Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Elan School: The Worst 'Troubled Teen' Facility

Episode Date: July 29, 2021

Robert is joined again by Miles Gray to continue to discuss The Elan School. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

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Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Of the Zoom Lady, Miles Gray. Miles, praise her. Oh, praise me to the ZL, the Zoom Lady that is, for without her contributions to our mortal galaxy, we would have nothing. Thank you for having me. Thank you for being on, Miles, and thank you for creating the first religious schism in our new cult that will eventually turn into a war that kills billions.

Which is, of course, whether or not we can abbreviate the Zoom Lady's name to ZL. To the ZL. And we've talked about this off mic, and like I said, you come with your people, I'll come with mine, and I guess we'll see who's alive in the end. Yes, I am excited for when we both gain access to nuclear silos and can really take this disagreement over theology to an apocalyptic level. Oh, I think that's the one thing we both agree on, and we're excited for. Secretly, it's like, we don't care who wins.

It's just about the joy of starting a nuclear war, Miles. It's just about doing that thing we saw during a mushroom trip, where we're like, dude, what if you saw a mushroom cloud right in front of you, though? Wouldn't that be rad? Look at us, our Zoom Lady cult now. Praise be. Praise be. So, Miles, when we were talking last time, if you remember, I don't know, you might have forgotten. That's right.

Some kids spanked a girl so badly she lost control of her bowels and had to be hospitalized. Because everything in Elan was done communally, including physical punishments. Which we're going to talk about a lot more today. There's a lot. Oh, it gets so much worse, Miles. So much worse. So, by the mid-70s, Elan had moved to the facility that would occupy for the majority of its existence in Poland's springs. Most of its residents lived on the five-acre facility, which included Elan-1, an administrative trailer,

and six other numbered buildings that acted as dormitories, classroom space, etc. There were two other Elan facilities, including one in Parsonsfield, Maine, that had once been a TB sanitarium. The space for all these facilities was necessary, or all of the space was necessary, because in the early 70s, Elan got a bunch of positive press reports, which brought hundreds of new residents to the program. So, again, yeah.

What are positive press resorts? What's a positive press resort for this guy? That this is saving kids whose lives are completely out of control. That this will give you back your kid. This will get them off of drugs. Nothing is worse than having a kid who's a drug addict, so anything Elan does is just. And the idea that this is the best kind of treatment for them.

This specific program is... Joe Ritchie built it as the Rolls-Royce of Teen Treatment programs. And I remember even... Because this is even with Kellogg, right? Although just wacky remedies that were just essentially ways to fuck people up, were there at least success stories that they would be like, oh, and then check out this kid who, you know, stopped naying like a horse? Yes, throughout the existence of the program,

there are kids who will claim it'll save their life. There's even some kids who hated it, but also will say like, it saved my life because I was like really into heroin, and I probably would have OD'd without it. It also has permanently damaged my brain. Like, the positive stories tend to be like, I would have died without it. Also, I am forever changed because of this program

in ways that are profoundly negative and complex. Right, I feel deeply disconnected to who I used to be. This is not to say there are some positive stories, and we can speculate on some of those people. Sure, sure. But when you go through reports of people who were there, the overwhelming reports are not possible. Now, that said, this is the early 70s.

Nobody's talking about this place online. You don't have a lot of former kids coming out, and a lot of these kids, it's a mix of rich kids who go there, and generally if you're rich, you do get some kind of special treatment, right? And wards of the state, and so nobody cares what the wards of the state say. Right.

And nobody's really able to check up on them to tell whether or not they actually have a high success rate, which we're going to talk about in a bit. So, it was certainly the popular perception that the Alon School was like, again, the Rolls-Royce. Like, this is the nicest place you can syndicate for this kind of intense rehab facility. It's at this beautiful compound in the woods in Maine.

Like, it's like a summer camp, you know? That was kind of the way this was marketed. Now, 1975 was a key year in the evolution of the Alon School. It's the year where a number of the most questionable aspects of early Alon procedures started to turn toxic. And one possible catalyst for the growing toxicity of the Alon School may be the fact that Joe Ritchie had an increasingly severe drug addiction of his own.

So, Joe's friends seemed to be pretty consistent that he was not a heroin addict as a kid. But whatever the truth was, his old injuries from his car accident started bothering him while he worked prior to opening the Alon School. And a number of his colleagues there mentioned to his wife that they were worried about how many pills he was taking. Sherry confronted him and he told her that he needed the pills

because his pain was unbearable. Now, once the Alon School started, Joe kept using. Sherry eventually realized that Dr. Davidson, their business partner, was prescribing her husband Opiates, which is, again, very ethical doctor here. She went to the doctor saying, hey, Joe is an addict and you should probably not give him a blank check for drugs. And he told her, hey, I know what I'm doing.

Don't tell me how to do my job. I'm a psychiatrist. Back off, lady. I'm running the Rolls Royce of Abuse Thunderdoms. And one of the things that's interesting about this is that later on in like the late 90s, when Joe Ritchie stops working there most of the time, he eventually, like, the school is still running,

but he's not really there most of the time, not involved in the day-to-day. The guy who replaces him running the program is also a heroin addict and is using actively while he's running the school. It's interesting. So Joe had a problem. Dr. Davidson did not know what he was doing.

And although Joe didn't really drink much, his pill usage caused wild mood swings, irritable and abusive behavior. When he would have a mood swing, the easiest people for him to take it out on were the patients at his school. So by 1975, this was becoming a serious problem. And that same year, his 54-year-old father, Bamboo,

shot one of his friends during a bar fight when his friend tried to de-escalate things after he called another patron the N-word. So Joe's dad goes to prison for shooting a dude. And yeah, this is a bad year. 75 is a bad year for Joe Ritchie, the point I'm building towards. And on July 22nd, it got even worse.

The state of Illinois sent a team of five investigators, a psychiatrist and four social workers, to Elan for a surprise evaluation. This was standard procedure when more than 10 wards of the state had been placed in the facility. So more than 10 kids from Illinois get sent to the Elan School.

And they say, like, oh, we have to send a team up there to make sure that it's like a good school, you know? Very reasonable idea, right? Yeah, the team stayed for two days. They talked with staff and residents and they observed daily activities. Now, this was the first inspection Elan School had. And so it came as a surprise

and as a result, they hadn't prepared ahead of time. Oh, my God. They hadn't cleaned anything up. Let's take the signs down. Take the signs down. Oh, we've got to stop hitting the kids till they shit themselves. What the fuck?

It turns out psychiatrists don't usually like that. Oh, guys, we've been doing this all wrong, according to them. So we can just pretend we don't do all this fucked up stuff. So the team found a number of horrifying things. One staff member in charge of a house where seven Illinois residents lived admitted he had a criminal history of assaulting women.

His third such assault had seriously injured his victim, which is why he'd been sent to Elan before graduating and being hired as staff there. He admitted to investigators that he had difficulty relating to women and was monitored by other staff to make sure that he didn't assault any female residents. Oh, my God. Now, that might be a mark against you, you know?

