and/or www.mantra.com/jai (Dr. Jai Maharaj)
16 years ago
Forwarded message from Tom Davos <***@gmail.com>
School of Shock
[Caption] Eight states are sending autistic, mentally
retarded, and emotionally troubled kids to a facility that
punishes them with painful electric shocks. How many times
do you have to zap a child before it's torture?
By Jennifer Gonnerman
Mother Jones
August 20, 2007
Rob Santana awoke terrified. He'd had that dream again, the
one where silver wires ran under his shirt and into his
pants, connecting to electrodes attached to his limbs and
torso. Adults armed with surveillance cameras and remote-
control activators watched his every move. One press of a
button, and there was no telling where the shock would
hitbhis arm or leg or, worse, his stomach. All Rob knew was
that the pain would be intense.
Every time he woke from this dream, it took him a few
moments to remember that he was in his own bed, that there
weren't electrodes locked to his skin, that he wasn't about
to be shocked. It was no mystery where this recurring
nightmare came frombnot A Clockwork Orange or 1984, but the
years he spent confined in America's most controversial
"behavior modification" facility.
In 1999, when Rob was 13, his parents sent him to the Judge
Rotenberg Educational Center, located in Canton,
Massachusetts, 20 miles outside Boston. The facility, which
calls itself a "special needs school," takes in all kinds
of troubled kidsbseverely autistic, mentally retarded,
schizophrenic, bipolar, emotionally disturbedband attempts
to change their behavior with a complex system of rewards
and punishments, including painful electric shocks to the
torso and limbs.
Of the 234 current residents, about half are wired to
receive shocks, including some as young as nine or ten.
Nearly 60 percent come from New York, a quarter from
Massachusetts, the rest from six other states and
Washington, D.C. The Rotenberg Center, which has 900
employees and annual revenues exceeding $56 million,
charges $220,000 a year for each student. States and school
districts pick up the tab.
The Rotenberg Center is the only facility in the country
that disciplines students by shocking them, a form of
punishment not inflicted on serial killers or child
molesters or any of the 2.2 million inmates now
incarcerated in U.S. jails and prisons. Over its 36-year
history, six children have died in its care, prompting
numerous lawsuits and government investigations. Last year,
New York state investigators filed a blistering report that
made the place sound like a high school version of Abu
Ghraib. Yet the program continues to thrivebin large part
because no one except desperate parents, and a few state
legislators, seems to care about what happens to the
hundreds of kids who pass through its gates.
In Rob Santana's case, he freely admits he was an out-of-
control kid with "serious behavioral problems." At birth he
was abandoned at the hospital, traces of cocaine, heroin,
and alcohol in his body. A middle-class couple adopted him
out of foster care when he was 11 months old, but his
troubles continued. He started fires; he got kicked out of
preschool for opening the back door of a moving school bus;
when he was six, he cut himself with a razor. His mother
took him to specialists, who diagnosed him with a slew of
psychiatric problems: attention-deficit/hyperactivity
disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder,
and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Rob was at the Rotenberg Center for about three and a half
years. From the start, he cursed, hollered, fought with
employees. Eventually the staff obtained permission from
his mother and a Massachusetts probate court to use
electric shock. Rob was forced to wear a backpack
containing five two-pound, battery-operated devices, each
connected to an electrode attached to his skin. "I felt
humiliated," he says. "You have a bunch of wires coming out
of your shirt and pants." Rob remained hooked up to the
apparatus 24 hours a day. He wore it while jogging on the
treadmill and playing basketball, though it wasn't easy to
sink a jump shot with a 10-pound backpack on. When he
showered, a staff member would remove his electrodes, all
except the one on his arm, which he had to hold outside the
shower to keep it dry. At night, Rob slept with the
backpack next to him, under the gaze of a surveillance
camera.
Employees shocked him for aggressive behavior, he says, but
also for minor misdeeds, like yelling or cursing. Each
shock lasts two seconds.
"It hurts like hell," Rob says. (The school's staff claim
it is no more painful than a bee sting; when I tried the
shock, it felt like a horde of wasps attacking me all at
once. Two seconds never felt so long.) On several
occasions, Rob was tied facedown to a four-point restraint
board and shocked over and over again by a person he
couldn't see. The constant threat of being zapped did
persuade him to act less aggressively, but at a high cost.
"I thought of killing myself a few times," he says.
Rob's mother Jo-Anne deLeon had sent him to the Rotenberg
Center at the suggestion of the special-ed committee at his
school district in upstate New York, which, she says, told
her that the program had everything Rob needed. She
believed he would receive regular psychiatric
counselingbthough the school does not provide this.
As the months passed, Rob's mother became increasingly
unhappy. "My whole dispute with them was, 'When is he going
to get psychiatric treatment?'" she says. "I think they had
to get to the root of his problemsblike why was he so
angry? Why was he so destructive? I really think they
needed to go in his head somehow and figure this out." She
didn't think the shocks were helping, and in 2002 she sent
a furious fax demanding that Rob's electrodes be removed
before she came up for Parents' Day. She says she got a
call the next day from the executive director, Matthew
Israel, who told her, "You don't want to stick with our
treatment plan? Pick him up." (Israel says he doesn't
remember this conversation, but adds, "If a parent doesn't
want the use of the skin shock and wants psychiatric
treatment, this isn't the right program for them.")
Rob's mother is not the only parent angry at the Rotenberg
Center.
Last year, Evelyn Nicholson sued the facility after her 17-
year-old son Antwone was shocked 79 times in 18 months.
Nicholson says she decided to take action after Antwone
called home and told her, "Mommy, you don't love me anymore
because you let them hurt me so bad." Rob and Antwone don't
know each other (Rob left the facility before Antwone
arrived), but in some ways their stories are similar.
Antwone's birth mother was a drug addict; he was burned on
an electric hot plate as an infant. Evelyn took him in as a
foster child and later adopted him. The lawsuit she filed
against the Rotenberg Center set off a chain of events:
investigations by multiple government agencies, emotional
public hearings, scrutiny by the media. Legislation to
restrict or ban the use of electric shocks in such
facilities has been introduced in two state legislatures.
Yet not much has changed.
Rob has paid little attention to the public debate over his
alma mater, though he visits its website occasionally to
see which of the kids he knew are still there. After he
left the center he moved back in with his parents. At first
glance, he seems like any other 21-year-old: baggy Rocawear
jeans, black T-shirt, powder-blue Nikes.
But when asked to recount his years at the Rotenberg
Center, he speaks for nearly two hours in astonishing
detail, recalling names and specific events from seven or
eight years earlier. When he describes his recurring
nightmares, he raises both arms and rubs his forehead with
his palms.
Despite spending more than three years at this behavior-
modification facility, Rob still has problems controlling
his behavior. In 2005, he was arrested for attempted
assault and sent to jail. (This year he was arrested again,
for drugs and assault.) Being locked up has given him
plenty of time to reflect on his childhood, and he has
gained a new perspective on the Rotenberg Center. "It's
worse than jail," he told me. "That place is the worst
place on earth."
One Punishment Fits All
The story of the Rotenberg Center is in many ways a tale of
two schools. Slightly more than half the residents are what
the school calls "high functioning": kids like Rob and
Antwone, who have diagnoses like attention-deficit
disorder, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder,
and other emotional problems. The other group is even more
troubled. Referred to as "low functioning," it includes
kids with severe autism and mental retardation; most cannot
speak or have very limited verbal abilities. Some have
behaviors so extreme they can be life threatening: chomping
on their hands and arms, running into walls, nearly
blinding themselves by banging their heads on the floor
again and again.
The Rotenberg Center has long been known as the school of
last resortba place that will take any kid, no matter how
extreme his or her problems are. It doesn't matter if a
child has been booted out of 2, 5, 10, or 20 other
programsbhe or she is still welcome here. For desperate
parents, the Rotenberg Center can seem like a godsend. Just
ask Louisa Goldberg, the mother of 25-year-old Andrew, who
has severe mental retardation. Andrew's last residential
school kicked him out after he kept assaulting staff
members; the Rotenberg Center was the only place willing to
accept him. According to Louisa, Andrew's quality of life
has improved dramatically since 2000, when he was hooked up
to the shock device, known as the Graduated Electronic
Decelerator, or ged.
The Rotenberg Center has a policy of not giving psychiatric
drugs to studentsbno Depakote, Paxil, Risperdal, Ritalin,
or Seroquel. It's a policy that appeals to Louisa and many
other parents. At Andrew's last school, she says, "he had
so many medicines in him he'd take a two-hour nap in the
morning, he'd take a two-hour nap in the afternoon. They'd
have him in bed at eight o'clock at night. He was sleeping
his life away." These days, Louisa says she is no longer
afraid when her son comes home to visit. "[For him] to have
an electrode on and to receive a ged is to me a much more
favorable way of dealing with this," she says. "He's not
sending people to the hospital."
Marguerite Famolare brought her son Michael to the
Rotenberg Center six years ago, after he attacked her so
aggressively she had to call 911 and, in a separate
incident, flipped over a kitchen table onto a tutor.
Michael, now 19, suffers from mental retardation and severe
autism. These days, when he comes home for a visit,
Marguerite carries his shock activator in her purse. All
she has to do, she says, is show it to him. "He'll
automatically comply to whatever my signal command may be,
whether it is 'Put on your seatbelt,' or 'Hand me that
apple,' or 'Sit appropriately and eat your food,'" she
says. "It's made him a human being, a civilized human
being."
Massachusetts officials have twice tried to shut the
Rotenberg Center downbonce in the 1980s and again in the
1990s. Both times parents rallied to its defense, and both
times it prevailed in court. (See "Why Can't Massachusetts
Shut Matthew Israel Down?" page 44.) The name of the center
ensures nobody forgets these victories; it was Judge Ernest
Rotenberg, now deceased, who in the mid-'80s ruled that the
facility could continue using aversivesbpainful punishments
designed to change behaviorbso long as it obtained
authorization from the Bristol County Probate and Family
Court in each student's case. But even though the facility
wasn't using electric shock when this ruling was handed
down, the court rarely, if ever, bars the Rotenberg Center
from adding shock to a student's treatment plan, according
to lawyers and disability advocates who have tried to
prevent it from doing so.
