A reporter for the Guardian is the first outsider in five years to have gained entry to Tranquility Bay, a Jamaican armed compund where rich foreigners (mostly Americans) send their naughty children to be “rehabilitated” through a program that violates the UN Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Convention, the Bill of Rights, and common decency.
This long, two-part article gives me the absolute horrors. The things these kids did — taking drugs, “sassing,” getting poor grades, etc — are things that I did, that my friends did, when I was a kid. Being locked in a walled prison for years and subjected to systematic torture and psychological abuse while being “taught” by means of correspondance courses and standard exams would have been deadly for me.
Jay Kay is 33 years old, and the son of Wwasp’s chief director. He opened the facility at the age of 27, after four years as administrator of a Wwasp-run juvenile psychiatric hospital in Utah. Previously he had been a night guard there, and before that a petrol-pump attendant, having dropped out of college. He has no qualifications in child development, but considers this unimportant.
‘Experience in this job is better than any degree. Am I an educational expert? No. But I know how to hire people to get the job done.’ There is more than a touch of the Jerry Springer guest about his looks – heavy, shaven-headed, colourless, and a similarly deadening certainty of mind. ‘I’ve got the best job in the world,’ he claims, but he carries himself like a man who has learnt to expect the worst, and is seldom disappointed.
Tranquility is basically a private detention camp. But it differs in one important respect. When courts jail a juvenile, he has a fixed sentence and may think what he likes while serving it, whereas no child arrives at Tranquility with a release date. Students are judged ready to leave only when they have demonstrated a sincere belief that they deserved to be sent here, and that the programme has, in fact, saved their life. They must renounce their old self, espouse the programme’s belief system, display gratitude for their salvation, and police fellow students who resist.
(via Interesting People)