Maybe you shouldn't be in charge of a house full of teenagers, including teenage girls, if you have a history of repeatedly criminally assaulting women. Perhaps not. Right, maybe. Yeah, yes. I don't think that's a part of the evaluation that most people realize just in general

that you don't want to be... Well, I guess I don't know whose fault that is. I mean, honestly, like they hired him. They did hire him. And here's my truth. And they're like, ooh. Here's my truth. I love criminally assaulting women.

Well, good news about this job. So do we. Yeah, you know what? And that's their fault for hiring you, honestly. Now, the investigators were also horrified by general meetings, the constant pattern of verbal abuse in a lawn, and the frequency of spankings. They eventually found out that the resident director

with a history of assaulting women had spanked numerous residents. So the staff had claimed like, well, we make sure he doesn't assault women, even though he has a history of it. And then they were like, well, but yeah, but he gets to spank them. He's using a paddle. Okay.

It's professional. What the fuck are they thinking? Team members of this Illinois monitoring team overheard constant verbal assaults from staffers to residents, including lines like, you motherfucking whore, you cock-sucking, titty-sucking, motherfucking asshole, and other things that did not seem like therapeutic criticism. Oh my God.

This is so wild to me, though, like you know how bad this is where outside observers come in, and it's become so normal that they're like, yeah, okay, back to our regular scheduled programming, which is just tearing people down verbally and like with the worst language. Now, when they interviewed the nurse, she revealed that she had gotten vaginal smears

and rectal exams from female residents before they started class, as well as semen samples from male residents. She said this was to test for VD. Semen samples were obtained by giving boys a small cup, directing them to a private room, and ordering them to masturbate. So the team from Illinois was like,

this seems not like the way you'd test for STDs, and they reached out to several doctors to be like, is it normal to get a cum sample from kids to test for STDs? And all of the doctors were like, oh, what? Yeah, that's exactly right. All of the doctors were like, what the fuck are you talking about? You don't need semen to test for this.

Someone told you this out loud? Yeah. You need to get this person away from children immediately. What the fuck are you talking about? I almost fainted. Oh my God, what? It's so fucked up. So the team from, yeah,

the nurse also admitted to handing out controlled substances without prescriptions to kids. For what? For whatever. Mainly birth control pills, which were given upon request and without carrying out a physical exam first. Now, none of that's great,

but what really freaked the investigators out was learning about the ring. Now, the ring has become one of the most infamous facts about a lawn. The ring was a boxing ring, where two people would beat each other up with gloves. But it was also a literal ring of people, Miles. The individual being punished would be forced to fight everyone in the ring,

sometimes more than 10 people, so that even if they were good at fighting and big, they would eventually be overwhelmed by sheer exhaustion and beaten bloody. In interviews, when this became widely known later, Joe Ritchie claimed that the ring was only given as punishment to bullies who had used or threatened physical violence against others. His argument was that you had to show these people

that there was always someone bigger than them. So that's what Joe claimed, yeah. Either way, no matter what you say. Either way, that's not how you teach children. Yeah, I'm like, okay, just shut up right there. So you do admit you're making them fight each other and then you make this fucking battle while you're out fighting in the Hill format?

Hey, yeah, but hold on, hold on, hold on. The point is, no, there's no point. The point is that you're forcing these kids doing it, fuck up. Yeah, I don't care about your reasoning. You're making children fight in a ring. Oh my God, here we go. Okay, so what do you suggest? So here's the reality the team from Illinois saw.

I'm going to quote from Duck in a Raincoat again. Those used to defeat the person being punished were mostly large, well-built boys fighting both male and female residents. Two residents independent... Oh, you're having issues already, Miles. Are you serious? Yeah, they picked the big kids for it.

Two residents independently talked about a young female being forced into the ring. When she resisted, she was held down while residents attempted to tie box and gloves on her hands. When that failed, she was sent into the ring bare-fisted and without headgear. Investigators also cited an incident where a pregnant girl was put in the ring and defeated.

Evaluators observed that... Oh my God. It's pretty bad. What the fuck? Evaluators observed that residents could be sent into the ring for any infraction, including not sharing in discussion groups. So no, not just bullies. If you don't want to talk in the group

about who you have a crush on, you're going to get beaten up by large teenage boys in a circle. Because you're not forthcoming with your pain in a fucking environment that is only meant to exploit it and make you feel worse, and then you have to fucking beat... Yeah, beating a pregnant girl. This is happening in the 90s, Miles. This evaluation is 75, but the ring goes on for decades.

The ring goes, oh my God. What the fuck? Please tell me, this better have a fucking good ending, man. It doesn't. Motherfucker. I mean, elements of it are good. So we'll talk more... What show do you think this is?

We'll talk more about the ring later. Another punishment, the investigator. Yeah, Miles. Oh, buddy. Oh, yeah. I mean, yeah, we got to talk about the kid it killed. But first, we're going to talk about another punishment the investigators discovered, which might actually be worse.

Now, this was called electric sauce. You want to take a guess as to what electric sauce was, Miles? Dude, no. That's so fucked up sounding. Yeah, I know. It's really bad. Quote, yeah, Miles? No, I can't even...

Don't do it. My brain's like short circuiting, even trying to combine... It's a really bad school. We've covered some, like honestly, elements of this sound not as bad as the German school that raped all those kids. The Waldorf school, right? No, no, that was just the weird cult school. You did?

Yeah. Yeah, so I'm going to... I mean, we've covered some really bad schools. Between the residential schools... Definitely not as bad as the residential schools. Ireland, I mean... But I guess the residential schools killed thousands, right? So much worse.

There's an element of this that is more disturbing just because in those schools, they're killing kids systematically through neglect and through just a lack of caring about their health. This is obviously less horrible. It's not an act of genocide. But the level of thought Joe Ritchie put into how to craft this engine of child abuse,

there's something like uniquely unsettling about it in a way that hasn't been present before in any of these other schools. It's just such an intricately crafted machinery of child abuse. That's what's so like the fuck about this to me. Yeah. Not trying to play which is worse than they obviously... Again, the genocide schools are worse,

but there's something about this that's like primally unsettling, like the level of thought this man spent decades designing an engine to abuse children. And again, there's so many of these stories that it's just repeating cycles of abuse because he went to some fucking place. Who knows what the fuck happened at the place he went? Yeah.

Right. So you're ready to finally learn about what the electric sauce was, Miles? Oh God, I'd forgotten about the title. Yeah, we still haven't gotten into the electric sauce. Quote, Electric sauce was the term used to describe a mixture of garbage, ketchup, mustard, cigarette butts, and other refuse, which was poured over a person's head as a form of punishment.

The report indicated that human feces were sometimes included in this sauce. What? Yeah, they're shitting and coming into buckets and throwing in trash and pouring it on people's heads when they're bad. And again, and if you're an investigator... This is therapy, by the way. What is Richie saying?

