Testimony about Diamond Ranch Academy

This testimony was found as a reply to a blog entry on the blog runned by Secret Prison for Teens. All rights goes to the original author

A lot of comments I have made in the past have ended up helping fuel the rage against DRA and I just want to add to those.

Before I go into further detail I want to state that the focus should not be on the troubled teen industry and especially not specifically one place.

IT should be on the state of UTAH which is proven to be funded by the church of lds and the donations of various Mormon owned companies such as troubled teen industries.

I have seen a kid who unsuccessfully tried committing suicide right in front of me multiple times. I had to live with the poor soul who had probably one of the most troubled past I have yet to come upon and the improper mixture of medicine to follow. I am studying medicine now and I can tell you the combination alone of just half of the psych med he was taking would cause me to turn suicidal.

One instance was when the kid was sitting on the rocks which he was isolated on. In a treatment called Isiah-landing aka Islanding where one is forced to sit in the 105 degree sun and be isolated from the group as punishment for bad behavior.

Please not while this is happening... the rest of the children are eating out of dog bowls filled with 24 oz of sour kraut or if morning a bowl of oatmeal cooked in over 1-2 gallons of sauerkraut juice in lieu of water. Pickle juice in your morning cereal is a good comparison If your not accustomed to fine German food like I am.

Blanket punishment influenced on everyone due to a child... stealing a piece of bread out of the trash can where the insider program doers dump there left over scraps. The trash can represents what resembles the scraps you would put in a pigs trough. I have personally eaten out of the trash can due to days where I would not be able to see straight from the lack of food due to the 13 year old cooking 150 peoples food unsupervised mistakes. opps. back to the witnessed suicide attempt. -_- This child was so suicidal he tried to swallow a golf ball sized rock. The staff happen to catch him doing this obviously because of the gagging and called for help on the restraint.

The restraint that followed was one you would see on the tv show "COPS" after a suspect was tackled for a very serious crime and arrested. 4 giant football players and 1 being one of the biggest guys I have ever met probably weighing 330 pounds. Would have been a defensive line backer for NFL if he didnt get hurt while playing for a college team. Followed with 210 -225 pounds lean. athletes who proceed to restrain this kid who was 120 pounds and 14 years old. He had multiple skin infections from mosqito bites and a scratching which was left untreated for 9 months so the sun was bothering him .... and just couldn't take it and lost control of his will to live. I was ordered multiple times to take care of this child and one of the demands made to me due to his
itching was to tape his hands together. I was told to use almost an entire roll of duct tape to tape his hands together since the previous taping of garden gloves to his wrists still allowed his ability to itch. Going against all that is Mormon and using Darwinism to come to the conclusion that if you have hands which allow you to itch and then remove those hands you lose the ability to itch. So put gloves on the kid tape them to his wrists and then tape his hands together with another roll of tape.

This guy had a hard time controlling his bladder alone so you can imagine sitting in 105 degree sun and being forced to drink 1 gallon of water a day while only being allowed to pee every 2-3 hours after hiking 4-5 miles pulling a ox cart with your hands taped together. For some reason re reading what i just wrote reminded me of Joseph smith.... Why:? Well the root cause is because of all the food I was given when I came to LDS church on sundays at Diamond ranch academy held by our science teacher... The side effect and main reason why it reminds me of J,Smith is because of how in a way there hiking and digging projects resembles how the plates of nephi where found but that is another story.

Back to the restraint.

