Part One: The Judge Rotenberg Center

Today Robert and Aidan Bonacci talk about a school that makes tons of money abusing kids with autism. 

1. https://autisticadvocacy.org/actioncenter/issues/school/climate/jrc/
2. https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/16/health/judge-rotenberg-center-appeals-court-ruling/index.html
3. https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-judge-rotenberg-center-uses-electric-shocks-on-students-now-a-court-says-thats-totally-fine?ref=scroll
4. https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/decades-long-fight-over-electric-shock-treatment-led-fda-ban-n1265546
5. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna22347088
6. https://edsource.org/2015/state-suspends-certification-tobinworld-matthew-israel-aversive-therapy/85342
7. https://autistichoya.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/doctor-hurt-by-ric-kahn-1985-text-transcription-by-lydia-brown-20131.pdf
8. https://www.bostonmagazine.com/2008/06/17/the-shocking-truth/

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
It's behind the Bastards. The podcast that yet again opened
with a tonal noises because I couldn't I couldn't think
of an introduction. Uh. This is partly the fault of Sophie,
who is not here today, um for reasons of of
of pure selfishness. Um. No, she hasn't a bunch of

(00:26):
unbelievable number of meetings. My guest today is Aiden Aidan
Bonacci Banacci Bacci, Aidan Bonacci. Aiden, you want to tell
the audience a little bit about yourself. My name is
Aidan Bonacci Um as of today, twenty eight year old.
Uh autistaic theater major. I tweet a lot, I do

(00:49):
a lot of like freelance work. It's nice to be here.
Nice to have you on, Aiden, and you are it's
your birthday, so happy birthday. Thank you, Thank you for
for making the time to show up. In the episode today,
we're we're going to talk about something all fun is
the wrong word. Have you heard of the Judge Rotenberg Center.

(01:10):
I'm that sounds familiar, but yeah, it's um it's not
a good place, obviously, this is the show that this
is um so one of the reasons you're obviously you're
you're an actor, you do theater stuff, but you're also,
as you said, autistic. And I wanted to bring in

(01:32):
somebody who was for this episode because we're gonna be
talking a lot about kind of well, I would say,
the dark ages of autism treatment. But this is still
going on although it's bad, Um, it's really bad, UM.
And this is I think when I reached out online looking, uh,

(01:53):
you know, I want you to do an episode that
was going to touch on a lot of issues of
like autistic, like health care for autistic people. Folks expect
that I was either gonna do Hans Asberger, who is
absolutely a bastard um, or talk about there's a number
of things that this could have been. But we're talking
about the Judge Rodenberg Center, and specifically we're talking about Um,
the guy who who started it. So I want to

(02:16):
start by noting that autism didn't enter the d s
M as like a diagnosis until nineteen eighty. Obviously, people
were using the term before then. It was a thing
that a lot of medical professionals recognized existed. But there's
often a gap between when something is sort of like
recognized and when it actually enters the d s M,
and even when it entered the d s M and
nineteen eighty, the diagnostic criteria for being declared autistic were,

(02:38):
to put it bluntly, more or less bullshit. Um, somebody
couldn't be autistic if their symptoms weren't a parent before
they were thirty months old, which we now know a
lot for a lot of people. It's like not until
you're your three or four that like stuff become that
symptoms become a parent. Um. And a bunch of things
we now recognize the signs of autism weren't recognized back then.

(02:59):
It was it was at like it just in terms
of like from a from a clinical standpoint, they didn't
have a good handle on like how to know if
somebody was autistic or not yet. Um. And kind of
making matters more complicated was the fact that many of
the doctors who were kind of pioneers and autism research
where ship shows as well. Um again, Hans Asberger, the
guy whose name gave us yeah, worked with the Nazis

(03:24):
to euthanize disabled people. Uh not a well we got
a little fat Yeah. Well we'll talk about him at
some point. I bring all this up to to acknowledge
that the history even like recognizing autism is fraught, UM,
and the history of educating autistic people through like the
school system is equally problematic because obviously, like once you

(03:46):
know that this is a thing, schools are going to,
you know, try to develop standards for how to how
to teach people who have autism, and UM, generally they're
going to do a bad job of this. UM. That's
been most of the history of the education system and
auto is UM. And I have a little bit of
personal knowledge here. I was a para professional for a
special ed classroom for about eighteen months. The kids I

(04:06):
worked with, Yeah, and it was not UM that we had.
There were kids with a variety of of of of
different kind of things. A lot of them were autistic. UM.
We had a kid who had a severe who had
had a head injury and like had had literally had
like a chunk of her brain scooped out in a
car accident. UM. We had kids with with Down syndrome.
We had you know, in my classroom, they were mostly UM.

(04:29):
I think the term we, the term used at the
time was nonverbal, which meant they couldn't communicate well or
at all. In a lot of cases via language, and
you know, we would develop we would use sign language,
we would use like cards, We had a bunch of
different kind of systems we would try to use to
help the kids communicate. And all of my my coworkers
cared a lot, but we also had effectively zero academic training.

(04:50):
They were like, out of I don't know twenty or
so people in the unit that I was in, there
were like two people who had gone to school to
any extent for what we were doing, and the rest
of us were just kind of yeah, we didn't know
what the funk we were doing. Yeah, um, And I
would say, you know, from the I've mentioned being a
special at a couple of times, and some people I

(05:11):
think make assumptions about the kind of the worst case
scenario for that. I don't believe we did anything that
was like harmful in terms of our our our teaching techniques.
We weren't using any of the stuff that we'll be
talking about today, any of like the really brutal methods
that have been used. But I don't think anything we did.
Most of what we did was very useful either because
we didn't really know what we were doing, like we

(05:33):
That's part of The problem with I don't know the
whole when when kind of the education system intersects with
healthcare in any way, is um, most don't really get
good results exactly don't. And as somebody who was in
Special Edge from like first grade through fifth grade that

(05:54):
you definitely got a lot more of they really wanted
to try, but there really wasn't much they could do
in terms like helping out and one that they really cared.
But you can definitely tell compared to like other classes
that they're kind of shorthanded, yeah, shorthanded and not. You know,
there's a lot of specialized knowledge that is required, both

(06:15):
in terms of like how to educate kids who may
you know, interpret kind of verbal command or verbal stimuli
or whatever in a different way, who maybe who may
have kind of sensory um like would be fundamentally like
kind of see and hear differently than everybody else. Like
that requires a lot of specialized knowledge to work with.
Outside of that, there's also like medical stuff like again,

(06:37):
I was going to this job with no training and
when I started was dealing with like a grand mall
seizure every day. Um, and it is I didn't like
we didn't we didn't like get good information on what
to do with that stuff. It was kind of like
learn on the job, which is not not a good
You shouldn't be learning on the job if you're treating
children having Yeah, no, not something you really want to

(06:58):
leave a few weeks, if not a lot more training officire. Yeah. Um. Now,
some of the students that I worked with had really
serious issues with violence. And again I've mentioned this before. Um,
from most of them, this was an occasional thing. It
would be maybe once a year, and it wasn't you know,
it wasn't their fault. It was something kind of flipped
in their head and they would they would get aggressive

