Part Two: The Judge Rotenberg Center

Robert is joined again by Aidan Bonacci to continue to discuss The Judge Rotenberg Center.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast where we
talk about real bleak shit and boy howdye? My guest
today Aidan Bonacci Aiden. Did I get it right this time? Yes?
You did? And thanks for having me question Mark? Yeah,
how are you? How are you enjoying learning about the

(00:23):
Judge Rodenberg Center. I am not surprised, but I'm also
very depressed. Yeah. Well, it's about to get a lot worse.
Uh actually significantly worst, vastly worse. Fun. How do you
feel about electrocuting children? Yeah, that's the right response. Um,

(00:50):
can we stop with the electricity once? Please? Got no? No, no,
it's uh yeah. We actually should start this episode by
talking a bit more about the parents who have made
Matt Israel's career possible. It should be clear by everything
I've said so far that I think they're wrong and
in some cases profoundly abusive. But people who are wrong
can have compelling reasons for being wrong that are not

(01:11):
easily dismissed. George Nazareth, former head of the Rhode Island
Human Rights Committee and the first person to take a
serious deep look at the fund up workings of b
R I probably put it best when he was asked
by a reporter from the Boston Phoenix why so many
parents would sign off on approval to have their children abused. Quote,
desperate parents will sign anything. You become desperate about a

(01:34):
lot of things. Some of the parents at b r
I are now saying they want the program to continue.
They think the state will send their children back home.
Some parents would blow their brains out if the states
sent their children back home. They've been through the mill. Yeah,
I mean, there's it's they have the reasons. But at
the same time, it's like, just because it may seem

(01:57):
like the right thing doesn't mean this. It's certainly not
and I'm not trying to say And part of what
I'm getting at here is that a lot of these
parents why they like the b r I isn't that
it's helping their kids. It's that it's keeping their kids away.
And the Judge rd Bricks Center is taking kids from
multiple states. They're taking the most severe kids. And it's

(02:18):
not right that a lot of parents are willing to
accept this school because it keeps their kids away. But
that's the that's that's where they are and there it
is not a thing of like they're not it's not
that I don't think they see themselves as being cruel.
I think they're unthinkably desperate in a lot of cases,
and they're not. There aren't a lot of options for them,
and that's that doesn't defend this because again I'm we're

(02:41):
spending ten thousand words and two hours talking about how
bad this place is. Oh yeah, it's excuseable, but yeah,
but it's not unexcusable. Yeah it's not. Okay, it's not acceptable,
but it is the result of a desperation more supreme
than I think most people can asp um especially, and

(03:03):
this becomes less the case because now I think the
parents who were defending it have options. It's fucking nineteen
eighty five. Like autism as a diagnosis is five years old.
What options do you have? Not that this was the
right one, but there's just not a lot of good ones,
and there's yea or even any of them besides this one. Yeah,

(03:25):
and it's you know, even even if there were in
in you know, there are in some cases other options
for parents. And I don't want to also make it
like look like it was more. But also the amount
of education the parents might have about what's available is minimal,
Like it's just you have to again really want to
emphasize that we're not we're not trying to whitewash either
the parents or what's happening at this facility, but like

(03:48):
it's a desperate situation. Um, And that's that That's part
of what I think condemns Matt Israel more because he
is taking advantage of this desperate situation to test his
weird you like, human avioral modification theories. He's taking advantage
of this horrible, horrible situation. Yeah, like what you mentioned
in the last part, he sees them more as features

(04:10):
than as actual children, and this is just something to
show off. Yeah, something how good he is it plugging
in new stimuli to alter their behavior, and it doesn't
matter to him. I think that this is that he's
just torturing these kids and to stopping behavior. He's not
changing anything. He's not he's not helping them. He's temporarily
stopping them from doing something via violence. I don't think

(04:32):
he cares because the behavior has stopped, and he has
no problem continuing the violence forever. In fact, he gets
he gets paid if he gets to continue the violence forever. Yeah, Um,
it's real bleak. Oh yeah, So George Nazareth, the guy
who gave that quote about some parents would blow their
brains out if they sent their children back home. They've
been through hell. Nazareth is number one. He's the guy

(04:53):
who carries out the first big investigation of b r
I and condemns it unequivocally. He's also the parent himself
of a mentally disabled daughter. I don't know how to
be more specific about her condition than that, because in
the nineteen article where I found this, she's just referred
to as retarded. The fact that a thoughtful, compassionate and
very ethical man like George Nazareth would use that term

(05:13):
for his own daughter is a sign of how primitive
the things were in that period in terms of science um.
Because this was not considered an offensive term. There are
advocacy agencies called like the Organization for Retarded Persons and
what UM that use that word. And I bring this
up because the primitiveness of the terminology and use suggests
how primitive the other methods of treatment were as well.

(05:36):
While the Judge Rodenberg Center was marked out by experts
at the time for its brutality, the gold standard of
care during that period also involved a lot of unnecessary
force and medication, which is a kind of force. Why
these parents say they're worried their kids would get stuck
in an institution and drug to unconsciousness. That is not
a lie or an unreasonable fear. A lot of these
people are an impossible situations. Matt Israel promised he could

(05:57):
help their kids, and in many cases he at least
seems to have delivered. And one of the things that
he does that makes this such a that makes them
so good at getting these people to believe in him,
is these are beautiful facilities. These are not dank and
frightening looking places. They're not run down. They're colorful, they're
filled with toys and statues of creatures, and like they're

(06:18):
he makes them look extremely friendly and comfortable. So if
you're a parent taking your kid in, this place looks
like a wonderful place for your kid to live and
and and and be treated. And he can say like, hey,
your kid's been biting or tearing open his skin, and
that stops after a couple of weeks, and maybe you
don't notice why it's stopping and what he's doing to
stop it. You know. Um, it's also a lot of

(06:39):
the parents who defend him aren't entirely aware of what's
going on at the school, and you can blame them
some degree for not availing themselves of the information that's
out because there are reports on this place. But that
is the situation, um so by n Matt is Reel School,
which is still called the Behavioral Research Institute at this
point where seeved eighty seven thousand dollars per student per year,

