Those of us who have managed to get a glimpse of Communist states have surely caught notice of the loudspeakers strewn about on the premises of campuses or housing facilities, whence were shot forth all the directives and useful info on how to become a model citizen and what should be done in matter of exercices to improve your life (according to the values of the State, that is). Well, there are such places near the freedom-loving United States. Right at its door actually, in the Caribbean Islands.

One major problems of modern Americans, it seems, is the incapacity to develop their own judgment and to impose their values on their children. Quite the paradox, considering that a sizeable portion of the US population seems bent on showing the world how to behave right and what good morals and values actually are. It is thus all the more surprising that some families are willing to spend large sums (US$25,000 to $40,000 a year) to keep their teenagers from winding up at the end of the road to hell. And it's my hard way or that highway it seems, as these children are sent to a modern version of boot camp that bear an uncanny resemblance to reeducation centers of Communist China and a stone's throw from Soviet Kulaks. But why Jamaica? Isn't it possible for these children to have access to similar centers in the United States? Or is this practice considered illegal there? The procedure is dubious at best, with private officers coming to the house of the family and removing by force the delinquent teenager.

Can parents become this desperate that they have to rely on private military? Is the desire for an authoritarian state of almost saintly purification (here embodied wholly by G.W. Bush and his tunraround from binge drinker to born again Christian) a sign of a people that has given up on Man?
Undoubtedly, countries with dense populations have to develop immensely coercive means of control to prevent mayhem or anarchy. All the major countries of more than 100 million inhabitants have death penalties and very robust prison systems.
Is this kind of institution a teenager version of the concentration camps that we have developed in recent years for unruly behavior? Can it be that Tranquility Bay is a Guantanamo Bay Lite for little insecure family governements? Are they refugee camps isolated from the large urban areas to prevent contamination of "dangerous'' ideas from within and from without? Or is this kind of endoctrination process some means to compensate the lack of military commitment or mandatory army service in the U.S.?

I can't help but feel some kind of uneasiness when I see those parents willing to send their own flesh and blood in a remote island of the Caribbean, entrust their child to a private company that strives not on discipline and well-being but on breaking the burgeoning self-confidence of future adults who need strong parental figures to guide them though life.