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Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break or handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. If you could completely remove one phrase from your vocabulary, which phrase would you choose? I don't know. Correct answer. No, I meant I don't know which phrase, and the best way to banish I don't know from your life is by cramming your brain full of stuff you should know. Join your host, Josh and Chuck on the Super Popular podcast packed with fascinating discussions on science, history, pop culture and more episodes that ask, was the lost city of Atlantis Real? I don't know. Is birth order important? I don't know. How does pizza work? Well, I do know. Bit about that see? You can know even more, because stuff you should know has over 1500 immensely interesting episodes for your brain to feast on. So what do you say? I don't want to miss the stuff you should know. Podcast you're learning already. Listen to stuff you should know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your Co host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast, in this special episode. You're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her social discoveries on chimpanzees. For four, oh, months, the chimps ran away from me. I mean, they take one look at this peculiar white ape and disappear into the vegetation. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to behind the ******** the podcast where we talk about real bleak ****. And boy howdy my guest today, Aiden Bonacci. Aiden, did I get it right this time? Yes, you did, Ben. Thanks for having me? Yeah, how are you? How are you enjoying learning about the Judge Rotenberg Center? I am not surprised, but I'm also very depressed. Yeah, well, it's about to get a lot worse. Actually, significantly worse. Vastly worse one. How do you feel about electrocuting children? Huck. Yeah, that's the right response. Can we stop with the electricity once, please? God, no, no, no. It's a yeah. We actually should start this episode by talking a bit more about the parents who have made Matt Israel's career possible. It should be clear by everything I've said so far that I think they're wrong and in some cases profoundly abusive. But people who are wrong can have compelling reasons for being wrong that are not easily dismissed. George Nazareth, former head of the Rhode Island Human Rights Committee and the first person to take a serious, deep look at the ****** ** workings of BRIC. Probably put it best when he was asked by a reporter from the Boston Phoenix why so many parents would sign off on approval to have their children abused. Quote. Desperate parents will sign anything you become desperate about a lot of things. Some of the parents at BRIC are now saying they want the program to continue. They think the state will send their children back home. Some parents would blow their brains out if the state sent their children back home. They've been through the mill. Yeah, I mean, there's. It's they have their reasons, but at the same time it's like just because it may seem like the right thing doesn't mean it is. It's certainly not, and I'm not trying to say. And part of what I'm getting at here is that I'm. A lot of these parents, why they like the Bri isn't that it's helping their kids, it's that it's keeping their kids away. And and the Judge Rotenberg Center is taking kids from multiple states. They're taking the most severe kids. And it's not right that a lot of parents are willing to accept this school because it keeps their kids away. But that's the that's that's where they are. And there it is not a thing of like, they're not. It's not that I don't think they see themselves as being cruel. I think they're unthinkably desperate. In a lot of cases, and they're not, there aren't a lot of options for them. And that's that doesn't defend this because again, I'm we're spending 10,000 words and two hours talking about how bad this place is. Oh yeah, it's an excusable, but yeah, it it. But it's not unexcusable. Yeah, it's not OK, it's not acceptable. But it is the result of of a desperation more supreme than I think most people can grasp, especially. And this becomes less the case because now I think the parents who are defending it have options. It's ******* 1985, like autism as a diagnosis is 5 years old. What options do you have? Not that this was the right one, but there's just not a lot of good ones. There's. And not, or even any of them besides this one. Yeah. And it's, you know, even even if there were and and, you know, there are in some cases other options for parents and I I don't want to also make it like look like it was more. But also the amount of education the parents might have about what's available is minimal. Like it's just, Oh yeah, you you have to and again, really want to emphasize that we're not, we're not trying to whitewash either the parents or what's happening at this facility. But like, absolutely it's a desperate situation and that's that. That's part of what I think condemns Matt Israel more because he is taking advantage of this. Desperate situation to test his weird. You like human behavioral modification theories he's taking advantage of? Of this horrible, horrible situation? Yeah, like what you mentioned in the last part. He sees them more as features than as actual children. This is just something to show off. Yeah, something to show off how good he is at plugging in new stimuli to alter their behavior. And it doesn't matter to him. I think that this is that he's just torturing these kids and to stopping behavior he's not changing. He's not, he's not helping them. He's temporarily stopping them from doing something via violence. I don't think he cares cause the behavior has stopped and he has no problem continuing the violence forever. In fact, he gets he gets paid if he gets to continue the violence forever. Yeah, it's real bleak. Ohhh. Yeah. So, George Nazareth, the guy who gave that quote about some parents would blow their brains out if they sent their children back home. They've been through hell. Nazareth is #1. He's the guy who carries out the first big investigation of BR and condemns it. Unequivocally, he's also the parent himself of a mentally disabled daughter. I don't know how to be more specific about her condition than that, because in the 1985 article where I found this, she's just referred to as ********. The fact that a thoughtful, compassionate and very ethical man like George Nazareth would use that term for his own daughter is a sign of how primitive the things were in that. In terms of the science. Because this was not considered an offensive term. There are advocacy agencies called like the Organization for ********. Persons and whatnot that use that word, and I I bring this up because the primitiveness of the terminology and use suggests how primitive the other methods of treatment were as well. While the Judge Rotenberg Center was marked out by experts at the time for its brutality, the gold standard of care during that. Also involved a lot of unnecessary force and medication, which is a kind of force on these parents, say they're worried their kids would get stuck in an institution and drug to unconsciousness. That is not a lie or an unreasonable fear. A lot of these people aren't impossible situations. Matt Israel promised he could help