The staff each restrained one limb of the child for over 15 minutes while his face was directly in the rocks that the child tried eating to end his suffering 15 minutes prior. Two types of rocks there are smooth rocks and there where lava rocks. When ever you got restrained by head staff they love to put your face in the extremely sharp Lava rocks. That is why they call the campus LAVA FALLS and being homeless. When your face is being ravaged by lava rocks it gets cut up pretty bad. I have never seen more then two people restrain a person while at dra except for this child. I weighed 180 at the time and even then I had only been restrained 1 time by two people (and im 2nd or 3rd place for restraints ). The suicide reports on this kid alone are probably numerous And need to be reviewed by the federal court. (I guess Romney proved that the federal system cant be bought so thats why I choose Federal Over State court.) Not that that It would matter anyway because I can personally attest to my personal experience of which I screamed at an inspector, "They made us hide there filthy semen, vomit, urine, etc mattress in the gym." I yelled this 4 times of what I can recall because I only got close enough to yell at these inspectors. They heard me but continued to not confront me. I was punished very hard for this through physical exercise and screaming. I was just getting even since We had to wake up 50 minutes early to take our filthy beds to the gym and where worked extra hard the night before cleaning the over crowded dorms.

This brings me to what I stated before. -Its the game not the players- We need to focus our efforts on the people in charge. Aside from the crooked private licensing organizations ran by the Mormon Mafia- WE need to as people under the federal court to abolish there rights to perform this.

Take what is happening in California for example. If the federal courts can demand the state prisons to release people due to overcrowding for non violent crimes and reposition the majority then why cant the federal courts abolish these types of treatment facilities ...

These are children. Not your typical children who run track or are voted prom king or queen. But maybe if they where not raped/beaten/ignored or simply raised differently then there would be a shining glimmer in each ones eye like the rest of there friends... In comparison to all the people who have complained about DRA or even as far as created little blogs and such have effectively done something. The same can be said about solitary reflection. I learned a lot about myself from the confinement but it only helped me learn how to deal with a problem and not SOLVE the problem.

*If my statements are used and I find out d.r.a tries to repute them I will be forced to drop time dates and names. To D.R.A. You know who I am. The suicide that has happen here would of happen a long time ago if you didn't restrain the suicidal. I have personally seen you fracture J.M's arm (who was autistic due to his birthing mothers drug addiction. ) He could not help himself. Unable to kill himself due to his learning disability he would cry constantly "Why dont you just -friggen- kill me already" While being restrained almost weekly.

Your use of punishment by physical force is excessive. Your use of punishment by calisthenic exercise exceeds that of the military. Its sole purpose is to exert so much physical exhaustion that one cant move to lift there arms let alone tie a rope. Yet the while of one person was stronger then your punishment. You took this persons happiness and joy away. You left them for the 18 year old staff that you hire out of dixie state college to perform pscyho-analisis reports and to mimic a employee who works at a mental institution. Your staff is grossly undereducated on both the real world and what it takes to properly analyze a mentally disturbed person.

I have had a short physical relationship with your female staff outside of the ranch and have gotten to really know who you are having run your facilities. Drug addicts treating drug addicts seems to have worked for N.A. groups but not when there punishing the people there treating through pain.

Diamond Ranch Academy was founded in 1999 in Idaho. The authorities intervened in their operations forcing them to move to Utah where the authorities short to say don't care much about what goes on at such places. They used to be located east of Hurricane but moved to a new campus west of Hurricane not long ago. A boy died there some years ago on the old campus. Another boy committed suicide on the new campus in 2013.


Sources:

• Diamond Ranch Academy fights back at negative testimonies from former students. (The original testimony found on the Secret Prisons for teen blog)
• Factsheet about the program (Fornits Wiki)

Book: Dead, Insane or in Jail: A CEDU Memoir

This book by Zack Bonnie tells the story about how to be forced to attend a CEDU bording school.

All the CEDU schools closed around 2005 after a number of lawsuits were issued by parents and former students.

Also several students disappeared never to be found again. Some of the children were most likely murdered by a serial killer James Lee Crummel who had unrestricted accesss to one of the campuses. To this day there are families out there looking for their relatives.

CEDU was founded in 1967 by an owner of a furniture business, who after a brief stint at Synanon created the first school in California where the main tool for transforming the children into the products their parents ordered were attack therapy.

The founder died in 2002. The school were sold but closed only some few years later due to the lawsuits.