Since Evelyn Nicholson filed her lawsuit in 2006, the
Rotenberg Center has faced a new wave of criticism and
controversy. (See "Nagging? Zap.
Swearing? Zap," page 41.) And again, the facility has
relied heavily on the testimonials of parents like Louisa
Goldberg and Marguerite Famolare to defend itself. Not
surprisingly, the most vocal parent-supporters tend to be
those with the sickest children, since they are the ones
with the fewest options. But at the Rotenberg Center, the
same methods of "behavior modification" are applied to all
kids, no matter what is causing their behavior problems.
And so, while Rob would seem to have little in common with
mentally retarded students like Michael and Andrew, they
all shared a similar fate once their parents placed them
under the care of the same psychologist, a radical
behaviorist known as Dr. Israel.
Dr. Israel's Radical Behavior
In 1950, matt israel was a Harvard freshman looking to fill
his science requirement. He knew little about B.F. Skinner
when he signed up for his course, Human Behavior. Soon,
though, Israel became fascinated with Skinner's scientific
approach to the study of behavior, and he picked up Walden
Two, Skinner's controversial novel about an experimental
community based on the principles of behaviorism. The book
changed Israel's life. "I decided my mission was to start a
utopian community," he says. Israel got a Ph.D. in
psychology in 1960 from Harvard, and started two communal
houses outside Boston.
One of the people Israel lived with was a three-year-old
named Andrea, the daughter of a roommate. The two did not
get along. "She was wild and screaming," Israel recalls. "I
would retreat to my own room, and she'd be trying to pull
away and get into my room, and I'd have to hold the door on
one side to keep her from disturbing me." When company
would come over, he says, "She would walk around with a toy
broom and whack people over the head."
Through experiments with rats and pigeons, Skinner had
demonstrated how animals learn from the consequences of
their actions. With permission from Andrea's mother, Israel
decided to try out Skinner's ideas on the three-year-old.
When Andrea was well behaved, Israel took her out for
walks. But when she misbehaved, he punished her by snapping
his finger against her cheek. His mentor Skinner preached
that positive reinforcement was vastly preferable to
punishment, but Israel says his methods transformed the
girl. "Instead of being an annoyance, she became a charming
addition to the house."
Israel's success with Andrea convinced him to start a
school. In 1971, he founded the Behavior Research Institute
in Rhode Island, a facility that would later move to
Massachusetts and become known as the Judge Rotenberg
Center. Israel took in children nobody else wantedbseverely
autistic and mentally retarded kids who did dangerous
things to themselves and others. To change their behavior,
he developed a large repertoire of punishments: spraying
kids in the face with water, shoving ammonia under their
noses, pinching the soles of their feet, smacking them with
a spatula, forcing them to wear a "white-noise helmet" that
assaulted them with static.
In 1977, Israel opened a branch of his program in
California's San Fernando Valley, along with Judy Weber,
whose son Tobin is severely autistic. Two years later, the
Los Angeles Times reported Israel had pinched the feet of
Christopher Hirsch, an autistic 12-year-old, at least 24
times in 30 minutes, while the boy screamed and cried. This
was a punishment for soiling his pants. ("It might have
been true," Israel says. "It's true that pinches were being
used as an aversive.
The pinch, the spank, the muscle squeeze, water sprays, bad
tasteball those procedures were being used.") Israel was in
the news again in 1981, when another student, 14-year-old
Danny Aswad, died while strapped facedown to his bed. In
1982, the California Department of Social Services compiled
a 64-page complaint that read like a catalog of horrors,
describing students with bruises, welts, and cuts. It also
accused Israel of telling a staff member "to grow his
fingernails longer so he could give an effective pinch."
In 1982, the facility settled with state officials and
agreed to stop using physical punishments. Now called
Tobinworld, and still run by Judy Weber, it is a $10-
million-a-year organization operating day schools near Los
Angeles and San Francisco. The Rotenberg Center considers
itself a "sister school" to Tobinworld, and Israel makes
frequent trips to California to visit Weber. The two were
married last year.
Despite his setback in California, Israel continued to
expand on the East Coastband to generate controversy. In
1985, Vincent Milletich, an autistic 22-year-old, suffered
a seizure and died after he was put in restraints and
forced to wear a white-noise helmet. Five years later, 19-
year-old Linda Cornelison, who had the mental capacity of a
toddler, refused to eat. On the bus to school, she clutched
her stomach; someone had to carry her inside, and she spent
the day on a couch in a classroom. Linda could not speak,
and the staff treated her actions as misbehaviors. Between
3:52 p.m. and 8 p.m., staffers punished her with 13 spatula
spankings, 29 finger pinches, 14 muscle squeezes, and 5
forced inhalings of ammonia. It turned out that Linda had a
perforated stomach. She died on the operating table at 1:45
a.m.
The local district attorney's office examined the
circumstances of Vincent's death but declined to file any
charges. In Linda's case, the Massachusetts Department of
Mental Retardation investigated and found that while
Linda's treatment had "violated the most basic codes and
standards of decency and humane treatment," there was
insufficient evidence to prove that the use of aversives
had caused her death.
By the time Linda died, Israel was moving away from
spatulas and toward electric shock, which, from his
perspective, offered many advantages. "To give a spank or a
muscle squeeze or a pinch, you had to control the student
physically, and that could lead to a struggle," he says. "A
lot of injuries were occurring." Since shocking only
required pressing a button, Israel could eliminate the need
for employees to wrestle a kid to the ground. Another
benefit, he says, was increased consistency. It was hard to
know if one staff member's spatula spanking was harder than
another's, but it was easy to measure how many times a
staff member had shocked a child.
Israel purchased a shock device then on the market known as
sibisbSelf-Injurious Behavior Inhibiting Systembthat had
been invented by the parents of an autistic girl and
delivered a mild shock that lasted .2 second. Between 1988
and 1990, Israel used sibis on 29 students, including one
of his most challenging, Brandon, then 12, who would bite
off chunks of his tongue, regurgitate entire meals, and
pound himself on the head. At times Brandon was required to
keep his hands on a paddle; if he removed them, he would
get automatic shocks, one per second. One infamous day,
Brandon received more than 5,000 shocks. "You have to
realize," Israel says. "I thought his life was in the
balance. I couldn't find any medical solution. He was
vomiting, losing weight. He was down to 52 pounds. I knew
it was risky to use the shock in large numbers, but if I
persevered that day, I thought maybe it would eventually
work. There was nothing else I could think of to do...but
by the time it went into the 3,000 or 4,000 range, it
became clear it wasn't working."
This day was a turning point in the history of Israel's
operationbthat's when he decided to ratchet up the pain.
The problem, he decided, was that the shock sibis emitted
was not strong enough. He says he asked sibis's
manufacturer, Human Technologies, to create a more powerful
device, but it refused. "So we had to redesign the device
ourselves," he says. He envisioned a device that would
start with a low current but that could increase the
voltage if neededbhence its name, Graduated Electronic
Decelerator or gedbbut he abandoned this idea early on. "As
it turns out, that's really not a wise approach," he says.
"It's sort of like operating a car and wearing out the
brakes because you never really apply them strongly enough.
Instead, we set it at a certain level that was more or less
going to be effective for most of our students."
Thirty years earlier, O. Ivar Lovaas, a psychology
professor at ucla, had pioneered the use of slaps and
screams and electric jolts to try to normalize the behavior
of autistic kids. Life magazine featured his work in a
nine-page photo essay in 1965 with the headline, "A
surprising, shocking treatment helps far-gone mental
cripples." Lovaas eventually abandoned these methods,
telling cbs in 1993 that shock was "only a temporary
suppression" because patients become inured to the pain.
"These people are so used to pain that they can adapt to
almost any kind of aversive you give them," he said.
Israel encountered this same sort of adaptation in his
students, but his solution was markedly different: He
decided to increase the pain once again. Today, there are
two shock devices in use at the Rotenberg Center: the ged
and the ged-4. The devices look similar and both administer
a two-second shock, but the ged-4 is nearly three times
more powerfulband the pain it inflicts is that much more
severe.
The Mickey Mouse Club
Ten years ago, Israel hung up a Mickey Mouse poster in the
main hall, and he noticed that it made people smilebso he
bought every Mickey Mouse poster he could find. He hung
them in the corridors and even papered the walls of what
became known as the Mickey Mouse Conference Room. Entering
the Rotenberg Center is a bit like stepping into a carnival
fun house, I discovered during a two-day visit last autumn.
Two brushed-aluminum dogs, each nearly 5 feet tall and
sporting a purple neon collar, stand guard outside. Giant
silver stars dangle from the lobby ceiling; the walls and
chairs in the front offices are turquoise, lime green, and
lavender.
Israel, 74, still holds the title of executive director,
for which he pays himself nearly $400,000 in salary and
benefits. He appears utterly unimposing: short and slender
with soft hands, rounded shoulders, curly white hair,
paisley tie. Then he sits down beside me and, unprompted,
starts talking about shocking children. "The treatment is
so powerful it's hard not to use if you have seen how
effective it is," he says quietly. "It's brief. It's
painful. But there are no side effects. It's two seconds of
discomfort." His tone is neither defensive nor apologetic;
rather, it's perfectly calm, almost soothing. It's the sort
of demeanor a mother might find comforting if she were
about to hand over her child.
Before we set off on our tour of the facility, there's
something Israel wants me to see: Before & After, a
homemade movie featuring six of his most severe cases.
Israel has been using some of the same grainy footage for
more than two decades, showing it to parents of prospective
students as well as visiting reporters. They've already
mailed me a copy, but Israel wants to make sure I watch it.
An assistant slips the tape into the vcr, Israel presses
the remote, and we all stare at the screen:
1977: An 11-year-old girl named Caroline arrives at the
school strapped down onto a stretcher, her head encased in
a helmet. In the next shot, free from restraints, she
crouches down and tries to smash her helmeted head against
the floor.