their kids, and in many cases he at least seems to have delivered. And one of the things that he does that makes this such a, that makes him so good at at getting these people to believe in him is these are beautiful facilities. These are not dank and frightening looking places. They're not run down, they're colorful, they're filled with toys and statues of of creatures and like they're, he makes them look extremely friendly and comfortable. So if you're a parent taking your kid and this place looks like a wonderful place for your kid to live and and and. And be treated and he can say, like, hey, your kid's been biting or tearing open his skin and that stops after a couple of weeks and maybe you don't notice why it's stopping and what he's doing to stop it, you know? It's also a lot of the parents who defend him aren't entirely aware of what's going on at the school. And you can blame them to some degree for not availing themselves of the information that's out because there are reports on this place, but that is the situation. So by 1985, Matt is real school, which is still called the Behavioral Research Institute at this point, received $87,000 per student per year and a lot of that wound up in Israel's pocket. His compensation topped out, I think around 2000 at 300,000. Dollars a year. So he's making a very comfortable income, but at the same time he is putting most of the money into this facility. These are expensive facilities to run. They're in many cases multiple full time employees per student. That Boston Phoenix article, which was a major source for episode one, was written during the massive series of legal battles between the state of Massachusetts and Bri. Thanks to Judge Rotenberg, those struggles eventually went Israel's way, but at the time the article was written, he did not know that. And the piece ends on this ominous line quote. If Massachusetts shut down Bri, Israel says he may open group homes in Rhode Island. Israel thinks the current crackdown may lead to greater understanding of his philosophy and allow him a greater array of behavioral modification tools. I've never used electric shock, he says in his calm, soft voice. I wouldn't rule it out, particularly if we were deprived of other procedures. It's more effective, and you wouldn't bruise or cut the skin. Oh, **** yeah, that's real bad. Scary. And I I kind of flipped out a little when I read that in this 1985 article. And I I should note here the only reason I have access to that article because that's a 36 year old article. It was originally published in a physical newspaper. I was able to read it because several copies have been archived by different disability justice advocates. Autistic civil rights advocates have a very particular interest in documenting that Israel's early career and his crimes. That's awesome. Yeah, they're doing this because they think he's basically a war criminal. Which, by the way, the UN agrees with. And they're they're trying to make sure, like, I, I'm, I'm, I'm assuming a, an autistic civil rights advocate who was like red came across an old copy of that, read that into piece where he starts talking about how he's looking into electric shock and was like, well, this needs to be preserved. Like at some point there's going to be a reconciliation Commission or whatever, and we need to document this ****. When we left off in the late 1980s, Bri was still Bri, but Judge Rotenberg had just saved it. Or, to be more accurate, the judge had saved its ability to use physical punishments on students. In 1990, another student, Linda Cornelison, died. Yeah, it's it's a weird SCORNELISON. I've never seen that last name before, but I think Linda Cornelison in 1990, she died, and she was a a nonverbal student at the facility, which she's she's not really able to use language to communicate. And one day she started grabbing her stomach while she was on the bus to school and let these kids, they'll go to a school and then they'll go home to a residential facility that Bri runs. When she arrived at the at the at her school, a nurse decided that she was just acting to try to like, get attention or something and sent her back to class. After school, she was sent back to a Bri run residential home where she lived. Staff were angry at her bad behavior. They believed this nurse basically like, oh, she's she's playing around by pretending to have stomach pain. So they gave her 13 spatula. Bankings 29 finger pinches, 14 muscle squeezes and forced her to inhale ammonia 5 times. She died in the hospital the next day. Yeah, and again. Her the cause of death was gastric perforation, which I don't think was caused by any of the aversives that were done at the school. But the fact that she was not taken to the hospital earlier, her pain was not treated seriously. That's certainly their fault and also super negligible. Yeah, very, very bad. Like, I I would feel comfortable saying they killed her even though maybe they didn't cause the thing that I would say the ammonia was just like, might have helped but didn't help. Yeah. And Linda's mom insists. He never her daughter never had gastrointestinal problems before. It's maybe it might even be possible that, like the stress from all the aversives that helped cause the gastro into I'm not a doctor. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna speculate further other than to say that by not taking this problem seriously when she started to complain and this is again part of like, the the the bigotry, I guess you would say I think, yeah, bigotry is a fair thing to say because she's not verbal. They assume she's not capable of expressing a serious concern about a health problem, right? She has to be just like fooling around, trying to trick you. And that's that is a kind of bigotry. And it led to it's a bigotry that led to this girl's death. So the state found after the the autopsy and whatnot that that while Bri had not caused her death, the IT had quote violated the most basic codes and standards of decency and how it treated her. And while. So while there were no charges on Matt Israel or the facility as a result of Linda's death, it did have an impact on him. He decided that there were too many different kinds of physical punishment at his school, and the nature and impact of those punishments varied too much from teacher to teacher. In other words, he was concerned that one. Employees pinch could be a mild pinch and another could cause a bleeding wound. He wanted more uniform physical aversives and he decided that electric shocks were the best way to do this. The machine he picked was called the self injurious behavior inhibiting system. It was made of an electrode and a radio transmitter which were attached to the arm or leg via Velcro. The shock was described as like being like struck by a rubber band. You know, somebody pulls back a rubber band. Like not serious, not a real, like a very mild shock. It lasted about 1/5 of a second. One 1990 paper on the SBS CIBUS system said the shock caused quote almost complete elimination of self harming behavior. We can debate whether or not this kind of treatment is ever ethical, but it is important to note and and and whether it's ethical is again a separate question from whether or not it works. We'll talk about that a bit later. We can debate that. It is important to note here that this machine was not designed as a punishment. They