Yeah. And I'm sorry, what does the electric fucking sauce do? Richie denies that this is a part of the school, right? Like this is not the kind of, he'll defend like the ring and stuff, and they do stop using the electric sauce eventually. Yeah, because there's no defense of the electric sauce. I could shoot a cop to the electric sauce, then I would the ring, if we're gonna weigh the two.

It's good to know where your lion is, Miles. Yeah, I mean, I'm like, if I got to own one, I'm like, well, at least no kids dying from being in a fist fight ring, and it's just straight up. Well... I mean, I don't even know why I'm trying to act like one's better than the other. Again, yeah. Look at what this show's done to me.

I'm gonna read you another fun quote about other punishments at the Elan School, Miles. Digging ditches was apparently still another reprimand. A day of digging ditches under surveillance was a common practice. After each ditch was dug, the resident being punished would be required to fill it back up again, and repeat the process for the duration of the punishment. The use of handcuffs was also alleged.

One resident explained that he had been handcuffed for about five hours for striking someone. Another had been ordered by a staff member to handcuff a girl to a table by placing the cuffs around her ankles. One of the Illinois wards had his shoes taken away. During his six weeks at Elan, he had made repeated requests for shoes, but the requests were denied because he was told that if he had shoes, he might run away.

When this child was brought back to Chicago, he had blood poisoning in one foot. What the fuck? Okay. So, you might expect, Miles, that when a government agency finds all of this shit out and writes a report on it in 1975, the end of the program would come soon after,

as would criminal charges for a lot of the people involved. Absolutely. This would be a pretty full episode if this ended in 1975, because we've talked about some bad shit here. But this is the United States of America. I need to remind you of that again, as I did in episode one, Miles. And the Elan School continued to operate for more than 30 years after this point. Because, again, parents have a sacred right to pay people to torture their children

if they think it's a good idea. That's unbelievable. So, they were just able to skate under that premise? Well, we're going to talk about how they got away with it. But the core of why they got away with it is there is a widespread idea that is particularly normative among conservative Americans that as a parent, you are the ultimate arbiter of what happens to your child. And they don't have rights.

You have a sacred right to do whatever the fuck you want to that kid is a punishment, right? Of course. It's a popular refrain. I'm the adult and you are the child. Maybe children should have equivalent rights to adults, even though we all agree children should not have equivalent responsibilities, they shouldn't have access to all of the same things that adults do. For example, I don't think nine-year-olds should be able to buy cars or guns, but perhaps they are entitled to the exact same human rights.

Well, come on down to Miles' catalytic converter barn, where no matter your age, you're walking out of here juiced up, baby. I think we should be teaching kids, because kids can get under the car easily, their little hands can reach in there. Oh, we should train stats. Miles, we could start a teen rehab facility, where we get kids off of dope by teaching them to steal catalytic converters. Um, no.

Sophie, you always stomp on my dreams to create residential schools for children. What, is this one illegal too? Like the other 15 ideas you said no to, Sophie? Yeah, she hates it when I talk about crimes. I like being able to pay my rent. Well, you could pay your rent in catalytic converters, just drop a bag of them off at the manager's office, Sophie. There you go.

You'd be like, hey, here's a bag of cats that's going to take care of me for the rest of the year, right? Wink. Give him a little wink. No. If he's smart, he'll take the deal. So, the good news is that the Illinois investigators did take the kids who were wards of the state away from the Elan School.

They issued a damning report that includes these lines. Quote, Elan will argue that the evaluation team has taken occurrences out of context, and that contrary to the findings of the evaluation team, the incidents were in the best interests of the child. Regardless of the reasons given by Elan, excusing or justifying the incidents, each and every incident reported is directly contrary to Illinois law and regulations, and under no circumstances can the agency permit any of its wards

to reside at an institution where such events occur. These practices violate the child's civil rights and liberties and deprive him of his self-respect and dignity. Under no circumstances can the Department of Education and Family Services permit any child to be subjected to Elan, which is good, good on you guys who tried in the fucking state of Illinois. I don't have a lot of praise for the state of Illinois,

but they did their best. And so, at the very least, that meant no more wards of the state would be going to this program. Oh, no, good God, no, no, no, no. It just means Illinois won't send kids for a while. Oh, just for a while. Well, and just that the state won't. Other kids from Illinois keep getting sent there.

We'll talk about that in a minute. Private citizens can now endlessly indulge in that. Yeah, very little actually changes, and we're about to talk about why. There's a lot of blow up about this, right? This becomes very public. The news is like all the fucking electric sauce and the beating pits.

People are not wild about this. But you know what people are wild about, Miles? The new bottle, the line of electric sauces from Heinz? Exactly. Heinz electric sauce. Now with 80% more feces and cum squirted on a child's head when they disbehave, misbehave, whatever. Ah, shit.

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We're back and we're talking about how the constant exposure to the horrors that this show exposes us to may have caused me to make some off-color comments that I ought not. We have these moments. It is like a real problem. We had this with the Irish schools episode where I think Sophia and I went a little bit hard on the dark humor because you just get overwhelmed with this eventually.

There's nothing to do but laugh about the electric sauce. No, it's like you're like someone who's been on the seas too long looking sharks in the eye at a certain point. You're just like, they've seen a lot of... You ever looked into an Alon school teacher's eyes, dead eyes, like a doll's eyes. Okay, sir. Again, I'm just here to take your order.

I do have fun with the Wendy's girl. So, Miles, there's this report comes out, right? It's bad. There's a bunch of bad press for the Alon school. And this prompts the governor of Maine to visit the school. Now, obviously, they have warning this time and they clean up the school ahead of the governor's visit. And he's like, oh, this seems fine.

But once he reads the report from Illinois, he has Maine's Department of Human Services issue a very speedy interim report. And the purpose of this report was to protect the Alon school, which had become a multimillion-dollar business, and thus protect Maine's economy as well, right? His concern is this would be bad for Maine's economy if this big business has to leave.

So, since Richie had warning before this investigation, he tasked his employees with making everything look squeaky clean. One teenage staff member later told Mara Curly, quote, we lied through our teeth. What we couldn't cover up, we admitted to as the exception rather than the rule. The residents were thrilled when the place was overrun with investigators because they had a real fun time.

We laid off everybody then, but everything the Illinois investigators said was true, every last word of it. Now, the Illinois investigators found a bunch of horrible shit and they wrote about it very unsparingly, like, this is a child abuse factory and should be closed immediately. The Maine investigators, who, again,

were sent there specifically to exonerate the Alon school to keep money in the state of Maine, found this, quote, no evidence of unjustifiable denials of civil liberties such as treatment, brutality, or anything that could be considered abhorrent to all accepted standards of child care. The residents of Alon interviewed usually expressed newfound feelings of dignity, self-assurance,

and mental well-being. They attributed these feelings to the treatment they received at Alon. Responding to the charges of the ring, spankings, and a physical abuse, Maine investigators wrote, one of the cardinal rules of the Alon program is that the use of physical violence

by either a staff member or a resident is strictly outlawed. Again, Joe Richie had admitted to the, using the ring, like, it's just nonsense. It's just a report full of lies paid for by the government of Maine to keep a business in the state. And part probably is Joe Richie's bribing people. He does that a lot.