(07:20):
generally because they were frightened. Um. But there were some kids,
one particular kid that was my major have to deal with,
for whom violence was a really daily issue and the
problem was severe in this kid's case. When you're talking
about kids with problems like that where they are either
very self injurious and this this kid I'm talking about,
was injured himself more than he injured other people. That's
a serious issue because he's not only a danger, he

(07:40):
could he could seriously injure other people. Um, he could
seriously injured, kill himself. Um that's a real issue, and
it's a real issue that our school, which was a
normal high school, was not at all equipped to handle.
And I feel very comfortable saying I had no business
working with a kid whose needs were so specialized. UM So,
I understand the need for residential facilities that can take

(08:04):
care of some of kids with issues this severe and
an ongoing basis. There's just cases like that where you
run to need people who are specialized in that type
of work and can be responsible and not have to
be like, oh, ship, what I do? Yeah, And there
are for some of these kids you need two seven
care because again you can't necessarily predict their self injurious

(08:26):
behavior or they need a tremendous amount of consistency in
order to make progress, and you just can't do that
in eight hours a day at a public school. Um
So the problem. So again I'm starting this by saying,
I get that there is potentially a need for residential facilities,
but as we've discussed on the show before, many residential
schools with kids for behavioral issues are fucking nightmares. And

(08:48):
I'm talking about the Allan School here, I'm talking about
like troubled kids schools. Um. And those places are nightmares
in catering to kids who are if not neuro typical,
than at least not you know, generally not dealing with
autism or a particularly specialist diagnosis, their kids with like
a behavioral issue, their kids who got into drugs or something.

(09:09):
Right at a place like the law school. When you
take it to a further step of specialization, where you're
dealing with with children with autism or children with other
very specific diagnoses, that's a whole another ball game. Um.
And it gets a lot sketchier because there's a lot
less specialization to deal with these places. So if you
kind of can bill yourself as an expert in whatever

(09:31):
these kids have, you can get away with a lot
of really terrible treatments, and people looking at in from
the outside will be like, well, I guess that's just
what you do with those kids, you know. Um, yeah,
that's not surprising. Yeah, And that's the subject of today
the Judge Rotenberg Center. So our story starts with a
man named Matthew Israel. He was born at some point

(09:51):
in the nineteen thirties. I have not found an exact year.
He was a contemporary of Michael Ducocus. They were friends
so around when Ducacus was artinism and I guess when,
uh when? Um, matt Israel was born. He was born
in Brookline, Massachusetts. His dad was a lawyer. He was
the youngest of two brothers. And to the extent that
Matthew has told interviewers about his family, he claims that

(10:13):
his parents were loving and seldom spank him. Um. So
that's good, and that's gonna be relevant here in a
little bit. But punishment was not a central focus of
his parents parenting strategies. Um. He went to Brookline High
School and he was good friends again with Michael Ducaucus,
who would later be governor of Massachusetts and would also
fail to become the president. Um, Matthew and Michael ran

(10:36):
across country track together and we're good friends. This will
become relevant later. Now we know a lot less about
Israel's early life than I would prefer, but we do
know that in high school he was kicked out of
an honor society after he spoke out against the school's
plan to allow athletes and people who pursued non academic
extracurricular activities into the club. He told one interviewer that

(10:58):
it was too much of an artificial reward system. So
he didn't like that the Gifted program was being extended
to people who were good at I don't know, like
music and theater. He oh, yeah, okay, one of those Yeah,
one of those guys like it's not math. It's like, yeah,
it's not football. I mean, yeah, he's he's just he's
a little bit of an elitist, maybe, like an academic

(11:19):
elitist and specifics. So in nineteen fifty is Reel started
at Harvard. He was fascinated with behavioral psychology, and he
had the good fortune to be taught by one of
the single most influential psychologists in the history of the discipline,
a guy named B. F. Skinner. Skinner was probably the
dominant psychologist of the mid twentieth century, and he specialized
in what's called behaviorism. Skinner believed that all human behavior

(11:42):
could be boiled down to environmental operant conditioning and the
reinforcement of selected responses with rewards or punishment. Skinner essentially
rejected the idea of free will, which he acknowledged quote
seems to question dignity or worth as and if people
don't have free will. If we're just robots responding to stimuli,
maybe we don't have any dignity yourself worth. But as

(12:02):
he pointed out, this also meant that under his analysis
of behavior, blame for bad behavior and credit for good
behavior we're both shifted to the environment. So you're never
responsible if you do bad or good things. It's the
result of the stimuli that has been fed into your brain. Um,
which is, you know, not my view of reality. It's

(12:24):
a pretty bleak y yeah. I mean it's it's bleak
in some ways because it kind of reduces, it flattens
the moral universe. Um. But it also means that like, potentially,
if you can figure out how to feed in the
good stimuli to people's brains, you can stop you know,

(12:44):
genocide and whatnot. You could you could deal with all
of that just by feeding people different different input um.
His hope was that accepting this, like accepting this reality
about how people worked, would lead to a new organization
of society based around social trolls that would be more
purposeful than the random positive and negative reinforcements in society.
In other words, like we're just the result of the

(13:07):
stimuli that's been fed into us. Um, but because it's
being kind of fed in randomly, and nobody's nobody's making
a concerted effort to make sure that like specific goods,
stimuli you know, kind of are are are put into
people's heads. Um, that's why all this messed up. That's
why society is so messed up. And if you could
just be consistent and whatnot, you could fix all these problems.

(13:28):
That's that's Skinner's kind of roughly Skinner's idea, I am again,
I'm flattening a decades long career and psychology. This is
the gist of it. Um Skinner wrote, quote, man struggle
for freedom is not due to a will to be free,
but to certain behavioral processes characteristic of the human organism,

(13:48):
the chief effect of which is the avoidance of, or
escape from, so called aversive features of the environment. Physical
and biological technologies have been mainly concerned with natural aversive stimuli.
The struggle for freedom is concerned with stimuli intentionally arranged
by other people. The literature of freedom has identified the
other people and has proposed ways of escaping from them

(14:09):
or weakening or destroying their power. It has been successful
in reducing the aversive stimuli used in intentional control, but
it has made the mistake of defining freedom in terms
of state of mind or feelings, and it has therefore
not been able to effectively deal with techniques of control
which do not breed escape or revolt, but nevertheless have
aversive consequences. It has been forced to brand all control

(14:30):
is wrong and to misrepresent many of the advantages to
be gained from a social environment. It is unprepared for
the next step, which is not to freemen from control,
but to analyze and change the kinds of control to
which they are exposed. See you see what he's saying there. Yeah,
I'm I'm seeing what he's saying. But there's a lot

(14:51):
of ways you can definitely miss interpreter and construe it. Yeah, absolutely,
And it's you can see both sides of this to
where like, right now in the US, the ideology of
freedom as it's often interpreted by particularly folks on the right,
has lit in the situation where like people are showing
up armed outside of schools because they don't think kids

(15:12):
should be made to wear masks during a pandemic. Um,
and that is a problem. And he's kind of pointing
out that, like, Um, but the kind of the the
tech the angle he's looking at this from is that
like the ideology of freedom, Um has has made it.
His has kind of made it seem like a bad
guys sort of thing to try and analyze the stimuli

(15:35):
people are exposed to and alter them in order to
change their behavior. Um and Skinner thinks that that's what
we ought to be doing. Right. So Skinner was interested
and nothing less than the controlled future evolution of human
beings with proper conditioning techniques. He believed all conflict, responsible behavior,
and the calamitous consequences of freedom could be erased. As

