And while DJJ administrators have launched many reforms in recent years to better protect children, the six boot camps were exempted from the reforms under pressure from sheriffs.

In July 2004, Gov. Jeb Bush and newly appointed DJJ Secretary Anthony Schembri announced an overhaul of the agency's policies on physical restraints. The result, the Youth Rights Policy, banned several types of restraints.

"You can't teach compassion by modeling callousness, " Schembri said at the time.

The policy banned the use of several aggressive tactics such as shoulder locks, wristlocks and restraint chairs, which had been linked to injuries among detained youths. Months earlier, a former DJJ secretary had forbidden the use of the so-called hammerlock, which had caused a spate of broken arms.

In 2000, a willowy, 66-pound 12-year-old boy named Michael Wiltsie died after being placed in a "full-body restraint" by a counselor at a now-closed Eckerd wilderness camp in Ocala. Like Martin, the youngster had complained to counselors that he could not breathe, a state death review said.

But DJJ officials exempted boot camps from the new regulations, Barreiro told The Miami Herald, as sheriffs successfully argued they needed more latitude than traditional programs when dealing with difficult youth. Barreiro, who has operated youth programs, calls the exemption a mistake.

The boot camps "should abide by the same procedures, " he said. The reforms, he said, "were written for the safety of the kids, after there were dire consequences" from earlier restraints.

A darling of law enforcement agencies, boot camps came into vogue a decade or so ago as youth corrections officials were searching for new ways to stanch a wave of violent juvenile crime.

Social scientists researched the model rigorously, professors say, and studies concluded almost uniformly that paramilitary youth programs were not effective in deterring crime.

DJJ's records show about 62 percent of the youth who graduate from one of the state's boot camps are arrested again for some type of offense - a recidivism rate experts call very high. Other programs for moderate-risk kids, such as wilderness camps, also have high re-arrest rates, but some, such as halfway houses, are much lower.

"Boot camps don't work, " said Aaron McNeece, dean of the Florida State University College of Social Work, which has done some of the research.

'SCARED STRAIGHT'

Most boot camps were modeled after an earlier program called Scared Straight, which arranged for troubled kids to experience life within adult jails or prisons, said Frank Orlando, a 21-year Broward circuit judge who served more than a decade in juvenile court. The Scared Straight programs were mostly discontinued after a host of abuses were reported.

"There is no way to scare or frighten or work a child at those boot camps" into changing their behavior, Orlando said. Such tactics, he added, might end up "killing him - or making him a more dangerous person."

"The only reform for boot camps as they are operated in Florida right now is to eliminate them, " added Orlando, who is director of the Center for the Study of Youth Policy at the Nova Southeastern University Law Center in Davie.

Still, said Orlando and McNeece, boot camps persist in Florida and elsewhere across the country because powerful law enforcement groups insist than can be effective in curbing youth crime.

"Just because it doesn't work doesn't mean people are not going to do it, " McNeece said. "There is a lot of investment in those programs - political investment as well as financial - and people have a stake in somebody sooner or later saying it's a great program."