He's very involved in politics in Maine, because he's a millionaire after a certain point. Right. Oh, my God. Now, since the ring had by this point gone viral as the most terrifying measure in Alon's arsenal, Maine state investigators had to make a declaration on that, too. They defended it after writing that violence wasn't used by saying, quote,

only acts of repeated physical violence result in a person being placed in the ring where rounds last about one minute and where the participants are evenly matched. Again, all of this is a lie, based on hundreds of reports. And now they're acting like, oh, but we've made it,

the regulations are way better now. We're seeing a way, we're getting fair ones now. We've got kids engaging in fair ones, not just straight up. Even if this was like a school where it's like, we only have one minute boxing matches for kids. It's like, why do you have children fighting? Well, okay, yeah, but they're,

but they're matched based on their weight class. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I'm again, if you do have a boxing class, that's fine. But boxing is a punishment I would call child abuse. Yeah, absolutely. Also, we should have a conversation about whether kids should be able to box

or play things like football that will damage their brains when they're too young to make an informed decision about whether or not they want to damage their brains. That's a, that's a subject for a different day. Not that you shouldn't be able to box or play football, but maybe not as a child. I don't know. So since the ring had by this point gone viral

was the most terrifying measure in Alans. Oh, right. Sorry to read that. So we'll talk more about the ring later. What's important for now is that hundreds of former students have come forward representing decades worth of time at Alan and all claimed that this is bullshit. The report had a bunch of other frustrating nonsense in it, but the gist of it was that Joe Ritchie in his school

get a clean bill of not committing crimes against humanity from their host state. They use this to repost back at Illinois, filing a civil complaint and alleging that the evaluation team had defamed Alan and done $6.1 million in actual damages and $4 million in punitive damages. Illinois filed suit in response, suing a district court and charging that Alan employees

had abused wards of the state. They requested damages too. A flurry of lawsuits followed, and in the end both sides settled without any money going anywhere except into the pockets of lawyers. The state kind of gives up after a point. Because again, these kids are wards of the state. They don't have anyone buying them.

It's not worth it, right? Purely just, yeah, statistics. Yeah, because our legal system is perfect. Now, earlier I quoted a teenage staff member, one of the people who was technically an inmate but reached a high position within the program. That person's name was Kinzeretsky. He was part of the architecture of violence at Alan,

organizing the ring, verbally abusing and physically abusing other children and making sure it all ran smoothly. Years later, he told Mara Curley, quote, but I was brainwashed. I may have abused someone, but I was a victim too. It can be compared to a mother in the concentration camps pushing the buttons on her children in the ovens.

How can you falter for that? Now, this is not a thing that ever happened at concentration camps. They just didn't work that way. That's nonsense. Kin didn't have an education though, so. Yeah, I'm like, what's... I'm sorry, what was that bit of...

This broader point, there actually is, if you'd known anything about the Holocaust, there's a better point you can make, which is that a lot of the actual, the physical work necessary to make the death camps run was done by Jews who were interned in the camps, right? And these were Jewish inmates who got some kind of privileges,

mainly the privileges that they didn't get killed as quickly, but they were the ones who were like pushing, shoveling the bodies in, like literally making the gas chambers work. Yeah, doing the maintenance. The poison was always put in by a doctor, but they were necessary to make it work. And these guys did, obviously,

even though they're making a concentration camp work, you can't judge them for it. Like he's right about that, when you are forced into it. Yeah, within the confines of your... Yeah. And at that point, I think he's right about it. If you're a child forced into this,

and you do horrible things to other kids in order to make your own experience less terrible, because that's what this place is designed to do, you're not really at fault. You know, I think there's a certain point, especially if you grow up and you come back to as an adult where you become culpable, but like a fucking 16-year-old agreeing to beat kids up in the ring,

because otherwise you're going to get the shit kicked out of you. Yeah. Then you're going to beat this shit out of that. Yeah. That's how you're out of your own self-interest. Yeah. And in the same way, if you're forced into a death camp,

and your chance to avoid getting murdered is to help the death camp operate, you're not morally responsible to that, I would argue. Sure. But Zaretsky, again, received no education. So I don't think he knows much about the Holocaust. Yeah. You heard some interesting things along the way, I'm sure.

Yeah. So Zaretsky provides us with some interest in context for how the whole system functioned outside of the school itself. He was a private referral sent to a lawn by a doctor named Marvin Schwartz. Marvin's nickname was Mr. Adolescent Illinois, which is one of the worst nicknames I've heard about in my life. He is said to have single-handedly built a lawn with his private referrals. Schwartz was a friend and colleague of Dr. Davidson,

and he received a kickback for every child he sent to a lawn. We now know that Dr. Zaretsky was only wrong in his statement that Schwartz built a lawn single-handedly. Dr. Davidson was also responsible for referrals, and there were a whole network of other psychiatrists like Dr. Schwartz, who knew Dr. Davidson, who would basically go to his friends in other states and be like, hey, I got this school,

every time you send a kid to us, I'll kick you a few hundred bucks. Right. You know? That's how this place works. It's just multi-level marketing for abuse. Exactly. Send the same very similar models.

One of the most fucked up things about the work of those Illinois investigators is that ultimately, you could argue it helped the school because it brought them a bunch of press, and they were able to defend themselves. Journalists went to them for the state, they were able to make statements in their defense, and a lot of people decided, oh, sounds like this tough love approach works,

like it's just some weak liberals in the Illinois state who want it to keep going. So they got more? Yeah, they got money. Yeah, and they got to make statements like this to the press, and this is Dr. Davidson speaking to the Corrections Magazine in 1979 about the Illinois investigation. What happened was we got some conventional,

middle-aged mental health workers who saw certain things they did not understand. The other thing was that the governor of Illinois at the time was a self-righteous guy. He was trying to make political hay by bringing all the juveniles back to the state. They were disrupting things, asking kids, why do you obey?

Now, in the same interview, Joe Ritchie was asked about the Illinois team, and he claimed it was a raid from the start. They were very unprofessional. They got drunk at one meal, and then came back to Elan to work. I didn't like that. Ritchie would also claim accurately

that three of the kids removed from Elan by Illinois eventually fled back to the Elan school. He claimed this was evidence that the program helped those kids. I think it was more evidence that when you abuse someone enough, they can't exist outside of the system of abuse that you built for them, which is why so many kids went to work there as adults. Because you break people in such a way

that they can't exist outside of this weird little society you've built in your school. Precisely. Yeah. Would be my argument. Now, this does, however, bring us to a very valid question. Is there any evidence that Elan's program worked? That 1979 Corrections Magazine article notes that,

at the time it was written, Elan had only been doing follow-up checks on former residents for two years. They claimed that of the 500 people who'd been admitted to Elan at that point, 326 had been tracked down. Of these, 190 had graduated the program. 78% of these people had stayed out of trouble with Elan.

