- Hi, my name is Jessy
and I have experienced a behavioral therapy program.
- Hi, I'm Jennifer
and I survived behavior modification programs
in the troubled teen industry.
- My program was called Cross Creek program.
This is located in Laverne in Utah.
It's been shut down since 2013.
My life leading up to being sent away to the program
was not the greatest.
A lot of the things that I was doing
really contributed to why my mom sent me away.
I was in a single parent household,
I was hanging out with let's call them the wrong crowd
at that point, dating a drug dealer.
And I was just hanging out with him
and his crowd and his people,
and then that just turned into doing those drugs
and partying and hanging out with them a lot more
and sneaking out of the house and failing drug tests
and skipping school.
So I think the last straw
was for her to like send me away to this program
that she had heard about through other people.
So the day that I left,
it's more like calling it sent away,
got sent away to this program.
Because a lot of these places, for the most part,
they talked to the program
and they hire these people to transport you.
So for me, I was sleeping.
It was the middle of the night.
I wanna say around three-ish four in the morning.
And I was awoken by two strangers in my bedroom.
My mom was standing there like crying and apologizing.
I was obviously very confused
because I was in a very vulnerable place,
waking up in my own room
to people I didn't know
who were standing there telling me to get out of bed
to get dressed and that I could go with them
the easy way or the hard way.
So they put this belt around my waist
and they grabbed onto it
and they guided me down the hallway and into the car.
So from there, we flew to Vegas
and I learned from Vegas that we would be renting a car
and be driving to Utah.
And so the whole time I'm asking questions,
like where are we going?
The woman would only tell me small things.
And a lot of that was just,
"You're going to this place, it's like a rehab,
"you're only gonna be there for like 30 days."
And that was it.
Like, that was the only information that I was given
and it was very traumatizing.
So when we arrived at the facility, middle of nowhere
and they take me inside the building
to like check me in, the reception desk.
It was very interesting
because I was so numb and drained at that point.
I knew I couldn't fight, I knew I couldn't run.
I knew at that point that this was it
and there was nothing I could do about it,
and there was nowhere that I could go
and deal with the 30 days they said I'd be there
and just deal with it.
Just deal with it so that I could go home.
It was scary, I felt alone, I felt abandoned.
I didn't trust anyone.
I was there for about nine months.
I consider myself one of the luckier ones
because I left a few weeks up until I turned 18.
And in Utah, the laws are different.
The kids there aren't considered
until a certain age, especially in our rights
or different in Utah than they are everywhere else.
I knew when I turned 18,
I was gonna get out of there regardless
of my mom said I could come home or not.
And that was a few weeks away.
So I got pulled out from the program
a few weeks before that.
Luckily, so I didn't end up staying there
for 12, 14, 16, two years
like a lot of the other girls and boys had.
There was a lot of things that were awful.
We didn't have our rights like juveniles centers
and jails and other things like that
have better rights than we did.
I didn't get my first phone call home
until two, almost three months into the program.
In the program, you have to take seminars every few months,
which are these really, really intense cult-like.
Seminars that the adults were taking in getting ripped on
and having a hard time going through.
Imagine doing that to a 11, 12, 13, 14, 15,
and a teenager who is battling all kinds of things.
And that was a scary part for me.
We would get in trouble, get punished,
but then they would tell the parents
that we're just manipulating them
and we're lying because we're gonna say whatever we want
for them to take us out of the program.
Because these industries are money sucking industries,
and they only care about,
the more kids in the program
the more money that they're gonna make.
All in all my time there
was day-by-day marking the calendar waiting
until I turned 18,
because I knew that I would one day be free.
It was an emotional battle,
it was traumatizing.
I still have nightmares about it to this day.
And I'm in my thirties.
Once you get to a certain level, you get certain things.
And so I got to a place where my mom was allowed
to come visit for three days.
She could pick me up at eight in the morning
and drop me off at 8:00 PM.
So she did that.
And on that third day, we were heading back to Cross Creek
and it was getting close to 8:00 PM
and I was terrified
because I was so brainwashed from this place.
They was, if I was late because of my mom,
I would get punished,
I would get in trouble,
I would get dropped to level,
I would get to merits.
So it's almost eight
and I'm getting really anxious and really nervous,
and my mom pulls the car to the side of the road.
And I remember looking at the clock
and getting really anxious and really nervous
and like, "Oh my gosh, what's happening?
"What is she doing?"
So she gets out of the car to make a phone call
and she's on the phone for a while.
And then it's past eight o'clock.
And I'm like, "I am gonna be in so much trouble."
My mom gets back in the car and she turns,
and she looks at me and she says,
"Do you wanna come back to the hotel with me?"
I was like, "What do you mean?"
And she's like, "Do you wanna come home?"
And I immediately start crying
because "Yeah I wanna come home."
And we went back to the hotel that night
and I took the longest bath of life.
So my life right now is really great.
Just been spend spending a lot of my time lately writing,
giving myself time to travel
and spend time with my close friends
and go home and visit my family.
So that's been really nice.
I went to Utah about two weeks ago
to go visit my old program Cross Creek,
which is now a motel.
It's the same exact building,
but they converted half of it into a motel.
And it was a wild to say the least
just to be back 13 years later, walk around the space
and go down the hall
where my old sleeping quarters used to be,
walking into one of the rooms
where I think I used to sleep in
and just see it be converted into this room
with two queen beds and the same carpet.
It was really emotional
and kind of closed the chapter
and was a really cool healing process for me.
- I was born in Southern California.
Early in my life, I experienced a lot of loss.
