Two years ago today, Paris Hilton released a documentary and said she was abused at Provo Canyon School, one of Utah’s largest youth residential treatment centers. You can learn more about the school in this story and from the 'Sent Away' podcast.
that she was physically and mentally abused at Provo Canyon School in the 1990s, the treatment facility’s owner quickly brushed off responsibility.
They spoke of repeated physical restraints, with up to 10 staffers piling on young children. Some were chemically sedated, or so overmedicated they felt like a zombie. Others spoke of being left in isolation rooms for days after getting in trouble for things like not getting out of bed or asking for an inhaler.
Jurors returned a verdict favoring Provo Canyon School after a lengthy trial in 1980, but a federal judge issued abanning the school from using polygraph tests on the boys, opening and reading their mail, using isolation for any reason other than to contain a boy who was violent, and prohibited physical force from being used to restrain a boy unless he was an immediate danger to himself or others.
He moved quickly through the levels of the program but was knocked back down after he tried to run away during an approved visit to a family reunion in New Hampshire. His punishment involved standing up against a wall for hours on end for several weeks. Whiteley said he was prescribed so much medication, he “felt like a zombie.”“The program was a complete failure for me,” the now-46-year-old man said. “It was basically almost two years of prison.
“I didn’t know what they were giving me,” she said. “I would just feel so tired and numb. Some people in that place were just gone. The lights were on, but no one was home.”It was around this same time that Provo Canyon School’s parent company was under intense scrutiny, facing allegations of Medicaid fraud and media reports of inappropriate treatment and inadequate care at Charter-owned facilities across the country.
Kayla Smith was 8 years old when her parents, in coordination with her California school district, sent her to Utah in 2010.Smith recalled being strip-searched and touched by staff, an experience that was foggy to her because she had been medicated before she came. She was homesick her first night, and staff put her in an isolation room and locked her inside — which is against Utah regulatory rules, which says “timeout rooms” cannot be locked.
But Kyra Lewis, who came to Provo Canyon School from Alaska in 2003, said physical restraints “happened all the time” when she was there. Injections also were common and had been nicknamed “booty juice.” He noted in a statement that mental health treatment has evolved over the past 20 years from a “behaviors-based foundation” to a “personalized, trauma-informed approach.” He said the facility does not use solitary confinement as a form of intervention and does not use drugs or medications as a disciplinary measure.
He said he identified a recurring pattern of risk factors in certain facilities run by large for-profit corporations where Illinois had placed hundreds of children in its foster care system: Staffing levels were low, incidents of serious harm and abuse were high, children were often overmedicated and over-restrained, and the corporate owners made a lot of money.
Utah’s Office of Licensing, which provides oversight to youth residential treatment centers, has conducted 341 investigations in the past five years at Provo Canyon School’s four campuses. In these cases, regulators “substantiated” 27 violations, according to the department.
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