WHY JESUS IS NOT A REGULATOR

One of the primary goals of President George W. Bush's new White House
Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives is "to eliminate
unnecessary legislative, regulatory, and other bureaucratic barriers that
impede effective faith-based and other community efforts to solve social
problems." Bush has said that America needs more "faith-based treatment"
for addiction and juvenile delinquency and that he would like to "promote
alternative licensing regimes to recognize religious training as an
alternative form of qualification."

Bad idea. Even leaving aside the dubious constitutionality of government
financial support for religious services, deregulation is a recipe for
disaster. Recent experience shows why.

Over the last 10 years, more than two dozen teenagers have died in
so-called "tough love" rehabilitation facilities that use violent
confrontation and exposure to primitive living conditions as a means to a
cure. At least three girls in different facilities died from dehydration or
hyperthermia following forced exercise; a 16-year-old California boy died
of an infection after staff laughed at him and forced him to carry a basket
filled with his vomit- and excrement-covered clothes; a 12-year-old Florida
boy died in 2000 when a 320-pound counselor physically restrained him (the
counselor said he thought the boy's complaints that he was unable to
breathe were "fake"). Not all victims of such "treatment" die, of course:
Many just end up with posttraumatic stress disorder or in a coma, or are
discovered tied up in closets. Some of the programs where these incidents
occurred were explicitly faith-based; some were not. None, however, were
properly regulated.

Yet despite these cautionary examples--and despite the testimony of
numerous experts who say that what is needed to prevent them from recurring
is more federal oversight, not less--Bush's enthusiasm for these programs
has not waned. In 1997, after Texas regulators had tried to shut down a
Christian rehabilitation program called Teen Challenge because its staff
failed to meet educational requirements, then-Governor Bush responded by
scuttling all the state's training and safety regulations for such
facilities. And in a speech two years later, Bush praised the fact that at
Teen Challenge, "if you don't work, you don't eat." Now that he's ensconced
in the White House, Bush intends to deregulate Teen Challenge-type programs
nationwide.

Our new president's enthusiasm for deregulation of faith-based services is
not hard to figure. As a onetime heavy drinker who says Jesus saved him as
well as a Republican with classic antipathy toward government, Bush sees in
faith-based services the opportunity both to trumpet his faith and to
shrink the size of government. (Why have taxpayers funded government
programs when religious groups will do the job cheaper?) But is there even
more to his support of faith-based programs than meets the eye?

Mel Sembler, who made his fortune as a shopping mall magnate, is a longtime
Bush-family supporter and friend. He was also the Republican Party's
campaign finance from 1997 to 2001. Sembler's the man who devised the term
"Republican Regents" for contributors of more than $250,000 to the GOP
during W.'s 2000 campaign.

He is also the founder of Straight, Inc. Started in 1976, Straight, Inc.,
was based on the "therapeutic community" approach pioneered several years
earlier, which involved addicts forcing harsh discipline and a surrender to
God on one another. (The first "therapeutic community" program, called
Synanon, went on to become a violent cult, some of whose members placed
snakes in their detractors' mailboxes.)

Whether Sembler has used his fundraising prowess as leverage to pressure
President Bush into funding faith-based programs is impossible to
determine. But he's clearly got the Bush family's ear--and claims to have
been responsible for former first lady Nancy Reagan's interest in the drug
fight. In any case, the story of Straight, Inc., is a cautionary tale for
anyone who believes that deregulating youth services facilities is a good idea.

Accounts by former patients depict a grim routine at Straight. "Newcomers"
were required to be trailed at all times by a series of "oldcomers," who
literally were to keep a finger through the newcomer's belt loop at all
times--even when the newcomer went to the bathroom. "Therapy" consisted of
mainly sitting straight for 10 hours a day, confessing sins. A teen who
wasn't sufficiently enthusiastic in his or her confession would be thrown
to the floor and immobilized, often for hours.

Immobilization was also the punishment for other infractions--such as eye
contact between a boy and a girl, or slouching. Television, music, and
reading were frequently forbidden. So was unsupervised contact with parents
or other outsiders. The program had a, shall we say, fundamentalist view of
sexuality. Girls were made to confess sexual transgressions in detail,
while boys yelled "Slut!" and "Whore!" at them. Boys were sometimes forced
to dress in drag as punishment for transgressions.

Yet Straight grew rapidly as the war on drugs escalated. Nancy Reagan
visited the organization twice and called it her "favorite." At its peak,
it operated nine centers in seven states. On average, teens stayed a year
at a cost of $14,000. Since "counselors" were former patients whose only
training had been treatment, costs were low and profits high.

The lawsuits began almost immediately. In 1981 the American Civil Liberties
Union sued the Atlanta-based branch of Straight, Inc., but dropped
litigation in return for an independent investigation. (Sembler told a
Florida business publication that the ACLU's opposition "just shows that we
have been doing things right.") In 1983 a former patient won $220,000 from
a jury for unlawful imprisonment that involved regular beatings at the
Straight, Inc., facility in St. Petersburg, Florida. Another Florida
patient won a $721,000 jury award in 1990. Dozens--if not hundreds--of
other suits were settled out of court.

State regulatory agencies, fueled by media accounts, were concerned about
Straight from the start. In 1983 60 Minutes focused on reports of abuse at
the St. Petersburg program. In 1991 the Springfield, Virginia, facility
visited by Mrs. Reagan was shut down by state authorities--and was
immediately reopened in Columbia, Maryland, until state regulators there
cracked down the following year.

Soon thereafter, the Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Texas facilities
were all shuttered, either by government regulators or as the result of
criminal investigations. By 1993 Straight, Inc., itself was dead--all the
regulation, investigation, and bad publicity had finally led to terminal
attrition. But Straight's ethos lives on: In 1999 a patient won $4.5
million in a suit against a similar program--shut down by New Jersey
regulators in 1998--that was run by Miller Newton, Straight's former
national clinical director.

Meanwhile, after Straight, Inc., closed its last facility in Florida in
1993, an internal state audit concluded that officials had renewed its
license despite knowledge of its abuses for years. Why? Political reasons,
according to the audit. A St. Petersburg Times editorial entitled "A
Persistent Foul Odor" noted the connections between Mel Sembler and George
Bush the elder.

Now that deregulation has been under way in Texas for a few years, familiar
abuses are being reported. A Christian counselor was arrested after teens
claimed they were beaten and bound at the Roloff Homes, a church-run
shelter in Corpus Christi. One boy had to be hospitalized with broken bones
after being forced to jump over a pit. Earlier, state regulators had closed
the program when they found a girl restrained with duct tape--but they had
been compelled to let the facility reopen once Governor Bush ditched the
regulations.

One final example. In Florida last July, juvenile justice stopped sending
kids to a center run by a faith-based group called Lutheran Services--whose
spokesperson is former Straight, Inc., official Joy Margolis--when
investigators discovered that a 15-year-old boy who hung himself had been
left dangling unconscious because the staff didn't know how to help. He
died after lying in a coma for several months. The program had operated
without a license since 1996, in part because staffers hadn't completed
resuscitation training. Under deregulation, such training wouldn't be required.

The irony is that even if you believe faith-based, tough-love addiction
programs are especially effective--and for the record, they aren't
(research shows that kindness works better than confrontation)--they don't
need to be deregulated in order to prosper. More than 90 percent of
American rehab centers already rely on "the 12-step" system, which requires
belief in a "higher power" or "God as you understand him," and most do use
significant confrontation as part of their treatment programs. The National
Institute on Drug Abuse has just begun an effort to push research-based
treatments--but Bush's approach moves in the opposite direction. What's
needed is not less regulation and more religion but the reverse.