At Schneier on Security I see the British are at it again, this time with DNA-tracking of youngsters.

Our unproductive and sometimes deadly system of public and private teen boot camps were first a British idea, one that wasn't working there when they became all the conservative rage here, and still don't work.

Yet we've enshrined Boot Camps as if they were a benevolent industry.

Apparently much of British law enforcement is drooling for this latest self-destructive thought-crime innovation, and they have Gary Pugh, director of forensic sciences at Scotland Yard on board as DNA spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo).

Forces of British good sense are pushing back, as Roger Graef of The Guardian did in his blog The usual suspects: Listing at-risk children on the DNA database risks breeding anger, resentment and defiance.

Shami Chakrabarti director of the British civil rights group Liberty takes a somewhat harder swing that the proposal, saying:

Targeting innocent children to expand the DNA database is the Government playing the wolf in sheep's clothing.
Any child who is stopped by police, even if under 10, can have his DNA taken and retained for life without being charged or cautioned.
If the Government wants a National DNA Database, they should say so and hold a public debate, not pick on our kids who can't fight back.

Bear in the mind the historic arc of the teen boot camp debate, and you can see that this isn't merely a British debate. Schneier isn't just being proactive by pushing back here, now. It's time.

              

Tough Love was the setting for another teenager's death while belated debate over the largely unregulated, unaccountable residential treatment industry for teenagers proceeded.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported:

Omega Leach, the Philadelphia teen killed in June after the city sent him to a Tennessee treatment center, died of strangulation after a fight with a staff member there, according to the Tennessee medical examiner.
The death has been ruled a homicide, the autopsy report says.
Bruce P. Levy found that Leach had "multiple hemorrhages" of his neck muscles from a clash June 2 with two staffers at the Chad Youth Enhancement Center outside Nashville. ...

What is that on my hands? And yours.

              

Codependency, Enabling and Tough Love are the damning trinity of the residential addiction treatment industry to which we Americans frequently consign our most troubled offspring.

All three are so thoroughly wrong-headed and scientifically upside down that they won a Psychology Today Loose Screw Award in January of 2005.

Yes, two years ago, and there had been evidence for years before that all three ideas were or had become little more than profitably well-marketed quakery.

All three partake of the view that young people and adults alike who are suffering from addiction or some other disorder are best-served by receiving less family support, less love and perhaps regular doses of meanness.

Yet the evidence indicates that abandoning a substance abuser in the name of "Tough Love" can result in a relapse (and death). Likewise, abandoning someone who suffering from acute depression in order to end and alleged co-dependent relationship with them can result in suicide.

"Enabling" is of course refusing to be mean (withholding "Tough Love" -- the solution which should never be applied) or refusing to abandon someone who is suffering (thus remaining "co-dependent" and perhaps keeping them alive so that they can recover). Altogether, (in a fit of paradoxical logic) the result is said to make it possible for the afflicted to remain afflicted.

Thanks to the Governmental Accountability Office we have seen in recent weeks that applying the wrong-headed idea of Tough Love within the misconceived setting of some form of "boot camp" results with alarming frequency in a form of treatment failure called death.

In light of the evidence, it is gullible to accept National Association of Therapeutic Schools and Programs claims that boot camps and their offspring, wilderness residential treatment for teenagers, have done so much good for so many.

Psychology Today was by no means the first to report a National Institutes of Health panel evaluation of "get tough" programs which concluded that "All the evaluations have shown [the programs] don't work."

Boot camps were already well-known as non-solutions abroad when they were profitably imported from Great Britain in the 1990s.

Because the evidence was clear, allowing American teenagers to be brutalized, traumatized and in some cases killed in them could be seen as an act of collective criminality -- one we are all obligated to move forcefully to correct.

              

"Tough love" is a poorly defined article of faith from the addiction-treatment community, where maps of the path to recovery often fail to resemble one another.

When reports surfaced that some paths for troubled young people led to unrehabilitative pain and sometimes death, groups including the National Association of Therapeutic Schools and Programs called it all “the noisy complaints of a few individuals.”

They were and are brutally wrong.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office investigated and "found thousands of allegations of abuse, some of which involved death, at residential treatment programs across the country and in American-owned and American-operated facilities abroad between the years 1990 and 2007," and a lack of appropriate regulatory oversight. In its report, the GAO wrote:

For example, during 2005 alone, 33 states reported 1,619 staff members involved in incidents of abuse in residential programs. GAO could not identify a more concrete number of allegations because it could not locate a single Web site, federal agency, or other entity that collects comprehensive nationwide data. and emotional problems. This testimony concerns programs across the country referring to themselves as wilderness therapy

Although the GAO focused on 10 deaths during "wilderness therapy" residential treatment, the full report (pdf) makes it clear that lack of appropriate oversight is characteristic of the entire industry. Residential drug rehabilitation treatment for young people is, "with the exception of financial services" simply "not regulated by the federal government" and by state government in a number of states effectively regulated only for programs that accept public funds.

The result is a sweeping lack of accountability which conceals great harm and many varieties of treatment failure.

We can do far better for our addicted young people and their families.

It is a matter of collective national shame that we have not done better.