The book provides a good insight into how it was to be a student in these special schools. After the original schools closed the concept were transferred into other schools where some are open even today.

Sources:

• Website about the book
• Article on Goodreads

Student testimony about the John Dewey Academy

The John Dewey Academy is located in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, housed in Searles Castle. In the media it is mostly known for a student-teacher relationship 10 years ago. All rights to this testimony goes to the original author who has decided to remain unnamed.

I went to JDA and it was the worst experience in my entire life. I ran away half a year ago. I was virtually homeless for four months because my parents were advised by the JDA staff not to let me come home.

The therapy session quoted in this article was mild compared to JDA standards. Therapy was usually much, much worse. It wasn't uncommon to be called "a fucking worthless piece of shit" "a manipulative, dishonest bastard" etc. It was verbal abuse.

After I left I received a letter from Bratter telling me, among other things, that I was friendless, that I'd never had any real friends in my entire life and I never would learn how to make friends. He wrote that the only way I would survive outside of John Dewey was if I resorted to prostitution and the only way I could become a "worthwhile" person was if I came back and completed the program. He wrote that he feared all I would ever become, at best, was "the assistant to the assistant to the assistant manager at a fast food restaurant."

When I first came to the program I was a senior. I'd already applied to several highly selective colleges. Tom Bratter asked me where I wanted to go and I told him my first choice and he told me if I stayed, he would get me in because another student who was graduating that year had applied early and been deferred, but with his insider info and leverage he was confident he could threaten the school into accepting the student. While I was at JDA this particular student was accepted into the school and is now attending it thanks to Bratter.

In his letter he also mentioned acceptance to the school, that if I came back I still had a chance of going there but if I left I'd never get in. I refused to go back, determined to never, ever return to a place where I'd felt so horribly worthless, which was quite a feat for someone who has been severely depressed for almost half her life.

I wasn't like most of the kids sent to JDA. I had never done any drugs, even pot, in my life, I never drank, I'd never engaged in promiscuous behavior, I'd been a straight-A student. I'd never cheated, stolen, or hurt other people. I was just severely depressed, and had attempted suicide several times even after years of therapy. My parents were fed up and didn't want to deal with me anymore, and John Dewey provided a great solution.

It was the worst thing they could have done.

The first time I tried to leave, I announced that I was because of their "open-door" policy. Bratter told me I was welcome to leave, but a student told me he'd call the cops the minute I set foot outside the door.

One day a while after that incident, I just walked out the door and across the street to the general store that sold bus tickets while most students were in classes. I hid in the bushes of the station until the bus arrive and boarded. I had all of $8.34 when I arrived in New York City, where I'd lived, and no phone numbers or means of contacting anyone because when I'd arrived at John Dewey they had taken all of that personal information away.

At John Dewey I suffered verbal abuse and isolation. I had to scrub the toilets my second week there because I'd asked a "Younger Member" a question without a Middle or Older Member listening. I worked through Closed House, which was a school-wide "consequence" where, among other things, we weren't allowed to eat cooked food, or sit down at all during the day, except for designated therapy time. The only place we were allowed to sit during the day was the floor, and only if it was hardwood or marble, no carpet. If we leaned back on our hands we were punished. We were never allowed more than six hours of sleep. All our "privileges" were taken away. We weren't allowed to go outside at all. We couldn't groom ourselves. During the day we had to "Super-GI" the entire castle, which included scrubbing the group in between the tiles on our hands and knees with q-tips. We could have no cooked food, prepared meals, or sweet foods. We could only drink water.

Closed House lasted almost an entire month.

I still have nightmares of John Dewey and it's affected me more than my parents care to understand. They still think they were right in sending me there, but I can't disagree more.


These places are not the answer.



Sources:

• The original testimony (Fornits Home for Wayward Web Fora )
• Angel Teachers: Educators Who Care about Troubled Teens (by William L. Fibkins, R&L Education,)
• Factsheet about the school (Fornits Wiki)