How Could You? Hall of Shame-Jamaica-Atlantis Leadership Academy and Tranquility Bay UPDATED

We covered Matt Bevin’s “czar” for foster case and adoption here. Now his adopted son,Noah (pseudonym) was removed and is now a ward of Jamaica.

This will be an archive of heinous actions by those involved in child welfare, foster care and adoption. We forewarn you that these are deeply disturbing stories that may involve sex abuse, murder, kidnapping and other horrendous actions.

From Treasure Beach, Jamaica, a recommended “trouble teen” programs is Atlantis Leadership Academy (ALA). “The “structured boarding academy” promised “empathy and love”; that “your son will always be treated with respect and dignity at all times.” “The fee would be $6,850 a month.”

“ALA’s rules forbade phone contact until a boy had advanced to a level that earned telephone privileges, which would typically take more than a year. ”

On February 8, 2024, ALA was raided and closed down.

“Bevin’s son was sent to a facility in Florida in 2019 and then to ALA “last year.” Those enrolled at ALA reported suffering beatings, cruel punishments, lack of food, filthy conditions, and lack of communication with their families, per the London Times.

But when the school was disbanded, the Bevin’s allegedly didn’t show up for custody hearings in April and he was left a ward of Jamaica.”

“The London Times claims that Bevin’s son said he was not surprised no one came for him and believed he was adopted for “public image.” ”

Paris Hilton attended “their court hearing in Jamaica after being saved from Atlantis Leadership Academy due to horrific abuse allegations including being violently beaten, whipped, waterboarded, and starved,” Hilton said on social media. “I knew I needed to show up for them. These children deserve to have people show up for them in their life and it makes me so proud that I was able to be there and tell them that I believed them and that they matter.”

Child Protection and Family Services Agency (CPFSA) “and embassy officials found eight American boys aged 14-18 confined in primitive conditions without soap, toothpaste, lavatory paper or even running water in one bathroom, displaying signs of abuse and neglect. All eight were removed immediately and transferred by court order the following day into the interim legal custody of the CPFSA.

One, having already turned 18, was returned to his parents in Texas. Before he left the other boys gave him handwritten statements cataloguing horrific allegations.”

“They wrote that they had been starved, waterboarded and brutally beaten with broom handles, rakes, belts and metal water bottles. They said they had been sleep-deprived and relentlessly insulted — “faggot”, “pussy”. Boys who self-harmed reported having bleach and salt rubbed in their wounds; others wrote that they were threatened with knives and kept in solitary confinement for months on end.

According to their statements, one boy was punched unconscious by staff; another boy’s nose was broken, another’s shoulder dislocated. Staff would get drunk at work, force the boys to fight each other for their entertainment and threaten to kill them. Many reported that Logan was beaten for screaming in his sleep and wetting the bed.”

The Troubled Teen Industry
“[I]n the US, where an estimated 50,000 children are placed by their parents in troubled teen facilities against their will every year. All operate in closely guarded secrecy. There are more than a hundred in Utah alone, but some are based offshore in remote, low-regulation, low-cost foreign locations such as Samoa, Costa Rica, Mexico and Caribbean islands. ”

Decca Aitkenhead, a Guardian reporter, said “I was living in Treasure Beach, a three-hour drive from Kingston and two and a half hours from Montego Bay, when I became aware of a facility on the outskirts called Tranquility Bay, which imprisoned 250 American teenage boys and girls. It took three years to persuade its director, from Utah, to grant me access. In June 2003 I wrote about it for The Guardian.”

“Any child who disobeyed was taken to a punishment room where they were forced to lie on the floor on their stomachs, allowed to sit up and stretch for ten minutes once an hour. One boy I saw in the room had been “lying on his face”, as the staff put it, for six months straight. They told me that was nothing; a girl had recently done 18 months.

Most of the children had been kidnapped from their beds at home in the US by armed guards hired by their parents to transport them there in handcuffs. Parents told me they had sent them, at $33,000 a year, for bunking off school, wearing inappropriate clothes, swearing, experimenting with cigarettes or alcohol or, in one case, “being disrespectful to his mom”.”

