Reform at Victory: A Survivor’s Story – By Michele Ulriksen – Reform at Victory is a non-fiction account about author Michele Ulriksen’s harrowing experience in an unlicensed/unregulated fundamentalist Baptist reform school, where the only way home is full conformity. She spends one full year at the locked-down facility, which is located in the […]
Pieces of Victory – By Jeneen Miller – What would you do if you were held captive behind an electrical barbed wire, 12-foot fence without due process? In 1988, Jeneen’s parents used trickery to achieve the ultimate betrayal. Instead of the therapy they promised Jeneen, they turned her over to a prison […]
Oh the Glory of it All – By Sean Wilsey – When Sean, “the kind of child who sings songs to sick flowers,” turns nine years old, his father divorces his mother and marries her best friend. Sean’s life blows apart. His mother first invites him to commit suicide with her, then has […]
No Direction Home (The Drifter Chronicles) – By Greg Cayea – In 1999, Greg Cayea was sent to Hidden Lake Academy: the most infamous juvenile institution in America touting itself as a “therapeutic boarding school.” The school has since been shut down for the tragic maltreatment of troubled youth, but before that… it […]
Nickel Boys – By Colson Whitehead – When Elwood Curtis, a black boy growing up in 1960s Tallahassee, is unfairly sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, he finds himself trapped in a grotesque chamber of horrors. Elwood’s only salvation is his friendship with fellow “delinquent” Turner, which deepens despite Turner’s […]
New Bethany: Picture Perfect on the Outside, Let Us Take You Inside – By Roger Dean Kiser – Behind high chain-link wire fences; the girls and boys of the New Bethany Schools were brutally and horribly abused for years by a religious group.
Mental Health Inc: How Corruption, Lax Oversight, and Failed Reforms Endanger Our Most Vulnerable Citizens – By Art Levine – The mental health system in America is hardly the front-burner issue it should be, despite lip service about reform after each new tragic mass killing. Yet every American should care deeply about […]
Jesus Land: A Memoir – Tells the story of a white girl who was sent from the Midwest to a Christian reform school in the Dominican Republic after she and her black adopted brother fought back against the racism and bullying that was directed toward them.
Institutionalized Persuasion: The Technology of Reformation in Straight Incorporated and the Residential Teen Treatment Industry – This is Marcus’s undergraduate thesis, written in 2013 and 2014. His graduate thesis, Totalistic Teen Treatment: A Qualitative Analysis of Retrospective Accounts (2019), is now available in paperback and as a free PDF, online. Institutionalized Persuasion […]
