If the company you keep is a reflection of the type of person you really are, then former Bay State governor and current presidential candidate Mitt Romney must be a heartless bastard who profits on the suffering of troubled adolescents. The following article by Maia Szalavitz is taken from the Valley Advocate, the local alternative newsweekly here in Western Massachusetts:
When Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said he’d support doubling the size of the prison at Guantanamo Bay, he was trying to show voters that he’d be tough on terror. Two of his top fundraisers, however, have long supported using coercive tactics that have been likened to torture for troubled teenagers.
As the newspaper The Hill noted recently, 133 plaintiffs filed a civil suit against Romney’s Utah finance co-chair, Robert Lichfield, and his various business entities involved in residential treatment programs for adolescents. The umbrella group for his organization is the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools (WWASPS, sometimes known as WWASP). Lichfield is its founder and is on its board of directors.
The suit alleges that teens were locked in outdoor dog cages, exercised to exhaustion, deprived of food and sleep, exposed to extreme temperatures without adequate clothing or water, severely beaten, emotionally brutalized, and sexually abused and humiliated. Some were even made to eat their own vomit.
But the link to teen abuse goes far higher up in the Romney campaign. Romney’s national finance co-chair is a longtime friend of the Bush family named Mel Sembler. Sembler was campaign finance chair for the Republican party during the first election of George W. Bush, and a major fundraiser for his father.
Sembler currently heads the Scooter Libby Defense Fund, in addition to his work for Romney, and has worked tirelessly to keep the Vice President’s former Chief of Staff out of prison, even after his conviction on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice.
Like Lichfield, Sembler also founded a nationwide network of treatment programs for troubled youth. Known as Straight, Inc., from 1976 to 1993 it variously operated nine programs in seven states. At all of Straight’s facilities, state investigators and/or civil lawsuits documented scores of abuses, including teens being bound, beaten, deprived of food and sleep for days, restrained by fellow youth for hours, sexually humiliated, abused and spat upon. [full text]
Kmareka.com 
There’s a great book, ‘Jesus Land’ by Julia Scheeres. It’s her firsthand account of being sent to a camp in the Dominican Republic for being wayward, along with her adopted brother. Every so often stories appear in the news about child abuse in fundamentalist religious churches and organizations, I think it’s built into fundamentalism–authoritarianism and abuse.
There are many reasons not to feel kindly towards Mr. Romney and, unfortunately, the investigative news story cited does nothing to lessen the negativity Mr. Romney and the people he holds close as advisors and supporters. In a sense, there are sufficient negatives swirling about Mr. Romney that will certainly “do him in” as a viable candidate, and these will remove the cultish/religious issues from the table and make an agonizing discussion of them superfluous. While we frequently get the candidates we deserve, simply because we tend to get cought up in campaign spin, we also are fortunate enough to not suffer that extra punisment of horrid candidates, simply because our mostly free press does its work.
Hard work by an astute cadre of journalists, can have a most beneficial effect. Thus, I fully expect Mr. Romney to fade into the New England sunset, much as I expect Mr. Edwards to diasppear in a cloud of hairspray or the dust of his mansion building as he extolls the virtues of caring for the poor.
Does anybody know if Ron Paul has any stated positions or policies on how to deal with the troubled parent industry? I’ve been watching this sad saga for around 30 years now since my family got involved in one of the original Synanon based troubled parent programs, The Seed in Ft. Lauderdale. I became convinced a good long while ago that regulation isn’t going to start working any time soon, as most of my buddies seem to think. So what would Ron Paul propose as a solution to the problem?