Complaint Review:
A & M Recovery
I'm writing this report on behalf of all Missouri taxpayers and probationers. This company is part of a state mandated program for a majority of probationers. They offer drug counseling, and critical thinking courses, among other things, to probationers in the Springfield area.
This particular complaint is regarding the state mandated 12 week course on critical thinking. It purpose is to teach the client how to make proper decisions in life so as not to return to the legal system. This is a 12 week course, twice a week, that must be attended by the offender by court order. The offender is also charged $30.00 a week to complete the course. Graduation is determined on a point score, and points are earned by completion of homework assignments, attendance, and participation in class discussion. However. No body knows how many points you must accumulate to achieve graduation. And they will not tell you. After attending this mandated course 4 months, one party has still not graduated, and can not find out what her accumulated points are. She has since been placed on financial suspension, because she refuses to pay for classes not attended, while they A & E Recovery insists that she do so. She had 2 absences due to surgery. This is the second time she has been placed on financial suspension when she was very close to graduating, the first time, she paid her fees, and continued her classes...after starting from the beginning again. This time,after attending for 4 months, she is financially suspended from completion pending payment for classes not attended, which places her in jeopardy of violating probation, and subjects her to 120 days in jail.
To her knowledge, there has only been one graduate of this class...a client who paid for the course in full prior to attending. Consequently, there was no way for A & M Recovery to continue to extend this clients classes, because they were paid in full prior to attending. Most clients make payments, and in the two different instances in which Client 1 attended, the fully paid client is the only one she witnessed graduating.
Therefore, I allege, A & M Recovery cheats their clients out of timely graduation in order to pad their own pockets.
The next complaint involves verbal abuse of their clients. Client 1 has been called a prostitute, drug abuser, liar, and lazy, and has also been ridiculed by being told she deserves to be hit, does not deserve to see her children, should not buy food, and she doesn't need to eat because she is fat enough. None of these accusations or comments are relative to her charged crime. (petty theft) She has also been told to put this all behind her and move on.
The critical thinking course is to educate the client in how to make the right decisions in life to be a prosperous, contributing, member of society. None of the above complaints is conducive to this. Furthermore, as a state mandated program, our tax dollars are supposed to be used (in this instance) to rehabilitate the client. There is no rehabilitation here, just enabling each client to continue to pay for fear they will be jailed for contempt. All for the sake of a dollar bill. The client's, yours, and mine.