(07:03):
and a lot of that wound up in Israel's pocket.
His compensation topped out I think around two thousand at
three hundred thousand dollars a year UM so he's making
a very comfortable income, but at the same time he
is putting most of the money into this facility. These
are expensive facilities to run there in many cases multiple
full time employees per student um. That Boston Phoenix article,

(07:25):
which was a major source for episode one, was written
during the massive series of legal battles between the State
of Massachusetts and b r I. Thanks to Judge Rodenberg,
those struggles eventually went Israel's way, but at the time
the article was written, he did not know that. And
the piece ends on this ominous line quote, if Massachusetts
shut down b r I. Israel says he may open

(07:45):
group homes in Rhode Island. Israel thinks the current crackdown
may lead to greater understanding of his philosophy and allow
him a greater array of behavioral modification tools. I've never
used electric shock, he says in his calm soft voice.
I wouldn't rule it out, particularly if were deprived of
other procedures. It's more effective and you wouldn't bruise or
cut the skin. Oh fuck, yeah, that's real bad's And

(08:10):
I kind of flipped out a little when I read
that in this nineteen article. UM. And I should note
here the only reason I have access to that article
because that's a thirty six year old article. He was
originally published in a physical newspaper. I was able to
read it because several copies have been archived by different
disability justice advocates. Autistic civil rights advocates have a very

(08:32):
particular interest in documenting that Israel's early career and his crimes. Also, yeah,
they're doing this because they think he's basically a war
criminal U, which by the way, the U n agrees
with UM. And they're they're trying to make sure, like
I'm assuming an autistic civil rights advocate who was like,
came across an old copy of that read that into

(08:54):
piece where he starts talking about how he's looking into
electric shock, and was like, well, this needs to be preserved,
like at some point there's going to be a reconciliation
commissioner or whatever, and we need to document this ship.
When we left off in the late nineteen eighties, b
r I was still b r I, but Judge Rotenberg
had just saved it, or, to be more accurate, the
judge had saved its ability to use physical punishments on students.

(09:17):
In nineteen nine and other student, Linda Cornellison died. Yeah,
it's it's a weird c O R N E l
I S O N. I've never seen that last name before,
but I think Linda Cornellison um in nineteen nineties she
died and she was a non verbal student at the facilities. Mean,
she's she's not really able to use language to communicate,
and one day she started grabbing her stomach while she

(09:38):
was on the bus to school. And a lot of
these kids, they'll go to a school and then they'll
go home to a residential facility that b r I
runs when she arrived at the at the at her school,
a nurse decided that she was just acting to try
to get attention or something and sent her back to class.
After school, she was sent back to a b r
I run residential home where she lived. Staff were angry

(09:59):
at her bad bay behavior. They believe this nurse basically like, oh,
she's she's playing around by pretending to have stomach pain,
So they gave her thirteen spatulus bankings, twenty nine finger pinches,
fourteen muscle squeezes, and forced her to inhale ammonia five times.
She died in the hospital the next day. Um, yeah,
and again her The cause of death was gastric perforation,

(10:22):
which I don't think was caused by any of the
adversives that were done at the school, but the fact
that she was not taken to the hospital earlier, her
pain was not treated seriously. That's certainly their fault. And
also sup, yeah, very very bad, Like I would feel
comfortable saying they killed her, even though maybe they didn't
cause the thing that I would say the ammonia was

(10:43):
just like yeah, And Linda's mom and says she never
her daughter never had gastro intestinal problems before. Um, it's
maybe it might even be possible that like the stress
from all the adversives had helped cause the gas. I'm
not a doctor. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna speculate
further other than to say that by not taking this
problem seriously when she started to complain. And this is

(11:04):
again part of like the biggotry, I guess you would say.
I think, yeah, biggotry is a fair thing to say.
Because she's not verbal, they assume she's not capable of
expressing a serious concern about health problem. Right, she has
to be just like fooling around trying to trick you.
Um and um that's that is a kind of biggotree

(11:25):
and it led. It's a bigger tree that led to
this girl's death. Um so Um. The state found after
the autopsy and whatnot, that that while b r I
had not caused her death, uh, that it had quote
violated the most basic codes and standards of decency and
how it treated her. Um. And while so, while there
were no charges on Matt Israel or the facility as

(11:46):
a result of Linda's death, it did have an impact
on him. He decided that there were too many different
kinds of physical punishment at his school, and the nature
and impact of those punishments varied too much from teacher
to teacher. In other words, he was concerned that one
employee's pinch could be a mild pinch and another could
cause a bleeding wound. He wanted more uniform physical aversives,
and he decided that electric shocks were the best way

(12:08):
to do this. The machine he picked was called the
Self Injurious Behavior Inhibiting System. It was made of an
electrode and a radio transmitter, which were attached to the
arm or leg via velcrow. The shock was described as
like being like struck by a rubber band, you know,
somebody pulls back a rubber band, Like not serious, not
a real, like a very mild shock, and it lasted

(12:29):
about a fifth of a second. One nine to ninety
paper on the s I B. S Civice system said
the shock caused quote almost complete elimination of self harming behavior.
We can debate whether or not this kind of treatment
is ever ethical, but it is important to note and
whether it's ethical is again a separate question from whether
or not it works. We'll talk about that a bit later.

(12:50):
To abate that. Um. It is important to note here
that this machine was not designed as a punishment. They
were not trying to shock kids to punish them. They
were trying to interrupt them when they were harming themselves. Right,
The people who made this machine felt that such extreme
measures were justified if the mild shock would stop a
kid from biting through their hand or bashing their head

(13:11):
against the wall. And again, I am not saying this
is the right move, and and in fact that the
evidence suggests that this doesn't really work all that well,
I get why. I don't think these scientists who say,
well let's try this, we're being monsters, even though we
can say this was a bad road to go down
and did not help your They are not trying to
punish kids. They're trying to stop kids from hurting themselves.

(13:33):
And again, it doesn't work, but it's not. The start
road for this technology is not monstrous. Yeah, it's not
fully malicious. It's just you could say unethical, you can
say unwise, ineffective. They're not They're not doing what Matt
Israel comes to do. They're not trying to hurt these kids. Um.

(13:54):
They are trying to interrupt dangerous behavior. UM. I just
think that's important to note because you you again, it's
this thing that you see in science, where like someone
will have an idea that isn't inherently horrible, but because
of how another person takes it and evolves it, it
becomes something profoundly abusive. UM. I just think it's important
to note this doesn't start as an abusive behavior. It

(14:16):
starts as as a desperate attempt to stop people from
hurting themselves. Israel School was an early adopter of sibbis.
Matt liked the consistency of the shock. He liked that
applying it required less manpower than holding down a child
to assault their feet. Uh the b R. I tested
it on twenty nine students over fourteen months. When early
guinea pig was Brandon Sanchez, an autistic boy who was

(14:38):
also the nephew of a state representative. From Wired quote,
Brandon banged his head until he cracked it open. He
wants chewed off part of his tongue. He was a
ruminator too. He would vomit, chew the vomit, swallow it,
and vomit again. The acidity was burning his esophagus. The
vomiting was causing him to lose weight. Israel thoughts Sibis
might be the only way to save this twelve year
old's life. Brandon was down to fifty two pounds. Israel

(15:00):
and his staff started with the treatments. Fifty shocks became
a hundred, a hundred became five hundred, five hundred became
a thousand, and they still shocked more. Brandon wasn't responding,
so two thousand shocks and then three thousand, four thousand.
After roughly five thousand shocks in a day, is Reel
told his staff to stop. The shocks weren't strong enough,
is Reel thought. He asked Sibis's developers to increase the voltage.

(15:22):
They refused, and that's when Israel made his own machine.
M So you see what's happened here. That's first off, horrific.
If you're doing that five thousand times and it doesn't work,
the problem isn't it's not strong enough. The problem is
it doesn't work. Yeah, I was gonna say, after like
shocking a kid five thousand times, to be like, hey,
maybe we're not doing it right. And and the people

(15:46):
who developed this again didn't intend it to be used
this way, because he is using it the way he
uses all aversives as a consistent punishment for a thing
that they do. So they do a behavior they're not
supposed to do, you punish them with a shock. That's
not what this is intended for. This was intended to
disrupt someone physically from from an action. Um. It was.
It was kind of like a tourniquet. It was an

(16:06):
emergency procedure, you know. Um. And he is not using
it that way, and the way he's using it doesn't work.
But instead of realizing maybe you're going down the wrong road,
he decides that they just need to be electrocuted more. Um.
The machine that they built was called well he and
he works with an engineer on this, right, he doesn't
do it all on himself. But the machine that Israel

(16:27):
has built that he calls the graduated Electronic descelerator like decelerate,
you know, like the opposite of acceleration. Um. He. This machine,
the g E D, would become Matt Israel's main claim
to infamy. It was three times stronger than Civice, and
its shock lasted a full two seconds instead of one
fifth of a second. Now this is a significant escalation,

(16:48):
and it's a dangerous one. But around a year of
testing the g E D, Israel became convinced that it
still was not strong enough. Students had gotten used to
the shocks, so he developed a new, even more power
a ful device, one that could deliver extremely painful shocks.
Israel was not the first psychologist working with this community
to use electric shocks. I have our Lavas, a doctor

(17:10):
with U C l A, had experimented with cattle prods
on children in the early nineteen seventies. He was a
major advocate for electric shocks as a behavioral modification aid
early on. But in nineteen eighties seven uh this doctor
Lavas published a study that showed that after forty weeks
of one on one therapy, autistic preschoolers could attain what

(17:30):
he called normal functioning without any kind of aversives. In
nineteen three, Lavas admitted that he had been wrong, and
he strongly rejected his early work, saying that shock therapy
was at best a short term solution that did not
fix problems and was not worth the pain it caused.
So Lavas pretty fucked up to cattle prod kids. But
he eventually he does his recently, yeah yeah, yeah, um,

(17:56):
I was wrong. This is fucked up, don't do it
now when Matt is really and I should also note
that I don't want to make it seem too easy
what he's saying here, like these forty weeks of one
on one therapy, that's a lot of work. We'll talk
about this more. Yeah, it's a commitment. It is a commitment,
and it's what these kids deserve, obviously, but it's also

(18:16):
often what there's resources or what schools are willing to
devote resources with the state is willing to devote resources
to do um. And there's furthermore, the thought that because
the that the adults doing this work are not well
paid generally, there are some, there are some specialists who
are very well compensated. There are some there's some specific
facilities that train and higher professionals and pay them. Well,

(18:40):
that is not the norm. I got about eight dollars
an hour, and again, no training. You are not going
to get someone to perform the kind of one on
one therapy that Lavoss is showing can work on these
kids and can can stop these kind of behaviors. You
are not going to get that with someone making eight
dollars an hour, working eight hours a day. You know,
it's just not possible, and especially we brought this up

(19:03):
in part one where they had to do a quick
turnaround in like the two weeks with a lot of
these exactly and with that eight dollars an hour. And yeah, no,
it's just you don't have any means to do so
you do not. And it's so much of the problem
here and again Matt Israel is the primary bastard. But

(19:25):
the fact that on the whole, all the state usually
wants to do with these it's a mix. There will
do devote more resources to the kids who will be
able to work a full time job and like make
a living. Right. Um, a lot of these kids, for
whatever reason aren't aren't aren't going to be able to
do that, They're not going to be able to live

(19:45):
what what I guess what you would say the state
considers to be a normal life, which is an economically
productive life. And so the goal becomes, how do we
wear house these kids for the least amount of money
as opposed to is there anything we can do to
to give them a your life, to help them like
be healthier? Um? And it's um, it's something we've seen

(20:07):
time and time again. It's not just here, it's like,
how how can we take these people who aren't going
to be productive quote unquote in sense and in economic
couple of sense and help them alford the leases amount
of money. It's yeah, honestly depressing and infuriate it is,
and it's it's again part of the villain here is

