Or how about Walter Sorrells’ The Silent Room (published in May 2006)? “Oz never imagined things could get this bad. Just months after his father's death, his mother has married a controlling, brutal man. But nothing prepares Oz for getting framed for drug possession. Or being abducted while his mom looks on. Suddenly Oz finds himself at Briarwood School, which is really a prison.”
Or my own Shock Point (published in February 2006? “Cassie Streng, 16, knows that her psychiatrist stepfather, Rick, prescribed an experimental drug for his teenage patients, three of whom have committed suicide. Before she can gather evidence, however, she is grabbed by two men, handcuffed, locked in the back of a van, and taken to Peaceful Cove, a facility for troubled teens in Mexico.”
I think all of them can be traced back to this 2003 New York Times article. “Two men carrying handcuffs and leg irons came for him at his mother's home in Sacramento, Calif., shoved him into a van and bound him hand and foot. They drove him 12 hours south, over the Mexican border, into a high-walled compound near here called Casa by the Sea. "It was nighttime," Ryan recalled. "I look around and I see kids sleeping on cement. I was really, really scared. The big honcho, Mauricio, said, `You don't speak English here.' I didn't know how to speak Spanish." Ryan quickly learned the rules: stay silent, be compliant, don't look up, don't look out the window, don't speak unless spoken to. The punishments for breaking the rules included solitary confinement, lying on the floor in a small room, nose to the ground, often for days on end.”
And now there’s been more articles about American boot camps, because of Congressional hearings. Does that mean more books three or four years down the road? “In one instance, a boy was so dehydrated that he ate dirt to survive, according to witnesses and an autopsy.” Read more here.
