Speaker 1: Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast where we
Speaker 1: talk about real bleak shit and boy howdye? My guest
Speaker 1: today Aidan Bonacci Aiden. Did I get it right this time? Yes?
Speaker 1: You did? And thanks for having me question Mark? Yeah,
Speaker 1: how are you? How are you enjoying learning about the
Speaker 1: Judge Rodenberg Center. I am not surprised, but I'm also
Speaker 1: very depressed. Yeah. Well, it's about to get a lot worse.
Speaker 1: Uh actually significantly worst, vastly worse. Fun. How do you
Speaker 1: feel about electrocuting children? Yeah, that's the right response. Um,
Speaker 1: can we stop with the electricity once? Please? Got no? No, no,
Speaker 1: it's uh yeah. We actually should start this episode by
Speaker 1: talking a bit more about the parents who have made
Speaker 1: Matt Israel's career possible. It should be clear by everything
Speaker 1: I've said so far that I think they're wrong and
Speaker 1: in some cases profoundly abusive. But people who are wrong
Speaker 1: can have compelling reasons for being wrong that are not
Speaker 1: easily dismissed. George Nazareth, former head of the Rhode Island
Speaker 1: Human Rights Committee and the first person to take a
Speaker 1: serious deep look at the fund up workings of b
Speaker 1: R I probably put it best when he was asked
Speaker 1: by a reporter from the Boston Phoenix why so many
Speaker 1: parents would sign off on approval to have their children abused. Quote,
Speaker 1: desperate parents will sign anything. You become desperate about a
Speaker 1: lot of things. Some of the parents at b r
Speaker 1: I are now saying they want the program to continue.
Speaker 1: They think the state will send their children back home.
Speaker 1: Some parents would blow their brains out if the states
Speaker 1: sent their children back home. They've been through the mill. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, there's it's they have the reasons. But at
Speaker 1: the same time, it's like, just because it may seem
Speaker 1: like the right thing doesn't mean this. It's certainly not
Speaker 1: and I'm not trying to say And part of what
Speaker 1: I'm getting at here is that a lot of these
Speaker 1: parents why they like the b r I isn't that
Speaker 1: it's helping their kids. It's that it's keeping their kids away.
Speaker 1: And the Judge rd Bricks Center is taking kids from
Speaker 1: multiple states. They're taking the most severe kids. And it's
Speaker 1: not right that a lot of parents are willing to
Speaker 1: accept this school because it keeps their kids away. But
Speaker 1: that's the that's that's where they are and there it
Speaker 1: is not a thing of like they're not it's not
Speaker 1: that I don't think they see themselves as being cruel.
Speaker 1: I think they're unthinkably desperate in a lot of cases,
Speaker 1: and they're not. There aren't a lot of options for them,
Speaker 1: and that's that doesn't defend this because again I'm we're
Speaker 1: spending ten thousand words and two hours talking about how
Speaker 1: bad this place is. Oh yeah, it's excuseable, but yeah,
Speaker 1: but it's not unexcusable. Yeah it's not. Okay, it's not acceptable,
Speaker 1: but it is the result of a desperation more supreme
Speaker 1: than I think most people can asp um especially, and
Speaker 1: this becomes less the case because now I think the
Speaker 1: parents who were defending it have options. It's fucking nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty five. Like autism as a diagnosis is five years old.
Speaker 1: What options do you have? Not that this was the
Speaker 1: right one, but there's just not a lot of good ones,
Speaker 1: and there's yea or even any of them besides this one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's you know, even even if there were in
Speaker 1: in you know, there are in some cases other options
Speaker 1: for parents. And I don't want to also make it
Speaker 1: like look like it was more. But also the amount
Speaker 1: of education the parents might have about what's available is minimal,
Speaker 1: Like it's just you have to again really want to
Speaker 1: emphasize that we're not we're not trying to whitewash either
Speaker 1: the parents or what's happening at this facility, but like
Speaker 1: it's a desperate situation. Um, And that's that That's part
Speaker 1: of what I think condemns Matt Israel more because he
Speaker 1: is taking advantage of this desperate situation to test his
Speaker 1: weird you like, human avioral modification theories. He's taking advantage
Speaker 1: of this horrible, horrible situation. Yeah, like what you mentioned
Speaker 1: in the last part, he sees them more as features
Speaker 1: than as actual children, and this is just something to
Speaker 1: show off. Yeah, something how good he is it plugging
Speaker 1: in new stimuli to alter their behavior, and it doesn't
Speaker 1: matter to him. I think that this is that he's
Speaker 1: just torturing these kids and to stopping behavior. He's not
Speaker 1: changing anything. He's not he's not helping them. He's temporarily
Speaker 1: stopping them from doing something via violence. I don't think
Speaker 1: he cares because the behavior has stopped, and he has
Speaker 1: no problem continuing the violence forever. In fact, he gets
Speaker 1: he gets paid if he gets to continue the violence forever. Yeah, Um,
Speaker 1: it's real bleak. Oh yeah, So George Nazareth, the guy
Speaker 1: who gave that quote about some parents would blow their
Speaker 1: brains out if they sent their children back home. They've
Speaker 1: been through hell. Nazareth is number one. He's the guy
Speaker 1: who carries out the first big investigation of b r
Speaker 1: I and condemns it unequivocally. He's also the parent himself
Speaker 1: of a mentally disabled daughter. I don't know how to
Speaker 1: be more specific about her condition than that, because in
Speaker 1: the nineteen article where I found this, she's just referred
Speaker 1: to as retarded. The fact that a thoughtful, compassionate and
Speaker 1: very ethical man like George Nazareth would use that term
Speaker 1: for his own daughter is a sign of how primitive
Speaker 1: the things were in that period in terms of science um.
Speaker 1: Because this was not considered an offensive term. There are
Speaker 1: advocacy agencies called like the Organization for Retarded Persons and
Speaker 1: what UM that use that word. And I bring this
Speaker 1: up because the primitiveness of the terminology and use suggests
Speaker 1: how primitive the other methods of treatment were as well.
Speaker 1: While the Judge Rodenberg Center was marked out by experts
Speaker 1: at the time for its brutality, the gold standard of
Speaker 1: care during that period also involved a lot of unnecessary
Speaker 1: force and medication, which is a kind of force. Why
Speaker 1: these parents say they're worried their kids would get stuck
Speaker 1: in an institution and drug to unconsciousness. That is not
Speaker 1: a lie or an unreasonable fear. A lot of these
Speaker 1: people are an impossible situations. Matt Israel promised he could
Speaker 1: help their kids, and in many cases he at least
Speaker 1: seems to have delivered. And one of the things that
Speaker 1: he does that makes this such a that makes them
Speaker 1: so good at getting these people to believe in him,
Speaker 1: is these are beautiful facilities. These are not dank and
Speaker 1: frightening looking places. They're not run down. They're colorful, they're
Speaker 1: filled with toys and statues of creatures, and like they're
Speaker 1: he makes them look extremely friendly and comfortable. So if
Speaker 1: you're a parent taking your kid in, this place looks
Speaker 1: like a wonderful place for your kid to live and
Speaker 1: and and and be treated. And he can say like, hey,
Speaker 1: your kid's been biting or tearing open his skin, and
Speaker 1: that stops after a couple of weeks, and maybe you
Speaker 1: don't notice why it's stopping and what he's doing to
Speaker 1: stop it. You know. Um, it's also a lot of
Speaker 1: the parents who defend him aren't entirely aware of what's
Speaker 1: going on at the school, and you can blame them
Speaker 1: some degree for not availing themselves of the information that's
Speaker 1: out because there are reports on this place. But that
Speaker 1: is the situation, um so by n Matt is Reel School,
Speaker 1: which is still called the Behavioral Research Institute at this
Speaker 1: point where seeved eighty seven thousand dollars per student per year,
Speaker 1: and a lot of that wound up in Israel's pocket.
