When "Tough Love" Kills.

Gina Score was never much of an athlete. At five feet four inches tall and 226 pounds, the eighth-grader was in no condition for strenuous exercise. But that didn't matter to the staff at South Dakota's Plankinton boot camp for girls, where military-style discipline ("Quitting is not an option") prevailed. On her first day at the camp, Score sentenced for stealing a Beanie Baby--was excoriated and ordered about in an official induction process that, according to Nancy Deppe, a former staff member, "isn't successful unless someone pukes or pisses their pants."

The second day, July 21, 1999, began with a sweltering 2.7-mile morning run. Immediately, Score fell behind the rest of the pack and was showing signs of heat stroke. By the end, she was lying in a pool of her own urine, frothing at the mouth, gasping for breath, twitching, and begging for "mommy," according to eyewitnesses.

Staff allegedly denied the girl water but did administer a full course of ridicule: calling her a faker, laughing at her, dragging her, dropping her limp hand onto her face, and finally threatening to videotape her to prove "what a pathetic and uncooperative child she was," the eyewitnesses said. When other girls attempted to shade Score from the pounding sun, they were ordered to step away. After more than three hours of this, the staff finally called an ambulance, but Gina Score died en route to the hospital.

This Lord of the Flies scenario, outlined in a lawsuit filed by Score's parents, is unfortunately an all too common feature of life in the social laboratory of "tough love." Nationwide, there are now more than seventy-nine such camps in thirty states. Most are county-run facilities for nonviolent and first-time offenders. And many were started with federal grants from an $8 billion prison and boot-camp-building fund that was created by the $30 billion crime bill of 1994.

Since 1985, when Louisiana set up the country's first juvenile boot camp, these "shock incarceration" or "shock probation" programs have been fashionable among politicians.

Governor Bill Janklow, Republican of South Dakota, who recently called juvenile inmates "scum," defends boot camps by telling the story of how he was a "wild youth" until joining the U.S. Marine Corps in the late 1950s. Therein lies the power of boot camps: They pander to America's square nostalgia by invoking an imaginary 1950s, when "dad was in charge."

Nicholaus Contreraz was another "faker." At age sixteen, Contreraz was busted while joyriding in a stolen car around Sacramento, California. He was sent out of state to the privately run Arizona Boys Ranch.

According to extensive investigations by Arizona Child Protective Services and the Pinal County Sheriff's Department, Contreraz's trouble started out typically enough: He was complaining of nausea and diarrhea. But Boys Ranch staff thought it was all a ploy to avoid physical exercise, and they called him "a baby" and told him it was all "in his head."

As Contreraz's condition spiraled downward, the staff allegedly escalated the abuse, at times waking him earlier than the rest, making him eat alone, and punishing him with push-ups and manhandling. Over the next two months, he lost fourteen pounds. During that time, he suffered bouts of 103-degree fever, muscle spasms, severe chest pains, and impaired breathing. All the while, the staff forced him to continue with the discipline, calisthenics, running, and constant "Yes, Sir! No, Sir!" When he faltered during exercise, the staff punched him and shoved him onward, according to Arizona Child Protective Services.

Soon, the investigations revealed, Contreraz was defecating in his bed and clothing, vomiting frequently, and complaining that his body was "hurting all over." When staff could tell an eruption was imminent they would mockingly count down "three, two, one...." On top of that, they allegedly forced him to tote a bucket filled with his own vomit, feces, and soiled sheets. For extra measure, they made him do push-ups with his face just above this acrid slop.

Contreraz's struggle finally ended on March 2, 1998. Staff allegedly spent much of that evening throwing him to the ground, bouncing him off a wall, and making him do more push-ups. Before he lost consciousness, he lay in the dirt unable to move while the bellowing staff commanded him to get up. According to witnesses interviewed by Arizona Child Protective Services, the boy's last word was a simple "no."