(15:56):
Skinner wrote, quote, a scientific view of man offers exciting
post abilities. We have not yet seen what man can
make of man. And I mean I can see he's
definitely looking at it from a positive angle. It's just
there's a lot to work around with that, at least

(16:18):
in my opinion, there is. And I think Skinner a
big chunk of what he's doing is kind of a
response to everything that happened in the first part of
the twentieth century. The disasters under state communism, the gin
sides of the Nazis, the horrors of the world wars,
and this idea that like, well, this is clearly terrible,
we could if we can make people better, if we
can like, if we can feed them better stimuli, we

(16:40):
can stop all this. At the same time he's kind
of doing He's what he's saying, you can find not
dissimilar things that the Nazis were saying, Man, can we
can make the human race better by kind right away?
But I was leaning towards yet And Skinner is not
a eugenicist. But anytime you're saying we can improve the

(17:02):
human race through like selective decisions and whatnot that may
limit people's freedom, you're not on a totally different wavelength.
Then you can also but draw some comparisons to like
the idea of the new Soviet man, and these these
strains of thought, these I and they're all cutting from
a similar place, which is that like in the early
half of the twentieth century, you're seeing all these horrible calamities, um,

(17:25):
human caused calamities, these terrifying wars and famines and genocide,
and you've got a lot of people being like, well
maybe we maybe we could do better than that. Um.
The problem is that it can lead you in some
and again I really want to easy. Skinner is not
a Nazi. He's not talking about eugenics. But you can see,
you can see how people could take some of the
things he's saying and turn them in unsettling directions. To

(17:47):
the road can be to how can be paved with
good intentions? Yes, yeah, and I that's that's not so
much Skinner because he's certainly not the bad guy here,
But that's kind of where his ideology leads. Matt is real.
Um So Matt fell in love with Skinners theories. At
the library one day he found a book his professor
had written but not assigned to the class, a book

(18:08):
called Walden two. And I'm gonna quote from a write
up in Boston Magazine quote. The controversial book is about
a utopian society where behaviors can be modified for the
benefit of all inhabitants. It is based on Skinner's theory
of operant conditioning. If an action is rewarded, it increases
the likelihood that the person will perform the action again.
This is, after all, how Skinner had taught pigeons to

(18:28):
play table tennis by rewarding the behaviors that led to
their game. Israel Lasers said of the book. It was
a real inspiration. I knew what I wanted to do
with my life. It was a feeling similar to those
claiming to have religious conversions. I wanted to start a
real utopian behavioral community. And this is um He's not
the only one who gets impacted this way by Walden two.

(18:50):
There's actually a whole subculture that forms around trying to
build utopian communities based around Skinner's ideas of operant conditioning. Obviously,
I'm also interested in utopian communities. I planned one day
to start one that will build a paradise on Earth
before it's torn us under in a hail of fire
and bullets from the f d A. And Matt had
the same ambition, m Oh yeah, I mean, who wouldn't

(19:11):
Who wouldn't want to build a paradise based around the
fundamental moral precept that you shouldn't be told by the
government what pills are and aren't healthy, or what pills
do and don't contain lead. I think we have the
freedom to ingest all sorts of brain pills and to
claim that they care all sorts of diseases. And I
I challenged the f d A to increase their munitions

(19:35):
budget enough to stop me. So Matt had a similar ambition,
without desiring an armed conflict with the f d A.
But being a young PhD candidate just getting started in
the world, he didn't really have a way to achieve
this dream, and sort of his his desire to start
a utopian community and his lack of resources led to
a period of depression for him. He later said, it

(19:57):
was a very difficult period. I thought about committing suicide.
If I couldn't bring a community into existence, what since
was life worth living? So he worked on his doctor
and he helped b. F. Skinner teach pigeons to play
ping pong. In nineteen sixty he received his doctorate, and
he used his formidable skill as a hype man to
try and raise capital to start a firm teach selling
teaching machines. His goal was to spend the profits from

(20:20):
this business into a utopian social project, but the business
didn't do well, and in nineteen sixty six, Israel was
not particularly close to achieving his dream. That year, though,
he attended a walden To conference where other weird b F.
Skinner nerds talked about how to start their own utopian societies.
Eighty three people attended, and he met a couple of
folks who were willing to get involved in such a

(20:43):
project with him. And it was a very minor scale
at this point. So in nineteen sixty seven, he and
a couple of these folks start a communal home in Arlington, Virginia.
Um and it's as utopian communities go, very small. It's
basically Matt Israel, a guy and his girlfriend, a teacher,
and her young daughter named Andrea. UM. So not a

(21:04):
big community. And this little girl, Andrea was, according to
Matt Israel, a real problem. He later said quote she
walked around the living room with a toy broom, hitting people.
She also screamed and threw tantrums often enough that Israel
claims I was forced to do behavior modification. So this
is the first time that he tries to alter a
human being through operat conditioning, right, um or at least

(21:26):
his first recorded times. I don't know that's a weird
I guess you could see. It's not any different than
like any other parent being like, oh, this kid is
doing something they shouldn't be doing. I'm gonna I'm gonna
like punish them or try otherwise to get them to
stop doing the thing. But it's not your kid. They
start seeing dicey. Yeah, it starts getting dicey, And I

(21:48):
guess like it's kind of unsettling too. For whatever reason,
it's less unsettled to be like, oh, you know, my
kid is is throwing tantrums, so I'm going to like
do this in order to try to get them to stop.
That's less unsettling to me than saying like, oh, this
kid is engaged in bad behavior and I'm going to
condition them to do better behavior through like operation. It's like,

(22:12):
not you're grounded, but you're going to get modified. It's like, yeah,
you're going to get modified. That's unsettling a little bit. Um.
He says he got the mom's permission to work on
her child. We've got only his word here. I have
not heard any interviews with any of the people who
are in this with him. Um, But given what comes next,
I will note that Matt Israel is really good at

(22:32):
convincing parents to let him experiment on their kids. So
I don't have trouble believing that water to it. Yeah, yeah,
I think he probably did get Andrea's mom's permission. The
methods he used to alter her behavior were called aversives.
Put bluntly, aversives are unpleasant stimuli done to a person
or animal in order to change their behavior. The classic

(22:55):
example of an adversive would be a punishment, although aversives
are not always administered as punishments, because like a punishment is,
somebody does someone does something undesirable, and you do something
undesirable to them to make them associate the two. Right,
that's a punishment. Aversives can be punishments, but they can
also occur before the behavior. There's a number of ways
to apply them. We'll talk about that a bit later.

(23:16):
The first adversive he used was time out. When Andrea
would scream, Matt would put her in a bedroom, close
the door, and hold it shut. He would keep track
of how long she screamed at him through the door
using a chart. Over time, her tantrums diminished. But Israel
also found the act of holding a door shut on
a screaming child to be exhausting and demoralizing for obvious reasons,

(23:37):
and ye seems kind of bad. At one point, his
patients ran out and he slapped Andrea, saying there's no
screaming and time out now. This would mark the first
time Matt used physical violence on a child to alter behavior.
And he doesn't say in interviews what impact this hat
on her, But according to an interview with Israel and

(23:59):
the Boston Nix, here's what came next. Quote. He began
to use a combination of rewards and punishments with Andrea.
I was a tremendous source of reward for Andrea, he says,
she was very cute, very smart, and very appreciative of attention.
I found that a combination of extraordinary rewards an occasional
aversive made an environment that helped change her whole personality.
Matt Israel's training had begun with Skinner, who believed you

(24:21):
didn't need to use aversions, but Israel could see the results.
Punishment is a fact of culture, he says. When the
police find you for parking in a no parking zone,
that's punishment. Andrea had been a spoiled bratt, but she
became a pleasant, attractive, charming feature in the house. So
that's a little unsettling to write that attractive. I don't
like that part. I don't like that, and I don't

(24:43):
like describing a human being as a feature. Oh yeah, yeah,
that's that's a little unsettling too. It's like two bedrooms,
one bath, one attractive feature, Yeah, one attractive small child. Yeah.
There's the way he talks about people is consistent the unnerving.
It will only get more so. But you know what's

(25:03):
not consistently unnerving? Um, I don't know what products and services?
Oh yes, the products and services to help keep this
a float. And and we guarantee here behind the bastards
that less than a fifth of our sponsors have ever
referred to a small child as an attractive feat And

(25:24):
that's as good as you're gonna get in the podcast business. Look, honestly,
that's spressive. Yeah, we we we worked hard for those numbers.
We're back so at Around the same time Matt Israel
started his Arlington Commune, he had formed a national organization

(25:46):
with a very dystopian name, the Association for Social Design.
Its objective was to establish a network of associated experimental
communities and cities throughout the world. He was essentially taking
there's this subculture of Wolden Two fans who are all
trying to build these little utopias based off of Skinner's ideas,
and he's trying to unite them in kind of like
a physical social network. Now there's a guy named Hilkey

(26:09):
Coolman who's a historian of this subculture. He's a historian
of like specifically, the people who like rallied around Walden
to uh and Coleman writes that Israel's goal was to
take B. F. Skinner's utopian experiments a step further. Privately,
Israel started to call his work Walden three. That said,
his first utopian experiment did not end well, as happens

(26:30):
with most of these experiments, the adults themselves couldn't get along,
and eventually the whole thing fell apart. I've never heard
an interview with the other adults who lived with Matt,
but I would very much like to. I suspect his
behavior was a larger part of things than he led on.
He tried another communal living situation after that, which also
fell apart. And this quote from the Boston Phoenix gives
some context as to why the problem with the houses,

(26:53):
says Israel, was that the residents weren't really buying into
the behavior mod mode. There was very little control over
the part participants. Israel says, they could always move out. Coleman,
who has studied this whole subculture extensively, also blames Israel
for the collapse of his two utopian projects and the
collapse of the Association for Social Design. From a write
up and Wired quote it Live in Walden to Coleman

(27:16):
blames Israel, suggesting he is the commune's patriarch when of
his inhabitants to live lives based on altering one another's behavior,
the others and the communes and the Association thought this
was no life at all. So you get what he's
saying here, like this is this is an extension of
what he's saying about this kid. He's treating these people
not like people but like machines, and he's angry that

(27:37):
they have the ability to leave. They don't just passively
take his input. They have the ability to say like, well,
I don't like this and I'm going. And he's not
a fan of that. No, it's not enough control for him.
And you can see how a guy whose attitude who's
who's who blames the failure of his utopian communes on
free will might not be the guy you want having

(27:58):
total control over a group of autistic children who are
forced to live in his residential facility. Oh. Absolutely, you
can setting in a bad direction, right when his issue
is it's the fact that these people can leave as
the real problem. So it's my opinion that Matt Israel

(28:20):
is sort of a predator. And I based that in
large part the fact that once his two utopic experiments
failed because the adults wouldn't do whatever he said, he
decided to start a school. Specifically, he wanted to start
a school for kids whose disabilities would render them less
able to defend or advocate for themselves. This is not
far from how he trained framed it, and this is

(28:40):
what he says in an interview about his decision to
start a school quote maybe a school for the emotionally disturbed.
He says behaviorism is the kind of thing, particularly in
these days, that has been allowed to be applied to
the handicapped. So he's like, adults won't let me do
this to them, but people that you do this to
handicap kids. And as a note here, we're going to
read a number of quotes from articles and individuals who

(29:02):
use terms for people with autism and other and other
um diagnoses that are not modern or appropriate terms. I
am not changing the wording these people used because in
part it's very useful and understanding how they think about
these kids, um, like erasing parts of it and yeah,
that would be kind of lessening the monsters or exactly exactly, well, yeah, yeah,

(29:29):
and I don't want to be doing that. So Israel
claims that he got the idea to start a school
when he visited a hospital in Providence and this hospital
had a residential program for emersial emotionally disturbed kids. And
when they say emotionally disturbed, a lot of these kids
are I wouldn't even I wouldn't call them like, I'm
sure they're they have their emotional but like their their
kids with who are maybe autistic, who have something going on,

(29:53):
and there's not any kind of good treatment program, and
so people register that is like, oh, it's emotionally disturbed,
when it's like no, really, you don't know how to
talk to this kid, or communicate to this kid or
or help them like integrate into society, and so they're unhappy.
Like that's what a lot of times we talked about
emotionally disturbed. That's what we're talking about is these kids

(30:13):
who just nobody people have not figured out a good
way to integrate them into society, and so want to
integrate them. People don't want to integrate them, Yes, and
they're unhappy for very justifiable reasons. Um. So the director
of this residential facility, like Matt Israel comes to visit
and like, look at how they're they're working with these kids.

(30:34):
And the director of the facility asks him a quote,
do you think behavior modification would work on autistic children?
Israel told them, yeah, I think it will, And so
he decides to he starts a unit in that hospital
to experiment on this with six kids, using a mix
of food rewards, spankings, time outs, and spraying them in
the face with a bottle of water to alter their behavior. Right,

(30:56):
so from the cats, Yeah, yeah, what a bit cats.
He loves spraying kids in the face. That's actually a
big part of for decades his his um and and
again when we talk about like critiques of Skinner, Skinner
when he's talking about altering people's behavior, is not really
a big fan of aversives, but Israel really focuses down
on them and seems to think that like like punishments,

(31:19):
and in a lot of cases physically violent punishments like
spanking are the best way to to to to end
behaviors that are bad from these kids. Um. So he
starts this. He does this for nine months or so,
working with these kids, and it goes well enough, at
least by his jest definition of it. Than in nineteen
seventy one, he starts the behavior Research Institute in Providence,

(31:42):
Rhode Island. Now, autism again was not a recognized DSM
diagnosis in but there were, of course autistic people. There
have been autistic people since the presumably the beginning of
the human race. Um. One of the things that's very
frustrating is like the anti VAC people will be like, look,
autism has gone up a thousand percent in the last

(32:03):
twenty years. You know, this is evidence that there's some poisons.
Like no, you just called these kids emotionally disturbed and
hit them in the seventies like they were still there.
You just put them in psych works. Yeah, you put
them in psych words. They sometimes they got killed, like
it was never very uh like they were around though,
you just pretended they weren't. Um. Yeah, So there on

(32:28):
day one, as he starts the Behavioral Research Institute Israel,
has two patients. It starts from a very small standpoint.
His His first two patients are a schizophrenic adult male
and a teenager with autism. Um. From the beginning, Israel's
plan was to alter behaviors and his patients that were
antisocial by using aversive stimuli. And again he was very
focused on punishment. The b R I saw early success.

(32:50):
And again I don't know, like I don't have an
objective way of evaluating whether or not it was successful.
But it was successful in the financial sense, and that
he was able to convince people that his work was
good and get more money and get more patients enrolled.
And generally it is the state enrolling these patients, you know, um, success, Yeah, yeah,

(33:11):
they considered it a success. And it's also these are
these are kids who have generally very severe behavior issues,
and are the states are like, well, obviously a regular
high school isn't a good place for them. This guy
says he can help even the most extreme kids. Let's
pay him to take them off our hands. We don't
have to worry about them anymore. Um. And there's always
with this, it's always framed as like, well, no one

(33:32):
else could help these kids. But there's always a huge
there's always a huge angle of like, well, but you
didn't really too, you wanted to get rid of these kids,
and he offered you a hole to put them in.
You know that's always a chunk of this Oh, absolutely, yeah.
So uh. The b R I, yeah, was was financially
successful early on. In nineteen seventy two, is really open

(33:54):
to residential program for the school in a wing of
a facility for schizophrenic patients. By nineteen seventy five, Life
he'd opened a second home in sekonk. Two years later,
in nineteen seventy seven, he founded a West Coast branch
of b r in California. He opened several more residential
homes on the East coast after that, and by nineteen
eighty he had completely given up on his dreams of
creating a utopia in favor of building schools for these

(34:18):
kind of of of patients. Wired talks briefly in their
article about his early methods. Quote. They used diversive therapy
at b R I. They used positive reinforcement to food
and toys in an air continuous stream of compliments for
behaving well. But it was the aversives that drew attention.
Teachers pinched students, spanked them with spatulas, stuck ammonia pellets

(34:38):
beneath their nostrils. And put them in white noise helmets.
Israel saw aversive therapy and still sees it as the
best response to self injurious and disruptive behavior. He almost
never doped his pupils, a position he holds to this day.
He believes drugs often only saved the patient, they do
not solve her problems. Israel then is now put his
trust in punishment. So didn't them but give him a smack.

(35:07):
He'll give him a smack, He'll he'll he'll spray them
with ammonia. Like there's all sorts of it. Is like
he's right, and that a lot of like the medication
treatments that are given to these kids are horrible, Like
they're just drugging them into non existence in a lot
of cases, which is fucked up. And he's recognizing that.
And he's also this is part of how he gets

(35:28):
a lot of parents on this side, because parents see
what it's like to have their kids drug like this
and they're horrified by it. And he's like, no, no, no,
simple punishment, I can stop these behaviors. The problem is
that a lot of what he's doing is torturing them
into not doing these behaviors. Um and when you hear pinching, right,
you may think that's kind of weird or even that's
kind of sucked up, but you're probably imagining something a

(35:50):
lot less violent than the reality. Right, Like a pinch
we don't consider to be serious violence. I wouldn't, but
now I'm nervous. Yeah, yeah, you should be. So. The
very first report on abuse within the Behavior Research Institute
came out in nineteen seventy three as the result of
a an investigation by the Massachusetts Human Rights Committee. They

(36:11):
produced a report on conditions in Israel school that pointed
out that matt advocated pinching kids and squirting water in
their faces. Teachers were under strict pressure to end bizarre
behavior in their students, and under two weeks, they could
lose their job if they did not eliminate a behavior
by deadline, and so as deadlines approached, teachers started quote

(36:32):
pinching harder and harder to meet their goal. Workers at
b r I told one Human Rights Committee member they
felt that quote they were turning into monsters. In nineteen
seventy nine allegation of abuse in Israel's facility provides more
graphic context. Quote on October night, according to court documents
CORWINSA and Corwin's. The person making the complaints says she

(36:54):
saw Israel fingernail pinching the bottoms of twelve year old
Christopher Hirsch's feet. Israel was administering a behavioral reversal lesson
to get Hirsh to stop defecating on rugs and in
the shower. Corwyn said she heard the boy cry and
scream in pain. The next morning at br I, worker
named Nancy Tibo got sick to her stomach when she
saw her his feet. There were open blisters and a

(37:14):
reddish substance using from them. She testified employees continued to
pinch the boy's feet. Corwin returned to work after two
days off. She was horrified at what she found. The
insteps of both Christopher's feet had a considerable amount of
blisters and a considerable amount of open bloody patches where
the skin had been entirely removed. She said, fucking girl,

(37:34):
So this is not like a pinch your mom would
give you where something when she got like ticked at you.
Like these are caused like bleeding wounds, like trying to
rip the skin off almost and a lot of it
is because they're doing this over and over again, sometimes
dozens of times, because right, that's what you you want
to have consistently be reinforcing. I guess that that whatever
they did was bad. And again, when he talks about this,

(37:56):
Israel is always like, well, we're trying to stop self
injurious behavior. And I think people think about that like
kind of some of the stuff I saw, if that
was if that's literally how it was being used, it
was like, look, we're just trying to stop them for
potentially killing themselves. I guess I would say, well, I
don't know, but he's also defining self injurious behaviors like
pooping on the ground, which I don't is not going

(38:18):
to kill them. It's it's not good, like you should
not poop on the ground, but that's not a danger
to the child's life. Um. And again I'm not saying
it would be justified to pinch bloody sores in them
if they were slamming their head into something. But that's
how he tries to frame it, is that like, yeah,
I know this is horrible, but we're trying to stop
them from permanently injuring or killing themselves. And it's just

(38:39):
such a serious situation. The reality is that they're doing
this for any kind of behavior they consider unpleasant. Um
and by trying to fix this problem, they're making dozens
more yes, yes, significant issues now. The entire time b
r I grew and expanded across the East Coast and
over to the West Coast, there were constant investigations and
allegations of misconduct from the beginning. What is happening in

(39:02):
these schools is marked out as fucked up and problematic.
That nineteen seventy three report by the Human Rights Committee
ended with deep concern over the impact of such aggressive
behavior modification techniques could have on an individual. Quote. This
is especially true when the individuals are severely handicapped children
who may not comprehend the reasons for being subjected to
such intense systematic procedures without specific criteria for determining deviant behaviors,

(39:25):
an individual with behaviors of questionable deviancy might be subjected
to a therapy program of excessive intensity merely because his
parent or teacher had a low tolerance for the particular
behavior exhibited. So they're saying what I'm saying, which is
that like, well, you say, this is only for the
most severe cases but the severity of a bad behavior
is determined by the person doing violence to the child,
and sometimes it's just because they don't like a kid

(39:47):
making noise. Um. Again, I'm not saying that any of
this would be justified if it was only being used
on kids with severe behaviors, but it's being used on
for anything that that the staff find unpleasant. The fight
is yeah, exactly. The head of value evaluator on that
report was a guy named Nazareth, and he later told

(40:07):
an interviewer that the students he saw at Israel school
had been turned into robots. Quote. He controls everything. He's
an egomaniac. It's either his way or no way. I'm
absolutely amazed he's still in business now. The article in
which Nazareth gaves Nazareth gave this quote was published in
nineteen eighty five, and Nazareth was amazed because between nineteen

(40:28):
seventy three, when the reports of abuse at his fastility
started in nineteen eighty five, a ton of people in
multiple states had tried to shut Matt Israel the held
down and they all failed. From the Boston Phoenix quote
in April nineteen seventy six, is Reel expanded his program
by founding a parallel reward and punishment school home for
six children in Van Nuys, California. The National Society for

(40:50):
Autistic Children and s a C, now known as the
National Society for Children and Adults with Autism, the country's
leading advocacy group for those with autism, took a long,
hard look at his reel expansion. On December ninety six,
Israel was officially bounced from n s a C founding
following allegations that he was practicing as a clinical psychologist
directing both day and residential programs in the state of

(41:12):
California without obtaining a professional license. Israel denies the charge.
Denies the charge charge that pain infliction and other physically
coercive techniques are now employed when it is not necessary
to do so. Israel was chiden for his apparent lack
of respect for rules and regulations. There is unsatisfactory evidence
that you are reputable and responsible in relation to the
operation of a licensed facility, and or that you have

(41:33):
the ability to comply with applicable regulations, The department wrote, First,
you have shown a disregard for the law by operating
your program without first obtaining a license from this Department
to do so. Also, you are apparently engaged unlawfully in
the practice of psychology without securing a California license. So
his work in California get shut the hell down because
he's abusing kids and he doesn't even have a license

(41:56):
to be the first Wild Days was able to open
it up in the place. Yeah, it kind of seems
like someone should have caught that before. Yeah. Yeah. Israel
was ordered to cease and desist operation or face legal
action that would close down his school. The day after
the scheduled shut down, according to published reports, the students
parents proclaimed that they had taken over the facility and

(42:17):
we're running it as a co op. The school, which
had started as a branch of the b r I
and Providence, severed ties with the parent institute and formed
its own corporation, b r I of California. Matt Israel
went from the guy in charge to just a consultant.
The new school applied for a license, and the move
was helped by California Governor Pat Brown, whose law firm
represented b r I of California. The institute got its

(42:39):
group home license, and it received the only permit ever
granted by California to use aversives physical aversives. So he's told,
you can't be teaching here because you're abusing kids and
you have no license. And so immediately the school says, oh,
now we're a parent co op and Matt has nothing
to do with this school. But also we're going to
use our connection to the governor of California to get

(43:01):
a license to use all of the techniques that he
got in trouble for using. But hey, he's not around anymore.
Don't worry about it, spoilers, he's still there. They just
start claiming that now he has nothing to do with it. Yeah, so,
and this is versions of this are going to happen
again in the future. Um it would come to it

(43:21):
would become something of a pattern for Israel. In nine,
the state or the City of New York balked at
Matt Israel's request to increase per people tuition from thirty
one thousand, six hundred dollars to thirty eight thousand dollars.
The state investigated, and, according to The New York Times,
found b r I was in violation of New York
state law. They ordered Israel to stop using physical aversives
on New York State students. In his Providence facility. Instead,

(43:45):
Israel threatened to kick them out. This prompted a group
of New York City parents to sue the state and
federal court and keep their kids at b r I. Yeah,
the parents one. We'll talk more about the parents throughout
this episode, but it's important to note right here that
from day one he has enjoyed tremendous support from a
lot of parents who have kids in his facilities. Others
have sued him. Obviously it's not universal, but a lot

(44:07):
of them will sing this guy's praises to the heavens.
This is partly because b r i s number one
rule is that they will turn no child down, no
matter how severe or violent their behavior. So again, if
there's a kid that you know you can't deal with
as a parent, I can't. I'm not capable of handling
my child's behavior. If you're a teacher and you know,

(44:28):
like we are, school can't handle his kid's behavior, you
know br I will take them. And that's a big
part of the support that he gets is because a
lot of these parents and that these these schools are
just overwhelmed with dealing with these kids, and b r
I as a lifeline. So they they're afraid that if
the school shuts down, they're going to have to take
care of these kids again, or to be fair, some

(44:50):
of them are concerned, well, if the school shuts down,
the only place for my kid is a mental institution
where they're going to be doped up twenty four hours
a day. You know. So that's that's understandable in a sense,
like it's like sometimes you just aren't capable of handling it.
But yeah, it's there. Yeah it's again. Israel is pretty

(45:12):
clearly the bad guy here, and I thinks of making
questionable calls, but they're not they're not villains. They're not
doing this to be cruel. I'm sure some of them
are shitty parents, but a lot of them are just like,
I have no idea how to handle this kid, and
obviously there's not resources for me. You know. It's it's
the wild West in a lot of this period in
terms of like any kind of of treatment for particularly

(45:33):
kids with much more severe behaviors. Um and uh. I
get the desperation, even though I think it leads them
in the wrong direction. It's not unreasonable, but they're desperate.
But you know who's not desperate The products and services
that sponsored podcast. That's right there. They are content in

(45:53):
the knowledge that that that you'll love them, um, you
will spend the money. Definitely. We're back. In January of
nineteen seventy nine, the State of New York sent a
follow up team to b r I for a three

(46:13):
day unannounced evaluation visit and the report was remarkable. Quote
the January team found b r I to be a
professionally conceived, well documented, and rigidly implemented behavior modification program.
It's effect on the students was the singular most depressing
experience that team members have had in numerous visitations to
human service programs. So they're both are this is a

(46:34):
very professional, well documented they're very consistent. None of this
is like slapdash er haphazard, and it's the most depressing
thing we've ever seen. And that's saying something. That's saying something.
The report listed the behavioral modification programs that a number
of students were under. One kid's program was as follows.
Biting self fifteen minutes, helmet, no vision, white noise, handplay,

(46:58):
spank but noses, pinch but out of seat, spank but
biting others, cool shower five pinches foot, hands to head, muscle, squeeze,
shoulder clapping, say no rocking, water squirt. These are yeah,
that's that's a list. It is And it's again, as

(47:18):
someone who did this and was I think bad at
teaching special LEAD, I can't imagine punishing most of these.
But like like a lot of kids will do like
you know, they call it hand play. You know, they'll
do like they'll flap or something, they'll make motions with
their hands specifically, Like we never punished that. It's just
the thing that like, well, okay whatever, who cares like
it's not hurting them or anybody else. Yeah, I know

(47:41):
in my experience it was definitely one of those things
were they never I did get the time outs and
obviously like some punishers by being ground and whatnot. But
then there'll be things where because I do digital ot
and do the hand wave thing just like focus and yeah,

(48:02):
it's weird how people who at least we're trying to
work in special ED were less reactive to it than
people who aren't. It just seems like, yeah, it's like
you've got to have kind of a right mindset with
the only that because it's not harmful, it's just no
and to focus. It may look weird, but yeah, it's
not hurting them or anyone else as opposed to like,

(48:24):
there are some behaviors on this that would need to
be dealt with, Like if a kid is biting themselves,
you know you want to stop that somehow, right, but like, yeah,
you gotta stop that. But I'm not convinced a white
noise helmet is necessarily the right way to deal with it.
That said, we had a couple of kids who did
bite themselves and I never we never figured out a
good way to stop the behavior either. Um So I

(48:45):
don't know, like, but it does seem like a lot
of the things that they are dealing punishing with aversives
are not bad for the kids. They're not really problems
other than that the parents or the staff don't like
the behavior. You know, they're rocking, they're clapping, they're waving
their hands. That's not bad for them. It's just that

(49:05):
it annoys the staff, and so the staff punish it
with punching or with pinching and with with banking and stuff.
And I find that pretty disturbing. Um And I should
note that the white noise helmet they're putting on these kids,
is described elsewhere is basically being a football helmet with
an opaque screen that blocks vision while white noise fills
the person's ears. Now, the squirting that they'll do the

(49:27):
water bottles was generally water mixed with compressed air, but
some students would also have ammonius sprayed near their nose
every fifteen minutes as an aversive, which is real pretty
fucked up, like about the water, but yeah, ammonius definitely worse.
Um and well, a lot of these aversives were administered

(49:48):
as punishments, and the traditional sense that was not always
the case. And to explain what I mean by that,
I'm going to quote again from the Boston Phoenix. One
of the most bizarre measures they saw was an Israel
technique dubbed behavioral rever so lessons. Israel believes that for
his treatment to work, particular behavior must occur often enough
for the people to get consequated, that is, rewarded or punished.