were not trying to shock kids to punish them, they were trying to. Interrupt them when they were harming themselves. Right. The people who made this machine felt that such extreme measures were justified if the mild shock would stop a kid from biting through their hand or bashing their head against a wall. And again, I am not saying this is the right move and and in fact that the evidence suggests that this doesn't really work all that well. I get why I don't think these scientists who say, well, let's try this, we're we're being monsters. Even though we can say this was a bad road to go down and did not help you, they are not. Trying to punish kids. They're trying to stop kids from hurting themselves and again, it doesn't work, but it's not the start Rd for this technology is not monstrous. Yeah, it's a folio malicious. It's just. No, that's why unethical, you can say unwise, say ineffective. They're not. They're not doing what mad Israel comes to do. They're not trying to hurt these kids. Hmm. They are trying to interrupt dangerous behavior. I just think that's important to note because you you again. It's this thing that you see in science where like someone will have an idea that isn't inherently horrible, but because of how another person takes it and evolves it, it becomes something profoundly abusive. I just think it's important to note this doesn't start as an abusive behavior. It starts as as a desperate attempt to stop people from hurting themselves. Israel School was an early adopter of Sibis. Matt liked the consistency of the shock. He liked that applying it required less manpower. And holding down a child to assault their feet. The BR I tested it on 29 students over 14 months. One early Guinea pig was Brandon Sanchez, an autistic boy who was also the nephew of a state representative. From Wired quote, Brandon banged his head until he cracked it open. He once chewed off part of his tongue. He was a ruminator too. He would vomit, chew the vomit, swallow it, and vomit again. The acidity was burning his esophagus. The vomiting was causing him to lose weight. Israel thought Sibis might be the only way to save this 12 year old's life. Brandon was down to 50. £2.00 Israel and his staff started with the treatments. 50 shocks became 100, A 100 became 505, hundred became 1000, and they still shocked more. Brandon wasn't responding. So 2000 shocks and then 3004 thousand after roughly 5000 shocks in a day. Israel told his staff to stop. The shocks weren't strong enough, Israel thought. He asked Cibus's developers to increase the voltage. They refused, and that's when Israel made his own machine. So you see what's happened here? I mean that's First off horrific fight. If you're doing that 5000 times and it doesn't work you the problem isn't it's not strong enough. The problem is it doesn't work. Yeah, I was going to say after like shocking a kid 5000 times to be like, hey, maybe we're not doing it right. And and the the the people who developed this again didn't intend it to be used this way because he is using it the way he uses all aversives as a consistent punishment for a thing that they do. So they do a behavior they're not supposed to do, you punish them. The shock. That's not what this is intended for. This was intended to disrupt someone physically from a from an action. It was it was kind of like a, a tourniquet. It was an emergency procedure, you know? Yeah, and he is not using it that way. And the way he's using it doesn't work. But instead of realizing maybe you're going down the wrong Rd, he decides that they just need to be electrocuted more. The machine that they built was called that. Well, he and he works with an engineer on this, right. He doesn't do it all on himself, but the machine that Israel has built that he calls the graduated electronic decelerator, like decelerate, you know, like the opposite of acceleration. Yeah, he this machine, the GED, would become Matt Israel's main claim to infamy. It was three times stronger than cibus and it shocked, lasted a full 2 seconds instead of 1/5 of a second. Now, this is a significant escalation and it's a dangerous. But, uh, yeah. Around a year of testing the GED, Israel became convinced that it still was not strong enough. Students had gotten used to the shocks, so he developed a new, even more powerful device, one that could deliver extremely painful shocks. Israel was not the first psychologist working with this community to use electric shocks. IFR Levas, a doctor with UCLA, had experimented with cattle prods on children in the early 1970s. He was a major advocate for electric shocks as a behavioral modification. Aid early on, but in 1987 this doctor Levas published a study that showed that after 40 weeks of 1 on one therapy, autistic preschoolers could attain what he called normal functioning without any kind of aversives. In 1993, Lavas admitted that he had been wrong, and he strongly rejected his early work, saying that shock therapy was at best a short term solution that did not fix problems and was not worth the pain it caused. So levos pretty ****** ** to cattle prod. Kids. But he eventually he does his research. He yeah, yeah. He eventually was walked through. Yeah, I was wrong. This is ****** **. Don't do it now. When Matt is real and I I should also note that I don't wanna make it seem too easy. What he's saying here, like these, these 40 weeks of 1 on one therapy, that's a lot of work and we'll talk about this more. Yeah, it's a commitment. It is a commitment and it's what these kids deserve, obviously. But it's absolutely not often what there's resources or what schools are willing to devote resources, what the state is willing to devote resources to do. And there's furthermore the thought that because the, the, the the adults doing this work. Are not well paid. Generally there are some. There are some specialists who are very well compensated. There are some. There's some specific facilities that train and hire professionals and pay them well. That is not the norm. I got about $8.00 an hour and again, no training. We're not going to get someone to perform the kind of 1 on one therapy that lavas is showing can work on these kids and can can stop these kind of behaviors. You are not going to get that with someone making $8.00 an hour and 8 hours a day. You know, it's just not possible. And especially we brought this up in part one where they had to do a quick turnaround and like just two weeks with a lot of these examples and with that $8.00 an hour and yeah, no, it's just. You don't have any means to do so. You do not. And it's so much of the problem here and again that Israel is the primary ******* but the fact that. On the whole, all the state usually wants to do with these and it's a mix. They're willing to devote more resources to the kids who will be able to work a full time job and like make a living, right. A lot of these kids for whatever reason aren't aren't aren't going to be able to do that. They're not going to be able to live. What what I guess what you would say the state considers to be a normal life, which is an economically productive life. And so the goal becomes how do we warehouse these kids for the least amount of money as opposed to. Is there anything we can do to to give them a richer life to to help them, like be healthier? And it's some. It's something we've seen time and time again, not just