On that strength, Elan claimed that nearly 80% of their graduates were successful, right? 80% success rate, basically. Now, that's a lie based on their own data. Because they tracked down 326 kids, right? 190 graduate, and they say 78% of these people stayed out of trouble with the law. That makes it a success.

But 136 of them didn't graduate, and only 26% of those kids were arrested or jailed again, which means dropouts had an identical success rate to graduates, basically. So number one, that makes it seem like maybe it had nothing, whether or not you graduate the Elan School didn't have anything to do about your success. But Corrections Magazine, in their write-up,

gave further reasons to doubt that data. Elan's recidivism figures are so low, especially given the fact that many of their referrals are from state agencies or hardcore delinquents, that most researchers would find them suspicious. Perhaps one explanation is that most of the follow-up was done by questionnaire. Without any attempt to confirm the information,

the former residents applied through official records. Of the 12 states who refer children to Elan, only four have ever done any follow-up, and that was limited and informal. Maryland, Rhode Island, Oregon, and Vermont surveyed a total of 71 former Elan residents. They found that 12, 17% of them were in jail. 17 were working or in school,

and 42 were, in the words of one official, living marginal lives that included some petty crime, frequent unemployment, and overuse of alcohol or drugs. So that doesn't sound like a great success rate to me. Not at all. And also, again, they're basing this whole no trouble with the law. They're basing 80% of our students went on

to have, you know, law-abiding lives based on self-reporting from those students rather than actually confirming anything. All of their data's bullshit, basically. There's no evidence this school helped any... There's no evidence this school helped anyone. Obviously, individuals will say it helped me, but there's no evidence that, like,

as a population, Elan students were less likely to commit crimes or have drug abuse problems than any other group of kids in a similar situation. It's almost like it's a total crock of sadistic shit that wasn't intended to do anything except make money. Just a child abuse factory.

Rhode Island sent a team of investigators to Elan, who were horrified to find that not only did the business lack a board of directors, it lacked any oversight mechanism to review tactics or employee behavior. The investigators talked to Dr. Davidson and were shocked to find out that he spent no time at the facility and was unable

to provide answers about stuff like the ring. There were three MA psychologists on staff, but all were recent hires, who, like Dr. Davidson, knew nothing about how the school functioned on a daily basis. And some students will claim that, like, those people were protected from knowing anything about the school.

They were brought in to do therapy sessions, and, like, you never got to do therapy alone. There would always be a student watching you, so if you said anything, you would get punished. So you would only... Yeah, exactly. They would do this for every visit. You're talking to your parents on the phone, and if someone's listening, they'll disconnect it

if you say anything bad is going on. We'll talk more about that later. 60% of former residents were found to... were later found to have been arrested for criminal violations. They noted that this was likely to be a conservative estimate of failure, because criminal records did not reflect child abuse,

neglect, mental health institutionalization, or a variety of other factors. So Rhode Island finds 60% of former Alon residents go on to be arrested for something, and more are probably having some sort of issue. It just wasn't reflected by the criminal justice system, because they were just beating their own kids, right? Right.

Like, that's literally what the state says. Oh, my God. None of these investigations did anything to stop Joe Richier, Dr. Davidson, for becoming millionaires. Joe and his wife, Sherry, bought a mansion. They got all the status symbols of success, a bunch of fancy cars.

But the wealthier Joe gets, and the more expansive the Alon school becomes, the more abusive and deranged he gets in his own relationship. I'm going to quote from Duck in a raincoat again here. In his marriage, Richie began employing the techniques he used at Alon. If his wife annoyed her angered him,

she'd be punished. One punishment was embarrassment and humiliation in the presence of other staff members. According to one former staffer, he'd shoot her down in a long term to describe the taking of authority away from someone who had misused it by humiliating her at staff meetings, or he'd purposely exclude her from decision-making,

instructing people not to tell her something. At first, we were led to believe that they had a perfect marriage, a former resident recalled. But after a while, it was apparent to some of us that it was far from it. Sometimes Richie would disappear, and when Sherry called Alon to find him, he wouldn't speak to her.

Once she was informed that he'd taken a blond social worker with him to Las Vegas. Yeah, there's a lot to say about like his kind of sexual relationships. It doesn't seem like he mostly wanted to fuck. It was just kind of a power thing. He wanted these young women around doing what he was saying.

I don't know. Thanks. Richie would insist on forcing attractive female residents of Alon to act as babysitters for his children. If Sherry complained, he would call her neurotic. One of these nannies later admitted to burning their son with a cigarette. When Sherry complained, Richie told her

that the staff member had changed, or the resident had changed, and he wasn't being fair to her by not giving her another chance. Oh my God. Okay, cool. So Sherry had a number of nervous breakdowns for which she was hospitalized in 1976.

While she was in recovery, Joe showed up to present her with a diamond and a sapphire necklace in full view of the nurses in order to like make the nurses, so the nurses wouldn't believe anything she'd say about him being abusive. Because look at Joe out of this necklace. He's the dream husband.

Yeah, I mean, yeah. This looks like the husband of the year. I mean, those are chocolate diamonds by Jane Seymour. Yeah, like we're mostly going to focus on the Alon school here and not Richie's personal life, but he's just a comprehensively abusive person. Right, so. You know who isn't a comprehensively abusive person

unless it's a Koch Brothers ad? Yeah, or, I don't know, Volkswagen? Kind of gaslit all of us with the, like literally actually with the diesel stuff. Yeah, we were like, we're nuts. Yeah. So, unless it's one of those. I see the point.

Missions to see here. Yeah, everything's fine. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson,

and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver.

At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad-ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine,

I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country,

the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman.

Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We're back. So Sherry started going to therapy and came to accept how fucked up Joe Ritchie was and how unhealthy their marriage had become. By 1978, they'd filed for divorce. The following year, Joe bought a nearby racetrack. The details of this transaction are sketchy as hell and it seems like he was involved with the mob.

The FBI certainly thought he was. Also at one point, the racetrack burnt down conveniently and he made a bunch of money. Burn a racetrack down. Just like this thing. Yeah, there's some sort of. Anyway, we're not going to dwell too much on that. I want to tell a couple of stories of other kids

who were sent to the Alon School. First, let's talk about Phil Newell. In 1981, Phil's father beat their mother, his ex-wife, nearly to death with a pipe. She spent the next 28 years almost in Sinsate in a nursing home. Phil and his sister became wards of the state and were sent first to a foster home.