My mother got cancer when I was three years old.
And so for most of my childhood, she was in the hospital
or at home needing to be taken care of
and not really able to do normal things
that most moms can do.
When I was six years old, she passed away.
I didn't really feel like I fit in
just because I didn't have that really
basic, loving, nurturing experience
that I feel like most people get to have.
I just kind of hit a limit
where I was just so upset and angry,
and I just didn't know what to do.
I didn't feel seen at all,
and I ran away at age 13 for the first time.
And I was gone for just a few days.
And the police had picked me up at a party
'cause I was very obviously a minor.
So from there I went to Charter hospital
which is an adolescent psychiatric unit.
From Charter I was told
that I was gonna go to a boarding school
and I ended up at CEDU.
It's shut down now.
But CEDU is an off shoot of the Synanon cults.
And they used really harsh, brutal tactics
to kind of break you
and try and get you to conform and comply.
A lot of the things that these programs have in common
is they have a culture of peers policing peers,
so that the only way you can get ahead
and get any privileges and in some cases get out
is by monitoring the people below you, ratting them out.
It just creates a really unsafe environment
to say the people you're like locked in with,
it's kind of like the Stanford prison experiment.
I was discharged to a normal life
and I moved to the East Coast to live with some family.
I was there and I went to public high school
for the first time,
I was in an alternative program.
So when I was 15, I ran away
from where I was staying in Massachusetts
and I spent the next three months going to raves,
meeting people, going home with them,
just kind of like on the run on the East Coast.
I was sexually assaulted.
I was raped by an adult.
I got more into drugs.
I think I was just trying to do anything I could do
to like numb the pain of my existence basically.
At a certain point,
I just saw that things were getting worse and worse
and I didn't see them getting better.
I was starting to get really scared for my life,
I called my dad and arranged to come back to California.
One night, my dad came into my room and he was crying.
He told me there were some people here.
It was basically like,
you need to go with these people or they're gonna take you.
And I went with them, I looked them handcuffed me
and they put me in a van
and the van had seat belts that locked on your laps.
And we made it to the airport.
They sat on either side of me on the plane.
And then they drove me to the middle of nowhere in Utah
to a place called Island View
which was like a sprawling institutional building
in the middle of a bunch of cow fields
with a couple of houses scattered around.
And I remember walking in there
and just being like flooded
with like fluorescent, horrible light,
just hearing the door close and then having to go through
another set of doors
until like an even more (indistinct) room
and hearing that like double lock,
like you hear in the movies of like a door closing.
I remember that felt really final to me.
They took me to a small room,
they made me take off all my clothes,
they made me lift up my breasts,
they made me cough and squat.
It was really humiliating,
I had never experienced anything like that before.
Island View used attack therapy, they used isolation,
they used all these crazy weird ritualistic things.
I developed a migraine.
I was really sick for several days, I was throwing up.
They humiliated me, they made me throw up in a trash can
because they said, if I'm on bed rest,
I'm too sick to go to the toilet.
I remember one time my therapist told me
that I was looking frumpy
and gave me an assignment to wear makeup.
And that was just so upsetting to just be told that like,
I'm a teenager and I'm basically incarcerated.
Why do I need to wear makeup?
When I got in there, my projected length of stay
was three to six months.
And once the school district started paying
for me to be there, my stay jumped to 18 months.
Once you get into these systems,
you are literally trafficked through them.
They will refer you to other programs owned
by the same umbrella companies
and they're making 10,000 plus a month per child.
So these places are
the perfect hunting grounds for predators.
And you're already locked up,
no one believes you, you're troubled.
Once you get into that system,
it's hard to get out of it
because there's just so much money to be made,
and they restrict contact with your family,
they monitor all your calls.
If you say that anything's wrong is happening,
they'll hang up the phone
and call them and say, you're being manipulative
and then you lose your privileges to make phone calls.
I only got out of there because I graduated high school.
So I got out of there and went home.
I had no idea how to like function in the world
I've had literally everything I did micro controlled
for most of my adolescents.
So that was a really hard adjustment
just to even be able
to like pick what kind of cereal I could have.
Like, I was just constantly afraid of doing something wrong.
And I had been told, I was just this horrible person
and this problem and I hated myself.
As of now I've been doing art professionally for a decade.
I've shown my art all over the world,
I've painted murals across the country,
I've brought an interactive project
that I created called the what's in your heart project,
into schools institution.
And I've really been able to build a life for myself
that I didn't think was possible.
And it's just through literally sounds so cheesy,
but like literally through like following my heart,
connecting with myself through art
and then using my art to connect to other people.
The trauma that you get from these places is very real,
the fear is real,
the nightmares are real.
I'm so grateful for Paris for speaking out
against the abuses here and for being so vulnerable,
she's literally saving people's lives.
And these are children.
And even if they're bad children, even if they misbehave,
if they're defiant, no child deserves to be kidnapped
and locked up and have all of their rights taken away.
I recently went back to Island View
after a protest in Provo, Utah,
and that was a really powerful experience.
I'm just grateful that I made it
and that I can tell my story and hopefully help.
I don't know, other people come forward
or parents look for alternatives
to sending their kids (indistinct).
- And if you're a parent watching,
I beg you to really do so much more research
and what else that you can do
to send your kid to something else.
Abuse happens, physical, sexual, verbal,
just please do your research
there are other outlets out there.
I know that it's challenging and it's hard,
if you have a teen going through something challenging,
there are other ways to manage
and to find them help.
And if there's any fellow survivors out there,
I see you.
Ad thank you guys.
(upbeat music)