Fear of, and anxiety for teenagers reached a political peak last week, with both Tony Blair and David Blunkett condemning violence and truancy. With £12.5m lottery funding driving an expansion of summer camps, the new court orders known as ASBOs (Anti-Social Behaviour Orders) parents feel increasingly unequal to the struggle of keeping children of all ages safe and off the streets during the long summer holidays may feel the solution is to use US-style institutions to sort out problems with discipline, drunkenness and drug abuse.

Yet anyone eager to sign problem kids up to such programmes would do well to read Terri Paddock’s Come Clean, published next week. A gripping and devastating novel, already described by critics as a cross between One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Catcher in the Rye, it is inspired by the real-life experiences of Paddock’s family with an American organisation called Straight, Inc. Paddock’s sister, Anne, was sent to the Virginia branch of Straight as a rebellious 17-year-old, and it is Terri’s “very bad memories” of the programme, which prompted the writing of Come Clean.

Visited by Nancy Reagan and Princess Diana as exemplary institutions, Straight was believed to put anti-social, drug-addicted teenagers back into society. It opened what Paddock describes as “bunker-like facilities” across the country, and its philosophy of “tough love” was politically popular. “Straight borrowed its core philosophies from Alcoholics Anonymous and other twelve-step recovery systems, but combined there with extreme peer-group pressure practices including – in addition to intimidation and ritual humiliation through provoked ‘confrontations’ – starvation,” she says. “Sleep deprivation, denial of privacy and other basic needs (like going to the toilet) and physically assaulting (or ‘restraining’) non-complaint teenagers was a part of its method.” Such physical assaults, according to many “survivors” of the programme who have told their story on the Internet and in lawsuits, included allegations of brainwashing, kidnapping, rape, torture, suicide and attempted suicide.

Paddock, now 34 and running the theatre website www.whatsonstage.com in London, was nearly sent to Straight Inc herself, like her heroine, Justine, who is duped by her parents into going for what she is told is a drive to the mall. She is stripped, starved, bullied and denied any freedom, but worse is to come. Terri’s only “crime”, like Justine’s, was to write in her diary, aged 15, about going to a party where she fancied a boy who had been drinking beer. With her older sister, Anne, already in Straight the whole family was constantly being monitored by “counsellors”, to whom nothing was private. The counsellor read Terri’s diary and she experienced “that incredible fear” that she, like her sister, would be incarcerated.

Justine’s ordeal in the novel is described in stomach-churning detail. Utterly betrayed by her weak, well-meaning conventional parents she enters institutional hell at “Come Clean”. The lying, the spying, the constant accusations of being a “druggie” and the pressure to confess to the tiniest misdemeanours reads like something from a Soviet concentration camp. What underlines the horror is that although Paddock’s story is fiction, the details are based on real-life experiences. Teenaged children, often suffering from psychological problems such as manic depression rather than drug abuse were not only stripped of their clothes, friendships and dignity but all other members of the family were harried and humiliated as well. Justine, bright and spirited though harrowed by guilt at betraying her beloved brother Joshua (whom we later learn has committed suicide) fights back against the crushing rules and eventually escapes with the help of Toby, another inmate. Paddock’s sister, Anne, did not do this. Instead, she “moved rapidly through the system” to become an (untrained) counsellor at Straight Inc. herself.

All of this makes one very curious about what kind of parents could consign their child to such an institution. Paddock is reluctant to condemn the actions of her family, saying that “they were very worried my sister would ruin her life. I must stress that they really did believe they were doing the right thing at a time when there was a lot of hyperbole about the war on drugs.”

Yet Anne, 17, was not a drug-addict. She was mixing with other high-school drop-outs and running away from home on the East Coast, often for months at a time, and living on the streets in Florida.

The Paddocks were a military family who moved around a lot, something that Terri thinks contributed to her middle sister’s reaction against authority. “Anne probably didn’t react well to the kind of life we led, she was quite rebellious. I was 3 years younger, my parents tried to shield me but I suppose that if you’re in the military you’re supposed to obey orders. My father was a military father, and quite strict.”

Colonel Paddock was posted to the Pentagon in 1984, and it was at this point that they enrolled Anne in the Virginia branch of Straight. Inc. It cost 4,000 pa – a lot in the 1980s - but they were convinced it was the only way forwards because the company, like many “wilderness programs” and “boot camps” today, claimed a high success-rate. Much of this reputation was due to total suppression – when Nancy Reagan and Princess Diana visited the Virginia facility, according to one web-site, the troublemakers were kept bound and gagged in a locked room.

“My parents did not know what was happening. The point is, Straight didn’t just humiliate kids, they also humiliated parents. It was very awful, especially for my father, who was used to a lot of respect, but they felt they had tried everything else. I kept a journal, I just wanted to be a normal teenager but when you put one kid in Straight, everyone in the family was interrogated. My brother was then at West Point Military Academy, and they didn’t want him to come home to get involved but the other siblings had to come. Your teens are so difficult anyway that to be constantly torn apart on top of that fills me with rage.”

Come Clean is a very angry book, and it infects the reader with the same bewildered fury that its heroine feels. The author was in tears at certain points during its composition, which took two years then finally happened largely in a week-long burst while staying at a flat in Monaco. Quiet, cultured and very sane she does not seem like the survivor of this kind of story, which her agent, Ed Victor, is currently negotiating for its translation into a Hollywood movie. Neither her parents nor Anne wanted to be interviewed for the novel about a time they all now regret, and she is apprehensive about how they may react. Paddock’s sister insists “perhaps for her own sanity that she’s lost all memory of her time inside the facility.” However, while researching the novel Paddock interviewed other “Straight survivors” , many of whom, she says, “recounted stories a thousand times worse than I’ve been able to convey” in a work of fiction in which the heroine is raped by a counsellor – who, it turns out, is only 21. Eventually, Straight was pursued by so many law-suits and allegations that it shut its doors in 1993, though “lives on in different names,” according to Paddock.

Was it a total failure? The founder of Straight, Mel Sembler, is close to President Bush, advising the US Government on drug use, and if the anger of many “survivors” seems wholly justified, the success of Paddock’s sister at readjusting to normality might counter it. She got out after turning 18. Now a management consultant, happily married with two children, she is “closer to my parents than my brother or I, and sees them most weeks.” A prisoner of the war on drugs, even if she herself never took them, she at least survived.

Come Clean by Terri Paddock, £5.99, is published by Harpercollins on August 3