By 1982, Phil had grown into a sweet but troubled teen. His sister later recalled, he was beautiful, all the girls liked him and I remember I used to get mad because that was my brother and I didn't want any girls around him. We were close, we were really close. But he also dealt with fits of anger, which is very understandable and expected

from a kid whose mom was beaten so badly by his dad that he had to become a ward of the state, right? Of course you're going to have some anger issues. And he mostly hurt himself. He would slam his head into walls and such. Migraine seemed to be a trigger for his violence. He had horrible migraines. And at one point during a migraine,

he swung his foster brother by the ankles into a couch. Like he just has a fit and he attacks his foster brother. Not a serious injury, but he gets sent to a youth center as a result of this. And when that didn't work, the state sent him to the Alon School. His sister continues, quote, we were told Alon was a step up from the youth center

because he got transferred and that he was doing well and that everything was going good and that he was going to come home. He came home in a box. So at the time, when he dies and like, I think it's 76 is when he dies, she's told that

it was an aneurysm, which I mean, it wasn't any, but she was just told that he had an aneurysm while he was at the school. And that's what she believed for 33 years, that he had just had a freak aneurysm at this normal school until in 2016, a former Alon resident named Mark Babitz tracked her down.

And I'm going to quote from the Sun Journal here. He tracked down Newell and put her on the phone with a witness who said Phil didn't just collapse one day as the family had been told. He'd been forced into Alon's infamous boxing ring and beaten by other teenagers because he complained of a headache. The witness saw Phil collapse,

spasm and turn blue. Eventually, staff took him away. He was dead within a day. Now, the Sun Journal spoke with that witness in another and although some of the details differ, their stories are essentially the same. And it turns out that stories of Phil's death had begun circulating online

in communities of Alon survivors starting in 2003. The first reference to his death came from a friend of his who said that on Christmas weekend, Phil was forced to go three rounds in the ring before he passed out and started vomiting. He lay on the floor for an hour before being given medical attention.

Another former student, Ann Bowen, gave a slightly different story. He thought he was manipulating the system by pretending to have a headache, so they put him in the ring. The only difference with her argument is that she doesn't recall him passing out. At first, he was just like

walked away from the ring having head issues and then eventually collapsed. But he definitely went into the ring for having a migraine. Yeah, he went into the ring for having a migraine, was beaten and died soon after. Yeah. Again, possible he would have died without the ring, but also possible that if, for example,

they'd treated his migraines seriously, he might have gotten medical care or something. Yeah. Or at least wouldn't have had his last experience before death getting beaten by a bunch of children in a ring. Yeah. So, there was an investigation into Phil's death, but it occurred so late

and five years after Alon itself closed that nothing conclusive came of it. It is worth noting that this network of former students who are the reason that his sister finds out about this were eventually what brings the Alon school down. They start to organize in like the early

2000s and whatnot and then carry out a campaign to report this place. It was a long process like killing the Alon school and it took years and years and years to do. Meanwhile, throughout the 80s and 90s, Alon saw hundreds and hundreds of new students.

Joe Ritchie ran for governor of Maine several times. He never quite pulled it off, but he was very influential in the state. Research for this episode was actually sparked by a graphic novel I found online called Joe vs. Alon School.

It was written by a former student who goes by Joe Nobody. He went to Alon in the 1990s and I really recommend his story to everyone. It's a fascinating graphic novel and it gives a lot of context on how the school had evolved by that point. The electric sauce was gone by then and safety gear in the ring was at least more common

but the whole experience was just as brutal. Solitary confinement had been added to the repertoire and kids could be sentenced to months of being forced to live and sleep within the confines of a space roughly the size of a broom closet. The goal was to break you because solitary confinement does that to people

so you'd be desperate enough to yield to the program just to get human contact again. In fact, over the course of the 1980s the strict hierarchy of jobs within Alon evolved for a dual purpose. It existed to police behavior and ensured that everyone was watching everyone else and it existed to encourage people

to buy into the system by working for better positions in order to get more privileges. For more on that, I want to quote from a reddit post I found from a former student. Education was considered a right but those of us who earned the right were still robbed of an education. School was from 7pm to 11pm.

No homework, no test, no projects. Example, math class consisted of grabbing a math book and handing the teacher at least one page of work. You're just supposed to read through the book and write a page of stuff. It was never graded, it was never... You didn't learn anything, right?

It was all basically pantomime. We have to have these kids in a room with a teacher who is probably an alcoholic living in the middle of nowhere and isn't going to care. The other 12 hours of the day consisted of constant conditioning and brainwashing. In the beginning you obviously rejected it

but then you would be dealt with. You would not be able to rise to the ranks of the program to earn more rights until you could prove yourself to be a good candidate for more brainwashing. Eventually it became your responsibility to begin indoctrinating the newer residents basically you six months later or six months earlier.

You had strength and non-strength. Non-strengths were not allowed to talk, interact, or communicate in any way with other non-strengths. It took a minimum of six months to earn the title of strength. It took some kids years to earn strength. Some kids never did. Elon made money based on the amount of time it took for you to graduate the program.

You had to have a minimum of seven promotions before you were a candidate for graduation. Each promotion took a minimum of three months and 90% of the kids never made it past the fifth promotion. These kids had to wait until they turned 18 and could legally sign themselves out. Other kids stayed past their 18th birthday

which is a true testament to the effectiveness of the brainwashing. I remember one dude was 23. Some of them didn't have a choice. This wasn't all brainwashing. If you're sent there at 17 or 16 because you broke a law, if you don't graduate you go to prison.

You go there as long as they won because they decide when you're ready to graduate. Right. And then again, even with incarcerated people, it's like if you're treated a certain way, sometimes you know no other way to live except within there.

Keeping kids after age 18 wasn't only a manner of brainwashing. Joe, who wrote that graphic novel, did eventually yield to the program after escaping. He escaped at one point before being captured and he spent months in solitary after that.

So he eventually just buys into the program because he can't stand how miserable his life is in solitary. Right? Now, his plan was to sign himself out when he turned 18. He didn't care about graduating. But before that day came, he had a call

with his parents. I should note here that according to Joe and other students, phone calls and visits with parents were tightly controlled. They would end the call if you seemed to be about to say anything negative about the Alon School. Alon administrators carefully choreographed parent visits and coached parents ahead of time,

preparing them for the idea that their child might lie to get out of a program that they desperately needed to be in. Oh my God. Of course. Now, students could have visits back home with their families if they earned them, but during those visits, higher-strength students were sent with them to police their behavior.

So you're never alone with your parents and have a chance to convince them of what's being done to you. So, Joe's about to turn 18 and he gets a call from his parents and they've been talking to the administrator who says he's doing great, but that he really needs to graduate the program and they tell him if you leave when you turn 18,

we'll cut you off from any financial assistance and he college funds whatever because we love you and we've been told this is best for you. By the way, Joe was sent to Alon because at 16, he and some friends got arrested with weed. Like, fuck.

