There is a fine line between a harsh punishment and an unacceptable one. I understand that teens can misbehave in a way that requires harsh punishment, but that doesn’t mean that their parents should hire strangers to kidnap them from their rooms in the middle of the night and live off the land with a group of other «troubled teens» and uncertified shady counselors. Of course, not all wilderness therapy is bad. Still, there’s a significant difference between an adult participating in it willingly to improve themselves and parents forcing their children to sleep in the wilderness for over a year because they misbehaved. 

A lot of parents are willing to increase the severity of a punishment when they don’t think anything else has worked. But there’s always that one dad who will go to the greatest possible extreme when his kid does something that is barely even worth a punishment in the first place.