here. It's like how how can we take these people who aren't going to be productive, quote UN quote, in our society? Like couples and and help them out for the least amount of money. It's, yeah, honestly. Depressing and infuriating it is, and it's it's again, part of the villain here is the reduction of human beings to their their pure economic potential. Yeah, so when Matt Israel started applying aversives to children with behavioral issues in the early 1970s, data on how Aversives worked was severely mixed. By the early 1980s, though, clinicians and researchers had published significant studies showing positive reinforcement. Could work in the most difficult cases. What it required was constant quote functional analysis, which is monitoring patients all day and night to discover what is causing the behavior and then to redirect those feelings. It's basically saying that like, well, you need a level if you're going to reinforce, if you're going to change these behaviors. In positive reinforcement, it it's it's a full like 24 hours a day job monitoring these kids, seeing what's causing the behaviors and redirecting them. That's obviously very expensive and difficult. The best solution is the most effortful and the most. Expensive one. Meanwhile, electrocuting kids works in the short term to stop behavior that's undesirable. And, yeah, that's that's kind of why this happens. In 1991, a guy named Phillip Campbell became commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Mental Retardation, which, again, that's the name of this government agency. Yeah, yeah. Again, the dark ages and this the Massachusetts Department of Mental Retardation regarded Bri as horrible. Like, rightfully so. They were also. The organization that was supposed to regulate it. So Phillip Campbell comes into to running this department and hates this school that his his department is regulating. With good reason. Ohh absolutely. And he goes after Bri, but unfortunately he decides to break the law to do so and he was eventually found to have leaked false reports about the school to the press and there's plenty of bad reports about the school. But he he does not go through this in a legal or ethical way and it causes a worse problem because BR is able to go to the court. And argue they had been wronged by Philip Campbell, and the court agreed. And Campbell's irresponsible behavior led in 1997 to a Massachusetts Supreme Court ruling that found he and his department in were in contempt of court. The state was ordered to pay more than $1,000,000 in court costs, and the department was effectively dissolved. So now the Judge Rotenberg Center, and they start calling it the Judge Rotenberg Center in honor of the judge who was most responsible for getting them. Through this period of of legal fighting, the Judge Rotenberg Center no longer is monitored by a state. Watchdog. Instead, they're only being monitored by an independent attorney hired by the probate court, which means they're effectively unregulated for a wow, that's fun. Yeah, and this is the period in which the use of he starts to experiment with electric shocks in, like, 1990 ninety one. But after 1997, it really explodes. Now that they're free to do whatever the **** mad Israel wants, the school expands massively. It's enrollment more than double s from 110 kids, and this is just the the the Providence facility to 228. In the space of about four years, the school's budget balloons from 18 million to $56 million. The patient base grows to include kids whose problems were not just like the result of a a diagnosis, but also largely behavior based. So kids who'd gotten in legal trouble, kids who had, in some cases, come from jail. Some of them are like kids with ADHD who, like, steal a car or something. In the early aughts, the school's educational policy also changes, and they switch from teaching kids. And the goal being, at least ostensibly, this is still a school. We're trying to alter their behavior, but we're also trying to educate them. To they they stopped trying to educate them. Really, they they move on to simply managing the behavior, one psychologist who worked at the Judge Rotenberg Center later told Wired. Quote, Israel couldn't stand them not behaving in a perfectly controlled way. And so now that he's in total control and without oversight, Matt Israel turns the Judge Rotenberg Center into a perfect prison, one in which every single kind of behavior can be tracked, judged and punished at the push of a button. But you know what's also a perfect prison? Ohh dear God. Baby capitalism. Yeah, you gotta love perfect prison. So lock yourself in with these products and services. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month, Mint mobile will give you the best rate. 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For more than a decade, we hear at stuff they don't want you to know have been seeking answers to these questions, sometimes their answers that people would rather us not explore. Now we're sharing this research. With you for the first time ever in a book format, you can pre-order stuff they don't want you to know now. It's the new book from us, the creators of the podcast and video series. You can turn back now or read the stuff they don't want you to know. Available for pre-order now, it's stuff you should read books.com or wherever you find your favorite books. All right, we are. We're back, and we're we're talking about horrible things. So I I just told you that he he is able to, after 97, turned the Judge Rotenberg Center into a perfect prison. And I'm going to read a quote from rot Wired that I think makes the point of what a ******* nightmare this. Here we go. Hmm. Yeah. Strap in. JRC has always believed in punishing not only the negative behavior but also the actions that presage it. A face slapper could be shocked for simply raising his hand. This is called treating the antecedent. A lot of things can be antecedents at JRC. Yelling, refusing a teacher's order, talking out of turn. Another psychologist who left in 2002 says those aren't precursors to violence so much as ordinary classroom disturbances. JRC has video monitors in every room of the school, in every residence has had. Since 1975, certain staffers called Quality Control sit in the Control room day at night, a wall of television monitors and computer screens before them, watching everyone. And because the rooms are miked, hearing everything, the control room is ostensibly to ensure that students are shocked for the inappropriate behaviors that an employee might miss. When that happens, quality control phones the staffer in the room, who then applies the shock. But the people who sit in the control room serve another purpose. They're watching their own if say. A teacher in a classroom refuses to shock a kid. He or she is written up. The write ups carry the Orwellian title performance improvement opportunities. Anyone can tattle on anyone else, regardless of the station. The school has staffers whose job is to read and track those forms. Get enough of them and you're gone. So yeah, that's wow, Buck. That's horrifying. Yeah. It also, it's making the point here with the treating the anesthetic and stuff. So again, they have to go to a judge to get approved to use aversives and to shock kids like or to go to a probate court. So they have to get legal approval to do this. And the way they do that is by saying the only option they're violent, they're hurting themselves or hurting other people and the only way to stop that is by applying the shocks, right. That's how they justify this. But and so the the probate court is saying, OK, in order to stop this kid from hurting or even killing themselves, you are allowed to shock. OK, but the Judge Rotenberg Center, because of how they view antecedents, can define raising their hand, not sitting down when told to, refusing to take off a jacket, refusing to put on shoes, all of that. They can call antecedents to a violent behavior. And so they can electrocute kids for anything, for flapping their hands by saying that will lead to violence if we don't electrocute them early. Yeah, they can just do fast and loose. Exactly. So they are always saying, and when they defend themselves. Only do these shocks in in order to prevent kids from hurting themselves, but they define hurting themselves as basically ******* anything. Yeah, whatever they want it to be. Yeah, so staffers at the time, and this is again the the early or late 1990s, noted the complete lack of ***** given to the education of kids in the center and the absolute obsession with surveillance and punishment at all times. Some teachers would eat in their cars just to avoid being listened to via hidden microphones. Meanwhile, the electrocution. An opticon built by Matt Israel had a profound impact on children. One teacher told an interviewer that he'd been warned by a staffer to announce to the class whenever he reached into his pocket. One time he didn't, and the kids he was with started screaming. They thought he was reaching for a shock buzzer, but because they'd screamed, which was an antecedent to violent behavior, they now had to be punished. Quote all of these behaviors had to be consecrated with a GED electric shock. There were no exceptions. A scream was a scream, a grab was a grab, and we had to. Follow court approved orders. So these kids are so ******* PTSD out by being electrocuted, but they see they reached into his pocket and they freak out and then they have to be electrocuted for freaking out. Yeah. So see what a ******* nightmare sits. Yeah, it's a ******* nightmare. Like, holy ****. Yeah, it's really bad now. In interviews, Matt Israel and other representatives of the school will claim that students are only eligible to be shocked if they've engaged in seriously dangerous behavior. This is untrue, at least according to a 2006 report by the New York State Education Department. It claimed that the JRC was shocking. Kids quote without a Clear History of self injurious behaviors, it is hard to exaggerate how profoundly abusive this treatment can be. To make that point, I am going to quote from an NBC News article about a kid named Rico Torres. Quote, Rico was just. 8 the first time school staffers strapped electrodes to his legs and shocked him. They draped 12 Volt battery over his shoulders in a backpack while a nearby teacher held a clear plastic box with a photo of his face attached. When Torres misbehaved, the teacher would reach inside the box and push a button that sent a two second jolt of electricity coursing through his body. Under his court approved treatment plan, Torres could be shocked for threatening to hit another student or for running away, swearing or screaming, refusing to follow directions or inappropriate urination, according to court records obtained by. NBC News One employee, he said, used to shock him in his sleep. Because I didn't wake up. She shocked me, recalled Torres, now 24. Then I ended up peeing the bed, so she shocked me again. The electrode stayed on his skin 24 hours a day for most of a decade, until he was 18. She Oh yeah, yeah, wolf like. The fact that they would do it while he was sleeping and it's like. And with the urination thing, it's almost like being closed because of the shocks. Yeah, yeah. If you electrocute a child while they're sleeping, they might pee the bed. Yeah, but it's not a behavioral issue. That's a. You were electrocuting a child issue? Yeah. Like home. My God. Hmm. Yeah, it's. It's rough. It's real rough. Yeah. No, yeah. My one thing is, like, I would just say that if they did, this is like the more noncommunicative kids, you know, the ones it's like then. It's just rough all around. Yeah, it is rough all around and it's like. I think, uh, I think a lot of these kids are nonverbal. I don't know. It's it's a it's it's a mix. It's hard to get, like, exact data on that. But yeah, I mean that that is an additional level of if the kid can't even tell you, well, it's the same thing with that girl who died. Yeah, they can't tell you. And it's like, oh, you're misbehaving. Here you go. Yeah, they're just trapped in this world of adults, electrocuting them, never understanding. Really? Why. Hmm. It's pretty bleak. Yeah. So obviously also pretty bleak for the staff, a lot of whom get this job. They see it's this nice facility. They see it's, I'm helping kids. They go and they realize, like, Oh no, I'm torturing children. You know, there's huge turnover and they don't, you know, you have to understand, too. A lot of these people who come to realize what they're doing is wrong. Initially, maybe like, well, this guy is a doctor. This school has a great reputation. It's like it's got a a approval from the state and whatnot. Maybe I'm just being squeamish and I don't understand why this is necessary for a lot of them. Do come to realize, like, Oh no, this is horribly ****** ** and the school has caught, like most workers don't last a ******* year, I don't think. Which of course makes it hard to get decent staff, because the kind of people who are going to do that job are maybe sometimes going to be monsters themselves. You're like, well, it doesn't pay well. I get to hurt people, you know? Hmm. Prison guard **** yeah, yeah, yeah. The consequences of this situation where you have constant turnover, the good people leave, the folks who are able to stay for a while or maybe terrible. The consequences of this are made abundantly clear on August 26th, 2007, when a prank caller calls the staff in the middle of the night and poses as a supervisor. Remember, there's always people watching and they'll call rooms and be like, hey, such and such kid did this behavior and you didn't catch it. You need to shock. Now, you know, so this person calls a supervisor who's awake on the night shift, and he orders punishments for two teenagers who are asleep at the time. The kids are 16 and 19, and the person on the phone claims they had misbehaved earlier in the evening. Now, staff weren't supposed to administer shocks long after bad behavior, and this had been hours ago. But also the thing that Israel had established is that if you are a staff member and you're told to shock a kid and you don't do it, you'll get fired, right, if you don't instantly obey orders. Because, again, he's kind of operant conditioning. Employees too, yeah, delay it all. Once told to electrocute these kids, you'll lose your job. So they they they wake these kids up to shock them. Other students who are awake at the time beg the staffers not to do this. And one of them is even like, hey, this, this might be a hoax. This phone call might not even be like an actual supervisor, but the staff wakes both boys up and electrocutes them repeatedly because again, the person on the