We'll talk about Joe's story in a bit, but before we get to that, I want to read you the story of another student. Tatiana Karam attended Alon from 1996 to 1998 and in her case, the fact that she was sent there by her parents was the result of a tragic error from the New York Times, quote,

Ms. Karam, a student at the Northeastern University in Boston, said she was sent to Alon from her home in Dubai after her parents who were looking for an American school that would shelter her from western sexual mores, saw a school brochure featuring relic photographs of the outdoors and students on horseback.

At one point, when her parents sent a fax to the school saying they planned to pick up their daughter, Ms. Karam said she was pressured to call them and ask for more time at the school. When she refused, a school official called her parents and told them their daughter was not ready to leave. It was only after she left Alon, Ms. Karam said,

that she was able to give them the details. My mother, when she found out what happened, was so disgusted, Ms. Karam said. She tells me she's sorry all the time. That was just a freak nightmare accident in her case. Jesus. They're not Americans.

They can't vet it maybe as much. They don't speak the language. They think they're doing the nice thing for their kid. She wights up there. She backs up a lot of the details about phone calls being monitored and all of that stuff. One of the things that's amazing about Joe's story

is that he escaped for a while. Alon had an intricate system to stop escapees. They had men in the woods waiting for people who might flee. But Joe got away. He went on a visit with his parents and another kid and he maced his parents and the other kid and fucking ran for it.

Oh, my God. Wait, and you're saying their people just stationed in the perimeter woods like in like a hunting blind almost? Yeah, kind of. Here to sweep up any runaways. Holy shit. He escapes

and he's like in the woods and he finds a guy. There's another dude in a documentary who escaped into the woods and met like a crazy hermit out there who had just been living off grid and this guy just adopted him

and taught him. And now that dude, the kid who escaped, is like a wilderness survival instructor. He spent years living alone with this guy in the woods of Maine and he was like, wow, after escaping after escaping, yeah.

He's in a documentary called The Last Stop. It's fucking amazing. He's just like, yeah, I was just lost in the woods and I meet this guy who's like living off the land and he just teaches me how which is actually rad. Yeah, and like

in my mind, like that guy had also escaped to like an Elon school and like, but you're like, okay, I understand young man and I'll give you the skills to live out here. What a fucking story. So Joe gets away and he's in the woods and he probably would have gotten caught again

but he found this drifter in a van who drives up and like the way Joe recalls this during his graphic novel, he's like certain he's going to be raped and this guy like is clearly doing a drug deal. They stop in Boston, pick up a huge bag of something and then the guy has a bunch

of cash but like again, Joe is like really worried about this guy at first and thinks like something horrible is going to happen, but the dude just winds up giving him a bunch of cash and saying like, good luck, don't get caught again. Like apparently just like a nice man who is just doing

some drug smuggling but realize this kid's in a bad place and needs some help. So he made it to New York City but after a day or so he gets spotted by employees of the Daytop School because Joe Ritchie had put out a bolo for his missing student and he gets kidnapped again and dragged back to Maine.

He was literally like trust up in the back of a van and at one point when they get back into Maine they stop at a gas station and he gets the attention of a cop who immediately assumes this is a kidnapping and like starts to like try to arrest the guys for kidnapping him but Joe

claims that the men kidnapping him gave the call, the cop Joe Ritchie's name and the officer's attitude completely changed right because this guy is a millionaire, he's bought a lot of politicians in the area. Now I can't tell you that Joe Ritchie was bribing the cops because I don't know that he was

but that's what this kid claims and that like the cop and there's others there's at least one story a fucked up story of a cop encountering in a lawn runaway and is this guy Max Ashburn this police lieutenant like

picks this kid up and he'd been hearing fucked up stories about the Elan School for years from like former inmates and from just people in the area and had been kind of sketched out by it but like also couldn't do anything about it because again they're a very powerful force in the community so he picks

this kid up at this runaway and he's supposed to hand this kid back to the Elan School legally that's his job but he's so horrified by this kid's story that he drives the kid to a truck stop and hands him off to a random group of truckers and it's just like someone here will take

you away that's the best thing this police lieutenant can think to do is like I'm just gonna hand the kid to some truckers it's better than sending him back to Elan School what a fucking binary to choose between which suggests that this guy assumed

there was nothing that law the law was going to do about this in your capacity as a lieutenant yeah my best option is hand this kid to random truck drivers I don't know these truck drivers seemed nice enough so

Joe Richie's story does not get a lot happier after the 90s at least he does, that's I guess the good thing is he is pretty miserable it seems his drug abuse seems to become an increasing problem at one point he has like this he goes on a rant over the

PA system at his horse track against a main racing official he's sued three times for sexual harassment and once for threatening to kill a female employee he dies in 2001 at age 54 the harm caused by Elan lives on and it's here I should note that you can find

a number of people again who will say that the school helped them more common are people who will say the program made them into the person they are today but also left them with lasting trauma and Joe's story which I really recommend reading in Joe versus Elan School makes it clear that this could teach children

very specific kinds of strength and coping strategies you get smart in a very specific way to survive a place like this they're not necessarily good for living in the rest of the world now I've made a conscious choice not to read any of the positive stories about Elan here for a couple

of reasons they are dwarfed absolutely buried by the horror stories and two I don't think the fact that some kids later were like I think I benefited from this experience makes it less criminal I do want to cite before we go the story of Stephen Smith he was 15 years old when a Connecticut social

worker sent him to Elan an award of the state since age 6 when his mom was convicted of armed robbery Stephen was sent to Elan after his neighbor kicked his dog and he responded by shooting him in the butt with a pellet gun his social worker gave him the choice of jail or Elan which she framed

as a summer camp in the woods from the beginning he had trouble with the Elan system and was subjected to numerous haircuts and general meetings quote they'd asked me if I hated my mother they'd read my file in front of everyone in the group and asked me if I hated my mother in her criminal record

I didn't dig that so I just didn't say anything then when I shut up they accused me of intimidating the group said I was doing some violent act against group members for not opening up so everyone once in a while they'd set up a general meeting and then throw me in the boxing ring until I lost I tried to run away all the time

it's the only thing I ever did tried to run away every chance I got I tried about seven times but they always caught me because they had this posse that would go out and be rewarded by Richie if they caught someone trying to run away so Stephen Smith said that the first time he met Joe was at a general meeting called by a staff member named Jeff Gottlieb

here's what he said about that day Richie came in and I was called out along with a girl named Nancy and another girl Marie two guys Ray and Johnny and another kid named Sean we were all sitting around a table and Richie announced we have some cancer in this house and any good surgeon knows the way to get rid of cancers

to cut it out before it spreads then he called us all up in front of the house and asked for everyone if they had any feelings for us then Richie says now we're going to put you upstairs in one of the rooms it was a room about the size of a cell they boarded up the windows in the door and locked it Richie said whatever goes on in there goes on

it was July I know it was in July because it was my 16th birthday the next day it was horrible six of us all stuck in there together the guys Ray and Johnny would take turns beating each other Ray would pound his head until he got tired and then they'd take turns having sex with the two girls

