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Paris Hilton made headlines in 2020 when she released her documentary This Is Paris and opened up about her disturbing eleven months at the Provo Canyon School, where she was sent as a teenager to get a dose of “tough love” to fix her behavioral issues. Her documentary helped shed light on the abusive and exploitative “troubled teen” industry and even resulted in legislation to address the issues she brought forward. Now she’s executive producing a podcast called Trapped In Treatment, hosted by another “troubled teen” facility survivor, Caroline Cole, and an investigator into the industry, Rebecca Mellinger. Together, they’ll talk with survivors, past employees, and subject-matter experts to show how behavior modification centers became a billion-dollar industry that left a trail of traumatized teens in its wake.
On the premier episode, Caroline and Rebecca share some of Paris’s upsetting memories of the “treatments” used by these types of facilities, which included physical restraints, solitary confinement, sleep and food deprivation, and over-medication. Kids were often sent miles away from family, unable to communicate with the outside world or disrupt the chain of command to report abuse. Even worse, the abuse was seen as effective treatment for teens with issues ranging from behavioral and emotional problems to drug addiction.
Caroline and Rebecca give a quick overview of the history of the industry, starting with harsh drug treatment programs in the 1950s and President Gerald Ford’s Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974. As well-intentioned as the act was, it lacked regulation from the beginning. This resulted in a mishmash of facilities that were sometimes called schools, sometimes detention centers, sometimes halfway homes that all had the same modus operandi: Isolate the kids, subject them to tough and terrifying treatment, and expect the best. Instead, Paris and others like her have been haunted their whole lives by the abuses they suffered in the name of “straightening them out.” Dive into the whole disturbing story on Trapped In Treatment.
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