Julianne’s Testimony – Turn About Ranch and Bromley Brook School

When I was 14 years old I was sent, against my will, to a residential treatment center in Utah. It was a Mormon-run, working cattle ranch. I had no history of drugs, violence, alcohol abuse, sex addiction, shopping addiction, any kind of addiction at all. I was sent to this program because I had a bad attitude, and because of troubles at home that family therapy hadn’t (yet) fixed. As a therapist, I know now that I was what a family therapist would call “the identified patient.”

I flew to Las Vegas and was picked up at the airport and driven to the facility by two people I had never met in my life. No one would answer my questions or explain why I was going. I also know I got lucky – many of my peers were stolen out of their beds in the night. I went willingly, following a lie that I was going to summer camp. When I got there, all of my belongings were taken from me and I was told to go sit in a rock circle in the dirt. I wasn’t allowed to lie down or speak to anyone. No one came to talk to me for 4 hours. When they finally did, I was told I was supposed to be “detoxing” and “thinking about what I’d done.” Again, I had never done drugs of any kind. There was nothing to detox from. I sat in that circle for 3 days, only coming indoors at night to sleep on the floor.

The first place they sent you was a tiny cabin that had no electricity or running water. You woke up at the crack of dawn and did hard farm labor, dubbed as “chores.” I vividly remember all 87 pounds of me trying to carry gallons of water from a creek to a trough where massive Clydesdale horses would immediately devour what I’d just spent hours carrying. It took all day, and I was soaking wet by the end. I was punished for taking too long. I was sent back to the “impact circle” for an additional 14 days because I wasn’t able to produce 8 fires from the bowdrill technique (the one where you use a bow and a stick to produce an ember). It takes a massive amount of arm strength that I did not possess, so I was basically being kept in solitary confinement due to being small for my age. Eventually, you graduated up to a barn that did have running water and electricity. This is where you stayed for the remainder of your time as long as you weren’t punished and sent back to level 1.

I spent 3 months being forced against my will to do hard labor, attend a church I didn’t believe in, repent my sins and be shamed about who I was as a person. I had to fill out a binder of paperwork teaching me how to change and be better. I was cut off from technology and from the outside world. People who ran were chased down on horseback and sent to other programs where they spent 3 months hiking in the wilderness. I didn’t speak to my parents except in letters that the program read ahead of time and threw out if I had revealed too much.

When you got to level 4, the highest available, the boys went to live in a cabin and watch tv and eat cereals of their choosing. They even had a puppy! The girls went to live with an ex-marine drill sergeant who woke us up at 4 am to go cook the meals for everyone else at the program. Nothing about the girls’ experience on level 4 was a reward. One time, on an all day hike, I sat on a cactus and was taken to a vet instead of a doctor. I was once kicked by my horse and not taken anywhere. My “schooling” was basically just packing a bunch of us into a room while the “teacher” slept and the rest of us read books for 4th graders.

I endured emotional abuse, witnessed animal abuse, dealt with bullying, all the while constantly being threatened that I would not get to leave the program if I didn’t do x, y, and z. They tried to keep me there longer than my parents even intended. We had a therapist on site, sure, but she would tell everything you said to your parents so there wasn’t much point in confiding in her.

To this day I suffer from Complex PTSD.

Some of my weird triggers: the smell of Pine-sol and campfires, horses, any type of isolation, tv shows or movies about incarceration of any kind.

When I finally got out of this program, I was sent to a lockdown boarding school in Vermont run by the same company. It called itself a school, but I learned nothing. Here we weren’t allowed to leave the facility, numerous girls tried to commit suicide, there were at least 2 sexual harassment cases between teachers and students (it has since been shut down for exactly that).

I had to be kidnapped by my mom to get out because the program didn’t allow you to leave until you were 18. I remember my 16th birthday spent in terror as we hid in a hotel room in town, trying to make it through the night without being caught so she could get me on a plane. I don’t think many people understand just how prevalent and well-funded these teen prisons are. The company that owned mine has hundreds of facilities across the country where youths are sent against their will and locked up, cut off from their families. Many families have lost contact with their children once this happens because the programs continue to send the children to other facilities without instructing the family first.

At this very moment, kids are locked in these facilities with no way out, because their parents couldn’t think of a better alternative to behavioral issues than locking up their child. As far as I know, not many people know about these places. I’m grateful to finally be given platforms to speak out. I’m grateful this experience drove me to become a therapist myself so the teens I work with would not know the betrayal of having your therapist tell your parents everything you said. I know how litigious these programs are. I hope that the more of us that speak, the less they can drown us out.