one of them didn't care but the other girl didn't want to but they made her Sean and Ray would keep her food and that's how they got her the day I turned 16 I mentioned it was my birthday Sean picked me up and said oh it's your birthday I have something to give you he started to hit me in the face and stuff and then well he raped me in there

oh my god yeah there are other stories of rape um there are other stories of rape at the Elan school I'm not going to just go through and read them all what I do want to read is so Stephen later gets arrested he goes to prison as an adult right

and when he was interviewed by the author of duck and a raincoat he was asked how Elan school compared to maximum security prison which is where he was incarcerated at the time of the interview quote Elan's much worse here there's a lot of shit but I get a chance for some solitude to read and I'm going to college

and I've also gotten to learn woodworking and make some money in the prison store at Elan there was nothing positive it was pure hell you know the worst thing is the judge that sentenced me there 10 years lectured me sentured me here for 10 years lectured to me telling me I blew the opportunity I had

at Elan I don't understand how the courts can legitimize a guy like Richie who has harmed so many mixed up kids what the fuck now there's also yeah I mean it's pretty bad right Miles we're not great and he's just fucking out here still

no he dies in 2001 okay I think I think the thing cut out in 2001 the school shuts down in 2011 after the last 10 years or so it's gradually degrading there's a campaign from a bunch of former students to shut it down

and like the state of New York does like it goes after them for to some extent like it's a process but it finally closes its doors in 2011 yeah and there's you know there's more

much more dude like there's stories that Joe Richie and other staff slept with teenage girls that were incarcerated at the school like obviously he did shit like that it's just a bottom bottomless well of horror I think it's best to end with a quote from Steven Smith which I think acts as a fine

eulogy both for Joe Richie and for the Elan school the most important thing is that the truth comes out about Richie he has no business screwing up kids and making a fortune doing it the state takes kids from messed up families but they put them in places worse if I was not messed up before I got to Elan I certainly was afterwards

good stuff yeah and I think yeah important to keep in mind that we still have things like this oh yeah there's a ton of others like yeah there's still the teen trouble teen industry is a huge business every year

there's a bill thrown into congress to try to regulate it and every year the Republicans make sure that nobody's going to be voting on that mother fucker because yep how do you feel Miles oh man thoroughly fucked

to be honest but I think more than anything I think it gives some layer of context to understanding like these schools that exist like end with that this is part it's not just sort of like it doesn't end with this thing we just talked about

like worse this is still continuing so in a way I'm in a very broad sense I'm grateful for the awareness that I have on the subject but it doesn't make it any less completely horrifying

yep it's good stuff I don't know Miles what do you do about this industry like how do you actually I don't know it just feels hopeless because there's so many people have that financial interest and it continues to exist

and this like culture of like coercion and power that we exist in like it's just it allows for that sort of dimension of our culture like manifest in like the ugliest fucking way to I mean honestly I feel like more than anything people

I think we just need to be comparing everything to this school so people have an idea of like truly like what it means to help someone not in like the sense that you got from like your grandparents who were like mainlining like Kellogg

books and like that kind of philosophy and actually like what it means for someone to develop what you know cycles and patterns of abuse look like and how to interrupt those and end those but yeah I don't know I mean I'll just stick to

smoking weed and talking about reality TV yeah and I think I'm I don't know I don't know it's just you know I started to make kind of like my bones in journalism some of the first stories I did were with like people who had gone to these these teen

back when I was still working at crack these teen troubled teen schools and it just keeps going on right like it's been it's it's the central problem like the Alon School is fascinating because you've got this uniquely fucked up guy and he builds

this uniquely fucked up system for abusing children but the whole reason why it's able to exist at all is there's this broad agreement with a lot of people in American culture that it would be fundamentally evil to take away a parent's right

to choose absolutely everything for their child and that that child doesn't get a say but the parent is the sovereign of their child and I think that's bad I don't think parents should be the unquestioned sovereign of children I don't think the state should be either

I don't entirely know what the solution to this is but clearly there are problems with the way we do it yeah I mean at the very least you can you can fundamentally create laws or at least guardrails to what you cannot do or things that we can all agree on that a child should not

experience no matter what the prerogative of a parent like I'm me I'm certainly not saying we should give the state more power over kids instead of the parents we should limit parents power certainly to do this right could we agree like you don't have the right to hire men to kidnap your children

into the woods right and then turn a blind eye to abuse because for whatever reason you feel that that's the solution to your inability to do something or whatever yeah it's all it it's it's very complex but so simple at the same time because

most people can say children do not deserve any kind of existence like that yeah absolute no one does like yeah I wouldn't be supportive of this if I thought we should have prisons I wouldn't want them to work

this way because this is not rehabilitating people this is just hurting them and making them more dangerous to everyone I think because you know we to address this we'd fundamentally have to address like a lot of these societal ills that we

have like that are deeply ingrained in our psyche and our culture and that's what it takes it takes this like tremendous reckoning to have to say like you know we're still manifesting these cycles of abuse infinitely

in every single way and like it it's weird that we can find these rationalizations in our minds whether it's like you broke the law quote unquote and that's why you deserve this or a parent is the one who decides what's best for their children

you mind your child I'll mind mine I'll mind mine sort of thing that you know will it keeps going on but yeah I mean I keep I think the ultimate solution Miles is that we should adopt nationwide my program

of hollowing out the center of the United States take all children away from their parents and make them live in the middle of the country is a big open-air child prison where they just grow feral and either survive or thrive based on their skills based on their tiktok views

no no internet nothing but like sharpened sticks and bows and arrows that's where I'm got a little more modern take see and this is where people are seeing the schism in the zoom lady cult where you believe the massive crater in the middle should be technologically free mine should be

technologically advanced and tiktok based well I think tiktok will come into mine when when they turn 18 they have to be brought back into society and adults get to hunt them on helicopters and you can put that on tiktok ah shooting kids with dart guns as they run in their feral packs

and then dragging them back to San Bernardino where they work as accountants for four years before being the great adults we can talk about dentists we can talk but uh Miles it's time for it's time for your pluggable me oh goodness me

uh yeah look uh check me out talking news on daily zeitgeist every day with uh your former co-worker at crack Jack O'Brien and you know if you like weed and 90 day fiance check out my reality show podcast for 20 day

fiance with Sophie Alexandra yeah that's always a good time that's not the only bummers we have or maybe some of the bad accents we'll do sometimes but not just good times over there well well that's that's that is the episode alphabet boys is a new

podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations in the first season we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protest it involves a cigar smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse and inside his hearse was like a lot of guns but are federal agents catching bad guys

or creating them he was just waiting for me to set the date time and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen listen to alphabet boys on the I heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast what if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows

like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price two death sentences and a life without parole my youngest I was incarcerated after her first birthday

listen to CSI on trial on the I heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast bring him down with the Soviet Union collapsing around him he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world

listen to the last soviet on the I heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts