Boot Camps

They sounded more like pumped-up high school seniors full of high hopes for the future than felony offenders "graduating" from a Juvenile boot camp.

"I want to keep going to school every day. I got to be disciplined because I want to get my degree and make my career in the service," said one 16-year-old from East Cleveland.

"I don't want to go back to public schools because of my peers. I want to get my GED, go to electronics school, get a job and stay away from the gangs," said a 17-year-old from another East Cleveland neighborhood.

"I've got to work more on my drug problem,” said a 15-year-old from southeast Cleveland, one of only two whites among the 34 youths at the camp. "Most of us, before we came here, we couldn't sit down and talk to anybody about our problems. Here, they teach us you got to open up."

Others in the "commissioned" class preparing to return home after 90 days in Camp Rouslton's military-style boot camp, launched in 1992 under a U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) demonstration grant, talked optimistically of going to college, landing well-paying jobs, marrying, raising families and being good fathers.

Here on the quiet campus of one-story dorms and classrooms in the bucolic Ohio countryside outside Cleveland they were a million miles from the inner city where they had committed armed robberies, assaults and other drug-related crimes that had landed them in this alternative-for-prison facility. In the warmth of a spring afternoon they could vow to be respectful to their parents and elders, to control their anger and avoid "the negativity" that led them down their prior criminal paths. And as new-found buddies, they swear they'll stick together in dealing with the risks and old temptations awaiting them back home.

"If I see him slipping, I'm going to tell him about it," the 17-year-old promises, pointing to the youth sitting next to him. "If he sees me slipping and he don't tell me about it, then he really ain't trying to help me."

High aspirations and earnest, brotherly commitments. But will these former delinquents be able to stake out new futures?

'Half-Baked Cakes'

No, says a growing body of research. The more probable outcome for many, if not most, of these young men and others like them passing through boot camps around the country is that they soon will be back on the wrong side of the law. The problem: highly-structured "aftercare" environments of education, training and counseling are lacking to complete their rehabilitation.

"It's just craziness to think that we're going to get up in these kids' face, and yell at them, and then, after three months, send them back to crack-infested neighborhoods and dysfunctional families, and they're going to be all right," said New Jersey juvenile justice consultant Paul DeMuro, who recently critiqued boot camps for the Baltimore-based Annie E. Casey Foundation.

"This is juvenile correctional policy by soundbite. If we had a boot camp policy that led to two years of employment and travel and promotion, that would make more sense,” he adds. DeMuro is also a court-appointed monitor of juvenile justice programs in Florida and Oklahoma.

Even the staunchest advocates agree a system of intensive aftercare is essential to produce the kind of reductions in Juvenile crime politicians promoting boot camps are promising the public. Says Martin Hassner, a consultant to North American Family Institute. Danvers, Mass., which operates Cleveland's Camp Rouslton:

"If you spend $4 million to build a boot camp program and $300,000 on aftercare, then all you've done is half-baked the cake. It's not done when you take it out of the oven. There is no program yet that has completely baked the cake."

Yitzhak Bakal, a venerated juvenile criminal justice expert who directs Camp Rouslton and debriefs every graduate, said: "It's shocking what I hear about their fears" of returning to the ’hood.

He and Hassner contend the military-style regimen of the camp does create the environment needed to break down a juvenile offender's destructive habits and hardened negative attitudes about himself, and life. Once the breaking-down process begins, they claim the boot camp model can provide the structure for building up self-esteem and inculcating new values.

"These kids need to feel that some human being cares enough about them to be a pain in the ass and stay in their face," says Hassner.

Evaluations Are Negative

Camp Rouslton is considered one of the best-run boot camps in the country, and has served as the model for others in several states (there are as yet no universally-accepted standards for what qualifies as a "boot camp"). But its efficacy is being questioned by the Ohio Department of Youth Services. In an as yet unreleased audit and critical evaluation, the department has concluded that the four-year old camp has failed to reduce Cuyahoga County Juvenile Court's criminal caseload. A summary of the state audit was obtained from Camp Rouslton officials, who are challenging the report's criticisms.

The Cuyahoga County Juvenile Court's City Center in East Cleveland operates a 9-month supervised after-care program for adjudicated delinquents upon their release. But it lacks the same educational and counseling intensity found at Camp Rouslton, critics say.

Similarly, a state study of the recidivism rate at the Manatee County Boot Camp, Florida's first juvenile boot camp, found that three out of four youths assigned to the camp during its first year had been re-arrested within a year of leaving the camp. Camp officials had claimed a recidivism rate of 19 percent, and Florida juvenile justice officials had suppressed the state study until Tampa Tribune reporters forced its release last March.

Moreover, several recent research studies indicate that the boot camp experience hasn't made those juveniles less likely to become repeat offenders. The recidivism rate, the studies found, isn't significantly lower than the rate among juveniles going through the traditional juvenile justice programs of training schools, supervised probation and secure incarceration.

In some instances, recidivism rates were higher among camp graduates.

The U.S. Department of Justice currently is withholding release of an evaluation covering Camp Rouslton and the Environmental Youth Corps Academy near Mobile, Ala., sponsored by the Mobile Boys and Girls Club and also started up four years ago as an OJJDP demonstration project. Both are continuing with state and local funding. (A third OJJDP demo in Denver closed after two years when New Pride, the non-profit agency selected to run the camp, went bankrupt.)

OJJDP launched the projects to assess the need and worth of military style boot camps to combat juvenile crime. Due earlier this year, OJJDP has delayed release of evaluations of the projects performed by Caliber Associates, Fairfax, Va., until some time next year. This has heightened speculation that the results disprove claims that boot camps lower youth recidivism rates and lessen prison overcrowding.

(OJJDP's Doug Dodge says the delay was caused by difficulties in collecting and analyzing data. He declined to comment on speculation that the results are not favorable.)

A Justice Department news release announcing the August boot camp grants, however, acknowledged that "evaluations of boot camps show mixed results regarding reducing recidivism."

University of Maryland criminology professor Doris MacKenzie has analyzed the nation's 32 or so adult boot camps for the National Institutes of Justice (her findings were not encouraging) and participated in the delayed OJJDP evaluation of Juvenile boot camps. "Research would suggest that if they include components of intensive treatment and quality aftercare, then boot camps may be able to have an impact on some of the juvenile offenders," she said. “There are a lot of qualifiers, and we don't know if the military atmosphere adds anything."

A Spreading Fad

Steam has been gathering behind the boot camp fad since news cameras caught Bill Clinton standing alongside conservative U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) as they watched African-American teenage men marching in step at a Georgia boot camp during Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign. As president, Clinton remains a committed supporter while other politicians have climbed aboard the movement as a ready answer of how to get tough on juvenile crime and, at the same time, avoid building expensive new prisons.

Abetting the approach are a fearful public eager for get-tough solutions and an aging male population that fondly re-calls its military boot camp days as one of life's seminal and positive experiences.

At present, 35 state and local government agencies are operating boot camps as alternatives to incarceration for juveniles, and that number could triple over the next few years.

The Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Assistance received 91 applications in June competing for the $24.5 million contained in last year's Crime Bill for boot camp construction. The Department's Office of Justice Programs which oversees the "Boot Camp Initiative" had conducted a three-day "technical assistance workshop" in Atlanta at the end of March for potential bidders. It attracted 236 grant seekers; winners were announced Aug. 7 (see page 18).

Meantime, the debate is heating up over whether such treatment ends up doing the youths more harm than good. The sad part is, a lot of times, the kids are misled,” said Jerry Miller, president of the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives in Alexandria, Va. “There have been periods in history — the 1920s — where prisons have been run on military models. It's nothing particularly new, and it's never worked. But it comes with the politics of the times."

Miller and other critics warn that the military-style model of in-your-face discipline and rigorous physical training invites abuse. At least a half dozen deaths and several serious injuries have occurred at boot camps in recent years.

In June, the Alabama Department of Corrections paid $1 million, the highest amount allowed under state law, to settle a lawsuit triggered by the death of 19-year-old Shaun Stinespring. An autopsy concluded the overweight Stinespring had been "exercised to death" at the state-run boot camp near Talladega. After conducting its own investigation, the state fired the camp director and three corrections officers for brutal mistreatment of youth.

Lee Vallier, director of Florida's Manatee County Boot Camp run by the county sheriff’s department, quit abruptly in June rather than face an investigation of allegations that he had physically abused youth at the camp.

Larry Meachum's Full Circle

An early pioneer in the boot camp experiment is Larry Meachum, who joined the Justice Department's Office of Justice Programs in February. As Oklahoma's corrections chief during the 1980s, Meachum launched the nation's first modern-era boot camp in 1983 (quickly followed by one in Georgia) with a great deal of enthusiasm. But he soon soured on the program, and by the time he became Connecticut's corrections director in the early 1990s, he had become a spokesman against boot camps.

His opposition became a hot political issue in last year's governor's race in that state, and Meachum was forced to leave his post in January. Now, even he finds irony in the fact that, in his new job at Justice, he is in charge of the expanding federal boot camp program.

"I started it (in Oklahoma) with a lot of expectation and enthusiasm," Meachum recalls. "And as I watched it develop, I became concerned about what we had created. When I went to Connecticut, I told them my experience (with boot camps) was not good, and it would be better for Connecticut not to "pursue that."

Now, Meachum is shifting his thinking again, and, like Bakal and Hassner, attests that boot camps can still be made to work effectively. To succeed, Meachum says these camps must stress education and leadership training rather than the harsh and abusive, 1940s-style Parris Island boot camp regimen that even the Marines have abandoned in the post-Vietnam era.

His new model is the Sgt. Henry Johnson Youth Leadership Academy at South Kortright in western New York financed by the state and run by retired Army Col. Thomas Cornick. Calling it a "third generation of boot camps," Meachum says, "It's clear to me now that some people are doing it right."

Bakal’s Faith Unyielding

No one has more at stake in this debate and experimentation than Bakal, a pioneer in developing community-based alternatives to institutionalization of youth offenders. When his nine-year-old nonprofit was chosen by OJJDP to operate Camp Rouslton and help prove the worth of boot camps. Bakal's pre-eminence brought credibility to the politically popular but scientifically dubious experiment.

"My guess is that Yitzhak saw this as a way to get some funding and to subvert things a bit — run boot camps that were decent and didn't hurt kids," said NCIA's Jerry Miller, who was Bakal’s radical reform-minded boss at the Massachusetts Department of Youth Services in the early 1970s.

"I think that he is kidding himself because it's buying into an ideology. When they're done with Yitzhak, they'll throw him aside and boot camps will go on as simple internment camps, particularly for young black males."

The gnomish-looking Bakal is weary, and leery, of responding to criticism that he got involved with boot camps as a source of federal funding for NAFI, his non-profit foundation which began in 1974 as the Northeastern Family Institute. And he refuses to be drawn into a debate with his critics over whether his involvement is lending credibility to a system that will fall, and be proved harmful to the youth it seeks to help.

"I am very proud of what I did in the area of boot camps," Bakal counters, "and I think that this whole notion that one would go to that because of the money is not something I want to comment on.

"We believe that these programs can get some good results. Kids like this structure. They talk about the fact that, for the first time in their lives, they have been productive."

Bakal says juveniles, in their three-month stay at Camp Roulston, "improve academically by one or two grade levels; they eat the right kinds of food; physically they get much, much better. We see tremendous changes in attitude. They are willing to trust authority better, they are less negative about life.

"However, all these results cannot do much for you if the life outside is bad, if there is no support system, if there is no job, no education. The question is how you move that intensity and structure into the outside community because that's where the youth needs it more."

But, after an initial phone interview about his boot camp programs, Bakal declined to respond to additional questions raised by critics and researchers. And he refused to provide annual reports and financial information about his agency. That information was obtained for this article through other sources, including the Division of Public Charities in the Massachusetts Attorney General's office.

Those boot camp adherents who belive like Justice's Meachum the use of retired military officers can salvage the experiment, or that funding for the popular camps will continue, should heed the experiences of Memphis's Project About Face. This boot camp, started in February 1991 to confront the crack epidemic hitting Memphis, lasted only two years. It was the first — and perhaps only—juvenile boot camp set up on a military base and manned largely by military personnel. OJJDP's Doug Dodge still points to it as an example of a successful program.

Situated at Millington Naval Air Station outside Memphis, the camp was financed by the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Assistance, the state of Tennessee, Shelby County (Memphis) Juvenile Court and Paul Piper ‘s Christ is Our Salvation Foundation in Waco, Tex., which donated $100,000. The program was run by the Memphis-based Youth Service USA.

The camp closed in March 1993 when federal funding ran out and state and local agencies were unable to come up with the money to keep it open. An evaluation published by Memphis State University researchers three months after the camp closed found that only 6 percent of the first-time cocaine offenders sent to the camp had been re-arrested on drug charges in the first year after leaving About Face. However, a total of 29 percent had been charged subsequently with felonies or misdemeanors.

"No matter what you do with them, you're going to get about a third of them back in trouble," says Youth Services operations director Frank Dawson. "But it's cheaper for the 70 percent who don't come back to put them through a 90-day program and put them back on the streets than to keep them incarcerated for two or three years."

But Dawson, Bakal, Meachum and others will have to come up with better results to convince critics of boot camps that they are the best alternative to incarceration.

“The majority of people involved in juvenile justice know these programs are flawed, know that they have questionable results — perhaps negative results — and know that they are fraught with the potential for abuse," says critic DeMuro. "Yet, the political pressure is so enormous that few people are willing to stand up and say, "Hey, wait a minute. What are we doing here?"

Resources:

Camp Rouslton
c/o Cuyahoga County Juvenile Court
2163 East 22nd Street
Cleveland, OH 44115
Phone: 216-656-0683
Contact: Sgt. Maj. Tom Ross

North American Family Institute and Northeastern Family Institute
10 Harbor Street
Danvers, MA 01923
Phone: 508-774-0774
Contact: Yitzak Bakal

Sgt. Henry Johnson Youth Leadership Academy
Route 10
South Kortright, NY 13842
Phone: 607-538-1401
Contact: Colonel Thomas Cornick

Manatee County Boot Camp
14490 Harley Road
Palmetto, FL 34221
Phone: 941-729-4563
Contact: Acting Commandant James Hallman or Randy Warren
Phone: 941-747-30ll; x 2906

Caliber Associates
3998 Fair Ridge Drive
Suite 360
Fairfax, VA 22033
Contact: Michael Peters
Phone: 703-385-3200

Youth Service USA, Inc.
314 South Goodlett
Memphis, TN 38117
Phone: 901-452-5600
Contact: Frank Dawson

National Center on Institutions & Alternatives
635 Slaters Lane, Suited G100
Alexander, VA 22314
Phone: 703-684-0373
Contact: Jerry Miller, President

Cummins, Ken. "Boot Camps: Still Only a ‘Half-Baked’ Delinquency Cure." Youth Today, September/October 1995, p. 14.

©2000 Youth Today. Reprinted with permission from Youth Today. All rights reserved.