(50:09):
When targeted inappropriate behavior comes at a low frequency, Israel
believes it makes it more difficult for the student to
grasp the connection between the behavior and the consequence. At
b r I, Israel has solved his problem by having
the staff encourage the beginning stages of bad behavior. Kathy,
one of the New York residents, was stealing food and drink.
To get her to stop, the br I staff first

(50:31):
urged her to steal so they could punish her. The
New York team found these instructions taped to her classroom table.
Kathy is to receive one stealing opportunity per hour. She
should be prompted to steal the juice squarter, and a
spank is to be administered. If Kathy does actually steal
the juice, she is to receive the helmet and white
noise for fifteen minutes. So the point, that's pretty bad, right, Yeah,

(50:55):
I'm not like that's real abusive, like forcing kids to
engage in bad behavior, or pushing them at least to
engage in bad behavior so you can punish them often
enough to stop the behavior. This seems kind of unhinged.
Um in the State of New York agreed. They called
consequating entrapment, which feels fair to me. Yeah. The evaluation

(51:16):
team summarize their feelings LESLIE rather than being a program
of neglect which harms children by not assisting them at growth,
the b r I program utilizes a current professional ideology
to deny children the opportunity to grow, to deny them
any choices, to deny them normal experiences in leisure time, pursuits,
to deny them any opportunities for fun, to deny them
the opportunity to demonstrate anything other than a few pre

(51:38):
selected responses. So you're not letting these kids evolve naturally
as human beings. You're even forcing them to do bad
behavior so you can punishment if you see like occasional
bad behavior, you're forcing it to become constant, so you
can punish. You are you're denying them the right to
grow the way a person grows. Yeah, and so it

(51:58):
could be like, hey, I don't like the kid, I
can just make them to this or plant something on them,
and then I can punish them, and then I can
punish them. Yeah, you get the feeling that did happen
christ you know it's again Unford, you know, Yeah, it's
messed up. So the state restricted bris use of physical
punishments on New York students. That's the result of this investigation.

(52:21):
But they and they made an agreement with bri I
that physical aversives would only be used in situations where
a child posed serious physical danger to himself or others,
and only after less violent diversives had already failed. Well,
all this was going on, Well, this whole set of
investigations and is going on. A Los Angeles based placement agency,
which like Places Kids and Facilities, voted to halt funding

(52:42):
to b r I after a review of their operation
found serious injury had been caused by the program's aversive therapies.
Parents again fought to block the move, saying their children
would be sent to state hospitals where they'd be drugged,
put in solitary confinement, and worst of all, given electric shocks.
Keep that in mind. The parents won again. California Governor
Pat Brown was said to him been a major reason

(53:04):
for this. The whole breujaha was sparked in large part
by the Corwin allegations, which I quoted from above. That's
the kid whose feet were pinched until he had bleeding blisters.
In nineteen seventy nine, Matt Israel published a rebuttal to
those allegations, wherein he claimed that he didn't see any
broken skin on the child he'd pinched, just a tiny
blood blister that cleaned up after a few days. Quote meantime,

(53:26):
Christopher Hirsch is alive, well, happy, healthy, behaving better than ever,
and with not a single serious or semi serious injury
from any treatment procedure administered by me or the staff
of b r I California. Shortly after that rebuttal was published,
Christopher's father took his son to a doctor to have
him evaluated. The boy was so panicked that it took
three adults to hold him down while they tried to

(53:47):
examine his feet. One observer at the time recalled, there
was no part of the skinny boy's body that didn't
have a bruise. Then they took off his shoes. It
was horrible. Christopher's father claims the insteps of his son's
feet were filled with oles the rough size and circumference
of a cigarette burn. B r I had been granted
special state permission to do pinching procedures, but the state

(54:07):
argued that the specific kinds of pinching that had been
done to this kid was not allowed, and they actually
had like legal definitions of the type of pinching you
were allowed to do, which is weird to me, but
even within the kind of fucked up standards of what
you could do to a kid. At the time, b
r I is crossing lines. There were other victims in Massachusetts.
In nineteen seventy eight, Michael Cutler was admitted to the

(54:29):
e r after being abused at the Providence facility. To
stop him from running away, the staff had handcuffed him
to a chair. He was hospitalized with blood poisoning in
his arm. His mother claims when she saw him that quote,
Michael looked like Auschwitz and was covered with black and
blue bruises on his thighs and lacerations on his body.
The only advers since she had approved for the school
to give her son was a cold shower. In nineteen eighty,

(54:52):
the school had its first death, Robert Cooper Jr. A
twenty five year old autistic student at b r I
who was taken to Rhode Island Hospital after he started vomiting.
He died at the hospital of a hymorrhagic bowel infarct,
and a medical examiner's investigation found no negligence on the
part of b r I, but noted that they had
not followed proper emergency procedures in taking him to the hospital.

(55:14):
Robert's parents defended the school quote it was difficult for
myself or my wife to allow Bobby to be pinched
or spanked. But there were no alternatives. Every other alternative
was no alternative. In a state institution, he would have
become a vegetable. On June seventeenth, another student died, Donnie Aswad.
He was restrained in bed by a contraption that kept

(55:35):
him flat on his stomach. He died somewhere between nine
and ten am while restrained. The coroner ruled his death
was also was caused by mental retardation and cerebral malformation,
which is pretty fucked up. And I think the first
one it made, that first death may have had nothing
to do with the school, right, the kid had boweled disorders.
They were just irresponsible and not getting him to the hospital. Yeah, yeah,

(55:59):
but but that they may not have caused it. I
think the coroners wrong on this one because we know
that restraining people in this way, this is why a
lot of cops have killed people this way, right, And
the fact that he's like, oh no, it was he
he died of mental retardation, not being restrained on his
belly um for a long period of time. Yeah, seems
pretty messed up to me. Um. The State of California

(56:21):
decided there was enough doubt as a result of this
case to put the school on a two year probation.
So even though the corner says this isn't their fault,
California evaluators are like kind of seems like this is
their fault. From Wired quote in, the States Department of
Social Services filed a sixty three page legal complaint alleging
abuse at the school. The complaint claimed, among other things,

(56:42):
that b r I withheld meals, showed staff how to
hide students injuries from regulatory agencies, and strangely encouraged students
to act out for a film crew, the footage to
be used later to just to demonstrate how the children
had behaved before b r I. Later that year, the
state reached a settlement with b r I in California
the school could use anything more punishing than a water spray.

