Mark Foley and "Growing Together" (abusive juvenile drug rehab)

I was googling around on Foley's name and came across this. Growing Together is a juvenile drug rehab which has been the subject of horrifying exposes. (It's a spinoff of Mel Sembler's Straight, Inc., a name which comes up here from time to time.)

I don't know how much to make of it, but Foley has been a prominent endorser of the program.

http://www.nospank.net/n-n71r.htm

Growing Together's 17-year-old, nonprofit facility treats 25 to 40 children at a time. It rakes in roughly $1 million annually from donations and fees paid by parents of drug-addicted kids, some of whom are ordered by judges to attend. It has powerful friends and donors, including West Palm Beach Mayor Lois Frankel, banker Warren W. Blanchard, attorney Jack Scarola, and Republican U.S. Rep. Mark Foley.

Yet physical and sexual abuse appears to be common there, according to a New Times investigation that included reviews of state records, police reports, and interviews with about two dozen former patients and parents. Kids rioted at the facility in April 1997, and last year, state investigators found that Growing Together was too quick to use physical restraint on children. Moreover, police have written more than 800 reports related to the program since 1995.

"I still can't get the screams out of my head from hearing kids dragged down the hall by the hair on their heads," says a former graduate of the program who asked to remain anonymous. "The crimes that were committed there have never been told in public. Nobody has ever put these people on trial."

Rik Pavlescak, a former investigator with the Department of Children and Families (DCF), wrote reports on the program in the early '90s that detailed beatings, restraint, imprisonment, and systematic humiliation. He alleges that influential outsiders have undermined investigations of the group.


http://www.thestraights.com/gop.htm

Growing Together's various programs for educational information about abuse, residential treatment for its clients, family support system and community outreach to targeted potential abusers have been very effective in helping to combat and deal with drug abuse.

- Republican Congressman Mark Foley, Florida. From a Growing Together brochure.

have easy access to children......

anything that he has done for or with children is suspect.....

I wonder if Jeb was involved in the coverup in this Foley project? Why wasn't this place closed? Probably because a lot of rich parents were sending their kids there...