The elevator pitch of this place is that it promises to reform your kids, make them more obedient and better prepared for life. It has been 17 years since I was at this program and I still deal with the demons this place created in my mind. Now being a parent of my own kids, I look back at this place with disdain, if you love your children, this is not the place for them. I will try to not too get too emotional while reliving the memories from this place but please excuse me if I rant. I spent 53 days in the program, I still do not talk about it very often, not even to my wife. I had been getting into trouble with my parents for a while when they sent me to this place, nothing with the law, hell, nothing that kids these days would consider bad, but at the time I was 15 and we all do stupid things when we are that age but to be clear, no drugs, a little drinking with friends but nothing problematic. They sent me to this place to try and "fix" me. I cannot tell when the "fixing" started, it was maybe the strip search at the begging, the kids trying to kill themselves next to you on the trail, the 15 pounds I lost while being here, or the oppressive prison type environment this place feels like. When I was there this place was working with the local court system and was actively pushing kids who should have been in jail through this "reform" program. I had interactions with kids who had meth, crack, kleptomania, carjacking, and one had child molestation issues. I know these things as they have group therapy time where all the kids confront why they were sent to this camp as well as conversations with the grown-up versions of the kids I knew while i was there. None of the kids, not one, while now adults, i speak to think that this place had any effect on their wellbeing as adults or as people. The camp starts in this old boy/girl scout camp, they strip search you of everything, make you shower while the counselors watch you then they give you the, uniform. Blue shirt, khaki pants, backpack, prison orange hats, hiking boots etc. so far not so bad. Then they send you to a week of orientation, they teach you to sent up a tent, make a campfire, set up a campsite. This is where you start to meet the worst of the other… lets call them inmates for now, They keep the runners, the violent, the mentally deranged, and plain insane kids here inside the camp where they are the most, controlled. You learn that many of these kids were grabbed in the night by thugs to take them there to the camp. You learn to never want to be in the camp as it is where the bad things happen, fights, suicide attempts, other kids staling your things, kids trying to escape. You do not want to be sent back to the camp, it has showers and resupply, but you really do not want to be here. If you are caught causing trouble you are sent to sleep in tarps so that every time you move the counselors who sleep on either side of you know you are moving. If you get into a fight you are sent to this special cabin, I am unsure what it was or what was in it, but I know you didn’t want to be sent there. I never found out what happened to the kids who tried to run. Getting out of orientation you are then assigned to a group of guys/ girls that you will be assigned to for likely the rest for the time you spend at SUWs, these are kids who are swinging through the camp from off the trail to shower, clean up, “rest”. I was assigned to group J; they had just created this group and so I had a bunch of “new guys” assigned into the program as well with me. These fellas and the corresponding memories with them are the only fond thing that I can remember from this place. Similar to being in war, we saw these kids break emotionally, you see tough guys cry, you see good guys try and kill themselves, you don’t see the emotionally weak survive… they get sent back to the camp…. it’s a pretty hard place to be when you are 15. If any of the guys of the group J of summer 2005 want to reach out, please email me. Your job as being part of group J was to hike each day to a new campsite, there are no maps that the students can see so there is no way to know how far or for how long you walk for. Then you pitch camp and work on your activities for that day. That’s it, I think it was once a week or once every two weeks you got to come into the camp and hit the showers, but no one liked coming back to camp as again, it is where they kept the insane kids that stole all your stuff. The staff that were assigned to us swaps out each I think it was per week, there are a few good guys that work here that entertain the group, they are not trained in dealing with these kids, they are just there to herd the cats and restrain when necessary. I remember one of the staff would tell us his stories of jumping trains to get across the US because he was homeless. It was funny because that was how a couple of the “runners” tried to get away. Yes, kids try and run, the parents have to sign half of the legal guardianship of the child to the camp so that the camp can call the police and deploy the dogs to “run down” the kid. Group J didn’t have any run attempts, although we did talk about it a few times. Once a week a therapist would come meet the group and one on one, this guy was the ticket out of the camp. I still know the exact spot where I heard the sound that a body makes when it loses consciousness and stops functioning. I can remember the sandwich I was eating and the exact place on the trail where one of the guys in group J tried to commit suicide. The kid had wrapped Parachute cord around his neck and cinched it down then thrown a sleeping bag over himself to look like he was taking a nap. The only reason we knew what had happened is that 10 min after he decided to rest sitting next to me, I heard the gurgle that the human body makes when it goes slack from lack of oxygen. I still hear it in nightmares and it constantly makes me jump out of bed at night to check on my kid. Very quickly after they rushed the rest of group J away from the scene while they were resuscitating him, I still don’t know to this day if he survived or not, the staff refused to tell us. I think the kids name was Brian. After you make it through their little program, it involves getting signatures through a little book that outlines a number of activities from making rope to creating enough campfires or building a bow drill. Menial tasks that really have no other function than to take up time. Once you get through the majority of the book or your parents cant afford the outrageous cost of this place anymore, you get to go to the last week, during this time they mingle the sexes again and you get to see girls again. It’s where your parents can come evaluate you to see if you are better or if you need to stay there longer, I knew a kid who had been in for over one hundred days that was getting out and his parents still where unhappy to see him even though he was literally begging to be let out of there. I was happy to see my parents; I was happy to taste freedom. By the time I left I was so skinny that my parents likened me to a holocaust victim. I am still friends with a number of the kids that went through the program on Facebook that I met during this last week, I know that a few have become close to others families, and it has created a bond, but this is not the good bond like, “yay we completed something great”, it is more along the lines of, “something terrible happened to all of us and we now share similar memories”. After all of that, after my time spent at SUWS I struggled for a long time, I had not done anything bad until after I got out of the program and spent years struggling to find my way through drugs, alcohol and parties in college and university. Did it heal me? No. did it make me a better person? Absolutely not. What did the program teach me? To fear my parents, to fear the system, to not trust anyone with my things, to not trust anyone at their word, and to find a way to always have an escape route in any situation. Would I recommend this program to ANYONE, no absolutely not, this place has done more lifelong damage to my mental health than depression could ever do. I still speak to the people who made it out, all of them have the same opinion, this place did not help any of the underlying problems, I know a few that still ended up back in jail, I know a few that are still out in the world, scarred as hell from this place and we still jokingly talk about how bad it was. As I have become older I have voiced my questions to my parents about why they sent me to this place, they felt like they were “trapped by a rebellious teenager”, they thought that I was “headed into a dark place that would lead to jail or death”… after many long talks, usually while drinking beer or two my parents honestly tell me that SUWS was ne of the greatest regrets they ever had, that sending me there broke the relationship between parent and child and made it more into a guard vs prisoner type relationship, this institution does not bring your kid back. It makes them fear you and want to get away from you.