New photos appear to show Jackson Duggar inside the controversial ALERT Academy — and it looks like he could be there for a long time. This is the first glimpse fans have gotten of the teen in a while, prompting concerns about why he's currently stashed away at the religious training camp that his older brother Josh was once sent to as punishment.
Frequent Duggar family critic Katie Joy shared the new photo with her followers.
"Jackson has been at ALERT since April," Katie explained on her Without a Crystal Ball Instagram page before noting that the teen hasn't appeared in any of the social media posts for the company.
On its own, this seems odd, because you think it would want to showcase some of its more famous recruits.
The academy advertises itself as a Christian training group.
According to the foundation, it is forging "extraordinary men who influence their world for Christ" while also giving them the tools needed to "prepare them for the specific callings God has placed on their lives."
However, for the Duggar family, it seems as if the camp has been a place where they send misbehaving boys to help them learn to follow the rules better.
This is the same place Josh spent some time as a youth.
In a post from April 1, Katie called the organization a "cult camp" and described the way a candidate once spoke of his time at ALERT. She said parents send their boys there because of their "impure thoughts" and that it's likely Jackson will be taught to suppress his emotions.
People claiming to have experience with ALERT chimed in on her post.
"As someone who went and graduated ALERT, it's horrible," one person wrote. "Some of it still haunts me to this day. I find myself trying to prove things they said wrong even now 14 years later. Feel bad for this young man, and everyone who has to go through it, or is tricked to trying to get away from their home life."
Another person wrote about the people they knew who had attended the training camp. "The boys I knew who attended were either super rebellious already or total dweebs who memorized whole books of the Bible and recited it to you and acted like they had just been accepted into an elite part of the Marines," the commenter wrote.
It sounds like Jackson will be celebrating his 18th birthday there.
Given the rumored restrictive practices at the academy and the fact that Jackson is approaching a major milestone birthday on May 23, we truly hope he's attending ALERT because he wants to and not because something happened that got him sent away.
We've come to learn a lot about the Duggars over the years, and given what we know about some of the reasons people like Josh were sent there in the past, we can't help but worry about what has been going on at home.