phone says, keep shocking them, keep shocking them, keep shocking them. She shocked them so many times that they have to bind their legs and arms. So they can continue to electrocute them. One teen was shocked 77 times. The other 29 times. The former had to be treated for two first degree burns. The call God. It's horrible, horrible. Now the caller is believed to have been a former resident of the center because he knew the staff, he knew the number, he knew the other residents. So it may have been someone who was there and had an issue with these two kids and like wanted to **** with them. I don't know. As far as I can tell, the person who did this has not been caught, NBC wrote quote. At the time of the call, five of the six staffers had worked double or triple shifts, and most had been on the job less than three months. The staffers were described as concerned and reluctant about the orders, but they failed to verify them with the central office or check treatment plans to make sure the teens could receive that level of shock therapy, the report said. Staffers also did not know who was the shift supervisor that night. One reason staffers might not have been suspicious of the phone call is that the Rotenberg Center uses surveillance cameras in its group homes to monitor residents and staff and a central office. Employee is allowed to initiate discipline by phone. So again, these guys haven't been there long. They don't know who's supposed to be giving the orders, so they don't recognize that anything's really ****** ** you know? They should have obviously. Yeah, they should. They stumble, checked, like once or at all. Sometime between the 1st and 77th time they shot the child they had tied to a ******* chair. But. It's also the fault of the system he's developed. Not to take blame off of these people for doing something horrible, but like, oh absolutely, that is real. Built a system where this was inevitable. Hmm. The staff responsible were fired immediately, but the incident was so horrific that it sparked another set of investigations into the Judge Rotenberg Center. A court demanded video footage of the two students being shocked for three solid hours. Matt Israel ordered the footage destroyed, which was a crime, and led to him being indicted by a grand jury in 2011. In order to avoid criminal charges, Israel agreed to leave the school he'd founded. So 2011, he quits because he illegally destroys evidence. And the court is like, hey, we won't charge you criminally if you if you get out of here bodges. I don't know, I think maybe lock the ****** up. Yeah, he should be in jail, but he shouldn't be around kids. No, I'll say that. So the very next year, 2012, is when the general public finally got their first good look at what the judge wrote. 3rd Center had been doing to children all those years. This was thanks to the case and the mother of Andre Mccollins, Andrew's mother, had enrolled him in the Judge Rotenberg Center. Not because he was super violent, but because he was special needs and he had been raped in a public school by another student and she her a big selling point of the JRC. First of all, it looks very nice. It looks like a a well run facility. She also likes that it's heavily surveilled. It's covered in cameras. So she feels like nothing bad can happen to her kid here, because someone's always watching. And that, like you have to understand like, that's all. It's reasonable that like the fact that this place is so surveilled is that, yeah, trying to her cause what happened to her kid, you know, she doesn't. Yeah, that's reasonable. Tested again. Yeah, totally reasonable. In short order, Andre was taken off his medication because again, the Judge Rotenberg Center and Matt Israel don't believe in Medicaid and kids he was put back on. And after he started acting out and engaging in self injurious behavior and like, the school couldn't correct it and they didn't have approval to give him electric shock. So after they have to put him back on his medicine, they go to court to get him approved to receive electric shocks. The court approves it, and the treatment plan listed that shocks could be applied if he was aggressive, if he screamed, or if he tried to remove his electric remove like the electrocution thing, or if he engaged in what they called health dangerous behavior and they defined health dangerous behavior. Specifically in his case is tensing up his body so if he gets tense, they can elect you better treat him, famously relaxing electrocution. Man, they they were horrifically creative with these excuses and shock kids. They they were. And it's one of the ****** ** things is that, like talking about how bad he's on Risperdal. They're talking about how bad Risperdal is. So they wanna they they take him off it. But then he he gets worse when he's off it because it's helping him. And but and that's why they justify putting this kid on the electrocution treatment, so that they can take him off Risperdal again and then electrocute his behaviors away. Which is. Yeah, the. They're basically doing the thing, like, hey, have them steal something now we could shock them. Yeah. And it's one of those things. Obviously, over medication is a problem. I've known a bunch of kids who were like in a bunch of adults who were like, no, once I found the right medication, it was life changing. Umm. And like, the kind of blanket rejection of any sort of medication in favor of electrocution is pretty bad. Oh yeah. You know, it comes out of a period when massive, like, like unreasonable and unlike immoral levels of of medication and drugging. They're common and I get that, but it it persists past the area where there are medications that really help and and it rejects those in favour of torture, which is is bad. So now that he's being electrocuted regularly, Andre is taken off of his meds again and his mother visits him, you know, several times and sees that like he's, he's he's changed. His behavior has changed in a negative way as a result of being off his meds and probably as a result of being tortured, and she begs the school to put him back on his meds. The school doesn't do this and the electrocutions continue. And he has like a bad incident one day where he, the school alleges that he at least attempted to hit a teacher. So they shocked him. And then afterwards, hours after that violent incident, they shocked him again. And I'm going to read a quote from New York magazine that that describes what happens later in that day, OK? Like other students in the room, Andre sat at a desk facing a computer, his back to the teacher, a worker told him, take off your jacket. Andre didn't move. Take off your jacket please. Again, no response. An employee pressed the button to activate his shock device. He screamed. Andre fell to the ground and tried to crawl under his desk. 4 adults grabbed him and wrestled him to the floor, holding him down while he struggled. His psychologist brought in a restraint board and the employees moved him onto it. Face down. Eight of them surrounded him as they bound his wrists and ankles to the board. Usually after Andre got a shock and was restrained, he'd calm down, but on this day he only got more agitated. The more upset he became, the more he tensed up his body, and the more he tensed up, the more shocks he received. Between 10:00 AM and about 11:00 AM, the workers shocked him 14 times. Each Press of the button triggered a loud high pitched alarm informing employees the shock had been delivered, while Andre's cries echoed down the corridor. Yeah, I I. I don't know what else to say at this point. Like, *** **** it. Yeah, it's pretty bad. And after a lengthy court battle, his mother succeeds in making this video public. And this leads to widespread outrage against the Judge Rotenberg Center and more investigations. In 2013, a United Nations special Rapporteur on Torture found that students who were electrocuted at the Rodenberg school had their rights violated under the UN Convention on Torture. So the United Nations says these kids are being tortured like. This is yeah, that meets our definition. You achieved a special level ****** yeah? If the UN is coming after your school like, yeah, you might want to reevaluate you. You may be real ****** **. You know what isn't? Hasn't been declared torture by the United Nations. Hopefully the products and services that sponsored this podcast, well, most of them. Most of them. OK again, north of 80% NE. Good odds. Good. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. The, the, the hard like the strong. Odds are whatever advertisers are on our show have not been declared to be torturing people. 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It's the new book from us, the creators of the podcast and video series. You can turn back now or read the stuff they don't want you to know. Available for pre-order now, it's stuff you should read books.com or wherever you find your favorite books. Ah, we're back. So as this, so, you know this this. The UN starts looking into **** and as a result of this video coming out, the Justice Department launches an investigation that I think is still ongoing, like a decade later. I haven't found a result from it, and I've read some recent reporting on it, so it it seems like either it got kind of buried or they're getting real deep into it, but it's been a long time without kind of a result, another thing that's ongoing. As Matt Israel's obsession with experimenting on children, if you'll recall, decades ago he was forced to sever his relationship with the school he'd founded in California. It had been taken over by Judith Weber, who had been the executive director of the West Coast TBRI when it was founded. Judith and Matt eventually married, and in 2015 it was found that Matt Israel, while not on staff at the West Coast BRIC, which had been renamed Tobin World Two and Tobin World Three, was working as a behavior analyst and an administrator at both facilities. The schools had not notified the state that Matt Israel had been added to the roster of employees because Matt Israel was legally prohibited from entering the facilities from a write up at edsource.org quote in unannounced visits to Tobin World Two and three on January 16th and 17th. Investigators also found that the schools were employing behavioral analysts with expired certifications and teachers without the required credentials to teach students with certain disabilities. The school also failed to comply with state regulations that require behavior plan reviews after staff members have physically restrained students. Or isolated them in rooms they cannot leave. The Judge Rotenberg Educational Center is the only facility in the country that still uses electric shock therapy. In this way, roughly 20% of their students receive shocks. Although given what we know about how lacks these facilities can be about rules and paperwork, it's hard to say if that's really all the kids who receive shocks. In March of 2020, the FDA banned the use of electronic shock devices in the context that they're used in the center, saying they caused, quote, an unreasonable and substantial risk of illness. Their injury. But in July of this year and a 2 to one decision by the Washington DC District Court of Appeals, it was ruled that the FDA's ban violated federal law by interfering with the authority of healthcare practitioners to practice medicine. The centers attorney, Mike Flammia, told CNN that the ruling was important because quote. It protects what all of us cherish and that is the right to go to our doctor and have our doctor decide what is the best treatment. Umm. You do you, I guess. What the hell you do your kids. Yeah. It's messy. Yeah, I'm like, honestly, that's unbelievable. Because it's like, yeah, no, it could be a little bit. So it's like, hey, my doctor can tell my kid that, yeah, you need to be shot. And a lot of them didn't even have the credentials anyways. So again, that's part of it is like, well, I, my doctor, I have a right to, you know, pick my doctor and for him to pick his well, but a lot of these people aren't legally qualified to to prescribe any kind of treatment to your kids or they're not doing kids have autism or any. Yeah. Yeah. That's the thing that's ******* me off the most about this. It's like these people are making super important decisions and they they have no right to make. Yeah. And part of this issue is this thing I've, I've complained about a few times on the show, which is that like, they're framing this as like. Well, we want the freedom to go to our doctor and and and have our doctor decide, no, no. You want the freedom to have absolute power to say what is and isn't OK for your kid. And I don't think parents should have that. You're not the God of your child and you're not the government of your child. And I don't think government should have a lot of the power that they have. But like I, there's there's this problem of how parents are treated as the ultimate authority of what's good or bad for their kid, which has a lot of horrible consequences outside of this too. But this is one of those. Consequences where it's like, well, yeah, especially within the context here where a kid is autistic and maybe not. It's like, well, the parents basically get the keys to the Kingdom, they get to make the final call, and they don't know what's going on most of the time. Yeah, a lot of parents suck. Maybe don't make them the absolute God of their of their child, because that's a bad thing. I will say no Full disclosure mind, though, but I'm just. Yeah. Yeah. But but, you know, I know, I know. I've known some people who've had disabilities, parents that weren't that great. Yeah, exactly. And it's it's a problem. Yeah. So the JRC was supported by a significant number of parents who has always argued that the facility was a matter of last resort for their kids in making this case flammia. The lawyer offered up the argument that absolutely no other treatment had worked for these kids. Quote I know that the people that oppose this treatment, they'll tell you over and over again that there are other treatments that work as well, if not better, and they'll talk about positive behavior supports, which JRC does. All of that. They'll talk about drugs, psychotropic medications, these clients. At JRC they've tried all that. Numerous drugs, numerous diagnosis, numerous combinations of drugs. That is again extremely common. This line of argument that they've tried everything, this is the last resort, I think, the most dedicated. Example of this came from that wired article I've cited a bit in this episode, and while that article goes into horrible detail about abuses at the JRC, it also includes this bit. You don't know what it's like to be