1981: Janine, also 11 years old, shrieks and slams her head
against the ground, a table, the door. Bald spots testify
to the severity of her troubles; she's yanked out so much
hair it's half gone.
Both girls exhibit autistic behaviors, and compared with
these scenes, the "After" footage looks almost
unbelievable: Janine splashes in a plastic pool, while
Caroline grins as she sits in a chair at a beauty salon.
"Most people haven't seen these pictures," Israel says,
setting down the remote. "They haven't seen children like
this, so they cannot imagine. These are children for whom
positive-only procedures did not work, drugs did not work.
And if it wasn't for this treatment, some of these people
would not be alive." The video is extremely persuasive: The
girls' self-abuse is so violent and so frightening that it
almost makes me want to grab a ged remote and push the
button myself. Of course, this is precisely the point.
Considering how compelling the "After" footage is, I am
surprised to learn that five of the six children featured
in it are still here.
"This is Caroline," one of my escorts says an hour or two
later as we walk down a corridor. Without an introduction,
I would not have known.
Caroline, 39, slumps forward in a wheelchair, her fists
balled up, head covered by a red helmet. "Blow me a kiss,
Caroline," Israel says.
She doesn't respond.
A few minutes later, I meet 36-year-old Janine, who appears
in much better shape. She's not wearing a helmet and has a
full head of black hair. She's also got a backpack on her
shoulders and canvas straps hanging from her legs, the
telltale sign that electrodes are attached to both calves.
For 16 yearsbnearly half her lifebJanine has been hooked up
to Israel's shock device. A couple years ago, when the
shocks began to lose their effect, the staff switched the
devices inside her backpack to the much more painful ged-4.
Rogue Science
In 1994, matthew israel had just 64 students. Today he has
234. This astonishing rate of growth is largely the result
of a dramatic change in the types of students he takes in.
Until recently, nearly all were "low functioning," autistic
and mentally retarded people. But today slightly more than
50 percent are "high functioning," with diagnoses like add,
adhd, and bipolar disorder. New York state supplies the
majority of these students, many of whom grew up in the
poorest parts of New York City. Yet despite this change in
his population, Israel's methods have remained essentially
the same.
Israel has long faced criticism that he has not published
research about his use of electric shocks in peer-reviewed
journals, where experts could scrutinize it. To defend his
methods, he points to a bibliography of 110 research
articles that he's posted on the Rotenberg Center website.
This catalog seems impressive at first.
Studied more closely, however, it is not nearly so
convincing.
Three-quarters of the articles were published more than 20
years ago.
Eight were written or cowritten by Lovaas, the ucla-
affiliated behaviorist. One of America's leading autism
experts, Lovaas long ago stopped endorsing painful
aversives. And Lovaas' old studies focus primarily on
children with autism who engage in extreme self-injurybnot
on troubled teens who have been diagnosed with adhd or add.
But then, it would be hard for Israel to find contemporary
research supporting his program, because the practice of
treating self-abusive kids with pain has been largely
abandoned. According to Dr. Saul Axelrod, a professor at
Temple University and an expert on behavior modification,
"the field has moved away from painful stimuli because of
public outcry and because we've devised better techniques,"
including determining the cause of an individual's self-
abuse.
Another expert Israel cites several times is Dr. Brian A.
Iwata, a consultant on the development of sibis, the device
Israel modified to create his ged. Now a professor of
psychology and psychiatry at the University of Florida,
he's a nationally recognized authority on treating severe
self-abuse among children with developmental disabilities.
Iwata has visited the Rotenberg Center and describes its
approach as dangerously simplistic: "There appears to be a
mission of that program to use shock for problem behaviors.
It doesn't matter what that behavior is." Iwata has
consulted for 25 states and says there is little
relationship between what goes on at Israel's program and
what goes on at other facilities. "He may have gotten his
Ph.D. at Harvard, but he didn't learn what he's doing at
Harvard. Whatever he's doing, he decided to do on his own."
Paul Touchette, who also studied with B.F. Skinner, has
known Israel since the 1960s when they were both in
Cambridge. Like Israel, Touchette went on to treat children
with autism who exhibit extreme self-abuse, but he isn't a
fan of Israel's approach either.
"Punishment doesn't get at the cause," says Touchette, who
is on the faculty of the University of California-Irvine
School of Medicine. "It just scares the hell out of
patients."
Over the decades, Touchette has followed Israel's career
and bumped into him at professional conferences. "He's a
very smart man, but he's an embarrassment to his
profession," Touchette says. "I've never been able to
figure out if Matt is a little off-kilter and actually
believes all this stuff, or whether he's just a clever
businessman."
Big Reward Store
At the rotenberg center, an elaborate system of rewards and
punishments governs all interactions. Well-behaved kids can
watch TV, go for pizza, play basketball. Students who've
earned points for good behavior visit a store stocked with
dvd players, cds, cologne, PlayStation 2, Essence magazine,
knockoff Prada pursesbanything the staff thinks students
might want. But even more prized is a visit to the "Big
Reward Store," an arcade full of pinball machines, video
games, a pool table, and the most popular feature, a row of
42-inch flat-screen TVs hooked up to Xbox 360s.
Students like the "brs" for another reasonbit's the only
place many can socialize freely. At the Rotenberg Center,
students have to earn the right to talk to each other. "We
had to wait until we were in brs to communicate with
others," says Isabel CedeC1o, a 16-year-old who ran away
from Rotenberg in 2006 after her boyfriend, a former
student, came and got her. "That was the only time you
really laughed, had fun, hung around with your friends.
Because usually, you can't talk to them. It was basically
like we had to have enemies. They didn't want us to be
friendly with nobody."
Students live grouped together in homes and apartments
scattered in nearby towns and are bused to the facility's
headquarters every morning. They spend their days in
classrooms, staring at a computer screen, their backs to
the teacher. They are supposed to teach themselves, using
self-instruction programs that include lessons in math,
reading, and typing. Even with breaks for gym and lunch,
the days can be incredibly dull. "On paper, it does look
like they're being educated, because we have lesson plans,"
says former teacher Jessica Croteau, who oversaw a
classroom of high-functioning teens for six months before
leaving in 2006. But "to self-teach is not exciting.
Why would the kids want to sit there and read a chapter on
their own without any discussion?"
Croteau says teachers have to spend so much time monitoring
misbehaviors there's often little time left for teaching.
Whenever a student disobeys a rule, a staff member must
point it out, using the student's name and just one or two
rote phrases like, "Mark, there's no stopping work. Work on
your task, please." Each time a student curses or yells, a
staffer marks it on the student's recording sheet.
Teachers and aides then use the sheet to calculate what
level of punishment is requiredbwhen to just say "No!" and
when to shock.
Employees carry students' shock activators inside plastic
cases, which they hook onto their belt loops. These cases
are known as "sleds," and each sled has a photo on it to
ensure employees don't zap the wrong kid.
Behaviorism would seem to dictate that staff shock students
immediately after they break the rules. But if employees
learn about a misbehavior after it has occurredbby, say,
reviewing surveillance footagebthey may still administer
punishment. Rob Santana recalls that Mondays were always
the most stressful day of the week. He would sit at his
desk all day, trying to remember if he had broken any rules
over the weekend, waiting to see if he'd be shocked.
Employees are encouraged to use the element of surprise.
"Attempt to be as discreet as possible and hold the
transmitter out of view of the student," states the
employee manual. This way, students cannot do anything to
minimize the pain, like flipping over their electrodes or
tensing their muscles. "We hear the sound of [a staffer]
picking up a sled," says Isabel, the former student. "Then
we turn around and see the person jump out of their seat."
Employees shock students for a wide range of behaviors,
from violent actions to less serious offenses, like getting
out of their seats without permission. In 2006, the New
York State Education Department sent a team of
investigators, including three psychologists, to the
Rotenberg Center, then issued a scathing report. Among its
many criticisms was that the staff shocked kids for
"nagging, swearing, and failing to maintain a neat
appearance." Israel only disputes the latter. As for
nagging and swearing? "Sometimes a behavior looks
innocuous," he says, "but if it's an antecedent for
aggression, it may have to be treated with an aversive."
New York officials disagreed, and in January 2007 issued
regulations that would prohibit shocking New York students
for minor infractions.
But a group of New York parents filed a federal lawsuit to
stop the state from enforcing these regulations. They
prevailed, winning a temporary restraining order against
the state, one that permits the Rotenberg Center staffers
to continue using shock. The parents' case is expected to
go to trial in 2008.
When they talk about why they use the shock device, Israel
and his employees like to use the word "treatment," but it
might be more accurate to use words like "convenience" or
"control." "The gedbit's two seconds and it's done," says
Patricia Rivera, a psychologist who serves as assistant
director of clinical services. "Then it's right back to
work." By contrast, it can take 8 or 10 employees half an
hour or longer to restrain a strong male student: to pin
him to the floor, wait for him to stop struggling, then
move his body onto a restraint board and tie down each
limb. Restraining five or eight kids in a single daybor the
same student again and againbcan be incredibly time-
consuming and sometimes dangerous.
Even with the ged, the stories both students and employees
tell make the place sound at times like a war zone: A
teenage boy sliced the gym teacher across the face with a
cd. A girl stabbed a staffer in the stomach with a pencil.
While staff have been contending with injuries ever since
Israel opened his facility, the recent influx of high-
functioning students, some with criminal backgrounds, has
brought a new fear: that students will join forces and
riot. Perhaps tellingly, among high-functioning kids most
of the violence is directed at the staff, not each other.
"Our Students Have a Tendency to Lie"
Rotenberg staff place the more troubled (or troublesome)
residents on 1:1 status, meaning that an aide monitors them
everywhere they go. For extremely violent students, the
ratio is 2:1. Soon after I arrived, right before I set off
on my tour, a small crowd gatheredbit seemed that almost
the entire hierarchy of the Rotenberg Center was going to
follow me around. That's when I realized I'd been put on
5:1. As I began to roam around the school with my escorts,
my every move monitored by surveillance cameras, I realized
it would be impossible to have a private conversation with
any student. The best I could hope for would be a few
unscripted moments.
