caps as big as their bodies and stuff like.
They would make people wear costumes. They made one kid,
uh dress up as Jesus. I think it was like
a horse. They like chained his feet to a ball
and like dressed him up as an animal like it
would get fucked up. Um damn. Yeah that's and and

(01:01:56):
you're saying this is in Corrections magazine, where they're like, yeah,
look check out the work they're doing here. It's actually
pretty critical, to be honest, like the Spotlight wasn't like
you know, like this is just a magazine for like
critical is it should have been maybe, but it was nine.
They didn't know. I don't know, we'll see they could
have been more critical, but it's like not positive, like

(01:02:17):
it doesn't pay to Maybe the fascists who read Corrections
Magazine were like this sounds like that, but like I
thought it was a pretty dark portrayal of this facility.
You just never know, like considering the odds are like wow,
did you see that? Right up? At one point, Um.
The article discusses encounter sessions, and these are a result

(01:02:39):
of one of the weird programs Joe Richie developed for
his school over the years, and encounter sessions students are
so students are required every day to write little fill
out slips of paper admitting their guilt, which is like
every day you have to write what rules you violated
during the day that you didn't get caught for, and
then you would have to come in and talk to
a group of your fellow student and a staff member

(01:03:01):
about the different things that you've done that you weren't
supposed to dosional. Yeah, and when I'm talking about rule breaking, miles,
I'm not talking about like, well, it's horrifying. Actually, um,
I'm gonna read you a brief, non comprehensive list of
the different guilts. And guilt is called you have guilt, right,
Like that's the term they would use it, like have

(01:03:22):
you've done something bad? Talking too loudly, talking too quietly,
talking to someone without authorization, talking to a non strength
while being non strength. So eventually one of the this
is one of the they keep adding like different sort
of rule, like different sort of classifications, so it's sort
of like workers or ramrods. And eventually they add in

(01:03:42):
strength or non strength, So all of the low ranking
students are non strength and all of the once you
reach a certain point your strength and then there's high strength,
and so certain jobs only open up when you become
strength or high strength. When you're low strength, you can't
talk to anyone else who's low strength. You can only
talk too high strength people or listen to high strength people,

(01:04:03):
So you can get in trouble for listening to someone
who's also low rank. It's this weird. There's a lot
of weird ship with the system. So in these rules,
like who's who's defining, like what's too quiet and what's
too loud, and what's too much and what's too little?
Like what what are is there like some kind of
like ranking system. No no, no subjective yeah, uh, talking

(01:04:25):
too much, not talking enough, talking about subjects that are
not a lawn related This is called being loose. Uh.
Sex and this doesn't just mean talking about sex. This
means looking at someone of the opposite gender. So they
would make you write down and confess if you were
attracted to anyone else in the school, and then if
you did that, they would bring it up. They would

(01:04:45):
call everyone together and say, hey, so and so thinks
Susie is hot, Like like, Susie, you don't think he's hot, right,
you think he's fucking hideous? Yeah, And like they would
do that in front of the whole school, Like you
have to admit that you have a crush on someone.
So they can make fun of you about it in
front of everyone else, quite literally, like the nightmare you
have as a junior high kid. Yeah, it's like exactly

(01:05:09):
nightmare is the whole school comes around and goes and
they and they make the person who's a crush on
you tell you that they think you're disgusting. Oh yeah,
it's really bad. Right. Um, you could get in trouble
for looking at someone of the opposite sex, But you
could also get in trouble for avoiding looking at someone
of the opposite sex, because that clearly means you have

(01:05:30):
a crush on them. Um, it's so good. Um, yeah,
you could get in trouble for basically anything. Yeah, it's
looking outside. Yeah you can't be looking outside, but you
can't all. But also the next one is looking at
the floor. Yeah, you have to be like constant state

(01:05:51):
of observation. Yeah, constant state of observation, always looking at
your fellow inmates. Robert, what does being sideways mean? Um? Okay,
when you sile, that's what I was thinking. I think
it just basically means like not following some sort of
like not not being on the program. Right, Like the

(01:06:12):
whole the only thing you're supposed to talk about with
each other. Is the program is like either what a
disaster your life would be without it, how it saved
your life, or like how someone else needs to do
a better job of following the program. Anything else is
being loose right, and you're not You're not supposed to
be doing that. Ship um every God. Yeah. The rest

(01:06:35):
of these are I think these are worse than the
first couple of ones you read, to be honest, which
one is having negative body language, reacting to insults, slouching
or yawning, looking at not falling asleep or sleeping for
too long so you can't be a person. No, they
keep you sleep deprived and they don't feed you enough,
because that's a great way to have a cold. Work

(01:06:56):
says it just says drawing. You can't draw. I'd be
done with the three books either I am? I am?
I am? What? Or school? Yeah? How do you? Okay? Whatever?
Go on? I mean, it's a about the kind of
school you do. Eventually, if you get to a high
enough rank, there's a library and you can even read
books if you get to a high enough rank, which

(01:07:18):
you get to by abusing your fellow students and maintaining
this this order, So again, that's part of the like,
after a couple of months of fighting back, you're so
fucking desperate to have a single like privilege that lets
you feel like a person that you will destroy the
people around you to get that right, right, And yeah,
you just made it a gladiator ring. Yeah, exactly for

(01:07:40):
just the slightest bit of stimulation that isn't total abused.
It's cool and good, miles cool and good. Every day
inmates would participate in in counter groups. These were smaller,
more focused versions of the game, where three to four
higher ranked inmates would sit down with a worker or
Ramrod and discuss their flaws. In ninety nine, the author
of the Corrections magazine article claims some sessions focused on

(01:08:03):
building up the self esteem of inmates and having peers
discussed their good qualities. This seems to have occurred at
some periods, and I've even found former allowance students who
will say that there were specific employees who were decent people.
Um Most of the accounts I found do not report
that building up self esteem was as common a task
for encounter groups as the opposite, which is breaking down

(01:08:25):
people's self conception of themselves. This was evident even in
nineteen quote. Encounters can run for ten minutes. They can
also go on for half a day. There are other
less frequent group sessions whose purposes to build up self
esteem rather than tear it down. Tears off. Tears often
flow in these sessions where residents talk about their good qualities.
It is moving to watch tears flow and encounter sessions too.

