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The Program: Cons, Cults and Kidnapping
★★★★
Netflix
It feels distinctly American to have an entire industry built around “troubled teens”, one which, according to a 2021 American Bar Association report, receives $23 billion in public funds annually. A portion of that goes towards so-called “disciplinary schools”, where tough love is meted out to misbehaving adolescents.
Filmmaker Katherine Kubler at the former Ivy Ridge school.Credit: Netflix
This documentary series was made by filmmaker Katherine Kubler, who was sent to one such school. Her father had seen the brochures for the Academy at Ivy Ridge in upstate New York, showing smiling teenagers riding horses, hiking, playing sport and eating nutritious meals. The reality was starkly different: Kubler and her classmates were not permitted to talk, smile, or even look at students of the opposite sex, and once inside Ivy Ridge, you were not allowed outside.
No phone calls home were permitted and even looking out of a window was forbidden. Students operated on a points system and losing points could extend their stay, although incarceration is a more appropriate word.
Kubler was driven to Ivy Ridge by her father, but many of the students were delivered to the school by “transport companies” – essentially kidnappers who were hired to show up at the children’s houses, often in the middle of the night, and forcibly remove them. Kubler and others describe daily life at Ivy Ridge and it’s shocking: solitary confinement, physical and mental abuse, torture and mandatory attendance at cult-like seminars.
Paris Hilton with Kubler, far right, and other former Ivy Ridge students.Credit: Netflix
Kubler’s father withdrew her after more than a year, in 2005, and she has been working on exposing the system that allows the “school”, and dozens of others like it in the US, ever since. She’s spent years interviewing former students, tracking down former “teachers” and management. The scare quotes are necessary as it transpired that the high-school certificates students were awarded after finishing their final year were worthless; one former student in the series didn’t even realise this until he tried to enrol in a college.
When Kubler learnt in 2020 that the Ivy Ridge property had been sold, she and her crew made their way there, discovering the buildings abandoned but full of evidence. There was surveillance footage of abuse, excessive force, “restraint logs” and heartbreaking letters sent home to mostly oblivious parents, who often spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for Ivy Ridge to help their children.