Ten years ago, a reporter visiting Israel's center would
have been unable to talk to most students; back then few of
them could speak.
These days, there are more than 100 high-functioning kids
fully capable of voicing their views, and Israel has
enlisted a few in his campaign to promote the ged. "If we
had only [severely] autistic students, they couldn't talk
to you and say, 'Gee, this is really helping me,'" Israel
says. "Now for the first time we have students like Katie
who can tell you it helped them."
In the world of the Rotenberg Center, Katie Spartichino is
a star. She left the facility in the spring of 2006 and now
attends community college in Boston. Around noon, a staff
member brings her back to the facility to talk to me. We
sit at an outdoor picnic table away from the surveillance
cameras but there's no privacy: Israel and Karen LaChance,
the assistant to the executive director for admissions, sit
with us.
Katie, 19, tells me she overdosed on pills at 9, spent her
early adolescence in and out of psych wards, was hooked up
to the ged at 16, and stayed on the device for two years.
"This is a great place," she says. "It took me off all my
medicine. I was close to 200 pounds and I'm 160 now." She
admits her outlook was less rosy when she first had to wear
the electrodes. "I cried," she says. "I kind of felt like I
was walking on eggshells; I had to watch everything I said.
Sometimes a curse word would just come out of my mouth
automatically. So being on the geds and knowing that
swearing was a targeted behavior where I would receive a
[GED] application, it really got me to think twice before I
said something disrespectful or something just plain-out
rude."
As Katie speaks, LaChance runs her fingers through Katie's
hair again and again. The gesture is so deliberate it draws
my attention. I wonder if it's just an expression of
affectionbor something more, like a reward.
"Do you swear anymore?" I ask.
"Oh, God, all the time," Katie says. She pauses. "Well, I
have learned to control it, but I'm not going to lie. When
I'm on the phone, curse words come out."
The hair stroking stops. LaChance turns to Katie. "I hope
you're not going to tell me you're aggressive."
"Oh, no, that's gone," Katie says. "No, no, no. The worst
thing I do sometimes is me and my mom get into little
arguments."
For Israel, of course, one drawback of having so many high-
functioning students is that he cannot control everything
they say. One afternoon, when I walk into a classroom of
teenagers, a 15-year-old girl catches my eye, smiles, and
holds up a sheet of paper with a message written in pink
marker: HELP US. She puts it back down and shuffles it into
her stack of papers before anyone else sees. When I move
closer, she tells me her name is Raquel, she is from the
Bronx, and she wants to go home.
My escorts allow me to interview Raquel while two of them
sit nearby.
Raquel is not hooked up to the ged, but she has many
complaints, including that she has just witnessed one of
her housemates get shocked. "She was screaming," Raquel
says. "They told her to step up to be searched; she didn't
want to step up to be searched, so they gave her one."
After 20 minutes, my escorts cut us off. "Raquel, you did a
great jobbthank you for taking the time," says Patricia
Rivera, the psychologist.
Once Raquel is out of earshot, Rivera adds, "Some of the
things she said are not true, some of them are. Our
students obviously have a tendency to lie about things."
She explains that a staff member searches Raquel's
housemate every hour because she's the one who recently
stabbed an employee with a pencil.
The Rotenberg Center does not have a rule about how old a
child must be before he or she can be hooked up to the ged.
One of the program's youngest students is a nine-year-old
named Rodrigo. When I see him, he is seated outside at a
picnic table with his aide. Rodrigo's backpack looks
enormous on his tiny frame; canvas straps dangle from both
legs.
"He was horrible when he first came in," Rivera says. "It
would take five staff to restrain him because he's so
wiry." What was he like? "A lot of aggression. A lot of
disruptive behavior. Whenever he was asked to do a task
that he didn't feel like doing, he would scream, yell,
swear. The stuff that would come out of his mouth you
wouldn't believebvery sexually inappropriate."
"Rodrigo, come here," one of my escorts says.
Rodrigo walks over, his straps slapping the ground. He
wears a white dress shirt and tiebthe standard uniform for
male studentsbbut because he is so small, maybe 4 feet
tall, his tie nearly reaches his thighs.
"What's that?" he asks.
"That's a tape recorder," I say. "Do you want to say
something?"
"Yeah."
Unfazed by the presence of Israel, Rivera, and my other
escorts, Rodrigo lifts a small hand and pulls the recorder
down toward his lips. "I want to move to another school,"
he says.
The Employee-Modification System
To understand how the Rotenberg Center works, it helps to
know that it runs not just one behavior-modification
program, but twobone for the residents, and one for the
staff. Employees have no autonomy. If a staffer believes
it's okay to shock a kid who is smashing his head against a
wall, but it's not okay to shock someone for getting out of
his chair without permission, that could spell trouble.
"There's pressure on you to do it," a former teacher told
me. "They punish you if you don't."
I met this former teacher at a restaurant, and our meeting
stretched on for six hours. At times it felt less like an
interview than a confession. "The first time you give
someone a ged is the worst one," the teacher said. "You
don't want to hurt somebody; you want to help.
You're thinking, 'This has got to be okay. This has got to
be legal, or they wouldn't be doing this.'" At the
Rotenberg Center, it's virtually impossible to discuss such
concerns with coworkers because there are cameras
everywhere, even in the staff break room. Staff members who
want to talk to each other without being overheard may meet
up in the parking lot or scribble notes to each other. But
it's hard to know whom to trust, since Israel encourages
employees to file anonymous reports about their coworkers'
lapses.
In addition, staff members are prohibited from having
casual conversations with each other. They cannot, for
example, say to a coworker, "Hey, did you see the Red Sox
game last night?" "We don't want them discussing their
social life or the ball games in front of the students or
while they're on duty," Israel says. "So we'll sometimes
actually have one staffer deliberately start a social
conversation with another and we'll see whether the
otherbas he or she shouldbwill say, 'I don't want to
discuss that now.'" Monitors watch these setups on the
surveillance cameras and punish staffers who take the bait.
Former employees describe a workplace permeated with
fearbfear of being attacked by students and fear of losing
their job. There are so many rulesband so many camerasbit's
not easy to stay out of trouble.
Employees quit or are fired so often that two-thirds of the
direct-care employees remain on the job for less than a
year.
New employees must sign a confidentiality agreement
promising not to talk about the Rotenberg Centerbeven after
they no longer work there.
Of the eight ex-employees I interviewed, most did not want
to be identified by name for fear of Israel suing them; all
were critical of how the ged is used. Maybe, says one, the
use of shocks was justified in a few extreme self-injurious
cases, but that's all. "Say you had a hospital that was the
only hospital in the nation that had chemotherapy, and they
were treating people who had the common cold with it," she
says. "I think the extreme to which they abuse their power
has outweighed what good they do."
The Hard Lessons of Connie Chung
Matthew Israel has been fielding questions from journalists
since the 1970s, but few have examined his operation as
thoroughlyband criticallybas the producers at Eye to Eye
with Connie Chung did. In 1993, they spent six months
investigating the facility. They even found an employee
willing to go inside with a hidden camera. But Israel ended
up getting the last laugh. As he recounts the story for me,
he can barely contain his glee. "We refused to meet with
her unless the parents could be in the same room," he says,
grinning. "She talked to the parents, and they really gave
it to her." This is no exaggeration: When Chung tried to
ask him tough questions, his parent-supporters shouted her
down.
Throughout this raucous meeting, Israel had his own camera
rolling, too, which turned out to be a brilliant move.
Before cbs got its 40-minute story on the air, Israel
launched a national campaign to discredit both Chung and
her report. He accused her of being "biased" and "hostile,"
and to prove it, he distributed edited videotapes of her
interview to media critics and cbs affiliates. It worked. A
New York Times television critic savaged cbs, accusing it
of using "shabby tricks of the trade." Suddenly the story
was not about whether the school had abused studentsbbut
whether cbs had abused the school.
"I don't think it was a positive thing for her career,"
says Israel, still smiling. It's late in the day, right
near the end of my visit, and I'm starting to wonder why
he's brought up this topic.
By now I've spent 22 hours with Israel and his
staffbwandering around the facility, meeting parents
they've brought in for me to interview.
But before I depart, there's one more place I want to see,
the room where they repair the geds. Israel and Glenda
Crookes, an assistant executive director, agree to take me
there. It is just past 7 p.m. and drizzling as we climb
into Israel's Lexus for a short drive to the maintenance
building.
There, Crookes and Israel lead me down a hall, past
storerooms filled with red helmets, ged sleds, batteries
and their chargers. The room at the end of the hall looks
like it could be a repair shop for any sort of electronics
equipment: scissors, screwdrivers, industrial-grade glue, a
Black & Decker Pivot Driver. On one desk, I spot a form
called a ged Trouble Report. The report explains that
someone dropped off Duane's shock device because it was
"making rattling noises." Crookes explains, "Anytime a
screw is loose or anything is wrong with the device, it's
automatically sent back here."
A Trouble Report on another desk suggests a more serious
problem: "Jamie Z was getting his battery changed, Luigi
received a shock." "What does this mean?" I ask. Crookes
picks up the paper, reads it, then hands it to Israel and
walks away. Her gesture seems to say, I cannot believe we
just spent two days with this reporter and now this is the
last thing she sees.
Israel stares at the report, then reaches into his pocket
and pulls out a pair of reading glasses. Nobody says
anything. Outside, one car after another races by, the tail
end of the evening commute.
After a minute or two, Israel says, "Well, I don't
understand the whole of it." He is still staring at the
paper in his hand. "But there was apparently a spontaneous
activation." The ged, in other words, delivered a shock
without anyone pressing its remote.
This moment reminds me of something Israel told me earlier
about the premise of Skinner's Walden Two, that by changing
people's behaviors you can help them have a better life.
But, Israel was careful to add, "The notion was that you
needed to have the whole environment under control. With a
school like this, we have an awful lot. Not the whole
environment, but an awful lot."
