Today, I learned about the Elan School, a child behavior modification camp in Poland Spring, Maine which operated from 1970 to 2011. It used ‘‘Lord of the Flies’’ styled techniques to mentally break children into becoming obedient and if any of the children escaped, the school would hire bounty hunters to track down the children and since bounty hunting is legal. Kids who escaped from the Elan School would be denied any help from the authorities, also, a few of them were killed by trigger-happy farmers who thought the kids were trespassers on their land.
This came to my attention via a thread on r/todayilearned. The thread included personal stories from several individuals who claimed that the school would kidnap children with the parent’s permission, force kids to fight each other in boxing matches that school employees would bet on, and lock misbehaving kids in windowless rooms with black painted floors, walls, and ceilings, often causing the kids to become insane. A handful of individuals in the comment section thought the school had a positive effect on them because ‘‘they deserved it’’.
It seems that although the school has been shut down, no one who ran the school was ever charged with a crime and there are possibly many more schools across the USA which operate just like the Elan School.