Part Two: The Judge Rotenberg Center

feel about electrocuting children? Yeah, that's the right response. Um, 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

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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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 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. 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 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. 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. 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 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

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

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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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

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,

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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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

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, 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 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

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, 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, 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. 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 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 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 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

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, 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.

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, 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.

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

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

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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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, 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

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.

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 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

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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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

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

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

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

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.

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, 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 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

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. 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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

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 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, 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, 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 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, 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

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 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 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 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 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. 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 the bastards. Thanks for having me