An autopsy found that Contreraz's distended abdomen was flooded with more than two-and-a-half quarts of pus from a virulent hybrid infection of staph and strep. The boy's lungs held fluid that was, according to one official inquiry, probably inhaled when vomiting. And his body was covered with seventy-one cuts and bruises. The official cause of death was cardiac arrest. But in the ensuing furor, "neglect" became the operative word.

"If you ask me, it was torture," says Joe Contreraz, Nick's uncle. "That was beyond abuse. I wonder if he was calling out Mom, Dad, Uncle Joe. It makes your heart hurt."

In the wake of Contreraz's death, it was revealed that the Boys Ranch had more than 100 complaints of child abuse lodged against it in the preceding five years. Shortly thereafter, four of the five Arizona Boys Ranch "campuses" were shuttered, and five staff members were indicted for murder. Both the state of Arizona and Sacramento County settled out of court with Contreraz's mother for more than a million dollars.

Since then, the Pinal County district attorney has dropped all charges except for one manslaughter and one child abuse charge against a former Boys Ranch nurse, who allegedly cleared Contreraz for exercise and penned reports to staff members urging them to "hold Contreraz highly accountable" for his "negative behavior."

Today, the Arizona Boys Ranch runs just one camp.

"It was not our policy and it is not our policy" to allow staff to strike people, says Cassandra McCray, director of development for the Arizona Boys Ranch. She would not comment further on the allegations of brutality concerning Contreraz's death.

On March 9, 1999, a twenty-four-year-old asthmatic named Eddie Bagby was pepper-sprayed by drill instructors during his first day at the Arkansas boot camp at Wrightsville. Bagby died a few hours later at a Little Rock hospital. He had been sentenced to eighteen months for driving while intoxicated and fleeing police. Official investigations blamed Bagby's death on several preexisting medical conditions.

"The autopsy said there were several things going on," says Dina Tyler, a spokesperson for the Arkansas Department of Correction. "He had sickle cell, he had a necrotic muscle around his heart, and he had asthma. The autopsy said that pepper spray couldn't be ruled out as a contributing factor."

Tyler says the application of pepper spray in Bagby's case "was not consistent with department policy. He was administered pepper spray for failure to follow orders, and that is not an appropriate reason," she says. "One employee was suspended for five days, and another was suspended for three days, and both were placed on one year's probation." Bagby's estate has filed a lawsuit against the department.

The gruesome deaths of Score, Contreraz, and Bagby flashed a spotlight on boot camp abuses. Two former Plankinton employees are being prosecuted for child abuse in connection with the Score case. And the Youth Law Center of Washington, D.C., has filed a class action suit on behalf of fourteen Plankinton boot camp veterans. (The boot camp has since moved to the more remote town of Custer.) The suit alleges that the boot camp, which disproportionately housed Native American youth, provided inadequate medical and mental health care and allowed staff to use excessive force.

There is, for example, "four pointing:" This punishment involved up to six male staff who would allegedly restrain a girl, then shackle her into a spread-eagle position on a raised concrete slab. From there, the staff would cut off the young woman's clothes with scissors and cover her naked body with a blood-and-urine stained sheet, known as a "suicide gown." Girls at Plankinton have endured whole days and nights like this, according to the suit.

One such woman was Patricia Demetrias, who was allegedly forced to run with her ankles and hands shackled, according to an amended complaint based on numerous affidavits from eyewitnesses. She says the resulting cuts left permanent scarring. One young woman who was at the camp says staff members made those who weren't chained drag those who were.

"If they'd fall, we'd have to pull them along by their chains," says seventeen-year-old Vanessa Martin, who spent three months in the boot camp and is now in foster care. "Doing that made me feel like crap."

Neither the Governor's office nor the South Dakota Department of Corrections would comment on the suit or on current conditions in the revamped boot camp in Custer, despite repeated requests.