the parent of a student at the Judge Rotenberg Center. You don't know what it takes to hear all this and still come out in favor of the school. And you don't know because you don't have a kid who pulls out her hair and bloody clumps, who seems to enjoy that. OK, a kid whose scalp resembles that of a frontier settler worked over by a furious native. And then to see her today, happy, smiling, a brunette just like any other brunette. And all thanks to JRC, her life saved by the machine saved. And that's just one kid, just one story. You see? There's another side. There's a lot that's ****** **. About that wired article. Yeah. And they cite, they cite some science that makes the situation seem much more muddled as to whether or not this is best. A lot of that science is, at this point, more than 20 years old. The most recent studies, I think they are, are from 1999. Oh yeah. And it's made more difficult by the fact that the GRC isn't exactly required to hand over objective, reliable evidence about the efficacy of its methods. And those strong arguments that they're not fixing any problems these kids have, they're just temporarily suppressing them with violence. Yeah. And there's also the thing of like. Are they actually trying these other methods or are they just going straight to the shocks or are they just going straight to the shocks? And yeah, supporters of the school will argue that, like the schools that's that don't use aversives and that use only positive support will turn kids down, will say this kid is too severe for us, and eventually those kids have no other option but the judge Rotenberg Center, which turns nobody down. Now, most of the studies have come across that purport to show a benefit to the aversives used at the JRC are more than 20 years old and again are very not at all conclusive. The preponderance of evidence seems to suggest that these kind of treatments are not necessary. Even in the most severe cases. But the kind of treatments that help in the most severe cases are labor intensive and expensive. It is worth noting, regardless of what you want to get into the weeds on the science here. No other facility in the US uses these methods, and many other facilities do treat children with problems just as severe, using methods that do not evolve electrocuting kids. The Judge Rotenberg Center and the parents who support it argue that, as unpleasant as the shock treatments are, they also represent the only viable treatment for patients who would otherwise destroy themselves. Nancy Weiss is the director of the National Leadership Consortium on Developmental Disabilities at the University of Delaware. She has been a longstanding critic of the JRC, and when that court ruled they could keep electrocuting kids, CNN went to her for comment on this matter. She said, quote, part of the reason that people with disabilities have behavioral problems, behaviors that we find challenging is that they're protesting the crappy lives we offer them. It's that person's only form of protest, and it's a critique of the life they're being offered. It's like there's no greater human impulse than to be in charge of your own. Life and what JRC does to an extent beyond what any other provider in this country does, is strip people of choice and control. Yeah, I mean, when you get down to it, it's. Ultimately. There are much better ways of doing it than electric shock. There are, there are, and I I find it compelling what she says about the a lot of these bad behaviors of these kids protesting in the 1st place, that their lives even before the JRC didn't offer them a lot of of autonomy, of choice. But also what what Israel is did at his facility is is strip choice, because he doesn't see people as having choice. He doesn't really believe in free will. He believes that we're just the product of of of stimuli that's put into us. Yeah, he treats these kids like robots. He treats his staff like robots. And the belief that you can make this perfect system if you just put perfectly, consistently put the right stimuli in and it does kind of work. As long as the kids are getting electrocuted, for the most part, they stop the behavior. They they comply. But that isn't because anything has changed about them, it's because they've been tortured into not doing certain things. He just didn't have an issue with that because, again, everyone's a robot. Yeah, it's just a feature. Yeah, it's a feature. It's pretty weak, yeah, it is pretty bleak. Oh, God. So yeah, the FDA has, you know, the FDA, to its credit, eventually did try to stop this. But then a judge was like, no, no, no, we're gonna keep doing this ****. So. So are they still running today? Oh yeah. Yep. Jesus Christ. Yeah. Yeah, I mean at the end. Yeah, I. That's freaking bleak, pan, yeah. I wish I could have more to say, but I'm just because. The the biggest problem, because as somebody who is autistic is. There are some people who, like myself, are lucky enough to be able to do work and all that fun stuff and. And a lot of times we get the name Asperger's, but **** that **** yeah. And so it's like, I just. I couldn't imagine something like this and just. It just makes me feel so angry. Sorry, I'm rambling on the no, no, no, no. I mean that's that's really important. Like the. I don't know how do we? How are we because? We all have. We all have some form of mental disability, even if it isn't outwardly apparent. How are we able to be able to treat one another or support one another without dehumanizing and? Freaking shock him like cattle. Yeah, and it's some. Part of the problem here is that a significant chunk of of people with autism aren't legally in control of their own lives, which in some of them are not in. That is true a legal capacity capable of of, of, of being in control. Yeah, and at least in a legal sense of the word, they need some sort of of caretaker. What that means? They're not making decisions for themselves. And and so like the the industry that has developed around providing these people with care often and in fact largely does so without any real input from the people in it. And because the people who are kind of most vulnerable to this tend to be unable to express themselves in a way that is easy for most people to understand. It happens without most people being aware of it. And yeah, and so there's no outcry and nothing is done and it and it continues on for decades and decades because they think that's how it is. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's the only option or the best option or, you know, we'll look their parents say, this is fine and like, yeah, it's some. It's not great. No, it's not great. Well then, you got any plegables to plug? You can follow me on Twitch at Notch. The BNOTCHTHEBI post a lot there. Social commentary throughout stuff. But that's my big thing to plug. Sweet well plug out. Plug away and I don't know, yell at the FDA or a judge or something about this. I don't know. I guess the FDA is more or less on board. I don't know who to yell at at this point. Just just yell. Just yell. Yell to the sky. You gotta ******* stand up for people. Yeah, alright, well thank you, Aiden. And that's that's behind the ********. Thanks for having me. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break or handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. 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