"Anything goes" at kids boot camps.

• Position: Child Abuse

They make the headlines when something goes terribly wrong: a child dies at the hands of guards administering "tough love" or a youngster collapses from dehydration during an outing of "character building." These are America's throw-away children--predominantly boys--consigned by families or courts to facilities that purport to offer alternatives to "straighten out" kids who seem to be in a downward spiral, from first-time offenders to incorrigible truants.

While this new breed of facilities for dealing with troubled children has been making news, the underlying philosophy is an old one, reports Richard B. Johnson, author of Abominable Firebug: A Memoir. Accused of arson as a child and imprisoned without trial at the notorious Roslindale Juvenile Detention Center in Massachusetts, he subsequently spent years at the nation's first reform school, the Lyman School for Boys, in the 1950s. While the institution became infamous for hatching Albert DeSalvo, an adolescent inmate who "graduated" to become the Boston Strangler, Johnson tells unflinchingly not only of the many weaknesses of that institution, but of the rare opportunities and occasional mentors that allowed him to become, in later life, an accomplished engineer, pilot, and inventor.

However, many children who have survived, and even thrived, in adulthood rarely publicly admit a troubled past; staff members who have found ways to make a difference are reluctant to risk being linked with institutions whose names are synonymous with abuse. Thus, valuable experience...