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The last resort

When you have a teenager on the rampage, who are you going to turn to? In America, parents send their troubled offspring to Jamaica's Tranquility Bay - a 'behaviour-modification centre' which charges $40,000 a year to 'cure' them. Decca Aitkenhead, the first journalist to gain access to the centre in five years, wonders if there isn't too high a price to pay

Decca Aitkenhead
Sunday June 29, 2003
The Observer

Were you to glance up from the deserted beach below, you might mistake Tranquility Bay for a rather exclusive hotel. The statuesque white property stands all alone on a sandy curve of southern Jamaica, feathered by palm trees, gazing out across the Caribbean Sea. You would have to look closer to see the guards at the wall. Inside, 250 foreign children are locked up. Almost all are American, but though kept prisoner, they were not sent here by a court of law. Their parents paid to have them kidnapped and flown here against their will, to be incarcerated for up to three years, sometimes even longer. They will not be released until they are judged to be respectful, polite and obedient enough to rejoin their families.....

Tranquility is basically a private detention camp. But it differs in one important respect. When courts jail a juvenile, he has a fixed sentence and may think what he likes while serving it, whereas no child arrives at Tranquility with a release date. Students are judged ready to leave only when they have demonstrated a sincere belief that they deserved to be sent here, and that the programme has, in fact, saved their life. They must renounce their old self, espouse the programme's belief system, display gratitude for their salvation, and police fellow students who resist....

Also striking is the assumption parents make of entitlement to their child's affection, as though this is a legal right. 'She's a neat kid, she really is,' a former student's mother says. 'She just didn't like us.' But now, 'I don't believe she's lying to me any more, and that's a neat feeling.'

Messy divorce and remarriage are the norm among these parents. Their expectations of loyalty from their children, though, suggest a gilt-edged ideal of American family life so brittle any rebellion or defiance is literally terrifying. This culture then creates its own logic - for once adolescence is criminalised, Tranquility becomes the obvious solution.

A clearer picture of this family culture emerges from conversation with a group of levels 5 and 6.

'Oh, my relationship with my family was pretty bad. I just went to my room and avoided my parents. There was always arguments and stuff,' offers Pete. 'I was very angry with my parents, their divorce had a big influence on me. I'm not angry with them now, though. Not at all. I mean, I look at this as a punishment, obviously, but I deserved it. How I acted towards my parents.'...

'What?' She looks thrown, before putting the question aside. 'If my mom hadn't sent me here I would have died.'

That without Tranquility they would be dead is an article of faith among all the students....

It soon becomes apparent that despite all having been programmed with the script of their near death, no one has paused to wonder how it would have happened. But if they hadn't been dead, they would have been poor, a destiny they have been taught to consider more or less the same thing. 'Tranquility showed me that I'd have been a minimum wager,' Nick says. 'This place saved my life.'...

Points and privileges are awarded to students who tell on each other. If you don't tell on someone for breaking a rule and get found out, you lose points. 'There is zero trust,' Scott explains. 'You can't trust anyone. It's not us against them. It's everyone against you.' Scott remembers a new boy being caught with incriminating used tissues; masturbation is strictly forbidden. 'And they got him up in front of everyone right after dinner, and the upper-level kids just ripped into him, this little 13-year-old kid. It was kind of the entertainment for the night. That's what I mean about breaking kids.'...