He was right; he controls nearly every aspect of his
facility. But all of his surveillance cameras and
microphones and paperwork and protocols had failed to
protect Luigi, a mentally retarded resident who had done
nothing wrong.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2007/08/school-shock
End of forwarded message from Tom Davos <***@gmail.com>
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School of Shock
[Caption] Eight states are sending autistic, mentally
retarded, and emotionally troubled kids to a facility that
punishes them with painful electric shocks. How many times
do you have to zap a child before it's torture?
By Jennifer Gonnerman
Mother Jones
August 20, 2007
Rob Santana awoke terrified. He'd had that dream again, the
one where silver wires ran under his shirt and into his
pants, connecting to electrodes attached to his limbs and
torso. Adults armed with surveillance cameras and remote-
control activators watched his every move. One press of a
button, and there was no telling where the shock would
hitbhis arm or leg or, worse, his stomach. All Rob knew was
that the pain would be intense.
Every time he woke from this dream, it took him a few
moments to remember that he was in his own bed, that there
weren't electrodes locked to his skin, that he wasn't about
to be shocked. It was no mystery where this recurring
nightmare came frombnot A Clockwork Orange or 1984, but the
years he spent confined in America's most controversial
"behavior modification" facility.
In 1999, when Rob was 13, his parents sent him to the Judge
Rotenberg Educational Center, located in Canton,
Massachusetts, 20 miles outside Boston. The facility, which
calls itself a "special needs school," takes in all kinds
of troubled kidsbseverely autistic, mentally retarded,
schizophrenic, bipolar, emotionally disturbedband attempts
to change their behavior with a complex system of rewards
and punishments, including painful electric shocks to the
torso and limbs.
Of the 234 current residents, about half are wired to
receive shocks, including some as young as nine or ten.
Nearly 60 percent come from New York, a quarter from
Massachusetts, the rest from six other states and
Washington, D.C. The Rotenberg Center, which has 900
employees and annual revenues exceeding $56 million,
charges $220,000 a year for each student. States and school
districts pick up the tab.
The Rotenberg Center is the only facility in the country
that disciplines students by shocking them, a form of
punishment not inflicted on serial killers or child
molesters or any of the 2.2 million inmates now
incarcerated in U.S. jails and prisons. Over its 36-year
history, six children have died in its care, prompting
numerous lawsuits and government investigations. Last year,
New York state investigators filed a blistering report that
made the place sound like a high school version of Abu
Ghraib. Yet the program continues to thrivebin large part
because no one except desperate parents, and a few state
legislators, seems to care about what happens to the
hundreds of kids who pass through its gates.
In Rob Santana's case, he freely admits he was an out-of-
control kid with "serious behavioral problems." At birth he
was abandoned at the hospital, traces of cocaine, heroin,
and alcohol in his body. A middle-class couple adopted him
out of foster care when he was 11 months old, but his
troubles continued. He started fires; he got kicked out of
preschool for opening the back door of a moving school bus;
when he was six, he cut himself with a razor. His mother
took him to specialists, who diagnosed him with a slew of
psychiatric problems: attention-deficit/hyperactivity
disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder,
and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Rob was at the Rotenberg Center for about three and a half
years. From the start, he cursed, hollered, fought with
employees. Eventually the staff obtained permission from
his mother and a Massachusetts probate court to use
electric shock. Rob was forced to wear a backpack
containing five two-pound, battery-operated devices, each
connected to an electrode attached to his skin. "I felt
humiliated," he says. "You have a bunch of wires coming out
of your shirt and pants." Rob remained hooked up to the
apparatus 24 hours a day. He wore it while jogging on the
treadmill and playing basketball, though it wasn't easy to
sink a jump shot with a 10-pound backpack on. When he
showered, a staff member would remove his electrodes, all
except the one on his arm, which he had to hold outside the
shower to keep it dry. At night, Rob slept with the
backpack next to him, under the gaze of a surveillance
camera.
Employees shocked him for aggressive behavior, he says, but
also for minor misdeeds, like yelling or cursing. Each
shock lasts two seconds.
"It hurts like hell," Rob says. (The school's staff claim
it is no more painful than a bee sting; when I tried the
shock, it felt like a horde of wasps attacking me all at
once. Two seconds never felt so long.) On several
occasions, Rob was tied facedown to a four-point restraint
board and shocked over and over again by a person he
couldn't see. The constant threat of being zapped did
persuade him to act less aggressively, but at a high cost.
"I thought of killing myself a few times," he says.
Rob's mother Jo-Anne deLeon had sent him to the Rotenberg
Center at the suggestion of the special-ed committee at his
school district in upstate New York, which, she says, told
her that the program had everything Rob needed. She
believed he would receive regular psychiatric
counselingbthough the school does not provide this.
As the months passed, Rob's mother became increasingly
unhappy. "My whole dispute with them was, 'When is he going
to get psychiatric treatment?'" she says. "I think they had
to get to the root of his problemsblike why was he so
angry? Why was he so destructive? I really think they
needed to go in his head somehow and figure this out." She
didn't think the shocks were helping, and in 2002 she sent
a furious fax demanding that Rob's electrodes be removed
before she came up for Parents' Day. She says she got a
call the next day from the executive director, Matthew
Israel, who told her, "You don't want to stick with our
treatment plan? Pick him up." (Israel says he doesn't
remember this conversation, but adds, "If a parent doesn't
want the use of the skin shock and wants psychiatric
treatment, this isn't the right program for them.")
Rob's mother is not the only parent angry at the Rotenberg
Center.
Last year, Evelyn Nicholson sued the facility after her 17-
year-old son Antwone was shocked 79 times in 18 months.
Nicholson says she decided to take action after Antwone
called home and told her, "Mommy, you don't love me anymore
because you let them hurt me so bad." Rob and Antwone don't
know each other (Rob left the facility before Antwone
arrived), but in some ways their stories are similar.
Antwone's birth mother was a drug addict; he was burned on
an electric hot plate as an infant. Evelyn took him in as a
foster child and later adopted him. The lawsuit she filed
against the Rotenberg Center set off a chain of events:
investigations by multiple government agencies, emotional
public hearings, scrutiny by the media. Legislation to
restrict or ban the use of electric shocks in such
facilities has been introduced in two state legislatures.
Yet not much has changed.
Rob has paid little attention to the public debate over his
alma mater, though he visits its website occasionally to
see which of the kids he knew are still there. After he
left the center he moved back in with his parents. At first
glance, he seems like any other 21-year-old: baggy Rocawear
jeans, black T-shirt, powder-blue Nikes.
But when asked to recount his years at the Rotenberg
Center, he speaks for nearly two hours in astonishing
detail, recalling names and specific events from seven or
eight years earlier. When he describes his recurring
nightmares, he raises both arms and rubs his forehead with
his palms.
Despite spending more than three years at this behavior-
modification facility, Rob still has problems controlling
his behavior. In 2005, he was arrested for attempted
assault and sent to jail. (This year he was arrested again,
for drugs and assault.) Being locked up has given him
plenty of time to reflect on his childhood, and he has
gained a new perspective on the Rotenberg Center. "It's
worse than jail," he told me. "That place is the worst
place on earth."
One Punishment Fits All
The story of the Rotenberg Center is in many ways a tale of
two schools. Slightly more than half the residents are what
the school calls "high functioning": kids like Rob and
Antwone, who have diagnoses like attention-deficit
disorder, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder,
and other emotional problems. The other group is even more
troubled. Referred to as "low functioning," it includes
kids with severe autism and mental retardation; most cannot
speak or have very limited verbal abilities. Some have
behaviors so extreme they can be life threatening: chomping
on their hands and arms, running into walls, nearly
blinding themselves by banging their heads on the floor
again and again.
The Rotenberg Center has long been known as the school of
last resortba place that will take any kid, no matter how
extreme his or her problems are. It doesn't matter if a
child has been booted out of 2, 5, 10, or 20 other
programsbhe or she is still welcome here. For desperate
parents, the Rotenberg Center can seem like a godsend. Just
ask Louisa Goldberg, the mother of 25-year-old Andrew, who
has severe mental retardation. Andrew's last residential
school kicked him out after he kept assaulting staff
members; the Rotenberg Center was the only place willing to
accept him. According to Louisa, Andrew's quality of life
has improved dramatically since 2000, when he was hooked up
to the shock device, known as the Graduated Electronic
Decelerator, or ged.
The Rotenberg Center has a policy of not giving psychiatric
drugs to studentsbno Depakote, Paxil, Risperdal, Ritalin,
or Seroquel. It's a policy that appeals to Louisa and many
other parents. At Andrew's last school, she says, "he had
so many medicines in him he'd take a two-hour nap in the
morning, he'd take a two-hour nap in the afternoon. They'd
have him in bed at eight o'clock at night. He was sleeping
his life away." These days, Louisa says she is no longer
afraid when her son comes home to visit. "[For him] to have
an electrode on and to receive a ged is to me a much more
favorable way of dealing with this," she says. "He's not
sending people to the hospital."
Marguerite Famolare brought her son Michael to the
Rotenberg Center six years ago, after he attacked her so
aggressively she had to call 911 and, in a separate
incident, flipped over a kitchen table onto a tutor.
Michael, now 19, suffers from mental retardation and severe
autism. These days, when he comes home for a visit,
Marguerite carries his shock activator in her purse. All
she has to do, she says, is show it to him. "He'll
automatically comply to whatever my signal command may be,
whether it is 'Put on your seatbelt,' or 'Hand me that
apple,' or 'Sit appropriately and eat your food,'" she
says. "It's made him a human being, a civilized human
being."
Massachusetts officials have twice tried to shut the
Rotenberg Center downbonce in the 1980s and again in the
1990s. Both times parents rallied to its defense, and both
times it prevailed in court. (See "Why Can't Massachusetts
Shut Matthew Israel Down?" page 44.) The name of the center
ensures nobody forgets these victories; it was Judge Ernest
Rotenberg, now deceased, who in the mid-'80s ruled that the
facility could continue using aversivesbpainful punishments
designed to change behaviorbso long as it obtained
authorization from the Bristol County Probate and Family
Court in each student's case. But even though the facility
wasn't using electric shock when this ruling was handed
down, the court rarely, if ever, bars the Rotenberg Center
from adding shock to a student's treatment plan, according
to lawyers and disability advocates who have tried to
prevent it from doing so.
