Raided program backs Roloff

America's modern teen confinement racket is modeled on several unsavory programs. Much of it descends from techniques found in POW camps, which were later adopted by cults of the '50s and '60s. A great deal of today's suffering though wouldn't be possible without the late Lester Roloff.

In the '70s, Roloff, a right-wing preacher, was known for his youth homes in Texas and other states that used heavy corporal punishment, forced kids to listen to tapes of his sermons for days on end, and refused to allow state inspections. Texas closed Roloff down, but in 1997, then-Gov. George W. Bush - being the big Nazi he is - enacted new laws to let the centers reopen. Roloff had died in 1982 in a plane crash, but his supporters carried on his "work."

Probably every teen confinement center in America today has some aspects that were inspired by Roloff's homes. The "quiet room", for instance, is almost pure Roloff.

When I was reviewing the clips about the raid on Reclamation Ranch in Alabama following abuse allegations there, I detected something I didn't notice the first time I viewed them. See if you can spot it:



Did you catch it? It's at 1:20.

The white van belonging to the program is emblazoned with the words, "IN HONOR OF LESTER ROLOFF."

So this program not only probably has some methods that descended from Roloff's abusive practices, but seems to be explicitly based on the dangerous Roloff modality. Why else would they pay so much gratitude to the late preacher?

The van windows also use that dark tinting characteristic of cars used by Kids Helping Kids, the Cincinnati cult that got smacked down recently by the roadside protests I was involved in.

The more you investigate teen programs, the more they seem to have in common.