We will send a plea to all students in every high school in the world to send a letter of comfort to those who are no longer among us.

We all know a student who has been sent to a boarding school, wilderness program, boot camp or abroad because the family finds the present youth culture too challengling.

They suffer isolated from their peers and we feel that is time to tell them or their captors that they are not forgotten.

May 26, 1961 the article The Forgotten Prisoners launced the campaign "Appeal for Amnesty 1961" and defined the term "Prisoner of Conscience".

We believe that it is time to honor this day every month by writing a letter to someone who used to be our classmate.

It doesn't matter if our beloved friend will be able to read the letter. It will often not be the case. A massive part of the residential solutions offered to minors today isolate their clients from the rest of the world.

49 years have gone and the world has still minors who have been sent away from their local communities for their belief, lifestyle, religion or sexual orientation. Will it ever change?

It will not change unless we all do our part. What would it take to write a simple letter every month?

Somewhere out there a person you have known suffer!

You can do your part:

- Get your pencil. 
- Buy or draw a postcard
- Write your message of comfort
- Mail the letter

Back in 1971 a small article mentions some teenagers and young women meeting a tragic end when they participated in one of the first wilderness therapy programs, we have learned of. In fact a then 17 year old Lorene Larhette is the earliest recorded death on a victim list published by another NGO.

Unfortunately her death was not the last one in the Oregon wilderness. As late as in 2009 Sergey Blashchishen died at a wilderness program called Sagewalk. Sagewalk is known from an entertainment program called Brat Camp, which was broadcasted by ABC in 2005.


More than 30 years passed between these deaths and no lesson seems to have been learned by the individuals who run these programs. Can you as a parent entrust your child to this industry?

References:
Victims in 1970s (Secret Prisons for Teens)
Survival test ends in tragedy (Rome News Courier, September 8, 1971)
Lorene Larhette - 1971 (Today a child died blog)
Portland teen collapses and dies during wilderness camp hike (OregonLive,September 1, 2009)
Brat Camp (Internet Movice Database)

Our search engines found this piece written by a then soon-to-be prisoner of conscience:
---
I have not yet been placed in a "character building school/wilderness program/boot camp/gay re-education camp/or a therapeutic boarding school" but as of today I am packing to be placed in the later. Basically, Monday I will be expected to walk into a therapeutic/troubled teen boarding school titled "Academy at Sisters" - which is in Bend, Oregon. 

So far I have heard nothing but bad things of this school. Facebook groups of survivors have said that it's "taken their hopes and dreams, and replaced them with skills only to be used by housewives," and have claimed that, "it took away our basic rights, and forced us to learn nothing but compliance." My parents think it is a good idea to send me here, however, I disagree to the highest extent. I have done nothing wrong.

Sure, In my past I've made mistakes, but whom hasn't? I have never done drugs, stolen, lied to the extent that it has caused me/others harm.. None of the things that the AAS advertises it shall help with. Why am I posting a testimony? Because I want this to be here for someone to edit while I'm in the program. Because I want someone to see that I had a level head about me before I left. I still have hopes, dreams, and ambitions, and I want that documented before it's gone.


I don't want to be added to the list of survivors. I don't want to have to try and survive it at all.
---
Later research did show that she lost her freedom around September 1, 2010. She is detained in La-pine, Oregon at the "Academy at Sisters" so-called boarding school. Here she is isolated from her former peers at the Glencoe High School in Hillsboro and that part of her extended family which would have offered her to live at their home.


Little is known about the type of cancer which led to the early death of her mother according to her blog, but one thing is certain. She began to doubt God. Those of us who have lived longer has experienced such periods of our life also. There will be time of hardship where we question our belief. But we also know that the desicion to start to believe again was made in loneliness undisturbed by others.


Nobody forced us to go to a certain religious boarding school so we could "find" God again. Nobody enforced their belief upon us. But this is the reality Morgan face. Academy at Sisters is a religious program. While they state that they accept people believing otherwise, they don't mention what they do with people who don't believe.


We know that this boarding school has a show-room campus which parents can tour. They also have the La-pine campus where the teenage girls are forced to work in the woods during breaks in the enforced therapy and missionary.


Pray for Morgan. Help her support group on Facebook out.

Regards
Hugh Elborn


Update: She is free for now, but like many teenagers she must now live very carefully because her parent can hire a youth transport firm to take her away in handcuffs and legirons 3 a.m. from her own bed. whenever they like, so she cannot prepare for help and support outside another time.

Who we are

We are a small non-governmental organization who are focusing on teenagers in residential treatment, which basically are prisoners of conscience because they are detained based on their beliefs rather than their actions.

Often they are confined based on an administrative desicion or by the orders of their parents without access to legal aid.

We have to accept that even here in 2010 the news of teenagers who die while they are placed in residential treatment continue to raise.

We support HR 911 which will introduce some minimum standards for teenagers who are placed at boarding schools, boot camps or wilderness programs.

Our approach is research on the internet and interviews with survivors of various programs.

You can reach us by email. Our email-address is (without spaces): h u g h e l b o r n @ y a h o o . c o m


Regards
Hugh Elborn
spokesperson