Speaker 1: His compensation topped out I think around two thousand at
Speaker 1: three hundred thousand dollars a year UM so he's making
Speaker 1: a very comfortable income, but at the same time he
Speaker 1: is putting most of the money into this facility. These
Speaker 1: are expensive facilities to run there in many cases multiple
Speaker 1: full time employees per student um. That Boston Phoenix article,
Speaker 1: which was a major source for episode one, was written
Speaker 1: during the massive series of legal battles between the State
Speaker 1: of Massachusetts and b r I. Thanks to Judge Rodenberg,
Speaker 1: those struggles eventually went Israel's way, but at the time
Speaker 1: the article was written, he did not know that. And
Speaker 1: the piece ends on this ominous line quote, if Massachusetts
Speaker 1: shut down b r I. Israel says he may open
Speaker 1: group homes in Rhode Island. Israel thinks the current crackdown
Speaker 1: may lead to greater understanding of his philosophy and allow
Speaker 1: him a greater array of behavioral modification tools. I've never
Speaker 1: used electric shock, he says in his calm soft voice.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't rule it out, particularly if were deprived of
Speaker 1: other procedures. It's more effective and you wouldn't bruise or
Speaker 1: cut the skin. Oh fuck, yeah, that's real bad's And
Speaker 1: I kind of flipped out a little when I read
Speaker 1: that in this nineteen article. UM. And I should note
Speaker 1: here the only reason I have access to that article
Speaker 1: because that's a thirty six year old article. He was
Speaker 1: originally published in a physical newspaper. I was able to
Speaker 1: read it because several copies have been archived by different
Speaker 1: disability justice advocates. Autistic civil rights advocates have a very
Speaker 1: particular interest in documenting that Israel's early career and his crimes. Also, yeah,
Speaker 1: they're doing this because they think he's basically a war
Speaker 1: criminal U, which by the way, the U n agrees
Speaker 1: with UM. And they're they're trying to make sure, like
Speaker 1: I'm assuming an autistic civil rights advocate who was like,
Speaker 1: came across an old copy of that read that into
Speaker 1: piece where he starts talking about how he's looking into
Speaker 1: electric shock, and was like, well, this needs to be preserved,
Speaker 1: like at some point there's going to be a reconciliation
Speaker 1: commissioner or whatever, and we need to document this ship.
Speaker 1: When we left off in the late nineteen eighties, b
Speaker 1: r I was still b r I, but Judge Rotenberg
Speaker 1: had just saved it, or, to be more accurate, the
Speaker 1: judge had saved its ability to use physical punishments on students.
Speaker 1: In nineteen nine and other student, Linda Cornellison died. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's a weird c O R N E l
Speaker 1: I S O N. I've never seen that last name before,
Speaker 1: but I think Linda Cornellison um in nineteen nineties she
Speaker 1: died and she was a non verbal student at the facilities. Mean,
Speaker 1: she's she's not really able to use language to communicate,
Speaker 1: and one day she started grabbing her stomach while she
Speaker 1: was on the bus to school. And a lot of
Speaker 1: these kids, they'll go to a school and then they'll
Speaker 1: go home to a residential facility that b r I
Speaker 1: runs when she arrived at the at the at her school,
Speaker 1: a nurse decided that she was just acting to try
Speaker 1: to get attention or something and sent her back to class.
Speaker 1: After school, she was sent back to a b r
Speaker 1: I run residential home where she lived. Staff were angry
Speaker 1: at her bad bay behavior. They believe this nurse basically like, oh,
Speaker 1: she's she's playing around by pretending to have stomach pain,
Speaker 1: So they gave her thirteen spatulus bankings, twenty nine finger pinches,
Speaker 1: fourteen muscle squeezes, and forced her to inhale ammonia five times.
Speaker 1: She died in the hospital the next day. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: and again her The cause of death was gastric perforation,
Speaker 1: which I don't think was caused by any of the
Speaker 1: adversives that were done at the school, but the fact
Speaker 1: that she was not taken to the hospital earlier, her
Speaker 1: pain was not treated seriously. That's certainly their fault. And
Speaker 1: also sup, yeah, very very bad, Like I would feel
Speaker 1: comfortable saying they killed her, even though maybe they didn't
Speaker 1: cause the thing that I would say the ammonia was
Speaker 1: just like yeah, And Linda's mom and says she never
Speaker 1: her daughter never had gastro intestinal problems before. Um, it's
Speaker 1: maybe it might even be possible that like the stress
Speaker 1: from all the adversives had helped cause the gas. I'm
Speaker 1: not a doctor. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna speculate
Speaker 1: further other than to say that by not taking this
Speaker 1: problem seriously when she started to complain. And this is
Speaker 1: again part of like the biggotry, I guess you would say.
Speaker 1: I think, yeah, biggotry is a fair thing to say.
Speaker 1: Because she's not verbal, they assume she's not capable of
Speaker 1: expressing a serious concern about health problem. Right, she has
Speaker 1: to be just like fooling around trying to trick you.
Speaker 1: Um and um that's that is a kind of biggotree
Speaker 1: and it led. It's a bigger tree that led to
Speaker 1: this girl's death. Um so Um. The state found after
Speaker 1: the autopsy and whatnot, that that while b r I
Speaker 1: had not caused her death, uh, that it had quote
Speaker 1: violated the most basic codes and standards of decency and
Speaker 1: how it treated her. Um. And while so, while there
Speaker 1: were no charges on Matt Israel or the facility as
Speaker 1: a result of Linda's death, it did have an impact
Speaker 1: on him. He decided that there were too many different
Speaker 1: kinds of physical punishment at his school, and the nature
Speaker 1: and impact of those punishments varied too much from teacher
Speaker 1: to teacher. In other words, he was concerned that one
Speaker 1: employee's pinch could be a mild pinch and another could
Speaker 1: cause a bleeding wound. He wanted more uniform physical aversives,
Speaker 1: and he decided that electric shocks were the best way
Speaker 1: to do this. The machine he picked was called the
Speaker 1: Self Injurious Behavior Inhibiting System. It was made of an
Speaker 1: electrode and a radio transmitter, which were attached to the
Speaker 1: arm or leg via velcrow. The shock was described as
Speaker 1: like being like struck by a rubber band, you know,
Speaker 1: somebody pulls back a rubber band, Like not serious, not
Speaker 1: a real, like a very mild shock, and it lasted
Speaker 1: about a fifth of a second. One nine to ninety
Speaker 1: paper on the s I B. S Civice system said
Speaker 1: the shock caused quote almost complete elimination of self harming behavior.
Speaker 1: We can debate whether or not this kind of treatment
Speaker 1: is ever ethical, but it is important to note and
Speaker 1: whether it's ethical is again a separate question from whether
Speaker 1: or not it works. We'll talk about that a bit later.
Speaker 1: To abate that. Um. It is important to note here
Speaker 1: that this machine was not designed as a punishment. They
Speaker 1: were not trying to shock kids to punish them. They
Speaker 1: were trying to interrupt them when they were harming themselves. Right,
Speaker 1: The people who made this machine felt that such extreme
Speaker 1: measures were justified if the mild shock would stop a
Speaker 1: kid from biting through their hand or bashing their head
Speaker 1: against the wall. And again, I am not saying this
Speaker 1: is the right move, and and in fact that the
Speaker 1: evidence suggests that this doesn't really work all that well,
Speaker 1: I get why. I don't think these scientists who say,
Speaker 1: well let's try this, we're being monsters, even though we
Speaker 1: can say this was a bad road to go down
Speaker 1: and did not help your They are not trying to
Speaker 1: punish kids. They're trying to stop kids from hurting themselves.
Speaker 1: And again, it doesn't work, but it's not. The start
Speaker 1: road for this technology is not monstrous. Yeah, it's not
Speaker 1: fully malicious. It's just you could say unethical, you can
Speaker 1: say unwise, ineffective. They're not They're not doing what Matt
Speaker 1: Israel comes to do. They're not trying to hurt these kids. Um.
Speaker 1: They are trying to interrupt dangerous behavior. UM. I just
Speaker 1: think that's important to note because you you again, it's
Speaker 1: this thing that you see in science, where like someone
Speaker 1: will have an idea that isn't inherently horrible, but because
Speaker 1: of how another person takes it and evolves it, it
Speaker 1: becomes something profoundly abusive. UM. I just think it's important
Speaker 1: to note this doesn't start as an abusive behavior. It
Speaker 1: starts as as a desperate attempt to stop people from
Speaker 1: hurting themselves. Israel School was an early adopter of sibbis.
Speaker 1: Matt liked the consistency of the shock. He liked that
Speaker 1: applying it required less manpower than holding down a child
Speaker 1: to assault their feet. Uh the b R. I tested
Speaker 1: it on twenty nine students over fourteen months. When early
Speaker 1: guinea pig was Brandon Sanchez, an autistic boy who was
Speaker 1: also the nephew of a state representative. From Wired quote,
Speaker 1: Brandon banged his head until he cracked it open. He
Speaker 1: wants chewed off part of his tongue. He was a
Speaker 1: ruminator too. He would vomit, chew the vomit, swallow it,
Speaker 1: and vomit again. The acidity was burning his esophagus. The
Speaker 1: vomiting was causing him to lose weight. Israel thoughts Sibis
Speaker 1: might be the only way to save this twelve year
Speaker 1: old's life. Brandon was down to fifty two pounds. Israel
Speaker 1: and his staff started with the treatments. Fifty shocks became
Speaker 1: a hundred, a hundred became five hundred, five hundred became
Speaker 1: a thousand, and they still shocked more. Brandon wasn't responding,
Speaker 1: so two thousand shocks and then three thousand, four thousand.
Speaker 1: After roughly five thousand shocks in a day, is Reel
Speaker 1: told his staff to stop. The shocks weren't strong enough,
Speaker 1: is Reel thought. He asked Sibis's developers to increase the voltage.
Speaker 1: They refused, and that's when Israel made his own machine.
Speaker 1: M So you see what's happened here. That's first off, horrific.
Speaker 1: If you're doing that five thousand times and it doesn't work,
Speaker 1: the problem isn't it's not strong enough. The problem is
Speaker 1: it doesn't work. Yeah, I was gonna say, after like
Speaker 1: shocking a kid five thousand times, to be like, hey,
Speaker 1: maybe we're not doing it right. And and the people
Speaker 1: who developed this again didn't intend it to be used
Speaker 1: this way, because he is using it the way he
Speaker 1: uses all aversives as a consistent punishment for a thing
Speaker 1: that they do. So they do a behavior they're not
Speaker 1: supposed to do, you punish them with a shock. That's
Speaker 1: not what this is intended for. This was intended to
Speaker 1: disrupt someone physically from from an action. Um. It was.
Speaker 1: It was kind of like a tourniquet. It was an
Speaker 1: emergency procedure, you know. Um. And he is not using
Speaker 1: it that way, and the way he's using it doesn't work.
Speaker 1: But instead of realizing maybe you're going down the wrong road,
Speaker 1: he decides that they just need to be electrocuted more. Um.
Speaker 1: The machine that they built was called well he and
Speaker 1: he works with an engineer on this, right, he doesn't
Speaker 1: do it all on himself. But the machine that Israel
Speaker 1: has built that he calls the graduated Electronic descelerator like decelerate,
Speaker 1: you know, like the opposite of acceleration. Um. He. This machine,
Speaker 1: the g E D, would become Matt Israel's main claim
Speaker 1: to infamy. It was three times stronger than Civice, and
Speaker 1: its shock lasted a full two seconds instead of one
Speaker 1: fifth of a second. Now this is a significant escalation,
Speaker 1: and it's a dangerous one. But around a year of
Speaker 1: testing the g E D, Israel became convinced that it
Speaker 1: still was not strong enough. Students had gotten used to
Speaker 1: the shocks, so he developed a new, even more power
Speaker 1: a ful device, one that could deliver extremely painful shocks.
Speaker 1: Israel was not the first psychologist working with this community
Speaker 1: to use electric shocks. I have our Lavas, a doctor
Speaker 1: with U C l A, had experimented with cattle prods
Speaker 1: on children in the early nineteen seventies. He was a
Speaker 1: major advocate for electric shocks as a behavioral modification aid
Speaker 1: early on. But in nineteen eighties seven uh this doctor
Speaker 1: Lavas published a study that showed that after forty weeks
Speaker 1: of one on one therapy, autistic preschoolers could attain what
Speaker 1: he called normal functioning without any kind of aversives. In
Speaker 1: nineteen three, Lavas admitted that he had been wrong, and
Speaker 1: he strongly rejected his early work, saying that shock therapy
Speaker 1: was at best a short term solution that did not
Speaker 1: fix problems and was not worth the pain it caused.
Speaker 1: So Lavas pretty fucked up to cattle prod kids. But
Speaker 1: he eventually he does his recently, yeah yeah, yeah, um,
Speaker 1: I was wrong. This is fucked up, don't do it
Speaker 1: now when Matt is really and I should also note
Speaker 1: that I don't want to make it seem too easy
Speaker 1: what he's saying here, like these forty weeks of one
Speaker 1: on one therapy, that's a lot of work. We'll talk
Speaker 1: about this more. Yeah, it's a commitment. It is a commitment,
Speaker 1: and it's what these kids deserve, obviously, but it's also
Speaker 1: often what there's resources or what schools are willing to
Speaker 1: devote resources with the state is willing to devote resources
Speaker 1: to do um. And there's furthermore, the thought that because
Speaker 1: the that the adults doing this work are not well
Speaker 1: paid generally, there are some, there are some specialists who
Speaker 1: are very well compensated. There are some there's some specific
Speaker 1: facilities that train and higher professionals and pay them. Well,
Speaker 1: that is not the norm. I got about eight dollars
Speaker 1: an hour, and again, no training. You are not going
Speaker 1: to get someone to perform the kind of one on
Speaker 1: one therapy that Lavoss is showing can work on these
Speaker 1: kids and can can stop these kind of behaviors. You
Speaker 1: are not going to get that with someone making eight
Speaker 1: dollars an hour, working eight hours a day. You know,
Speaker 1: it's just not possible, and especially we brought this up
Speaker 1: in part one where they had to do a quick
Speaker 1: turnaround in like the two weeks with a lot of
Speaker 1: these exactly and with that eight dollars an hour. And yeah, no,
Speaker 1: it's just you don't have any means to do so
Speaker 1: you do not. And it's so much of the problem
Speaker 1: here and again Matt Israel is the primary bastard. But
Speaker 1: the fact that on the whole, all the state usually
Speaker 1: wants to do with these it's a mix. There will
Speaker 1: do devote more resources to the kids who will be
Speaker 1: able to work a full time job and like make
Speaker 1: a living. Right. Um, a lot of these kids, for
Speaker 1: whatever reason aren't aren't aren't going to be able to
Speaker 1: do that, They're not going to be able to live
Speaker 1: what what I guess what you would say the state
Speaker 1: considers to be a normal life, which is an economically
Speaker 1: productive life. And so the goal becomes, how do we
Speaker 1: wear house these kids for the least amount of money
Speaker 1: as opposed to is there anything we can do to
Speaker 1: to give them a your life, to help them like
Speaker 1: be healthier? Um? And it's um, it's something we've seen
Speaker 1: time and time again. It's not just here, it's like,
Speaker 1: how how can we take these people who aren't going
Speaker 1: to be productive quote unquote in sense and in economic
Speaker 1: couple of sense and help them alford the leases amount
Speaker 1: of money. It's yeah, honestly depressing and infuriate it is,
Speaker 1: and it's it's again part of the villain here is
Speaker 1: the reduction of human beings to their their pure economic potential.
Speaker 1: So when Matt Israel started applying aversives to children with
Speaker 1: behavioral issues in the early nineteen seventies, data on how
Speaker 1: adversives worked was severely mixed. By the early nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: though clinicians and researchers had published significant studies showing positive
Speaker 1: reinforcement could work in the most difficult cases. What it
Speaker 1: required was constant quote functional analyzes, which is monitoring patients
Speaker 1: all day and night to discover what is causing the
Speaker 1: behavior and then to read a wreck those feelings. It's
Speaker 1: basically saying that like, well, you need a level if
Speaker 1: you're going to reinforce, if you're going to change these behaviors.
Speaker 1: In positive reinforcement, it's it's a full, like twenty four
Speaker 1: hours a day job monitoring these kids, seeing what's causing
Speaker 1: the behaviors and redirecting them. That's obviously very expensive and difficult. Um,
Speaker 1: the best solution is the most effortful and the most
Speaker 1: expensive one. Meanwhile, electrocuting kids works in the short term
Speaker 1: to stop behavior. Um that's undesirable. Um. And yeah, that's uh,
Speaker 1: that's kind of why this happens. Um. In nine, a
Speaker 1: guy named Philip Campbell became commissioner of the Massachusetts Department
Speaker 1: of Mental Retardation, which is again that's the name of
Speaker 1: this government agents. Yeah again the dark ages. Uh. And
Speaker 1: this the Massachusetts Department of Mental Retardation regarded b r
Speaker 1: R is horrible, like rightfully, so they were also the
Speaker 1: organization that was supposed to regulate it. So Philip Campbell
Speaker 1: comes into to running this department and hates this school
Speaker 1: that his his department is regulating with good reason, and
Speaker 1: he goes after b r I. But unfortunately he decides
Speaker 1: to break the law to do so, and he was
Speaker 1: eventually found to have leaked false reports about the school
Speaker 1: to the press. And there's plenty of bad reports about
Speaker 1: the school, but he he does not go through this
Speaker 1: in a legal or ethical way, and it causes a
Speaker 1: worse problem because b r I is able to go
Speaker 1: to the court and argue they had been wronged by
Speaker 1: Philip Campbell, and the court read um and Campbell's irresponsible
Speaker 1: behavior led in nine seven to a Massachusetts Supreme Court
Speaker 1: ruling that found he and his department were in contempt
Speaker 1: of court. The state was ordered to pay more than
Speaker 1: a million dollars in court costs, and the department was
Speaker 1: effectively dissolved. So now the Judge Rotenberg Center, and they
Speaker 1: start calling at the Judge Rodenberg Center in honor of
Speaker 1: the judge who was most responsible for getting them through
Speaker 1: this period of legal fighting. Um. The Judge Rotenberg Center
Speaker 1: no longer is monitored by a state watchdog. Instead, they're
Speaker 1: only being monitored by an independent attorney hired by the
Speaker 1: Probate Court, which means they're effectively unregulated for a while. Fun. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this is the period in which the use of
Speaker 1: he starts to experiment with electric shocks in But after
Speaker 1: nineteen seven it really explodes. Now that they're free to
Speaker 1: do whatever the funk Matt Israel wants, the school expands massively,
Speaker 1: its enrollment more than doubles from a hundred and ten kids.
Speaker 1: And this is just the Providence Facility to two D
Speaker 1: and twenty eight. In the space of about four years,
Speaker 1: the school's budget balloons from eighteen million to fifty six
Speaker 1: million dollars. The patient base grows to include kids whose
Speaker 1: problems were not just like the result of a diagnosis,
Speaker 1: but also largely behavior base, so kids who have gotten
Speaker 1: in legal trouble, kids who had in some cases come
Speaker 1: from jail. Some of them are like kids with a
Speaker 1: d h D who likes steal a car or something
Speaker 1: um In the early odds. The school's educational policy also changes,
Speaker 1: and they switch from teaching kids and the goal being,
Speaker 1: at least distensibly this is still a school. We're trying
Speaker 1: to alter their behavior, but we're also trying to educate
Speaker 1: them to they stopped trying to educate them, really, they
Speaker 1: move on to simply managing the behavior. One psychologist who
Speaker 1: worked at the Judge Rodenberg Center later told Wired quote
Speaker 1: Israel couldn't stand them not behaving in a perfectly controlled way,
Speaker 1: and so now that he's in total controlling without oversight,
Speaker 1: Matt Israel turns the Judge Rodenberg Center into a perfect prison,
Speaker 1: one in which every single kind of behavior can be tracked, judged,
Speaker 1: and punished. At the push of a button. But you
Speaker 1: know what's also a perfect prison? Oh dear God, perfect prison.
Speaker 1: So lock yourself in with these products and services. All right,
Speaker 1: we are we're back, and we're we're talking about horrible things.
Speaker 1: So I just told you that he is able to
Speaker 1: after turn the Judge Rodenberg Center into a perfect prison.
Speaker 1: And I'm going to read a quote from rot Wired
Speaker 1: that I think makes the point of what a wocking
Speaker 1: nightmare this place. Here we go, Mm hmm, yeah, strap m.
Speaker 1: J RC has always believed in punishing not only the
Speaker 1: negative behavior, but also the actions that presage. At a
Speaker 1: face slapper could be shocked for simply raising his hand.
Speaker 1: This is called treating the antecedent. A lot of things
Speaker 1: can be antecedents at j r C. Yelling, refusing a
Speaker 1: teacher's order, talking out of turn. Another psychologist who left
Speaker 1: in two thousand two says those are precursors to violence
Speaker 1: so much as ordinary classroom disturbances. J r C has
Speaker 1: video monitors in every room of the school, in every residence,
Speaker 1: has had them since nineteen. Certain staffers, called quality control
Speaker 1: sit in a control room day at night a wall
Speaker 1: of television monitors and computer screens Before them watching everyone,
Speaker 1: and because the rooms are miked, hearing everything. The control
Speaker 1: room is ostensibly to ensure that students are shocked for
Speaker 1: the inappropriate behaviors that an employee might miss. When that happens,
Speaker 1: quality control phones the staffer in the room, who then
Speaker 1: applies the shock. But the people who sit in the
Speaker 1: control rooms serve another purpose. They're watching their own. If say,
Speaker 1: a teacher in the classroom refuses to shock a kid,
Speaker 1: he or she is written up. The write ups carry
Speaker 1: the Orwellian title performance improvement opportunities. Anyone can tattle on
Speaker 1: anyone else, regardless of the station. The school has staffers
Speaker 1: whose job is to read and track those forms. Get
Speaker 1: enough of them and you're gone. So yeah, that's wow, Buck,
Speaker 1: that's horrifying. Yeah. It also it's making the point here
Speaker 1: with the treating the aniset and stuff. So again they
Speaker 1: have to go to a judge to get approved to
Speaker 1: use aversives and to shock kids like or to go
Speaker 1: to probate court. So they have to get legal approval
Speaker 1: to do this, and the way they do that is
Speaker 1: by saying the only option they're violent, they're hurting themselves
Speaker 1: or hurting other people, and the only way to stop.
Speaker 1: That is by applying the shocks, right, That's how they
Speaker 1: justify this. But and so the probate court is saying, okay,
Speaker 1: in order to stop this kid from hurting or even
Speaker 1: killing themselves, you are allowed to shock them. Okay. But
Speaker 1: the judge Rodenberg Center, because of how they view antecedents,
Speaker 1: can define raising their hand, not sitting down when told to,
Speaker 1: refusing to take off a jacket, refusing to put on shoes,
Speaker 1: all of that, they can call antecedents to a violent behavior.
Speaker 1: And so they can electrocute kids for anything, for flapping
Speaker 1: their hands by saying that will lead to violence if
Speaker 1: we don't electrocute them early, Yeah, they can just do
Speaker 1: fast loose exactly. So they are always saying, and when
Speaker 1: they defend themselves, we only do these shocks in order
Speaker 1: to prevent kids from hurting themselves. But they define hurting
Speaker 1: themselves as basically fucking anything whatever they want to be. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: staffers at the time, and this is again the early
Speaker 1: or late nineteen nineties, noted the complete lack of fox
Speaker 1: given to the education of kids in the center and
Speaker 1: the absolute obsession with surveillance and punishment at all times.
Speaker 1: Some teachers would eat in their cars just to avoid
Speaker 1: being listened to via hidden microphones. Meanwhile, the electrocution panopticon
Speaker 1: built by Matt Israel had a profound impact on children.
Speaker 1: One teacher told an interviewer that he'd been warned by
Speaker 1: a staffer to announce to the class whenever he reached
Speaker 1: into his pocket. One time, he didn't, and the kids
Speaker 1: he was with started screaming. They thought he was reaching
Speaker 1: for a shock buzzer. But because they'd screamed, which was
Speaker 1: an antecedent to violent behavior, they now had to be punished. Quote.
Speaker 1: All of these behaviors had to be consequated with a
Speaker 1: geed electric shock. There were no exceptions. A scream was
Speaker 1: a scream, a grab was a grab, and we had
Speaker 1: to follow court approved orders. So these kids are so
Speaker 1: fucking ptsdd out by being electrocuted. I reached into his
Speaker 1: pocket and they freak out, and then they have to
Speaker 1: be electrocuted for freaking out. Yeah, So see what a
Speaker 1: fucking nightmare that sits. Yeah, it's a fucking nightamabic like
Speaker 1: the Holy Ship. Yeah, it's really bad. Now. In interviews,
Speaker 1: Matt Israel and other representatives of the school will claim
Speaker 1: that students are only eligible to be shocked if they've
Speaker 1: engaged in seriously dangerous behavior. This is untrue, at least
Speaker 1: according to a two thousand six report by the New
Speaker 1: York State Education Department. It claimed that the j RC
Speaker 1: was shocking kids quote without a clear history of self
Speaker 1: injurious behaviors, it is hard to exaggerate how profoundly abuse
Speaker 1: of this treatment could be. To make that point, I
Speaker 1: am going to quote from an NBC News article about
Speaker 1: a kid named Rico Torres. Quote. Rico was just eight
Speaker 1: the first time school staffers strapped electrodes to his legs
Speaker 1: and shocked him. They draped twelve vote battery over his
Speaker 1: shoulders in a backpack while a nearby teacher held a
Speaker 1: clear plastic box with a photo of his face attached.
Speaker 1: When Torres misbehaved, the teacher would reach inside the box
Speaker 1: and push a button that sent a two second jolt
Speaker 1: of electricity coursing through his body. Under his quarterproofd treatment plan,
Speaker 1: Torres could be shocked for threatening to hit another student,
Speaker 1: or for running away, swearing or screaming, refusing to follow directions,
Speaker 1: or inappropriate urination. According to court records obtained by NBC News,
Speaker 1: one employee, he said, used to shock him in his
Speaker 1: sleep because I didn't wake up. She shocked me, recalled
Speaker 1: to risk now four. Then I ended up peeing the bed,
Speaker 1: so she shocked me again. The electrodes stayed on his
Speaker 1: skin twenty four hours a day for most of a
Speaker 1: decade until he was eighteen. She oh, yeah, yeah, like
Speaker 1: the fact that they would do it while he was sleeping,
Speaker 1: and it's like and with the urination thing, it's most
Speaker 1: like being class because of the shocks. Yeah. Yeah, if
Speaker 1: you electrocute a child while they're sleeping, they might be
Speaker 1: the bed. Yeah, but it's not a behavioral issue. That's
Speaker 1: what you were electrocuting a child issue. Yeah, Like oh
Speaker 1: my god. Yeah, it's um it's rough, it's real rough.
Speaker 1: Yeah no, um yeah. My one thing is like I
Speaker 1: would just hate if they did this was like the
Speaker 1: more noncommunicative kids, you know, the ones it's like that. Ah,
Speaker 1: it's just rough all around. Yeah, Um, it is rough
Speaker 1: all around. And it's like I think, uh, I think
Speaker 1: a lot of these kids are non verbal. I don't know,
Speaker 1: it's it's a it's it's a mix. It's hard to
Speaker 1: get like exact data on that, but yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: that that is an additional level. If the kid can't
Speaker 1: even tell you, well, it's the same thing with that
Speaker 1: that girl who died. Yeah, yeah, they can't tell you,
Speaker 1: and it's like, oh, you're misbehaving. Yeah, they're just trapped
Speaker 1: in this world of adults electrocuting them, never understanding really why. Um,
Speaker 1: it's pretty bleak. So obviously also pretty bleak for the staff.
Speaker 1: A lot of whom get this job. They see it's
Speaker 1: this nice facility, they see it's I'm helping kids. They
Speaker 1: go and they realize like, oh no, I'm torturing children.
Speaker 1: You know, there's huge turnover and they don't you know,
Speaker 1: you have to understand too. A lot of these people
Speaker 1: who come to realize what they're doing is wrong. Initially
Speaker 1: maybe like, well, this guy is a doctor, this school
Speaker 1: has a great reputation. It's like it's got a approval
Speaker 1: from the state and whatnot. Maybe I'm just being squeamish
Speaker 1: and I don't understand why this is necessary. For a
Speaker 1: lot of them do come to realize like, oh no,
Speaker 1: this is horribly fucked up, and the school has caught
Speaker 1: Like most workers don't last a fucking year, I don't think. Um,
Speaker 1: which of course, makes it hard to get decent staff
Speaker 1: because the kind of people who are going to do
Speaker 1: that job are maybe sometimes going to be monsters themselves.
Speaker 1: We're like, well, it doesn't pay well, but I get
Speaker 1: to hurt people, you know, prison guard ship. Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: The consequences of this situation where you have constant turnover,
Speaker 1: the good people leave, the folks who are able to
Speaker 1: stay for a while, or maybe terrible. The consequences of
Speaker 1: this are made abundantly clear on August six, two thousand seven,
Speaker 1: when a prank caller calls the staff in the middle
Speaker 1: of the night imposes as a supervisor. Remember there's always
Speaker 1: people watching, and they'll call rooms and be like, hey,
Speaker 1: such and such kid did this behavior and you didn't
Speaker 1: catch it. You need to shock him now, you know.
Speaker 1: So this person calls a supervisor who's awake on the
Speaker 1: night shift, and he orders punishments for two teenagers who
Speaker 1: are asleep at the time. The kids are sixteen and nineteen,
Speaker 1: and the person on the phone claims they had misbehaved
Speaker 1: earlier in the evening. Now, staff weren't supposed to administer
Speaker 1: shocks long after bad behavior, and this had been hours ago.
Speaker 1: But also the thing that Israel had establishes that if
Speaker 1: you are a staff member and you're told to shock
Speaker 1: a kid and you don't do it, you'll get fired,
Speaker 1: right if you don't instantly obey orders, because again he's
Speaker 1: kind of operat conditioning his employees too. If you delay
Speaker 1: it all. Once told to electrocute these kids, you'll lose
Speaker 1: your job. Um, So they they they wake these kids
Speaker 1: up to shock them. Other students who are awake at
Speaker 1: the time beg the staffers not to do this, and
Speaker 1: one of them is even like, hey, this this might
Speaker 1: be a hoax, this phone call might not even be
Speaker 1: like an actual supervisor. But the staff wakes both boys
Speaker 1: up and electrocutes them repeatedly, because again the person on
Speaker 1: the phone says, keep shocking them, keep shocking them, keep shocking.
Speaker 1: They shocked them so many times that they have to
Speaker 1: bind their legs and arms so they can continue to
Speaker 1: electrocute them. One team was shocked seventy seven times, the
Speaker 1: other twenty nine times. The former had to be treated
Speaker 1: for two first degree burns. The call it's horrible, horrible. Now.
Speaker 1: The caller is believed to have been a former resident
Speaker 1: of the center because he knew the staff. He knew
Speaker 1: the number, he knew the other residents. Um, so it
Speaker 1: may have been someone who was there and had an
Speaker 1: issue with these two kids and like wanted to funk
Speaker 1: with him. I don't know. As far as I can tell,
Speaker 1: the person who did this has not been caught, NBC
Speaker 1: wrote quote. At the time of the call, five of
Speaker 1: the six staffers had worked double or triple shifts, and
Speaker 1: most have been on the job less than three months.
Speaker 1: The staffers were described as concerned and reluctant about the orders,
Speaker 1: but they failed to verify them with the central office
Speaker 1: or check treatment plans to make sure the teens could
Speaker 1: receive that level of shock therapy. The report said. Staffers
Speaker 1: also did not know who was the shift supervisor that night.
Speaker 1: One reason staffers might not have been suspicious of the
Speaker 1: phone call is that the Rottenberg Center uses surveillance cameras
Speaker 1: in its group homes to monitor residents and staff, and
Speaker 1: a central office employee is allowed to initiate discipline by phone.
Speaker 1: So again, these guys haven't been there long, they don't
Speaker 1: know who's supposed to be giving the orders, so they
Speaker 1: don't recognize that anything is really fucked up. You know,
Speaker 1: they should have obviously. Yeah, they sure they stumble checked
Speaker 1: like a once or at some time between the first
Speaker 1: and seventy seventh time they shocked the child they had
Speaker 1: tied to a fucking chair. Um, But it's also the
Speaker 1: fault of the system he's developed. Not to take blame
Speaker 1: off of these people for doing something horrible, but like so,
Speaker 1: Matt Israel built a system where this was inevitable. The
Speaker 1: staff responsible were fired immediately, but the incident was so
Speaker 1: horrific that it sparked another set of investigations into the
Speaker 1: Judge Rotenberg Center. A court demanded video footage of the
Speaker 1: two students being shocked for three solid hours. Matt Israel
Speaker 1: ordered the footage destroyed, which was a crime and led
Speaker 1: to him being indicted by a grand jury in two
Speaker 1: thousand eleven. In order to avoid criminal charges, Israel agreed
Speaker 1: to leave the school he'd founded. So two thousand eleven
Speaker 1: he quits because he illegally destroys evidence, and the court
Speaker 1: is like, hey, we won't charge you criminally if you
Speaker 1: if you get out of here, which I don't know,
Speaker 1: I think maybe locked the funk up. Yeah he should
Speaker 1: be in jail, but he shouldn't be around kids. I'll
Speaker 1: say that. So the very next year, two thousand twelve,
Speaker 1: is when the general public finally got their first good
Speaker 1: look at what the Judge Rodenberg Center had been doing
Speaker 1: to children all those years. This was thanks to the
Speaker 1: case and the mother of Andre mccollins. Andre's mother had
Speaker 1: enrolled him in the Judge Rodenberg Center, not because he
Speaker 1: was super violent, but because he was special needs and
Speaker 1: he had been raped in a public school by another student.
Speaker 1: And she a big selling point of the jearse. First
Speaker 1: of all, it looks very nice. It looks like a facility.
Speaker 1: She also likes that it's heavily surveilled. It's covered in cameras,
Speaker 1: so she feels like nothing bad can happen to her
Speaker 1: kid here because someone's always watching. And that's like you
Speaker 1: have to understand, like that's all. It's reasonable. That like
Speaker 1: the fact that this place is so surveilled, freeting to
Speaker 1: her because what happened to her kid, you know, she's
Speaker 1: rasonsted again, Yeah, totally reasonable. In short order, Andre was
Speaker 1: taken off his medication because again the Judge Rodenberg Center
Speaker 1: and Matt Israel don't believe in medicating kids. He was
Speaker 1: put back on and after he started acting out and
Speaker 1: engaging in self injurious behavior and like the school couldn't
Speaker 1: correct it, and they didn't have approval to give him
Speaker 1: electric shocks. So after they have to put him back
Speaker 1: on his medicine, they go to court to get him
Speaker 1: approved to receive electric shocks. The court approves it, and
Speaker 1: the treatment plan listed that shocks could be applied if
Speaker 1: he was aggressive, if he screamed, or if he tried
Speaker 1: to remove his electric remove like the electrocution thing, or
Speaker 1: if he engaged in what they called health dangerous behavior
Speaker 1: and they defined health dangerous behavior specifically in his case
Speaker 1: is tensing up his body, So if he gets tense,
Speaker 1: they can electric famously relaxing electrocution. Yeah. Man, they were
Speaker 1: horrifically creative of these excutions shock kids. They were. And
Speaker 1: it's one of the fun up things is that like
Speaker 1: they're talking about how bad he's on risper it All,
Speaker 1: and they're talking about how bad risper it All is,
Speaker 1: so they want to they they take him off it,
Speaker 1: but then he gets worse when he's off it because
Speaker 1: medication is helping. But and that's why they justify putting
Speaker 1: this kid on the electrocution treatment so that they can
Speaker 1: take him off Risper Doll again and then electrocute his
Speaker 1: behaviors away, which is yeah, the they're basically doing the
Speaker 1: thing like, hey, have them steal something, now we can
Speaker 1: shock them. Yeah, and it's one of those things. Obviously,
Speaker 1: over medication is a problem. I known a bunch of
Speaker 1: kids who were like in a bunch of adults who
Speaker 1: are like No. Once I found the right medication, it
Speaker 1: was life changing. And like the kind of blanket rejection
Speaker 1: of any sort of medication in favor of electrocution is
Speaker 1: pretty bad. Oh yeah, you know. It comes out of
Speaker 1: a period when massive, like like unreasonable and unlike immoral
Speaker 1: levels of medication and drugging were common. And I get that,
Speaker 1: but it it persists past the area where there are
Speaker 1: medications that really help and and it rejects those in
Speaker 1: favor of torture, which is is bad. So now that
Speaker 1: he's being electrocuted regularly, Andre has taken off of his
Speaker 1: meds again, and his mother visits him, you know, several
Speaker 1: times and sees that like he's he's he's changed. His
Speaker 1: behavior has changed in a negative way as a result
Speaker 1: of being off his meds and probably as a result
Speaker 1: of being tortured, and she begs the school to put
Speaker 1: him back on his meds um. The school doesn't do this. Uh,
Speaker 1: And the electrocutions continue, and he has like a bad
Speaker 1: incident one day where he the school alleges that he
Speaker 1: at least attempted to hit a teacher, so they shocked him.
Speaker 1: And then afterwards, hours after that violent incident, they shocked
Speaker 1: him again. And I'm going to read a quote from
Speaker 1: New York magazine that that describes what happens later in
Speaker 1: that day. Like other students in the room, Andre sat
Speaker 1: at a desk facing a computer, his back to the teacher.
Speaker 1: A worker told him, take off your jacket. Andre didn't move.
Speaker 1: Take off your jacket please again, no response. An employee
Speaker 1: pressed the button to activate his shock device. He screamed.
Speaker 1: Andre fell to the ground and tried to crawl under
Speaker 1: his desk. Four adults rabbed him and wrestled him to
Speaker 1: the floor, holding him down while he struggled. His psychologist
Speaker 1: brought in a restraint board, and the employees moved him
Speaker 1: onto it, face down. Eight of them surrounded him as
Speaker 1: they bound his wrists and ankles to the board. Usually,
Speaker 1: after Andrea got a shock and was restrained, he'd calmed down,
Speaker 1: but on this day he only got more agitated. The
Speaker 1: more upset he became, the more he tensed up his body,
Speaker 1: and the more he tensed up, the more shocks he received.
Speaker 1: Between ten am and about eleven am, the workers shocked
Speaker 1: him fourteen times. Each press of the button triggered aloud,
Speaker 1: high pitched alarm, informing employees the shock had been delivered,
Speaker 1: while Andrea's cries echoed down the corridor. Yeah, I I
Speaker 1: don't know what else to say at this point, like god,
Speaker 1: damn it. Yeah, it's pretty bad. And after a lengthy
Speaker 1: court battle, um his mother succeeds in making this video
Speaker 1: public and this leads to widespread outrage against the Judge
Speaker 1: Rodenberg Center and more investigations. In two thousand thirteen, a
Speaker 1: United Nations special report tour on Torture found that students
Speaker 1: who were electrocuted at the Rodenberg School had their rights
Speaker 1: violated under the UN Convention on Torture. So the United
Speaker 1: Nations says, these kids are being tortured, like this is yeah,
Speaker 1: that unites our definition. You achieved the special level. Fucked. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if the UN is coming after your school, like yeah,
Speaker 1: you might want to reevaluate you. You may be real
Speaker 1: fucked up. Um. You know what isn't hasn't been declared
Speaker 1: torture by the United Nations hopefully. The products and services
Speaker 1: that sponsored this podcast, well most of them, most of
Speaker 1: them okay again north of eight percent north yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: The the the hard like the strong odds are whatever
Speaker 1: advertisers are on our show have not been declared to
Speaker 1: be torturation people. Almost none of them. That's a good thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're back. So as this so you know this this
Speaker 1: the u N starts looking into ship and as a
Speaker 1: result of this video coming out, the Justice Department launches
Speaker 1: an investigation that I think is still ongoing, like a
Speaker 1: decade later. I haven't found a result from it, and
Speaker 1: I've read some recent reporting on it, so it seems
Speaker 1: like either it got kind of buried or they're getting
Speaker 1: real deep into it. But it's been a long time, um,
Speaker 1: without kind of a result. Another thing that's ongoing is
Speaker 1: Matt Israel's obsession with experimenting on children. If they recall,
Speaker 1: decades ago, he was forced to separate his relationship with
Speaker 1: the school he'd founded in California. It had been taken
Speaker 1: over by Judith Weber, who had been the executive director
Speaker 1: of the West Coast b r I when it was founded.
Speaker 1: Judith and Matt eventually married, and in two thousand and fifteen,
Speaker 1: it was found that Matt Israel, while not on staff
Speaker 1: at the West Coast b r I, which had been
Speaker 1: renamed Tobin World too and Tobin World three, was working
Speaker 1: as a behavior analyst and an administrator at both facilities.
Speaker 1: The schools had not notified the state that Matt Israel
Speaker 1: had been added to the roster of employees because Matt
Speaker 1: Israel was legally prohibited from entering the facilities. From a
Speaker 1: write up at ed source dot org quote in unannounced
Speaker 1: visits to Tobin World two and three on January sixteenth
Speaker 1: and seventeenth, investigators also found that the schools were employing
Speaker 1: behavioral analysts with expired certifications and teachers without their acquired
Speaker 1: credentials to teach students with certain disabilities. The school also
Speaker 1: failed to comply with state regulations that require behavior plan
Speaker 1: reviews after staff members have physically restrained students or isolated
Speaker 1: them in rooms they cannot leave. The Judge Rodenberg's Educational
Speaker 1: Center is the only facility in the country that still
Speaker 1: uses electric shock therapy. In this way, roughly twenty of
Speaker 1: their students received shocks, although given what we know about
Speaker 1: how lacks these facilities can be about rules and paperwork,
Speaker 1: it's hard to say if that's really all the kids
Speaker 1: who receive shocks. In March of the FDA banned the
Speaker 1: use of electronic shocked vices in the context that they're
Speaker 1: used in the center, saying they caused quote an unreasonable
Speaker 1: and substantial risk of illness or injury. But in July
Speaker 1: of this year, in a two to one decision by
Speaker 1: the Washington D C. District Court of Appeals, it was
Speaker 1: ruled that the FDA's band violated federal law by interfering
Speaker 1: with the authority of healthcare practitioners to practice medicine. The
Speaker 1: center's attorney, Mike Flamia, told c and Then that the
Speaker 1: ruling was important because quote, it protects what all of
Speaker 1: us cherish, and that is the right to go to
Speaker 1: our doctor and have our doctor decide what is the
Speaker 1: best treatment. Um, you do you, I guess what the
Speaker 1: hell you do your kids? Yeah, it's Messy'm like, honestly,
Speaker 1: that's unbelievable because it's like, yeah, I know, it could
Speaker 1: be a little. But so it's like, hey, my doctor
Speaker 1: can tell my kid that you need to be shot,
Speaker 1: and a lot of them didn't even have the credentials anyways. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so again that's part of it, Like, well, I my doctor.
Speaker 1: I have a right to you know, pick my doctor
Speaker 1: and for him to pick his well, but a lot
Speaker 1: of these people aren't legally qualified to prescribe any kind
Speaker 1: of treatment to your kids, or to kids of autism
Speaker 1: or anything. Yeah, that's the thing that's passing me off
Speaker 1: the most about this. It's like these people are making
Speaker 1: a super important decisions that they have no right to make. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And part of this issue is this thing I've I've
Speaker 1: complained about a few times on the show, which is
Speaker 1: that like they're framing this is like, well, we want
Speaker 1: the freedom to go to our doctor and and and
Speaker 1: have our doctor to no know, you want the freedom
Speaker 1: to have absolute power to say what is and isn't
Speaker 1: okay for your kid. And I don't think parents should
Speaker 1: have that. You're not the god of your child, and
Speaker 1: you're not the government of your child. And I don't
Speaker 1: think government should have a lot of the power that
Speaker 1: they have. But like there's there's this problem of how
Speaker 1: parents are treated as the ultimate authority of what's good
Speaker 1: or bad for their kid, which has a lot of
Speaker 1: horrible consequences outside of this too. But this is one
Speaker 1: of those consequences where it's like, well, especially within the
Speaker 1: context here where a kid is autistic and maybe not,
Speaker 1: it's like, well, the parents basically get the keys to
Speaker 1: the kingdom. They have to make the final call, and
Speaker 1: they don't know what's going on most of the time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a lot of parents suck. Yeah, Maybe don't make them
Speaker 1: the absolute god of their own of their child, because
Speaker 1: that's a bad thing. I will say the full disclosure.
Speaker 1: Mind o't but I'm but but you know, I know,
Speaker 1: I know. I've known some people who have fed disability
Speaker 1: as parents that weren't a great Yeah, exactly, and it's
Speaker 1: it's a problem. Yeah. Um. So, the j RC was
Speaker 1: supported by a significant number of parents who has always
Speaker 1: argued that the facility was a matter of last resort
Speaker 1: for their kids. In making this case, Flammia, the lawyer
Speaker 1: offered up the argument that absolutely no other treatment had
Speaker 1: worked for these kids. Quote, I know that the people
Speaker 1: that oppose this treatment, they'll tell you over and over
Speaker 1: again that there are other treatments that work as well,
Speaker 1: if not better. And they'll talk about positive behavior supports,
Speaker 1: which j RC does all of that. They'll talk about drugs,
Speaker 1: psychotropic medications. These clients at j r C, they've tried
Speaker 1: all that, numerous drugs, numerous diagnoses, numerous combinations of drugs.
Speaker 1: That is again extremely common, this line of argument, that
Speaker 1: they've tried everything. This is the last resort. I think
Speaker 1: the most dedicated example of this came from that Wired
Speaker 1: article I've cited a bit in this episode. And while
Speaker 1: that article goes into horrible detail about abuses at the
Speaker 1: j RC, it also includes this bit. You don't know
Speaker 1: what it's like to be the parent of a student
Speaker 1: at the Judge Rodenberg Center. You don't know what it
Speaker 1: takes to hear all this and still come out in
Speaker 1: favor of the school. And you don't know because you
Speaker 1: don't have a kid who pulls out her hair and
Speaker 1: bloody clumps, who seems to enjoy that. Okay, a kid
Speaker 1: who scalp resembles that of a frontier settler worked over
Speaker 1: by a furious native. And then to see her today, happy, smiling,
Speaker 1: a brunette just like any other brunette, and all thanks
Speaker 1: to j rc her life saved by the machine saved.
Speaker 1: And that's just one kid, just one story, you see,
Speaker 1: there's another side. There's a lot that's funked up about
Speaker 1: that Wired article, and they site they cite some science
Speaker 1: that makes the situation seem much more muddled as to
Speaker 1: whether or not this is best. Um. A lot of
Speaker 1: that science is at this point more than twenty years old.
Speaker 1: The most recent studies that they side are from Oh Yeah.
Speaker 1: And it's made more difficult by the fact that the
Speaker 1: jear C isn't exactly required to hand over objective, reliable
Speaker 1: evidence about the efficacy of its methods. And there's strong
Speaker 1: arguments that they're not fixing any problems these kids have.
Speaker 1: They're just temporarily suppressing them with violence. And there's also
Speaker 1: the thing of like, are they actually trying these other methods?
Speaker 1: Are they just going straight to the shocks? Are they
Speaker 1: just going straight to the shocks? Um? The and yeah.
Speaker 1: Supporters of the school will argue that like these schools
Speaker 1: that's that don't use aversives and that use only positive
Speaker 1: support will turn kids down, will say this kid is
Speaker 1: too severe for us, and eventually those kids have no
Speaker 1: other option. But the judge Rodenberg Center, which turns nobody down. UM. Now,
Speaker 1: most of the studies have come across that purport to
Speaker 1: show a benefit to the adversives used at the j
Speaker 1: r C are more than twenty years old, and again
Speaker 1: are very not at all conclusive. Um. The preponderance of
Speaker 1: evidence seems to suggest that these kind of treatments are
Speaker 1: not necessary even in the most severe cases. But the
Speaker 1: kind of treatments that help in the most severe cases
Speaker 1: are labor intensive and expensive. Um. It is worth noting,
Speaker 1: regardless of what you want to get into the weeds
Speaker 1: on the science here. No other facility in the US
Speaker 1: uses these methods, and many other facilities do treat children
Speaker 1: with problems just as severe using methods that do not
Speaker 1: evolve electrocuting kids. The judge Rodenberg Center and the parents
Speaker 1: who support it argue that as unpleasant as the shock
Speaker 1: treatments are, they also represent the only viable treatment for
Speaker 1: patients who would otherwise destroy themselves. Nancy Weiss is the
Speaker 1: director of the National Leadership Consortium on Developmental Disabilities at
Speaker 1: the University of Delaware. She has been a longstanding critic
Speaker 1: of the j r C, and when that court ruled
Speaker 1: they could keep electrocuting kids. CNN went to her for
Speaker 1: comment on this matter. She said, quote, part of the
Speaker 1: reason that people with disabilities have behavioral problems, behaviors that
Speaker 1: we find challenging is that they're protesting the crappy lives
Speaker 1: we offer them. It's that person's only form of protest,
Speaker 1: and it's a critique of the life they're being offered.
Speaker 1: It's like, there's no greater human impulse than to be
Speaker 1: in charge of your own life. And what jere C does,
Speaker 1: to an extent beyond what any other provider in this
Speaker 1: country does, is strip people of choice and control. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, when you get down to it, it's ultimately
Speaker 1: there are much better ways of doing it than ye
Speaker 1: electric shock. There are there are, And I find it
Speaker 1: compelling what she says about the a lot of these
Speaker 1: bad behaviors of these kids protesting in the first place,
Speaker 1: that their lives even before the JEARC didn't offer them
Speaker 1: a lot of autonomy of choice. But also, um, what
Speaker 1: what Israel did at his facility is stripped choice because
Speaker 1: he doesn't see people as having choice. He doesn't really
Speaker 1: believe in free will, believes that we're just the product
Speaker 1: of of of stimuli that's put into us. Um. He
Speaker 1: treats these kids like robots. He treats his staff like robots.
Speaker 1: And the belief that you can make this perfect system
Speaker 1: if you just put perfectly, consistently put the right stimuli
Speaker 1: in and it does kind of work as long as
Speaker 1: the kids are getting electrocuted. For the most part, they
Speaker 1: stopped the behavior. They comply UM, but that isn't because
Speaker 1: anything has changed about them. It's because they've been tortured
Speaker 1: into not doing certain things. He just didn't have an
Speaker 1: issue with that because again, everyone's a robot. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: just a feature. Yeah, it's a feature. Um it's pretty yeah,
Speaker 1: pretty weak. God. So yeah, the f d A has
Speaker 1: you know, the FDA, to its credit, eventually did try
Speaker 1: to stop this UM, but then a judge was like, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: we're gonna keep doing this ship. So they're still running today.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah Jesus Christ. Yeah. Uh, I mean at the end, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I that's freaking bleak. Yeah. I wish I could have
Speaker 1: more to say, but I'm just because the biggest problem,
Speaker 1: because as somebody who is autistic, is there are some
Speaker 1: people who, like myself, are lucky enough to be able
Speaker 1: to do work and all that and stuff, and and
Speaker 1: a lot of times we get the name Aspergers, but
Speaker 1: buck that ship. And so it's like, I just I
Speaker 1: couldn't imagine something like this, and just it just makes
Speaker 1: me feel so angry. Sorry, I'm rambled. No no, no, no,
Speaker 1: I mean that's that's really important, Like the I don't know,
Speaker 1: how do we uh, how are we because we all
Speaker 1: have a we all have some form of mental disability,
Speaker 1: even if it isn't outwardly apparent, how are we able
Speaker 1: to be able to treat one another, support one another
Speaker 1: without dehumanizing and freaking shocking them like cattle. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: it's some part of the problem here is that a
Speaker 1: significant chunk of of people with autism UM aren't legally
Speaker 1: in control of their own lives, which in some of
Speaker 1: them are not in a legal capacity capable of of
Speaker 1: of of being in control in at least in a
Speaker 1: legal sense of the word. UM. They need some sort
Speaker 1: of of caretaker, but that means they're not making decisions
Speaker 1: for themselves, and and so, like the the industry that
Speaker 1: has developed around providing these people with care often and
Speaker 1: in fact largely, does so without any real input from
Speaker 1: the people in it. UM and because the people who
Speaker 1: are kind of most vulnerable to this tend to be
Speaker 1: unable to express themselves in a way that is easy
Speaker 1: for most people that understand. It happens without most people
Speaker 1: being aware of it, and so there's no outcry and
Speaker 1: nothing is done and it and it continues on for
Speaker 1: decades and decades because they think that's how it is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the only option or the best option, or you know,
Speaker 1: we'll look their parents say this is fine and like
Speaker 1: yeah it's Um, it's not great. No, it's not great. Well,
Speaker 1: and you've got any plug doubles to plug? Uh? You
Speaker 1: can follow me on twitch at notch the b N
Speaker 1: O T C H t H e B. I post
Speaker 1: a lot their social commentary WoT stuff. Um, but that's
Speaker 1: my big thing. To plug sweet well, plug out, plug away.
Speaker 1: And I don't know, Uh, yell at the FDA or
Speaker 1: a judge or something about this, I don't know. I
Speaker 1: guess THEDA is more or less on board. I don't
Speaker 1: know who to yell at at this point. Just just yell,
Speaker 1: yell ye to the sky. You gotta stand up for people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all right, well, thank you, aiden. And that's that's behind
Speaker 1: the bastards. Thanks for having me