A sizeable number of the children had been adopted by parents who had then changed their minds and didn’t want them. Some had been in trouble with the police for drugs; many more had been diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder, whose symptoms — refusing to do what an adult asks, always questioning rules, doing things to annoy adults — sound indistinguishable from typical adolescent behaviour.

Tranquility Bay was affiliated to an umbrella organisation in Utah called the World Wide Association of Speciality Programs, or WWASP. The pioneer of modern troubled teen programmes, its operating model — total isolation from the outside world, physical brutality — is the industry standard. WWASP had officially disbanded by 2010, but its executives continue to work in the industry and, owing to their complex ownership structure, facilities forced to close often reopen under new names. A recent Netflix documentary, The Program: Cons, Cults and Kidnapping, reveals jaw-dropping abuse in another former WWASP facility, the Academy at Ivy Ridge in upstate New York, which closed in 2009. Allegations of neglect and abuse have forced countless others to close — including, in 2009, Tranquility Bay.”

‘I’d rather die than go back’: Jamaica’s school for troubled US boys
[The Times 7/13/24 by Decca Aitkenhead]

Son of former Gov. Matt Bevin a ward of the state in Jamaica, bombshell report claims
[Louisville Journal-Courier 8/5/24 by Luca Aulbach]

Former Gov. Bevin’s adopted son allegedly became ward of Jamaica after troubled-teen program disbands
[WDKY 8/5/24 by Madeline Goins]

REFORM Puzzle Piece

Update:“The adopted son of former Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin is back in the United States — after he was removed earlier this year from an allegedly abusive Jamaican youth facility and left in care of that country’s child welfare system.

The boy, 17, is in a placement worked out with help of Jamaican children’s authorities after his adoptive parents, Matt and Glenna Bevin, did not immediately respond to inquiries about his situation, said advocates working behalf of him and seven other boys removed from the facility in February.

“He is safe,” said Rebecca Growne, a representative of a child advocacy foundation created by hotel heiress Paris Hilton, who has used her celebrity to shed light on conditions in so-called “troubled teen” facilities.

“He is in an appropriate placement.”

The Bevins, Growne said, are not involved in the matter.

Hilton’s foundation, 11:11 Media Impact, is a non-profit organization which advocates on behalf of children in allegedly abusive residential settings.

Hilton herself traveled to Jamaica in April to meet the boys and offer her organization’s support, a visit she mentioned in June testimony before Congress over her concerns about such residential programs.

Hilton said she, as a teenager, was placed involuntarily in several such facilities she said were highly abusive.

The Bevins did not respond to repeated queries about their son as officials and advocates sought to find a custodian for him, according to advocates with the Hilton foundation. As a result, he was placed in custody of the Jamaican child welfare system.

“They were not communicating with us,” said Chelsea Maldonado, also with the Paris Hilton foundation, who went to Jamaica to assist in the case. “Everyone has tried. No one has had success.”

Neither Matt Bevin, who served as Kentucky governor from 2015 through 2019, nor his lawyer responded to a request for comment.

Glenna Bevin, who is seeking a divorce from her husband, did not respond to a request for comment through her lawyer.

Matt Bevin, a conservative Christian, ran a campaign based in part on improving adoption services in Kentucky and reducing the number of children in foster care. In a 2017 interview on KET he called his desire to reform the system “the driving reason I made the decision to run.”

The Bevins are the parents of five biological children and four children they adopted from Ethiopia in 2012, including the youth who was sent to the Atlantis Leadership Academy in Jamaica last year.

Matt Bevin often cited the adoption in his political campaign and after he was elected in calling on members of Kentucky’s faith community to provide adoptive homes for children in need.”

Former Ky. Gov. Matt Bevin’s son back in U.S. after being removed from abusive facility
[The Lexington Times 8/8/24 by Deborah Yetter]