Since Evelyn Nicholson filed her lawsuit in 2006, the
Rotenberg Center has faced a new wave of criticism and
controversy. (See "Nagging? Zap.
Swearing? Zap," page 41.) And again, the facility has
relied heavily on the testimonials of parents like Louisa
Goldberg and Marguerite Famolare to defend itself. Not
surprisingly, the most vocal parent-supporters tend to be
those with the sickest children, since they are the ones
with the fewest options. But at the Rotenberg Center, the
same methods of "behavior modification" are applied to all
kids, no matter what is causing their behavior problems.
And so, while Rob would seem to have little in common with
mentally retarded students like Michael and Andrew, they
all shared a similar fate once their parents placed them
under the care of the same psychologist, a radical
behaviorist known as Dr. Israel.
Dr. Israel's Radical Behavior
In 1950, matt israel was a Harvard freshman looking to fill
his science requirement. He knew little about B.F. Skinner
when he signed up for his course, Human Behavior. Soon,
though, Israel became fascinated with Skinner's scientific
approach to the study of behavior, and he picked up Walden
Two, Skinner's controversial novel about an experimental
community based on the principles of behaviorism. The book
changed Israel's life. "I decided my mission was to start a
utopian community," he says. Israel got a Ph.D. in
psychology in 1960 from Harvard, and started two communal
houses outside Boston.
One of the people Israel lived with was a three-year-old
named Andrea, the daughter of a roommate. The two did not
get along. "She was wild and screaming," Israel recalls. "I
would retreat to my own room, and she'd be trying to pull
away and get into my room, and I'd have to hold the door on
one side to keep her from disturbing me." When company
would come over, he says, "She would walk around with a toy
broom and whack people over the head."
Through experiments with rats and pigeons, Skinner had
demonstrated how animals learn from the consequences of
their actions. With permission from Andrea's mother, Israel
decided to try out Skinner's ideas on the three-year-old.
When Andrea was well behaved, Israel took her out for
walks. But when she misbehaved, he punished her by snapping
his finger against her cheek. His mentor Skinner preached
that positive reinforcement was vastly preferable to
punishment, but Israel says his methods transformed the
girl. "Instead of being an annoyance, she became a charming
addition to the house."
Israel's success with Andrea convinced him to start a
school. In 1971, he founded the Behavior Research Institute
in Rhode Island, a facility that would later move to
Massachusetts and become known as the Judge Rotenberg
Center. Israel took in children nobody else wantedbseverely
autistic and mentally retarded kids who did dangerous
things to themselves and others. To change their behavior,
he developed a large repertoire of punishments: spraying
kids in the face with water, shoving ammonia under their
noses, pinching the soles of their feet, smacking them with
a spatula, forcing them to wear a "white-noise helmet" that
assaulted them with static.
In 1977, Israel opened a branch of his program in
California's San Fernando Valley, along with Judy Weber,
whose son Tobin is severely autistic. Two years later, the
Los Angeles Times reported Israel had pinched the feet of
Christopher Hirsch, an autistic 12-year-old, at least 24
times in 30 minutes, while the boy screamed and cried. This
was a punishment for soiling his pants. ("It might have
been true," Israel says. "It's true that pinches were being
used as an aversive.
The pinch, the spank, the muscle squeeze, water sprays, bad
tasteball those procedures were being used.") Israel was in
the news again in 1981, when another student, 14-year-old
Danny Aswad, died while strapped facedown to his bed. In
1982, the California Department of Social Services compiled
a 64-page complaint that read like a catalog of horrors,
describing students with bruises, welts, and cuts. It also
accused Israel of telling a staff member "to grow his
fingernails longer so he could give an effective pinch."
In 1982, the facility settled with state officials and
agreed to stop using physical punishments. Now called
Tobinworld, and still run by Judy Weber, it is a $10-
million-a-year organization operating day schools near Los
Angeles and San Francisco. The Rotenberg Center considers
itself a "sister school" to Tobinworld, and Israel makes
frequent trips to California to visit Weber. The two were
married last year.
Despite his setback in California, Israel continued to
expand on the East Coastband to generate controversy. In
1985, Vincent Milletich, an autistic 22-year-old, suffered
a seizure and died after he was put in restraints and
forced to wear a white-noise helmet. Five years later, 19-
year-old Linda Cornelison, who had the mental capacity of a
toddler, refused to eat. On the bus to school, she clutched
her stomach; someone had to carry her inside, and she spent
the day on a couch in a classroom. Linda could not speak,
and the staff treated her actions as misbehaviors. Between
3:52 p.m. and 8 p.m., staffers punished her with 13 spatula
spankings, 29 finger pinches, 14 muscle squeezes, and 5
forced inhalings of ammonia. It turned out that Linda had a
perforated stomach. She died on the operating table at 1:45
a.m.
The local district attorney's office examined the
circumstances of Vincent's death but declined to file any
charges. In Linda's case, the Massachusetts Department of
Mental Retardation investigated and found that while
Linda's treatment had "violated the most basic codes and
standards of decency and humane treatment," there was
insufficient evidence to prove that the use of aversives
had caused her death.
By the time Linda died, Israel was moving away from
spatulas and toward electric shock, which, from his
perspective, offered many advantages. "To give a spank or a
muscle squeeze or a pinch, you had to control the student
physically, and that could lead to a struggle," he says. "A
lot of injuries were occurring." Since shocking only
required pressing a button, Israel could eliminate the need
for employees to wrestle a kid to the ground. Another
benefit, he says, was increased consistency. It was hard to
know if one staff member's spatula spanking was harder than
another's, but it was easy to measure how many times a
staff member had shocked a child.
Israel purchased a shock device then on the market known as
sibisbSelf-Injurious Behavior Inhibiting Systembthat had
been invented by the parents of an autistic girl and
delivered a mild shock that lasted .2 second. Between 1988
and 1990, Israel used sibis on 29 students, including one
of his most challenging, Brandon, then 12, who would bite
off chunks of his tongue, regurgitate entire meals, and
pound himself on the head. At times Brandon was required to
keep his hands on a paddle; if he removed them, he would
get automatic shocks, one per second. One infamous day,
Brandon received more than 5,000 shocks. "You have to
realize," Israel says. "I thought his life was in the
balance. I couldn't find any medical solution. He was
vomiting, losing weight. He was down to 52 pounds. I knew
it was risky to use the shock in large numbers, but if I
persevered that day, I thought maybe it would eventually
work. There was nothing else I could think of to do...but
by the time it went into the 3,000 or 4,000 range, it
became clear it wasn't working."
This day was a turning point in the history of Israel's
operationbthat's when he decided to ratchet up the pain.
The problem, he decided, was that the shock sibis emitted
was not strong enough. He says he asked sibis's
manufacturer, Human Technologies, to create a more powerful
device, but it refused. "So we had to redesign the device
ourselves," he says. He envisioned a device that would
start with a low current but that could increase the
voltage if neededbhence its name, Graduated Electronic
Decelerator or gedbbut he abandoned this idea early on. "As
it turns out, that's really not a wise approach," he says.
"It's sort of like operating a car and wearing out the
brakes because you never really apply them strongly enough.
Instead, we set it at a certain level that was more or less
going to be effective for most of our students."
Thirty years earlier, O. Ivar Lovaas, a psychology
professor at ucla, had pioneered the use of slaps and
screams and electric jolts to try to normalize the behavior
of autistic kids. Life magazine featured his work in a
nine-page photo essay in 1965 with the headline, "A
surprising, shocking treatment helps far-gone mental
cripples." Lovaas eventually abandoned these methods,
telling cbs in 1993 that shock was "only a temporary
suppression" because patients become inured to the pain.
"These people are so used to pain that they can adapt to
almost any kind of aversive you give them," he said.
Israel encountered this same sort of adaptation in his
students, but his solution was markedly different: He
decided to increase the pain once again. Today, there are
two shock devices in use at the Rotenberg Center: the ged
and the ged-4. The devices look similar and both administer
a two-second shock, but the ged-4 is nearly three times
more powerfulband the pain it inflicts is that much more
severe.
The Mickey Mouse Club
Ten years ago, Israel hung up a Mickey Mouse poster in the
main hall, and he noticed that it made people smilebso he
bought every Mickey Mouse poster he could find. He hung
them in the corridors and even papered the walls of what
became known as the Mickey Mouse Conference Room. Entering
the Rotenberg Center is a bit like stepping into a carnival
fun house, I discovered during a two-day visit last autumn.
Two brushed-aluminum dogs, each nearly 5 feet tall and
sporting a purple neon collar, stand guard outside. Giant
silver stars dangle from the lobby ceiling; the walls and
chairs in the front offices are turquoise, lime green, and
lavender.
Israel, 74, still holds the title of executive director,
for which he pays himself nearly $400,000 in salary and
benefits. He appears utterly unimposing: short and slender
with soft hands, rounded shoulders, curly white hair,
paisley tie. Then he sits down beside me and, unprompted,
starts talking about shocking children. "The treatment is
so powerful it's hard not to use if you have seen how
effective it is," he says quietly. "It's brief. It's
painful. But there are no side effects. It's two seconds of
discomfort." His tone is neither defensive nor apologetic;
rather, it's perfectly calm, almost soothing. It's the sort
of demeanor a mother might find comforting if she were
about to hand over her child.
Before we set off on our tour of the facility, there's
something Israel wants me to see: Before & After, a
homemade movie featuring six of his most severe cases.
Israel has been using some of the same grainy footage for
more than two decades, showing it to parents of prospective
students as well as visiting reporters. They've already
mailed me a copy, but Israel wants to make sure I watch it.
An assistant slips the tape into the vcr, Israel presses
the remote, and we all stare at the screen:
1977: An 11-year-old girl named Caroline arrives at the
school strapped down onto a stretcher, her head encased in
a helmet. In the next shot, free from restraints, she
crouches down and tries to smash her helmeted head against
the floor.
1981: Janine, also 11 years old, shrieks and slams her head
against the ground, a table, the door. Bald spots testify
to the severity of her troubles; she's yanked out so much
hair it's half gone.