(01:08:47):
You want a knife, Bruce, you want to kill yourself,
asks Alice. Matter of factly, Bruce's lower lip is quivering.
Someone get me a knife. There's a rattle of a
drawer and someone hands Alice a silver blade. Here, Bruce,
kill yourself. Bruce whimpers. He cannot shout as the others do. No,
I don't want to change. I don't know why. I
just don't want to change his eyes redden, Alice sees,

(01:09:07):
is the chance to toughen this newcomer. Let me rip
your stomach out for a second. Okay, Bruce, you don't
think anyone likes you, do you? That's because you don't
think you're worth being liked. She turns to the group.
How many people feel that Bruce has an insatiable desire
to be loved but won't let that be because he
hates himself. Six hands grow up. If you're crying now, Bruce,
you should be. If you aren't crying, now Bruce, you
should be. He is. It's just like what the fun

(01:09:30):
mind game ship absolute torture, And again, Alice is just
like another kid right like this to like be Yeah,
physical abuse was just like, yeah, that's so weird. Like
you're just sort of nurturing the same fucked up skills
within everyone and it's just becoming this like a Petri
dish of dysfunction that you're just watching all the bacteria

(01:09:51):
like replicate and grow and geez. I mean it past
a certain point. All of the staff pretty much are
people who went to a law as kids because like
they can't do anything else, you know. Um. Physical abuse
was also extremely common in a Land. At its lowest levels,
it involved spankings administered by other students via ping pong paddle.

(01:10:13):
Administrators and employees were not supposed to partake in corporal punishment,
although whether or not they did is something that seems
to have varied from person to person over time during
the decades the school operated. Now, I was spanked in school,
and when I say students were given spankings. Depending on
your background, they may that may not sound too horrible.
Right At a laan, spankings were administered the way therapy

(01:10:34):
was in groups. Sometimes as many as a dozen students
would spank a single person, taking turns until the child's
buttocks was bruised and often bleeding. I found one account
from an a law and alumnus, Gregory Coleman, who actually
gave this account during the murder trial of another former
law student. At the time he gave the statement, Coleman
was in maximum security prison for criminal trespassing, which might

(01:10:56):
be a hint as to how well the program really worked.
But that's a story for another day. And you're saying
he was testifying at the murder trial. Yeah. Now, Back
in the seventies, Gregory had been sent to a lawn
for stealing a TV. He was one of many students
who participated in the mass paddling of a female student.
Decades later, he could not remember what she had done

(01:11:18):
to earn the punishment. Here is how his testimony on
that was described in a federal court document. She was
paddled so violently with open hands in a wooden mallet
that she had to be taken to the hospital. Coleman
nonchalantly testified that the assault was so horrific that she
went into shock and lost the ability to retain her
bowel movements. Pretty bad stuff. So fucking and then beginning

(01:11:40):
I was like, oh, yeah, man, this dude was just
a grifter insurance. And then I'm like, yeah, here we go.
Now we're getting to the bastard part. As I turn
away because I can't even focus him. Yeah. So yeah,
to from it's like it's not enough of all the
psychological ship and now we're talking about create eating you know,

(01:12:01):
generations of kids who probably needed actual, you know, professional
help that was more centered around their humanity rather than
some dude getting off on creating like the Thunderdome of abuse.
Uh yeah, it's a lot. So Miles, how are you.

(01:12:21):
How are you feeling today after all this good? I'm sweating, sexy. Yeah,
the just I'm just trying to focus on my catalytic converters.
I'm not gonna lie right now. The only thing catalytic converter.
Catalytic converters don't abuse kids. You know, they would never
spank a child. All they do is get stolen by

(01:12:43):
us in order to make profit and it's beautiful. I
think that's beautiful. Miles. We saw him for fifteen roses
on Craigslist. All right, well we're going to talk more
about a law in school in part two, including its
most notorious therapy, the Ring. But that's gonna have to
wait till Thursday. Oh Miles, you are not going to

(01:13:06):
have a good time. Yeah, it's real bad, buddy. I
don't I take these fucking like w w E event
names like you know, Harry Ring a general like like, Okay,
well it's all right if it helps. It's a lot
worse than the w w E. Okay, yeah, that's that's true.
I guess that doesn't help me. Yeah, well that's the episode, Miles.

(01:13:31):
You got any you know if you like? I feel
like nicey nice stuff, right, I just get high and
talk about trash reality TV like Fiance checkout for twenty
day Fiance. Also, so if the Alexander somebody you have
here on the time, that's my co host. So that's
where we do that and daily Side check out for
twenty day check it out, check out for twenty day

(01:13:52):
and um check out Catalytic Converters by crawling up underneath
a Toyota Prius with a set of bolt cuts, and
just start cutting, just start cutting until you get the
good ship. There you go, cutting for gold. That's how
it works, baby, all right,

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part One: Elan School: The Worst 'Troubled Teen' Facility