Enforce trafficking laws against youth confinement facilities

I think the first time I heard of American-based operators of abusive youth torture facilities shipping teenagers to centers in foreign countries to evade U.S. laws was in the late '90s when it was exposed as a national scandal.

Shocked as I was that American authorities seemed to be doing nothing about it, some of the countries where the centers were located eventually did. Other countries are nations of laws, you see. They weren't going to tolerate that shit.

Now, I want to know a couple things. First, have there been any new laws in the U.S. since then to crack down on this abuse? If there haven't, there should be. Second, are the existing laws enough to prosecute the operators of these facilities? More naive observers would expect it to be prosecuted as kidnapping, but there's a few problems with that: The parents are often misled by deceptive marketing by the facilities, so they permit the child to be literally snatched from their home by the facility's thugs. Because the Rethug-a-lugs who have ruled the country for the past 25 years hate kids, children and teenagers are considered property, not people.

There is a vista that I think is realistic for prosecuting these facilities: the human trafficking laws. If I'm not mistaken, human trafficking - especially across international borders - is illegal. It's a serious charge too. I don't think it matters whether the parent approved the trafficking or not. In poor countries, it's not completely unknown for an impoverished parent to sell their kids to be taken to another country to work. But authorities have also been known to prosecute the people who transport or exploit the children for human trafficking.

I think the existing laws in the U.S. can and should be used to go after teen confinement facilities that ship kids abroad to be tortured.

I'll even say these laws should be used to go after facilities that keep their activities confined entirely to the United States. That's not a stretch at all. They're detaining people under false pretenses, so I think the law applies.

Let me give you an idea of what goes on: Some of these facilities (even ones that are limited to the U.S.) make teenagers sign the paperwork admitting themselves to the facility without letting them read it first. They also tell them that if they sign it, they can sign themselves out of the facility any time they want to. But these are lies. They can't sign themselves out. A lot of these are for-profit facilities. So how is this any different from a wealthy agribusiness owner who tells some kid in a poor village that they have a good job waiting for them at the farm but later refuses to pay them and won't let them leave?

So I say throw the book at the greedy ogres who operate the facilities.

It's a shame some of America's human trafficking laws are too new to prosecute older offenses with. Under Newtzi, Congress was in such a mad rush to pass bills to censor the Internet and cut off college aid to people who smoked a joint when they were 15 that tougher laws against human trafficking had to wait another 5 years. Shows you where the ruling party's priorities are.