(20:29):
the reduction of human beings to their their pure economic potential.
So when Matt Israel started applying aversives to children with
behavioral issues in the early nineteen seventies, data on how
adversives worked was severely mixed. By the early nineteen eighties,
though clinicians and researchers had published significant studies showing positive
reinforcement could work in the most difficult cases. What it

(20:51):
required was constant quote functional analyzes, which is monitoring patients
all day and night to discover what is causing the
behavior and then to read a wreck those feelings. It's
basically saying that like, well, you need a level if
you're going to reinforce, if you're going to change these behaviors.
In positive reinforcement, it's it's a full, like twenty four
hours a day job monitoring these kids, seeing what's causing

(21:12):
the behaviors and redirecting them. That's obviously very expensive and difficult. Um,
the best solution is the most effortful and the most
expensive one. Meanwhile, electrocuting kids works in the short term
to stop behavior. Um that's undesirable. Um. And yeah, that's uh,
that's kind of why this happens. Um. In nine, a

(21:32):
guy named Philip Campbell became commissioner of the Massachusetts Department
of Mental Retardation, which is again that's the name of
this government agents. Yeah again the dark ages. Uh. And
this the Massachusetts Department of Mental Retardation regarded b r
R is horrible, like rightfully, so they were also the
organization that was supposed to regulate it. So Philip Campbell

(21:53):
comes into to running this department and hates this school
that his his department is regulating with good reason, and
he goes after b r I. But unfortunately he decides
to break the law to do so, and he was
eventually found to have leaked false reports about the school
to the press. And there's plenty of bad reports about
the school, but he he does not go through this

(22:14):
in a legal or ethical way, and it causes a
worse problem because b r I is able to go
to the court and argue they had been wronged by
Philip Campbell, and the court read um and Campbell's irresponsible
behavior led in nine seven to a Massachusetts Supreme Court
ruling that found he and his department were in contempt
of court. The state was ordered to pay more than

(22:35):
a million dollars in court costs, and the department was
effectively dissolved. So now the Judge Rotenberg Center, and they
start calling at the Judge Rodenberg Center in honor of
the judge who was most responsible for getting them through
this period of legal fighting. Um. The Judge Rotenberg Center
no longer is monitored by a state watchdog. Instead, they're
only being monitored by an independent attorney hired by the

(22:56):
Probate Court, which means they're effectively unregulated for a while. Fun. Yeah,
and this is the period in which the use of
he starts to experiment with electric shocks in But after
nineteen seven it really explodes. Now that they're free to
do whatever the funk Matt Israel wants, the school expands massively,

(23:16):
its enrollment more than doubles from a hundred and ten kids.
And this is just the Providence Facility to two D
and twenty eight. In the space of about four years,
the school's budget balloons from eighteen million to fifty six
million dollars. The patient base grows to include kids whose
problems were not just like the result of a diagnosis,
but also largely behavior base, so kids who have gotten

(23:37):
in legal trouble, kids who had in some cases come
from jail. Some of them are like kids with a
d h D who likes steal a car or something
um In the early odds. The school's educational policy also changes,
and they switch from teaching kids and the goal being,
at least distensibly this is still a school. We're trying
to alter their behavior, but we're also trying to educate
them to they stopped trying to educate them, really, they

(24:00):
move on to simply managing the behavior. One psychologist who
worked at the Judge Rodenberg Center later told Wired quote
Israel couldn't stand them not behaving in a perfectly controlled way,
and so now that he's in total controlling without oversight,
Matt Israel turns the Judge Rodenberg Center into a perfect prison,
one in which every single kind of behavior can be tracked, judged,

(24:22):
and punished. At the push of a button. But you
know what's also a perfect prison? Oh dear God, perfect prison.
So lock yourself in with these products and services. All right,

(24:44):
we are we're back, and we're we're talking about horrible things.
So I just told you that he is able to
after turn the Judge Rodenberg Center into a perfect prison.
And I'm going to read a quote from rot Wired
that I think makes the point of what a wocking
nightmare this place. Here we go, Mm hmm, yeah, strap m.

(25:06):
J RC has always believed in punishing not only the
negative behavior, but also the actions that presage. At a
face slapper could be shocked for simply raising his hand.
This is called treating the antecedent. A lot of things
can be antecedents at j r C. Yelling, refusing a
teacher's order, talking out of turn. Another psychologist who left
in two thousand two says those are precursors to violence

(25:28):
so much as ordinary classroom disturbances. J r C has
video monitors in every room of the school, in every residence,
has had them since nineteen. Certain staffers, called quality control
sit in a control room day at night a wall
of television monitors and computer screens Before them watching everyone,
and because the rooms are miked, hearing everything. The control

(25:49):
room is ostensibly to ensure that students are shocked for
the inappropriate behaviors that an employee might miss. When that happens,
quality control phones the staffer in the room, who then
applies the shock. But the people who sit in the
control rooms serve another purpose. They're watching their own. If say,
a teacher in the classroom refuses to shock a kid,
he or she is written up. The write ups carry

(26:11):
the Orwellian title performance improvement opportunities. Anyone can tattle on
anyone else, regardless of the station. The school has staffers
whose job is to read and track those forms. Get
enough of them and you're gone. So yeah, that's wow, Buck,
that's horrifying. Yeah. It also it's making the point here

(26:33):
with the treating the aniset and stuff. So again they
have to go to a judge to get approved to
use aversives and to shock kids like or to go
to probate court. So they have to get legal approval
to do this, and the way they do that is
by saying the only option they're violent, they're hurting themselves
or hurting other people, and the only way to stop.
That is by applying the shocks, right, That's how they
justify this. But and so the probate court is saying, okay,

(26:56):
in order to stop this kid from hurting or even
killing themselves, you are allowed to shock them. Okay. But
the judge Rodenberg Center, because of how they view antecedents,
can define raising their hand, not sitting down when told to,
refusing to take off a jacket, refusing to put on shoes,
all of that, they can call antecedents to a violent behavior.

(27:17):
And so they can electrocute kids for anything, for flapping
their hands by saying that will lead to violence if
we don't electrocute them early, Yeah, they can just do
fast loose exactly. So they are always saying, and when
they defend themselves, we only do these shocks in order
to prevent kids from hurting themselves. But they define hurting
themselves as basically fucking anything whatever they want to be. Yeah. So,

(27:42):
staffers at the time, and this is again the early
or late nineteen nineties, noted the complete lack of fox
given to the education of kids in the center and
the absolute obsession with surveillance and punishment at all times.
Some teachers would eat in their cars just to avoid
being listened to via hidden microphones. Meanwhile, the electrocution panopticon
built by Matt Israel had a profound impact on children.

(28:05):
One teacher told an interviewer that he'd been warned by
a staffer to announce to the class whenever he reached
into his pocket. One time, he didn't, and the kids
he was with started screaming. They thought he was reaching
for a shock buzzer. But because they'd screamed, which was
an antecedent to violent behavior, they now had to be punished. Quote.
All of these behaviors had to be consequated with a

(28:26):
geed electric shock. There were no exceptions. A scream was
a scream, a grab was a grab, and we had
to follow court approved orders. So these kids are so
fucking ptsdd out by being electrocuted. I reached into his
pocket and they freak out, and then they have to
be electrocuted for freaking out. Yeah, So see what a
fucking nightmare that sits. Yeah, it's a fucking nightamabic like

(28:48):
the Holy Ship. Yeah, it's really bad. Now. In interviews,
Matt Israel and other representatives of the school will claim
that students are only eligible to be shocked if they've
engaged in seriously dangerous behavior. This is untrue, at least
according to a two thousand six report by the New
York State Education Department. It claimed that the j RC
was shocking kids quote without a clear history of self

(29:09):
injurious behaviors, it is hard to exaggerate how profoundly abuse
of this treatment could be. To make that point, I
am going to quote from an NBC News article about
a kid named Rico Torres. Quote. Rico was just eight
the first time school staffers strapped electrodes to his legs
and shocked him. They draped twelve vote battery over his
shoulders in a backpack while a nearby teacher held a

(29:31):
clear plastic box with a photo of his face attached.
When Torres misbehaved, the teacher would reach inside the box
and push a button that sent a two second jolt
of electricity coursing through his body. Under his quarterproofd treatment plan,
Torres could be shocked for threatening to hit another student,
or for running away, swearing or screaming, refusing to follow directions,
or inappropriate urination. According to court records obtained by NBC News,

(29:54):
one employee, he said, used to shock him in his
sleep because I didn't wake up. She shocked me, recalled
to risk now four. Then I ended up peeing the bed,
so she shocked me again. The electrodes stayed on his
skin twenty four hours a day for most of a
decade until he was eighteen. She oh, yeah, yeah, like

(30:16):
the fact that they would do it while he was sleeping,
and it's like and with the urination thing, it's most
like being class because of the shocks. Yeah. Yeah, if
you electrocute a child while they're sleeping, they might be
the bed. Yeah, but it's not a behavioral issue. That's
what you were electrocuting a child issue. Yeah, Like oh
my god. Yeah, it's um it's rough, it's real rough.

(30:42):
Yeah no, um yeah. My one thing is like I
would just hate if they did this was like the
more noncommunicative kids, you know, the ones it's like that. Ah,
it's just rough all around. Yeah, Um, it is rough
all around. And it's like I think, uh, I think

(31:05):
a lot of these kids are non verbal. I don't know,
it's it's a it's it's a mix. It's hard to
get like exact data on that, but yeah, I mean
that that is an additional level. If the kid can't
even tell you, well, it's the same thing with that
that girl who died. Yeah, yeah, they can't tell you,
and it's like, oh, you're misbehaving. Yeah, they're just trapped

(31:26):
in this world of adults electrocuting them, never understanding really why. Um,
it's pretty bleak. So obviously also pretty bleak for the staff.
A lot of whom get this job. They see it's
this nice facility, they see it's I'm helping kids. They
go and they realize like, oh no, I'm torturing children.
You know, there's huge turnover and they don't you know,

(31:47):
you have to understand too. A lot of these people
who come to realize what they're doing is wrong. Initially
maybe like, well, this guy is a doctor, this school
has a great reputation. It's like it's got a approval
from the state and whatnot. Maybe I'm just being squeamish
and I don't understand why this is necessary. For a
lot of them do come to realize like, oh no,
this is horribly fucked up, and the school has caught

(32:08):
Like most workers don't last a fucking year, I don't think. Um,
which of course, makes it hard to get decent staff
because the kind of people who are going to do
that job are maybe sometimes going to be monsters themselves.
We're like, well, it doesn't pay well, but I get
to hurt people, you know, prison guard ship. Oh yeah, yeah.
The consequences of this situation where you have constant turnover,

(32:30):
the good people leave, the folks who are able to
stay for a while, or maybe terrible. The consequences of
this are made abundantly clear on August six, two thousand seven,
when a prank caller calls the staff in the middle
of the night imposes as a supervisor. Remember there's always
people watching, and they'll call rooms and be like, hey,
such and such kid did this behavior and you didn't

(32:51):
catch it. You need to shock him now, you know.
So this person calls a supervisor who's awake on the
night shift, and he orders punishments for two teenagers who
are asleep at the time. The kids are sixteen and nineteen,
and the person on the phone claims they had misbehaved
earlier in the evening. Now, staff weren't supposed to administer
shocks long after bad behavior, and this had been hours ago.

(33:12):
But also the thing that Israel had establishes that if
you are a staff member and you're told to shock
a kid and you don't do it, you'll get fired,
right if you don't instantly obey orders, because again he's
kind of operat conditioning his employees too. If you delay
it all. Once told to electrocute these kids, you'll lose
your job. Um, So they they they wake these kids
up to shock them. Other students who are awake at

(33:34):
the time beg the staffers not to do this, and
one of them is even like, hey, this this might
be a hoax, this phone call might not even be
like an actual supervisor. But the staff wakes both boys
up and electrocutes them repeatedly, because again the person on
the phone says, keep shocking them, keep shocking them, keep shocking.
They shocked them so many times that they have to
bind their legs and arms so they can continue to

(33:54):
electrocute them. One team was shocked seventy seven times, the
other twenty nine times. The former had to be treated
for two first degree burns. The call it's horrible, horrible. Now.
The caller is believed to have been a former resident
of the center because he knew the staff. He knew
the number, he knew the other residents. Um, so it
may have been someone who was there and had an

(34:16):
issue with these two kids and like wanted to funk
with him. I don't know. As far as I can tell,
the person who did this has not been caught, NBC
wrote quote. At the time of the call, five of
the six staffers had worked double or triple shifts, and
most have been on the job less than three months.
The staffers were described as concerned and reluctant about the orders,
but they failed to verify them with the central office

(34:36):
or check treatment plans to make sure the teens could
receive that level of shock therapy. The report said. Staffers
also did not know who was the shift supervisor that night.
One reason staffers might not have been suspicious of the
phone call is that the Rottenberg Center uses surveillance cameras
in its group homes to monitor residents and staff, and
a central office employee is allowed to initiate discipline by phone.

(34:56):
So again, these guys haven't been there long, they don't
know who's supposed to be giving the orders, so they
don't recognize that anything is really fucked up. You know,
they should have obviously. Yeah, they sure they stumble checked
like a once or at some time between the first
and seventy seventh time they shocked the child they had
tied to a fucking chair. Um, But it's also the

(35:18):
fault of the system he's developed. Not to take blame
off of these people for doing something horrible, but like so,
Matt Israel built a system where this was inevitable. The
staff responsible were fired immediately, but the incident was so
horrific that it sparked another set of investigations into the
Judge Rotenberg Center. A court demanded video footage of the
two students being shocked for three solid hours. Matt Israel

(35:41):
ordered the footage destroyed, which was a crime and led
to him being indicted by a grand jury in two
thousand eleven. In order to avoid criminal charges, Israel agreed
to leave the school he'd founded. So two thousand eleven
he quits because he illegally destroys evidence, and the court
is like, hey, we won't charge you criminally if you

(36:01):
if you get out of here, which I don't know,
I think maybe locked the funk up. Yeah he should
be in jail, but he shouldn't be around kids. I'll
say that. So the very next year, two thousand twelve,
is when the general public finally got their first good
look at what the Judge Rodenberg Center had been doing
to children all those years. This was thanks to the

(36:23):
case and the mother of Andre mccollins. Andre's mother had
enrolled him in the Judge Rodenberg Center, not because he
was super violent, but because he was special needs and
he had been raped in a public school by another student.
And she a big selling point of the jearse. First
of all, it looks very nice. It looks like a facility.
She also likes that it's heavily surveilled. It's covered in cameras,

(36:45):
so she feels like nothing bad can happen to her
kid here because someone's always watching. And that's like you
have to understand, like that's all. It's reasonable. That like
the fact that this place is so surveilled, freeting to
her because what happened to her kid, you know, she's
rasonsted again, Yeah, totally reasonable. In short order, Andre was
taken off his medication because again the Judge Rodenberg Center
and Matt Israel don't believe in medicating kids. He was

(37:07):
put back on and after he started acting out and
engaging in self injurious behavior and like the school couldn't
correct it, and they didn't have approval to give him
electric shocks. So after they have to put him back
on his medicine, they go to court to get him
approved to receive electric shocks. The court approves it, and
the treatment plan listed that shocks could be applied if
he was aggressive, if he screamed, or if he tried
to remove his electric remove like the electrocution thing, or

(37:31):
if he engaged in what they called health dangerous behavior
and they defined health dangerous behavior specifically in his case
is tensing up his body, So if he gets tense,
they can electric famously relaxing electrocution. Yeah. Man, they were
horrifically creative of these excutions shock kids. They were. And

(37:53):
it's one of the fun up things is that like
they're talking about how bad he's on risper it All,
and they're talking about how bad risper it All is,
so they want to they they take him off it,
but then he gets worse when he's off it because
medication is helping. But and that's why they justify putting
this kid on the electrocution treatment so that they can
take him off Risper Doll again and then electrocute his

(38:13):
behaviors away, which is yeah, the they're basically doing the
thing like, hey, have them steal something, now we can
shock them. Yeah, and it's one of those things. Obviously,
over medication is a problem. I known a bunch of
kids who were like in a bunch of adults who
are like No. Once I found the right medication, it
was life changing. And like the kind of blanket rejection

(38:34):
of any sort of medication in favor of electrocution is
pretty bad. Oh yeah, you know. It comes out of
a period when massive, like like unreasonable and unlike immoral
levels of medication and drugging were common. And I get that,
but it it persists past the area where there are
medications that really help and and it rejects those in

(38:55):
favor of torture, which is is bad. So now that
he's being electrocuted regularly, Andre has taken off of his
meds again, and his mother visits him, you know, several
times and sees that like he's he's he's changed. His
behavior has changed in a negative way as a result
of being off his meds and probably as a result
of being tortured, and she begs the school to put

(39:15):
him back on his meds um. The school doesn't do this. Uh,
And the electrocutions continue, and he has like a bad
incident one day where he the school alleges that he
at least attempted to hit a teacher, so they shocked him.
And then afterwards, hours after that violent incident, they shocked
him again. And I'm going to read a quote from
New York magazine that that describes what happens later in

(39:38):
that day. Like other students in the room, Andre sat
at a desk facing a computer, his back to the teacher.
A worker told him, take off your jacket. Andre didn't move.
Take off your jacket please again, no response. An employee
pressed the button to activate his shock device. He screamed.
Andre fell to the ground and tried to crawl under
his desk. Four adults rabbed him and wrestled him to

(40:01):
the floor, holding him down while he struggled. His psychologist
brought in a restraint board, and the employees moved him
onto it, face down. Eight of them surrounded him as
they bound his wrists and ankles to the board. Usually,
after Andrea got a shock and was restrained, he'd calmed down,
but on this day he only got more agitated. The
more upset he became, the more he tensed up his body,
and the more he tensed up, the more shocks he received.

(40:24):
Between ten am and about eleven am, the workers shocked
him fourteen times. Each press of the button triggered aloud,
high pitched alarm, informing employees the shock had been delivered,
while Andrea's cries echoed down the corridor. Yeah, I I
don't know what else to say at this point, like god,

(40:45):
damn it. Yeah, it's pretty bad. And after a lengthy
court battle, um his mother succeeds in making this video
public and this leads to widespread outrage against the Judge
Rodenberg Center and more investigations. In two thousand thirteen, a
United Nations special report tour on Torture found that students
who were electrocuted at the Rodenberg School had their rights

(41:08):
violated under the UN Convention on Torture. So the United
Nations says, these kids are being tortured, like this is yeah,
that unites our definition. You achieved the special level. Fucked. Yeah,
if the UN is coming after your school, like yeah,
you might want to reevaluate you. You may be real

(41:29):
fucked up. Um. You know what isn't hasn't been declared
torture by the United Nations hopefully. The products and services
that sponsored this podcast, well most of them, most of
them okay again north of eight percent north yeah, yeah, yeah.

(41:50):
The the the hard like the strong odds are whatever
advertisers are on our show have not been declared to
be torturation people. Almost none of them. That's a good thing. Yeah,
we're back. So as this so you know this this

(42:14):
the u N starts looking into ship and as a
result of this video coming out, the Justice Department launches
an investigation that I think is still ongoing, like a
decade later. I haven't found a result from it, and
I've read some recent reporting on it, so it seems
like either it got kind of buried or they're getting
real deep into it. But it's been a long time, um,
without kind of a result. Another thing that's ongoing is

(42:35):
Matt Israel's obsession with experimenting on children. If they recall,
decades ago, he was forced to separate his relationship with
the school he'd founded in California. It had been taken
over by Judith Weber, who had been the executive director
of the West Coast b r I when it was founded.
Judith and Matt eventually married, and in two thousand and fifteen,
it was found that Matt Israel, while not on staff

(42:56):
at the West Coast b r I, which had been
renamed Tobin World too and Tobin World three, was working
as a behavior analyst and an administrator at both facilities.
The schools had not notified the state that Matt Israel
had been added to the roster of employees because Matt
Israel was legally prohibited from entering the facilities. From a
write up at ed source dot org quote in unannounced

(43:17):
visits to Tobin World two and three on January sixteenth
and seventeenth, investigators also found that the schools were employing
behavioral analysts with expired certifications and teachers without their acquired
credentials to teach students with certain disabilities. The school also
failed to comply with state regulations that require behavior plan
reviews after staff members have physically restrained students or isolated
them in rooms they cannot leave. The Judge Rodenberg's Educational

(43:40):
Center is the only facility in the country that still
uses electric shock therapy. In this way, roughly twenty of
their students received shocks, although given what we know about
how lacks these facilities can be about rules and paperwork,
it's hard to say if that's really all the kids
who receive shocks. In March of the FDA banned the
use of electronic shocked vices in the context that they're

(44:01):
used in the center, saying they caused quote an unreasonable
and substantial risk of illness or injury. But in July
of this year, in a two to one decision by
the Washington D C. District Court of Appeals, it was
ruled that the FDA's band violated federal law by interfering
with the authority of healthcare practitioners to practice medicine. The
center's attorney, Mike Flamia, told c and Then that the

(44:23):
ruling was important because quote, it protects what all of
us cherish, and that is the right to go to
our doctor and have our doctor decide what is the
best treatment. Um, you do you, I guess what the
hell you do your kids? Yeah, it's Messy'm like, honestly,

(44:44):
that's unbelievable because it's like, yeah, I know, it could
be a little. But so it's like, hey, my doctor
can tell my kid that you need to be shot,
and a lot of them didn't even have the credentials anyways. Yeah,
so again that's part of it, Like, well, I my doctor.
I have a right to you know, pick my doctor

(45:06):
and for him to pick his well, but a lot
of these people aren't legally qualified to prescribe any kind
of treatment to your kids, or to kids of autism
or anything. Yeah, that's the thing that's passing me off
the most about this. It's like these people are making
a super important decisions that they have no right to make. Yeah,

(45:26):
And part of this issue is this thing I've I've
complained about a few times on the show, which is
that like they're framing this is like, well, we want
the freedom to go to our doctor and and and
have our doctor to no know, you want the freedom
to have absolute power to say what is and isn't
okay for your kid. And I don't think parents should
have that. You're not the god of your child, and
you're not the government of your child. And I don't

(45:47):
think government should have a lot of the power that
they have. But like there's there's this problem of how
parents are treated as the ultimate authority of what's good
or bad for their kid, which has a lot of
horrible consequences outside of this too. But this is one
of those consequences where it's like, well, especially within the
context here where a kid is autistic and maybe not,

(46:10):
it's like, well, the parents basically get the keys to
the kingdom. They have to make the final call, and
they don't know what's going on most of the time. Yeah,
a lot of parents suck. Yeah, Maybe don't make them
the absolute god of their own of their child, because
that's a bad thing. I will say the full disclosure.

(46:31):
Mind o't but I'm but but you know, I know,
I know. I've known some people who have fed disability
as parents that weren't a great Yeah, exactly, and it's
it's a problem. Yeah. Um. So, the j RC was
supported by a significant number of parents who has always
argued that the facility was a matter of last resort

(46:51):
for their kids. In making this case, Flammia, the lawyer
offered up the argument that absolutely no other treatment had
worked for these kids. Quote, I know that the people
that oppose this treatment, they'll tell you over and over
again that there are other treatments that work as well,
if not better. And they'll talk about positive behavior supports,
which j RC does all of that. They'll talk about drugs,
psychotropic medications. These clients at j r C, they've tried

(47:13):
all that, numerous drugs, numerous diagnoses, numerous combinations of drugs.
That is again extremely common, this line of argument, that
they've tried everything. This is the last resort. I think
the most dedicated example of this came from that Wired
article I've cited a bit in this episode. And while
that article goes into horrible detail about abuses at the
j RC, it also includes this bit. You don't know

(47:34):
what it's like to be the parent of a student
at the Judge Rodenberg Center. You don't know what it
takes to hear all this and still come out in
favor of the school. And you don't know because you
don't have a kid who pulls out her hair and
bloody clumps, who seems to enjoy that. Okay, a kid
who scalp resembles that of a frontier settler worked over
by a furious native. And then to see her today, happy, smiling,
a brunette just like any other brunette, and all thanks

(47:55):
to j rc her life saved by the machine saved.
And that's just one kid, just one story, you see,
there's another side. There's a lot that's funked up about
that Wired article, and they site they cite some science
that makes the situation seem much more muddled as to
whether or not this is best. Um. A lot of
that science is at this point more than twenty years old.
The most recent studies that they side are from Oh Yeah.

