‘The Program’: Netflix doc exposes horrors of the ‘troubled teen’ industry
globalnews.caIf you were paying attention to the news in the early 2000s, you’ve likely seen footage — desperate parents, exhausted and frightened by their troubled teen’s behaviour, pay to have their child abducted in the night and placed in a program that will scare them straight and reform them back into good behaviour.
Netflix’s latest docuseries offering, The Program: Cons, Cults and Kidnapping, takes a harrowing look at what happened to one set of such teenagers, who underwent a personal nightmare when the institution they were placed in ended up being, essentially, a corrupt machine for torture, brainwashing and abuse.
The three-part documentary, which began airing Mar. 5, focuses on the story of Katherine Kubler, who also serves as director for the series.
In the early 2000s, at the age of 16, Kubler was attending a Christian boarding school in Long Island, N.Y., when she was expelled for drinking hard lemonade. Staff at the school said her dad would arrive soon to take her home, but, instead, two strange men with handcuffs showed up to take her away.
They forcibly escorted her to the Academy at Ivy Ridge in upstate New York — a facility that was peddled to her parents with a shiny brochure and slick video featuring kids riding horseback and swimming in a lake — where she faced anything but the idyllic image that was sold to her family.
It's time to expose the horrors of the troubled teen industry.
THE PROGRAM: CONS, CULTS, KIDNAPPING is now streaming pic.twitter.com/m9NlgutSOw
— Netflix Canada (@Netflix_CA) <a href=«https://twitter.com/Netflix_CA/status/1765006851513434218?ref_src=» https:>March 5, 2024
Instead, she was enlisted in a program that forced compliance through manipulation, fear and violence. She was made to
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