A Beneficial Treatment Facility for Teens Is Shut Down

Founded in 2009, Re-Creation Retreat (RCR) was a therapeutic program for troubled girls in Fredonia, Arizona. It served more than 800 teens, offering clinical therapy and life-skills training.

But last month, the Arizona Department of Health Services shut it down.

The closure, Christina Buttons writes, “is part of a nationwide backlash against youth residential treatment, where adolescents live in a group setting and receive 24-hour care for serious emotional or behavioral challenges.”

RCR, in particular, came under scrutiny when Inside Edition aired a segment in May that featured emotional accounts from former residents. But it “omitted critical context about why the program exists, the behaviors that led to placement, and the constraints of treating minors in crisis,” Buttons writes.

Read her inside story, featuring interviews with some of the families, about the events that led to RCR’s closure and what it means for girls’ diminishing treatment options.

As New York City comptroller, Brad Lander oversees $288.59 billion in assets, including the city’s budget and five pension funds that support public safety workers, teachers, and civil servants. How has he done?

Well, as Allison Schrager points out, “the pension funds have returned less than 3 percent annually—during one of the strongest bull markets in living memory.” This might be forgivable, she argues, if Lander had moved assets into safer investments. “Instead, he managed to deliver both weak returns and greater exposure to risk,” she writes.

Schrager digs into the numbers and explores Lander’s unsuccessful record here.

Last year, California raised the minimum wage for fast-food workers to $20 an hour. While the state raised wages by 8 percent, it simultaneously reduced employment by 3 percent, according to a new working paper.

The finding isn’t entirely surprising, Robert VerBruggen writes, noting that if “employers are forced to pay more for labor, they tend to buy less of it.” He unpacks the minimum-wage debate, which you can read here.

In a recent New York Times op-ed, Zephyr Teachout, a leader of the “anti-oligarchy” movement, argues that the U.S. food system is “rigged in favor of big retailers and suppliers in several ways” that drive up consumer prices. “Big retailers often flex their muscles to demand special deals; to make up the difference, suppliers then charge the smaller stores more,” she writes.

But, as Judge Glock points out, businesses charge the price that maximizes profit—not a lower price to one group and a higher price to another to “make up” the discount. “Why would suppliers suddenly reduce prices for independent retailers if they could charge more to big retailers? They wouldn’t, and they don’t,” he writes.

Read his take on Teachout’s “incoherent” argument, and the problematic thinking behind city-owned grocery stores.

“The public charter my child attends has a waiting list of 2,000.

Meanwhile, the traditional public school not a mile away is shutting down for lack of students.

In many areas, the traditional public school could go away entirely and the slack would easily be picked up—especially with vouchers, and if public charters received 100% of the per pupil funding traditional public schools received instead of 80%.”

Photo credit: Justin Paget / DigitalVision via Getty Images