(48:19):
And it's made more difficult by the fact that the
jear C isn't exactly required to hand over objective, reliable
evidence about the efficacy of its methods. And there's strong
arguments that they're not fixing any problems these kids have.
They're just temporarily suppressing them with violence. And there's also
the thing of like, are they actually trying these other methods?
Are they just going straight to the shocks? Are they
just going straight to the shocks? Um? The and yeah.

(48:43):
Supporters of the school will argue that like these schools
that's that don't use aversives and that use only positive
support will turn kids down, will say this kid is
too severe for us, and eventually those kids have no
other option. But the judge Rodenberg Center, which turns nobody down. UM. Now,
most of the studies have come across that purport to
show a benefit to the adversives used at the j

(49:04):
r C are more than twenty years old, and again
are very not at all conclusive. Um. The preponderance of
evidence seems to suggest that these kind of treatments are
not necessary even in the most severe cases. But the
kind of treatments that help in the most severe cases
are labor intensive and expensive. Um. It is worth noting,
regardless of what you want to get into the weeds
on the science here. No other facility in the US

(49:27):
uses these methods, and many other facilities do treat children
with problems just as severe using methods that do not
evolve electrocuting kids. The judge Rodenberg Center and the parents
who support it argue that as unpleasant as the shock
treatments are, they also represent the only viable treatment for
patients who would otherwise destroy themselves. Nancy Weiss is the
director of the National Leadership Consortium on Developmental Disabilities at

(49:50):
the University of Delaware. She has been a longstanding critic
of the j r C, and when that court ruled
they could keep electrocuting kids. CNN went to her for
comment on this matter. She said, quote, part of the
reason that people with disabilities have behavioral problems, behaviors that
we find challenging is that they're protesting the crappy lives
we offer them. It's that person's only form of protest,

(50:10):
and it's a critique of the life they're being offered.
It's like, there's no greater human impulse than to be
in charge of your own life. And what jere C does,
to an extent beyond what any other provider in this
country does, is strip people of choice and control. Yeah,
I mean, when you get down to it, it's ultimately

(50:33):
there are much better ways of doing it than ye
electric shock. There are there are, And I find it
compelling what she says about the a lot of these
bad behaviors of these kids protesting in the first place,
that their lives even before the JEARC didn't offer them
a lot of autonomy of choice. But also, um, what
what Israel did at his facility is stripped choice because

(50:56):
he doesn't see people as having choice. He doesn't really
believe in free will, believes that we're just the product
of of of stimuli that's put into us. Um. He
treats these kids like robots. He treats his staff like robots.
And the belief that you can make this perfect system
if you just put perfectly, consistently put the right stimuli
in and it does kind of work as long as

(51:18):
the kids are getting electrocuted. For the most part, they
stopped the behavior. They comply UM, but that isn't because
anything has changed about them. It's because they've been tortured
into not doing certain things. He just didn't have an
issue with that because again, everyone's a robot. Yeah, it's
just a feature. Yeah, it's a feature. Um it's pretty yeah,

(51:41):
pretty weak. God. So yeah, the f d A has
you know, the FDA, to its credit, eventually did try
to stop this UM, but then a judge was like, no, no, no,
we're gonna keep doing this ship. So they're still running today.
Oh yeah Jesus Christ. Yeah. Uh, I mean at the end, Yeah,

(52:08):
I that's freaking bleak. Yeah. I wish I could have
more to say, but I'm just because the biggest problem,
because as somebody who is autistic, is there are some
people who, like myself, are lucky enough to be able

(52:31):
to do work and all that and stuff, and and
a lot of times we get the name Aspergers, but
buck that ship. And so it's like, I just I
couldn't imagine something like this, and just it just makes
me feel so angry. Sorry, I'm rambled. No no, no, no,

(52:55):
I mean that's that's really important, Like the I don't know,
how do we uh, how are we because we all
have a we all have some form of mental disability,
even if it isn't outwardly apparent, how are we able
to be able to treat one another, support one another

(53:19):
without dehumanizing and freaking shocking them like cattle. Yeah, and
it's some part of the problem here is that a
significant chunk of of people with autism UM aren't legally
in control of their own lives, which in some of

(53:41):
them are not in a legal capacity capable of of
of of being in control in at least in a
legal sense of the word. UM. They need some sort
of of caretaker, but that means they're not making decisions
for themselves, and and so, like the the industry that

(54:01):
has developed around providing these people with care often and
in fact largely, does so without any real input from
the people in it. UM and because the people who
are kind of most vulnerable to this tend to be
unable to express themselves in a way that is easy
for most people that understand. It happens without most people
being aware of it, and so there's no outcry and

(54:22):
nothing is done and it and it continues on for
decades and decades because they think that's how it is. Yeah,
that's the only option or the best option, or you know,
we'll look their parents say this is fine and like
yeah it's Um, it's not great. No, it's not great. Well,
and you've got any plug doubles to plug? Uh? You

(54:43):
can follow me on twitch at notch the b N
O T C H t H e B. I post
a lot their social commentary WoT stuff. Um, but that's
my big thing. To plug sweet well, plug out, plug away.

(55:04):
And I don't know, Uh, yell at the FDA or
a judge or something about this, I don't know. I
guess THEDA is more or less on board. I don't
know who to yell at at this point. Just just yell,
yell ye to the sky. You gotta stand up for people. Yeah,
all right, well, thank you, aiden. And that's that's behind

(55:24):
the bastards. Thanks for having me