Both girls exhibit autistic behaviors, and compared with
these scenes, the "After" footage looks almost
unbelievable: Janine splashes in a plastic pool, while
Caroline grins as she sits in a chair at a beauty salon.
"Most people haven't seen these pictures," Israel says,
setting down the remote. "They haven't seen children like
this, so they cannot imagine. These are children for whom
positive-only procedures did not work, drugs did not work.
And if it wasn't for this treatment, some of these people
would not be alive." The video is extremely persuasive: The
girls' self-abuse is so violent and so frightening that it
almost makes me want to grab a ged remote and push the
button myself. Of course, this is precisely the point.
Considering how compelling the "After" footage is, I am
surprised to learn that five of the six children featured
in it are still here.
"This is Caroline," one of my escorts says an hour or two
later as we walk down a corridor. Without an introduction,
I would not have known.
Caroline, 39, slumps forward in a wheelchair, her fists
balled up, head covered by a red helmet. "Blow me a kiss,
Caroline," Israel says.
She doesn't respond.
A few minutes later, I meet 36-year-old Janine, who appears
in much better shape. She's not wearing a helmet and has a
full head of black hair. She's also got a backpack on her
shoulders and canvas straps hanging from her legs, the
telltale sign that electrodes are attached to both calves.
For 16 yearsbnearly half her lifebJanine has been hooked up
to Israel's shock device. A couple years ago, when the
shocks began to lose their effect, the staff switched the
devices inside her backpack to the much more painful ged-4.
Rogue Science
In 1994, matthew israel had just 64 students. Today he has
234. This astonishing rate of growth is largely the result
of a dramatic change in the types of students he takes in.
Until recently, nearly all were "low functioning," autistic
and mentally retarded people. But today slightly more than
50 percent are "high functioning," with diagnoses like add,
adhd, and bipolar disorder. New York state supplies the
majority of these students, many of whom grew up in the
poorest parts of New York City. Yet despite this change in
his population, Israel's methods have remained essentially
the same.
Israel has long faced criticism that he has not published
research about his use of electric shocks in peer-reviewed
journals, where experts could scrutinize it. To defend his
methods, he points to a bibliography of 110 research
articles that he's posted on the Rotenberg Center website.
This catalog seems impressive at first.
Studied more closely, however, it is not nearly so
convincing.
Three-quarters of the articles were published more than 20
years ago.
Eight were written or cowritten by Lovaas, the ucla-
affiliated behaviorist. One of America's leading autism
experts, Lovaas long ago stopped endorsing painful
aversives. And Lovaas' old studies focus primarily on
children with autism who engage in extreme self-injurybnot
on troubled teens who have been diagnosed with adhd or add.
But then, it would be hard for Israel to find contemporary
research supporting his program, because the practice of
treating self-abusive kids with pain has been largely
abandoned. According to Dr. Saul Axelrod, a professor at
Temple University and an expert on behavior modification,
"the field has moved away from painful stimuli because of
public outcry and because we've devised better techniques,"
including determining the cause of an individual's self-
abuse.
Another expert Israel cites several times is Dr. Brian A.
Iwata, a consultant on the development of sibis, the device
Israel modified to create his ged. Now a professor of
psychology and psychiatry at the University of Florida,
he's a nationally recognized authority on treating severe
self-abuse among children with developmental disabilities.
Iwata has visited the Rotenberg Center and describes its
approach as dangerously simplistic: "There appears to be a
mission of that program to use shock for problem behaviors.
It doesn't matter what that behavior is." Iwata has
consulted for 25 states and says there is little
relationship between what goes on at Israel's program and
what goes on at other facilities. "He may have gotten his
Ph.D. at Harvard, but he didn't learn what he's doing at
Harvard. Whatever he's doing, he decided to do on his own."
Paul Touchette, who also studied with B.F. Skinner, has
known Israel since the 1960s when they were both in
Cambridge. Like Israel, Touchette went on to treat children
with autism who exhibit extreme self-abuse, but he isn't a
fan of Israel's approach either.
"Punishment doesn't get at the cause," says Touchette, who
is on the faculty of the University of California-Irvine
School of Medicine. "It just scares the hell out of
patients."
Over the decades, Touchette has followed Israel's career
and bumped into him at professional conferences. "He's a
very smart man, but he's an embarrassment to his
profession," Touchette says. "I've never been able to
figure out if Matt is a little off-kilter and actually
believes all this stuff, or whether he's just a clever
businessman."
Big Reward Store
At the rotenberg center, an elaborate system of rewards and
punishments governs all interactions. Well-behaved kids can
watch TV, go for pizza, play basketball. Students who've
earned points for good behavior visit a store stocked with
dvd players, cds, cologne, PlayStation 2, Essence magazine,
knockoff Prada pursesbanything the staff thinks students
might want. But even more prized is a visit to the "Big
Reward Store," an arcade full of pinball machines, video
games, a pool table, and the most popular feature, a row of
42-inch flat-screen TVs hooked up to Xbox 360s.
Students like the "brs" for another reasonbit's the only
place many can socialize freely. At the Rotenberg Center,
students have to earn the right to talk to each other. "We
had to wait until we were in brs to communicate with
others," says Isabel CedeC1o, a 16-year-old who ran away
from Rotenberg in 2006 after her boyfriend, a former
student, came and got her. "That was the only time you
really laughed, had fun, hung around with your friends.
Because usually, you can't talk to them. It was basically
like we had to have enemies. They didn't want us to be
friendly with nobody."
Students live grouped together in homes and apartments
scattered in nearby towns and are bused to the facility's
headquarters every morning. They spend their days in
classrooms, staring at a computer screen, their backs to
the teacher. They are supposed to teach themselves, using
self-instruction programs that include lessons in math,
reading, and typing. Even with breaks for gym and lunch,
the days can be incredibly dull. "On paper, it does look
like they're being educated, because we have lesson plans,"
says former teacher Jessica Croteau, who oversaw a
classroom of high-functioning teens for six months before
leaving in 2006. But "to self-teach is not exciting.
Why would the kids want to sit there and read a chapter on
their own without any discussion?"
Croteau says teachers have to spend so much time monitoring
misbehaviors there's often little time left for teaching.
Whenever a student disobeys a rule, a staff member must
point it out, using the student's name and just one or two
rote phrases like, "Mark, there's no stopping work. Work on
your task, please." Each time a student curses or yells, a
staffer marks it on the student's recording sheet.
Teachers and aides then use the sheet to calculate what
level of punishment is requiredbwhen to just say "No!" and
when to shock.
Employees carry students' shock activators inside plastic
cases, which they hook onto their belt loops. These cases
are known as "sleds," and each sled has a photo on it to
ensure employees don't zap the wrong kid.
Behaviorism would seem to dictate that staff shock students
immediately after they break the rules. But if employees
learn about a misbehavior after it has occurredbby, say,
reviewing surveillance footagebthey may still administer
punishment. Rob Santana recalls that Mondays were always
the most stressful day of the week. He would sit at his
desk all day, trying to remember if he had broken any rules
over the weekend, waiting to see if he'd be shocked.
Employees are encouraged to use the element of surprise.
"Attempt to be as discreet as possible and hold the
transmitter out of view of the student," states the
employee manual. This way, students cannot do anything to
minimize the pain, like flipping over their electrodes or
tensing their muscles. "We hear the sound of [a staffer]
picking up a sled," says Isabel, the former student. "Then
we turn around and see the person jump out of their seat."
Employees shock students for a wide range of behaviors,
from violent actions to less serious offenses, like getting
out of their seats without permission. In 2006, the New
York State Education Department sent a team of
investigators, including three psychologists, to the
Rotenberg Center, then issued a scathing report. Among its
many criticisms was that the staff shocked kids for
"nagging, swearing, and failing to maintain a neat
appearance." Israel only disputes the latter. As for
nagging and swearing? "Sometimes a behavior looks
innocuous," he says, "but if it's an antecedent for
aggression, it may have to be treated with an aversive."
New York officials disagreed, and in January 2007 issued
regulations that would prohibit shocking New York students
for minor infractions.
But a group of New York parents filed a federal lawsuit to
stop the state from enforcing these regulations. They
prevailed, winning a temporary restraining order against
the state, one that permits the Rotenberg Center staffers
to continue using shock. The parents' case is expected to
go to trial in 2008.
When they talk about why they use the shock device, Israel
and his employees like to use the word "treatment," but it
might be more accurate to use words like "convenience" or
"control." "The gedbit's two seconds and it's done," says
Patricia Rivera, a psychologist who serves as assistant
director of clinical services. "Then it's right back to
work." By contrast, it can take 8 or 10 employees half an
hour or longer to restrain a strong male student: to pin
him to the floor, wait for him to stop struggling, then
move his body onto a restraint board and tie down each
limb. Restraining five or eight kids in a single daybor the
same student again and againbcan be incredibly time-
consuming and sometimes dangerous.
Even with the ged, the stories both students and employees
tell make the place sound at times like a war zone: A
teenage boy sliced the gym teacher across the face with a
cd. A girl stabbed a staffer in the stomach with a pencil.
While staff have been contending with injuries ever since
Israel opened his facility, the recent influx of high-
functioning students, some with criminal backgrounds, has
brought a new fear: that students will join forces and
riot. Perhaps tellingly, among high-functioning kids most
of the violence is directed at the staff, not each other.
"Our Students Have a Tendency to Lie"
Rotenberg staff place the more troubled (or troublesome)
residents on 1:1 status, meaning that an aide monitors them
everywhere they go. For extremely violent students, the
ratio is 2:1. Soon after I arrived, right before I set off
on my tour, a small crowd gatheredbit seemed that almost
the entire hierarchy of the Rotenberg Center was going to
follow me around. That's when I realized I'd been put on
5:1. As I began to roam around the school with my escorts,
my every move monitored by surveillance cameras, I realized
it would be impossible to have a private conversation with
any student. The best I could hope for would be a few
unscripted moments.
Ten years ago, a reporter visiting Israel's center would
have been unable to talk to most students; back then few of
them could speak.
