Rough Love

Yet similar claims have been made in other media. In June 2003, the New York Times published a lengthy article about TB. It states, "A striking number of youths say that, while the program's goals may be noble, its methods are not." It goes on to claim that "many children, mostly boys, say staff members twist their arms behind their backs until their hands touch their heads, inflicting intense pain without bruises."

Complaints come from "one-tenth of one percent" of past clients, TB's Jay Kay said in 2003. They come from a few people with "axes to grind."

Also in 2003, a fifteen-year-old from Louisville, Kentucky, said he had two teeth knocked loose by a staff member's fist. In 2005, 23-year-old Layne Brown told a Missouri newspaper that during a nine-month stint at TB beginning in 1997, staff members made him defecate and urinate in a black garbage bag tied around his waist like a diaper. They also, he says, dragged him across a cement floor face-down, scrubbed his genitals with a hard-bristle toilet brush, and pepper-sprayed him.

More recently, Layne described the mistreatment to a French film company at his home in Kanab, Utah, for a documentary titled Tranquility Bay. Released earlier this year, the film also includes an interview with a man identified as former TB assistant director Randall Hinton, who stated he and Jay Kay used pepper spray. "I think I can remember Layne being pepper-sprayed more than once a day. I know he was pepper-sprayed more than two times a day. I don't think it would have been more than three times ... and from somebody on the outside looking in, I would say it would be abusive."

Yet Jay Kay has said that corporal punishment is not practiced at TB and the use of pepper spray was abolished in 1998. "Anyone who saw inside Tranquility would support and admire it," he said in 2003, blaming criticism on ignorance. "Nothing has really presented things in a way that is factual."

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Robert Browning Lichfield has spent his professional career in the tough-love business. He opened what would become the first WWASPS complex, Cross Creek, in La Verkin, Utah, in 1986. He launched several other schools in the years that followed, and then in January 1998 — with a small group of associates — incorporated WWASPS as a nonprofit.

Since then, in response to a growing need for facilities equipped to help out-of-control teens, Lichfield has added affiliates — there are now six schools in four U.S. states, in addition to TB in Jamaica. His organization, headquartered in St. George, Utah, earns approximately $80 million per year, according to an article by John Gorenfeld published on AlterNet's Website this past January. It is one of the largest and most lucrative organizations in the tough-love field.

Although all the schools are independently owned and operated, they employ the same system, devised by WWASPS. Lichfield owns many of the buildings and grounds where WWASPS schools are located. His younger brother Narvin owns Carolina Springs Academy in South Carolina and the former Academy at Dundee Ranch in Costa Rica.

Ken Kay, who met Lichfield in Utah, claims WWASPS has salvaged the lives of about 18,000 young people. The curriculum involves "reshaping troubled teens in a structured environment." It includes a rigorous daily schedule, individualized academic instruction, emotional growth and development courses, and physical fitness programs.

WWASPS's literature claims graduates have gone on to attend Harvard and the California state university system. "TB has a tremendous record of success," Ken Kay states, "and a 97 percent parent satisfaction rate, which is very admirable. I don't know of anything where you have a hundred percent customer satisfaction."

Sales personnel offer thousands of dollars in incentives to adults who recruit new youths or host Websites advertising the programs. Some of the parents interviewed for this article attended meetings promoting TB, which are held throughout South Florida.

TB is WWASPS's oldest outpost and has been attended by 1500 students, Ken Kay says. It was opened by the younger Kay in 1997, when he was 27, with a stated mission to "challenge and motivate the student ... so they become mature, responsible, and contributing members of society." Before moving to Jamaica, Jay Kay worked as a manager of a gas-station minimart in San Diego, California, having dropped out of college.

Though several lawsuits alleging abuse and neglect have been filed against WWASPS, none has been upheld. But during the past decade, at least six WWASPS programs have closed on the heels of government raids or investigations conducted by authorities from the countries in which they were located, including Mexico, Western Samoa, and the Czech Republic.