Nineteen-year-old casino worker David Zamot was busted for possession of marijuana and received a thirty-day sentence to a boot camp at May's Landing in Atlantic County, New Jersey. Three days into his stay, drill instructors caught him in the bathroom sharing a cigarette with two other inmates. Instead of writing Zamot up, as is official policy, the drill instructors allegedly marched him out to "Bader's Coffin," a shallow, six-foot-long earthen pit filled with waste from the camp's laundry. There they forced him into the pit to do several sets of sit-ups and push-ups, he says.

"I was screaming, 'Something's burning me! But they were like, 'Shut up--we tell you when you can get out,' "explains Zamot from his mother's home in Egg Harbor City, New Jersey. When the drill instructor finally let Zamot out, he was crying, begging for mercy, and his buttocks, back, scrotum, and penis were lacerated with third-degree burns, he says.

At the time, he was given only cursory care and then locked in an isolation cell for the rest of his thirty-day sentence, says Zamot. "I was in a wheelchair, in this tiny cell, and my scrotum was swollen and full of the chemicals," he says. "They gave me Tylenol, that's all." Eventually, Zamot required three major surgeries to repair damage to his skin and reproductive organs. He says he still suffers from numbness in his groin and right leg.

Camp and county officials eventually settled out of court for $900,000. The county attorney's office still says the whole incident was just "an unfortunate mistake."

Zamot's lawyer, Paul D'Amato, disagrees: "The motherfuckers knew the chemicals were in there! And we caught them lying about it."

Not ,all boot camps are abusive. Lockup! shouts the drill instructor at the Kings County boot camp in sun-baked Hanford, California. Before her is a squad of eight surly and very bored-looking Latino teenagers in gray camouflage, heads shaven.

"Drop!"

Down go the kids for another round of twenty push-ups. Their thirty-minute lunch of grilled cheese sandwiches and sodas has just ended. And because some were slow to finish, the whole squad is kissing the concrete. Their compound is a shabby patch of ground surrounded by a chain-link fence topped by bright coils of concertina razor wire. The grounds hold six cinder block buildings and a flagpole. Nearby, on the other side of the fence, sits a small obstacle course.

The boot camp is wedged, as an architectural afterthought, into the back corner of the Kings County Government Center, a sprawling complex of fiat, Pizza Hut-style buildings connected by open walkways.

"I never give them more push-ups than I can do," says the fit-looking senior officer Rick Yzaguirre. As we watch the instructor yelling at her "cadets," camp commander Robert Smiley says finding qualified staff is a problem "because so many people have criminal convictions."

Most of the day here is taken up by exercise, remedial classes, and "life skills" classes. All of which are punctuated by salutes, double-timing it, and following the camp's many rules about how to speak, walk, and fold towels. But the few inmates I was allowed to speak with say they like the regimen.

"It's difficult. They brainwash you. But it's good. You learn respect," says a skinny sixteen-year-old Latino kid named Nelson. He was busted for graffiti. His fellow cadet, Falando, agrees. Both say the staff members treat them well and never hit them.

Up the road at the Fresno County Probation Department's Elkhorn juvenile boot camp, the story is similar.

This camp is bigger and sits amidst 300 acres of orchards. Behind the chain-link fence, I meet the camp commandant, or rather the director, Dick Simonian. He wears black fatigues and the military insignia of a general. His staff members also dress in black or camouflage fatigues and wear military ranks from lieutenant up through major and colonel. But Simonian isn't what you'd expect: He never did time in the armed forces, his desk is a mess, and he hates Proposition 21, California's latest get-tough-on-youth crime initiative.

"I was a bartender going to grad school until a friend of mine talked me into becoming a probation officer," Simonian says. "In the thirty years since then, we've gone from being social workers to cops."

Out on the compound, his 130 fatigue-clad "cadets"--all nonviolent or first-time offenders, most of them Latino and Laotian--line up in formation.

"Right face, forward! March? One of the cadet sergeants leads the cadence as the "Bravo platoon" marches off to class beneath its own homemade standard, a white flag bearing the image of an air-brushed tank and in graffiti-style letters the slogan: "Bravo, No Limit Soldiers."

"The guys make their own flags," says Simonian, who almost seems a little embarrassed that the cadets aren't snapping to attention in his presence as would real soldiers before a real general.

He goes on to show me the classrooms and barracks and outlines an elaborate curriculum of anger management and life skills classes that cover everything from filling out job applications to doing mock interviews and public speaking. After the youth complete their five months in boot camp, they go on to an aftercare program that involves intensive probation, drug testing, and a special community-based school.

I talk to several of the cadets. Away from the "TAC" (Teach, Advise, and Counsel) officers, they comment freely on the program.

"It's better than juvenile hall. We have more freedom here. If we don't mess up, we can get weekend furloughs home. The structure is good," says a sixteen-year-old who was repeatedly busted for residential burglary.

Others echo his sentiment: Juvenile hall is boring, more confining, and dangerous; boot camp is less restrictive and at least offers some "programming," i.e., classes.

As the day unfolds, the reality of Elkhorn emerges: Simonian, one of the top dogs in the Fresno County Probation Department, still believes in rehabilitation.

But, he says, the only way he can get his old-fashioned forms of intervention funded is to dress them up in camouflage and apply for federal grants. The extent to which the program is successful has more to do with its life skills classes and after-care school than with its marching and pseudo-military discipline.

"Even the military knows that boot camp does very little for emotionally damaged youth. That's why the military doesn't accept people with serious criminal records," says Jerome Miller, who served eleven years in the military and has directed the juvenile justice systems in Massachusetts and Illinois. Miller, the author of several influential books, most recently Search and Destroy: African American Males in the Criminal Justice System (Cambridge, 1996), says: "Remember, many of these kids have been yelled at all their lives; they need more than that."

Many studies show the harsh boot camp model to be a failure. The latest one--done by the conservative Koch Crime Institute in Topeka, Kansas--found that boot camps have a 64 to 75 percent recidivism rate, making them less effective than any other sort of program, such as time in prison or drug rehabilitation.

"The dynamic between captor and captive can very quickly deteriorate into serious abuse," says Miller.

The mounting revelations of abuse and the costly lawsuits may finally be taking the shine off the boot camp fad. A number of states are backing out of the boot camp cul-de-sac.

In Maryland, corrections officials were so proud of their program that they gave two Baltimore Sun journalists free access to the state boot camp to follow a group of fourteen inductees from start to finish. What the journalists saw shocked the entire state.

Induction started with the officers punching and kicking the stunned and terrified boys. The rest of the program was full of the same: blatant physical abuse coupled with little education.

In response to newspaper photos of officers reducing kids to tears and splitting open their lips, Maryland state officials swung into damage-control mode: The head of corrections was fired, the national guard was brought in to take charge, and the camps were toned down.

Georgia officials likewise overhauled their boot camp program after a 1998 U.S. Justice Department investigation found that it was overcrowded and dangerous to the point of being unconstitutional.

The California Department of Corrections closed its boot camp in 1997 after it was shown to be ineffective.

"We had boot camps for several years, but the recidivism rate was not better than in the regular programs, and they were expensive to run, so we got out of that business," says Steve Green, a spokesman for the Youth and Adult Correctional Agency of California. Many California counties have also dropped the model after brief flirtations.

So what does work?

Miller recommends old-fashioned programs "based in relationships" with good staff.

"In Massachusetts, we used to send kids mountain climbing in Norway," he says. "It was cheaper than incarceration, they got to rub shoulders with nondelinquent youth, and it kept them out of town for a while." But, he adds, the Massachusetts legislature soon found out about the Norway trips and, for the sake of looking tough, shut them down.

Christian Parenti is the author of "Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis" (Verso, 1999).