Art Levine: How I Began Investigating the Troubled Teen Industry

Like many teen treatment centers, Trails Carolna had allegations of abuse and neglect that stretched back for years (WBTV,2014)

Art Levine, the author of Mental Health Inc., and a contributing editor at The Washington Monthly, is the author of an ongoing series on the troubled teen industry for MindSite News. Here he talks about what first inspired him to cover the story:

Since covering mental health issues in the early 2000s, I’ve found there is arguably no institution involving scandal, abuse, sexual assaults and death as impervious to reform as the troubled teen industry.

Even the decades-long Catholic Church scandal involving pedophile priests has been greeted with some accountability – since the Boston Globe’s groundbreaking 2002 series — in the form of disgraced priests and bishops, public and private legal settlements totaling over four billion dollars and a relative smattering of prison sentences for accused priests.

Nothing close to that has happened to the investors and executives profiting off of kids needing help who experience abusive care and neglect, as outlined in the 2024 Senate Finance Committee report “Warehouses of Neglect.”

In 2001, as a journalist then based in Florida, I first became aware of abusive treatment of mentally ill people in jails. Then one of the most dangerous states for youth residential treatment, Florida had already seen publicity about boot camp deaths that drew my attention, augmented by the pioneering reporting of Maia Szalavitz and her 2006 book, Help At Any Cost. I made my first preliminary inquiries about this issue in 2007 in an interview witha Florida-based psychology professor and reformer Allison Pinto, who was already championing effective community-based alternatives to dangerous residential treatment programs. Teen torture at residential centers also got some national attention with Congressional hearings and the first GAO report on the issue in 2007.

But I didn’t get an opportunity to write about these issues myself until 2012, when I pitched the Nation Institute (now Type Investigations) for a grant and Salon on an investigative story involving the troubled teen industry. It looked at how the then-GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s co-founded Bain Capital, a private investment firm that specialized in private equity and venture capital, was funding allegedly abusive residential teen and addiction treatment programs under the umbrella of CRC Health, since sold to the Acadia behavioral health firm I wrote about for MindSite News.

In the course of that reporting, I got to learn from survivors whom I still remained in contact with, such as Chelsea Maldonado (cited in the main article of the MindSite News series) and Jodi Hobbs, founder of Survivors of Institutional Abuse. They provided me with leads, insights and contacts for a new generation of activists.

I didn’t get a chance to investigate the deadly teen treatment field again until I got a book contract and an Alicia Patterson fellowship in 2014. That, in turn, led to my 2017 book Mental Health, Inc., which contained several chapters on the ongoing deaths and abuse in the teen treatment field. It was my continuing check-ins with survivors over the years that led to my Newsweek article on the horrific abuses taking place at the fundamentalist Restoration Youth Academy in Alabama and the reformist police captain, Charles Kennedy, who sought to get its leaders arrested. His relentless pursuit helped lead to the RYA leaders being sentenced to prison for 20 years each, as mentioned by in our lead article this week.

Without the voices, information and evidence from first-hand survivors, I couldn’t investigate the ongoing scandals that make up a large part of the reporting I’ve done for MindSite News on this issue.