These days, there are more than 100 high-functioning kids
fully capable of voicing their views, and Israel has
enlisted a few in his campaign to promote the ged. "If we
had only [severely] autistic students, they couldn't talk
to you and say, 'Gee, this is really helping me,'" Israel
says. "Now for the first time we have students like Katie
who can tell you it helped them."
In the world of the Rotenberg Center, Katie Spartichino is
a star. She left the facility in the spring of 2006 and now
attends community college in Boston. Around noon, a staff
member brings her back to the facility to talk to me. We
sit at an outdoor picnic table away from the surveillance
cameras but there's no privacy: Israel and Karen LaChance,
the assistant to the executive director for admissions, sit
with us.
Katie, 19, tells me she overdosed on pills at 9, spent her
early adolescence in and out of psych wards, was hooked up
to the ged at 16, and stayed on the device for two years.
"This is a great place," she says. "It took me off all my
medicine. I was close to 200 pounds and I'm 160 now." She
admits her outlook was less rosy when she first had to wear
the electrodes. "I cried," she says. "I kind of felt like I
was walking on eggshells; I had to watch everything I said.
Sometimes a curse word would just come out of my mouth
automatically. So being on the geds and knowing that
swearing was a targeted behavior where I would receive a
[GED] application, it really got me to think twice before I
said something disrespectful or something just plain-out
rude."
As Katie speaks, LaChance runs her fingers through Katie's
hair again and again. The gesture is so deliberate it draws
my attention. I wonder if it's just an expression of
affectionbor something more, like a reward.
"Do you swear anymore?" I ask.
"Oh, God, all the time," Katie says. She pauses. "Well, I
have learned to control it, but I'm not going to lie. When
I'm on the phone, curse words come out."
The hair stroking stops. LaChance turns to Katie. "I hope
you're not going to tell me you're aggressive."
"Oh, no, that's gone," Katie says. "No, no, no. The worst
thing I do sometimes is me and my mom get into little
arguments."
For Israel, of course, one drawback of having so many high-
functioning students is that he cannot control everything
they say. One afternoon, when I walk into a classroom of
teenagers, a 15-year-old girl catches my eye, smiles, and
holds up a sheet of paper with a message written in pink
marker: HELP US. She puts it back down and shuffles it into
her stack of papers before anyone else sees. When I move
closer, she tells me her name is Raquel, she is from the
Bronx, and she wants to go home.
My escorts allow me to interview Raquel while two of them
sit nearby.
Raquel is not hooked up to the ged, but she has many
complaints, including that she has just witnessed one of
her housemates get shocked. "She was screaming," Raquel
says. "They told her to step up to be searched; she didn't
want to step up to be searched, so they gave her one."
After 20 minutes, my escorts cut us off. "Raquel, you did a
great jobbthank you for taking the time," says Patricia
Rivera, the psychologist.
Once Raquel is out of earshot, Rivera adds, "Some of the
things she said are not true, some of them are. Our
students obviously have a tendency to lie about things."
She explains that a staff member searches Raquel's
housemate every hour because she's the one who recently
stabbed an employee with a pencil.
The Rotenberg Center does not have a rule about how old a
child must be before he or she can be hooked up to the ged.
One of the program's youngest students is a nine-year-old
named Rodrigo. When I see him, he is seated outside at a
picnic table with his aide. Rodrigo's backpack looks
enormous on his tiny frame; canvas straps dangle from both
legs.
"He was horrible when he first came in," Rivera says. "It
would take five staff to restrain him because he's so
wiry." What was he like? "A lot of aggression. A lot of
disruptive behavior. Whenever he was asked to do a task
that he didn't feel like doing, he would scream, yell,
swear. The stuff that would come out of his mouth you
wouldn't believebvery sexually inappropriate."
"Rodrigo, come here," one of my escorts says.
Rodrigo walks over, his straps slapping the ground. He
wears a white dress shirt and tiebthe standard uniform for
male studentsbbut because he is so small, maybe 4 feet
tall, his tie nearly reaches his thighs.
"What's that?" he asks.
"That's a tape recorder," I say. "Do you want to say
something?"
"Yeah."
Unfazed by the presence of Israel, Rivera, and my other
escorts, Rodrigo lifts a small hand and pulls the recorder
down toward his lips. "I want to move to another school,"
he says.
The Employee-Modification System
To understand how the Rotenberg Center works, it helps to
know that it runs not just one behavior-modification
program, but twobone for the residents, and one for the
staff. Employees have no autonomy. If a staffer believes
it's okay to shock a kid who is smashing his head against a
wall, but it's not okay to shock someone for getting out of
his chair without permission, that could spell trouble.
"There's pressure on you to do it," a former teacher told
me. "They punish you if you don't."
I met this former teacher at a restaurant, and our meeting
stretched on for six hours. At times it felt less like an
interview than a confession. "The first time you give
someone a ged is the worst one," the teacher said. "You
don't want to hurt somebody; you want to help.
You're thinking, 'This has got to be okay. This has got to
be legal, or they wouldn't be doing this.'" At the
Rotenberg Center, it's virtually impossible to discuss such
concerns with coworkers because there are cameras
everywhere, even in the staff break room. Staff members who
want to talk to each other without being overheard may meet
up in the parking lot or scribble notes to each other. But
it's hard to know whom to trust, since Israel encourages
employees to file anonymous reports about their coworkers'
lapses.
In addition, staff members are prohibited from having
casual conversations with each other. They cannot, for
example, say to a coworker, "Hey, did you see the Red Sox
game last night?" "We don't want them discussing their
social life or the ball games in front of the students or
while they're on duty," Israel says. "So we'll sometimes
actually have one staffer deliberately start a social
conversation with another and we'll see whether the
otherbas he or she shouldbwill say, 'I don't want to
discuss that now.'" Monitors watch these setups on the
surveillance cameras and punish staffers who take the bait.
Former employees describe a workplace permeated with
fearbfear of being attacked by students and fear of losing
their job. There are so many rulesband so many camerasbit's
not easy to stay out of trouble.
Employees quit or are fired so often that two-thirds of the
direct-care employees remain on the job for less than a
year.
New employees must sign a confidentiality agreement
promising not to talk about the Rotenberg Centerbeven after
they no longer work there.
Of the eight ex-employees I interviewed, most did not want
to be identified by name for fear of Israel suing them; all
were critical of how the ged is used. Maybe, says one, the
use of shocks was justified in a few extreme self-injurious
cases, but that's all. "Say you had a hospital that was the
only hospital in the nation that had chemotherapy, and they
were treating people who had the common cold with it," she
says. "I think the extreme to which they abuse their power
has outweighed what good they do."
The Hard Lessons of Connie Chung
Matthew Israel has been fielding questions from journalists
since the 1970s, but few have examined his operation as
thoroughlyband criticallybas the producers at Eye to Eye
with Connie Chung did. In 1993, they spent six months
investigating the facility. They even found an employee
willing to go inside with a hidden camera. But Israel ended
up getting the last laugh. As he recounts the story for me,
he can barely contain his glee. "We refused to meet with
her unless the parents could be in the same room," he says,
grinning. "She talked to the parents, and they really gave
it to her." This is no exaggeration: When Chung tried to
ask him tough questions, his parent-supporters shouted her
down.
Throughout this raucous meeting, Israel had his own camera
rolling, too, which turned out to be a brilliant move.
Before cbs got its 40-minute story on the air, Israel
launched a national campaign to discredit both Chung and
her report. He accused her of being "biased" and "hostile,"
and to prove it, he distributed edited videotapes of her
interview to media critics and cbs affiliates. It worked. A
New York Times television critic savaged cbs, accusing it
of using "shabby tricks of the trade." Suddenly the story
was not about whether the school had abused studentsbbut
whether cbs had abused the school.
"I don't think it was a positive thing for her career,"
says Israel, still smiling. It's late in the day, right
near the end of my visit, and I'm starting to wonder why
he's brought up this topic.
By now I've spent 22 hours with Israel and his
staffbwandering around the facility, meeting parents
they've brought in for me to interview.
But before I depart, there's one more place I want to see,
the room where they repair the geds. Israel and Glenda
Crookes, an assistant executive director, agree to take me
there. It is just past 7 p.m. and drizzling as we climb
into Israel's Lexus for a short drive to the maintenance
building.
There, Crookes and Israel lead me down a hall, past
storerooms filled with red helmets, ged sleds, batteries
and their chargers. The room at the end of the hall looks
like it could be a repair shop for any sort of electronics
equipment: scissors, screwdrivers, industrial-grade glue, a
Black & Decker Pivot Driver. On one desk, I spot a form
called a ged Trouble Report. The report explains that
someone dropped off Duane's shock device because it was
"making rattling noises." Crookes explains, "Anytime a
screw is loose or anything is wrong with the device, it's
automatically sent back here."
A Trouble Report on another desk suggests a more serious
problem: "Jamie Z was getting his battery changed, Luigi
received a shock." "What does this mean?" I ask. Crookes
picks up the paper, reads it, then hands it to Israel and
walks away. Her gesture seems to say, I cannot believe we
just spent two days with this reporter and now this is the
last thing she sees.
Israel stares at the report, then reaches into his pocket
and pulls out a pair of reading glasses. Nobody says
anything. Outside, one car after another races by, the tail
end of the evening commute.
After a minute or two, Israel says, "Well, I don't
understand the whole of it." He is still staring at the
paper in his hand. "But there was apparently a spontaneous
activation." The ged, in other words, delivered a shock
without anyone pressing its remote.
This moment reminds me of something Israel told me earlier
about the premise of Skinner's Walden Two, that by changing
people's behaviors you can help them have a better life.
But, Israel was careful to add, "The notion was that you
needed to have the whole environment under control. With a
school like this, we have an awful lot. Not the whole
environment, but an awful lot."
He was right; he controls nearly every aspect of his
facility. But all of his surveillance cameras and
microphones and paperwork and protocols had failed to
protect Luigi, a mentally retarded resident who had done
nothing wrong.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2007/08/school-shock
End of forwarded message from Tom Davos <***@gmail.com>
Jai Maharaj
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Om Shanti
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