Years after being sent to a disciplinary school, a woman still haunted by her experiences exposes the corruption and abuse of the troubled teen industry.If you were paying attention to the news in the early 2000s, you’ve likely seen footage — desperate parents, exhausted and frightened by theirbehaviour, pay to have their child abducted in the night and placed in a program that will scare them straight and reform them back into good behaviour.
“I’ve always said this was like Count of Monte Cristo because I had this false imprisonment where I planned my big revenge,” Kubler says to the camera, standing in the now-dilapidated library of the abandoned facility. “I was like, ‘When I get out of here, I’m going to make a documentary about these places, and I’ll get back at every one of you!'”Kubler and a handful of other Ivy Ridge alumni act as an amateur investigators, set out to expose the truth of the suffering they endured.
However, once the teens arrived at the facility, it became clear that Ivy Ridge was not an educational facility at all. They were told they were no longer allowed to step foot outside and, instead, had to move from building to building via makeshift, enclosed walkways. Many of the facilities used ideas formed by the drug rehabilitation program, Synanon, which was founded in the 1950s by Charles Dederich and went on to become a full-blown cult by the late 1970s.