(57:02):
The state also forbade Israel, who says he'd turned over
control of the campus before US wants death from stepping
foot on the north Ridge property. So again he would
he'd already been kicked out of the school, But California
I don't think they had evidence, hard evidence that he'd
been working there, but they suspected it enough to legally
forbid him from entering the property. In nine, Vincent Militek died.

(57:24):
As like Vincent, was a b r I student, he'd
been acting out at the residential home in Sea Conk
and was restrained in a chair, His hands and feet
were put in plastic cuffs, his face was masked and
helmeted with a white noise machine, and he suffocated to death.
Yeah that's pretty bad, um, But of course b r
I was found again not to have caused the death.

(57:45):
And you get the feeling that a lot of corners
are just saying, like, well, if if a kid who's
got some sort of mental disability dies in any way,
it's the refault of that disability that they it's it's
it's depressingly seems like it happened eventually type of deals.
What they're going at. Yeah, um, And a district court judge, though,

(58:06):
did find that the school had been negligent in approving
the therapy for him, as they hadn't been Basically, it
isn't their fault that he suffocated while they had put
him in all this stuff, but it wasn't they should
have monitored him more to make sure he didn't suffocate,
which again seems like it was their fault, but whatever,
I'm not a fucking judge. Later that and I guess
we should give the judge credit because the coroner was

(58:28):
willing to let them off entirely, and the judge does
call them negligent, So I don't know. I guess that's
your best fucking case scenario. You're only going to get
a half one at this point. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Later
that year, the Massachusetts Office of Children carried out an
inspection of br I that ended with an order to
close the school. The school appealed and counter suit, and
a judge suggested that they compromised by ending the use

(58:49):
of aversives. Matt Israel. Matt Israel complained that if aversans
were ended or Matt Israel complained because and and said
basically that like, okay, we ended all of our aversive
train and my students all regressed and started carrying out
the behavior again. He took this as proof that his
aversive therapy worked. Right as soon as we stopped it,
they all regressed and got worse. New York State investigators, though,

(59:11):
said this is actually evidence that aversives don't work. The
kids were not being treated in any way. They were
being controlled by the threat of punishment, and quote, when
that threat is removed, they revert to their original behaviors. Yeah. Yeah,
they're basically being able to be unfucked with the mental
torture they have been doing. Yeah. Yeah, And it's it's

(59:35):
he's not treating them in any way. He's not he's
not ending the behavior. He's just he's there. They're stopping
the behavior temporarily because they're being tortured. Um. And it's uh,
it's that's that's the core of what's happening here because
to a lot of people, it does work in the

(59:57):
short term. And that You've got a kid who keeps
hitting himself, right you, Um, you punish him with like
some form of like you're pinching him, or you're you're
spanking him, or you're putting him in his helmet spraying
with ammonium. Whenever he hits himself, he'll stop hitting himself
as long as you're applying those punishments whenever he starts
the behavior. But that's that's not helping him. That that's

(01:00:19):
it's really all it's helping is like the adults around
him who are unsettled by the behavior, but you're not
providing him with anything better. I think you can make
an argument that if this kid is, like I don't know,
trying to like kill himself or whatever, and you apply
in aversive therapy that stops the behavior, maybe that's the
only option you have in that short term. But again,
it's still not a long term solution, and the vast

(01:00:41):
majority of these kids it's not that severe. Again, if
you've got a kid who's trying to put their head
through a glass window and you will apply in aversive
in the moment to stop that behavior, uh, somehow, I
guess you could make an argument for it. I'm not
saying that's the right thing to do, um, but it's not.
It's still not going to solve the problem. You would
need to they need long term therapeutic help, and that's

(01:01:03):
not what is happening at b r I. B r
I is just saying, as long as we keep torturing
these kids, they won't engage in the behavior you brought
them here for. But also they can never leave or
stop being tortured, which is a nightmare. Yeah, and it's
it's it's interesting to me because he's he's he's rejecting
the use of like doping kids up in order to

(01:01:24):
deal with this behavior. And yeah, it feels like it's
just like doping in a different way. It's yeah, it's like, yeah,
sure we're not drugging them, but we are basically taking
pemmony on spraying in the face. So and it's like,
you know, drugging them doesn't work because you're just covering
up the problem with drugs. It's like, well, you're just

(01:01:44):
covering up the problem with fucking torture. Yeah, I think
a lot of kids would rather, if you have, if
your choices, be doped up or be tortured. I'm gonna
guess a lot of kids would choose dope if they Yeah,
choice not that not Again, one of the issues you
haven't just guessing this is that like, for kids this severe,
there's not a lot of good options at this point.
That's not today and the school is still around today.

(01:02:07):
Today there are a lot better options. But the fucking
seventies and eighties, it is the wild West for this.
And so you do have to have some understanding for
parents who are like, well, what are my fucking options,
you know, and yeah, they don't have a lot of them.
Not to mitigate Israel's behavior here, but there's a lot
of desperation on behalf of of of the parents and

(01:02:29):
of the schools that are sending kids to b r
I maybe, and they're also not in fully aware of
everything that's happening at b r I too. Yep. So,
as the court battles raged on, Israel eventually hit upon
the idea of bringing one of his most self abuse
of students before Judge Ernest Rodenberg for a hearing at
the Bristol County Probade Court in six Rodenberg found Israel's

(01:02:53):
presentation so convincing that the judge ruled that the patient
would have chosen to go to b r I if
they've been mentally capable of doing so. The Office for
Children in b r I settled in nineteen eight seven.
The States paid the school half a million dollars, and
Judge Rodenberg ruled that b r I would be allowed
to continue using a Verson's as long as each student's
treatment plan was approved by a probate court. Matt Israel

(01:03:16):
was so happy with this verdict that a few years later,
in nineteen nine four, he renamed his Behavior Research Institute
in honor of the judge who had allowed his work
to continue. From then on b R I was known
as the Judge Rodenberg Center. Yeah oh boy, yeah, bad ship.

(01:03:39):
How are you feeling? Aim? Oh, well, I will didn't think.
I mean, it's a lot, but I kind of figured
there's gonna be some ship. Yeah yeah, I mean yeah, yeah.
That's one of the things. Unfortunately, especially with the whole

(01:04:00):
wild West thing, it's definitely gotten a lot better in
terms of getting treatment, in terms of whatnot, finding groups
and finding people that can help you out. In terms
of this, I'm just let's see where is it gonna go? Yeah,
now we're good, but you know what is going to
go somewhere? Good? The products and services that sponsor this show. Um,

(01:04:29):
well no, it's not a products and services time. What's good?
Is your your plugs? Oh yes, plugs? You can with
your I'm just interrupting you and no, none of them.
It's okay. I'm just trying to pull it up. Uh,
don't have too much of My biggest presence is on

(01:04:51):
Twitter at notch They'll be n O T C H
T H E B and I just punched post a
lot of political stuff bunch of stupid stuff. It's a
fun time. Yeah. Well, um, that's the episode you can
find us. I mean, where where you found us. Let's

(01:05:14):
be honest, you found us. You know where we are.
You're listening right now, like, don't don't funk around with me, like,
you know where we are. You know where you are.
You good at our other shows. Hard, it's not gonna
be hard, alright. Episode over.