"School of Shock" wins Journalism Prize

Jennifer Gonnerman won Honorable Mention at The MOLLY's, the 2008 National Journalism Prize, for "School of Shock" first published in Mother Jones.

In her troubling expose, Gonnerman sheds light on the Judge Rotenberg Center, a Massachusetts-based behavior modification program that for 30 years has used an elaborate system of rewards and punishments--including painful electric shocks administered through electrodes attached to the bodies of children as young as 9 years old--in an attempt to socialize troubled teens.

Like so many six-guns, workers at the Judge Rotenberg Center carry remote controls on their belts. Kid misbehaves... Zap !

Each remote bears the face of the child to be zapped - so that they won't accidently shock the wrong kid.

But in August, one student was shocked 77 times, and another 29 times, after a prank caller posing as a supervisor ordered the "treatments." One of the boys was treated for first-degree burns.

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.

It is also the facility that destroyed the videotape showing showing those shocks, despite being ordered to preserve the tape.

School of Shock is reprinted here at the Texas Observer:

Rotenberg Records Seized

Rotenberg records reportedly are seized

State Police seized documents late last week from the offices of the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center in Canton that are related to a prank phone call last summer that led two students to wrongfully receive dozens of punishing electrical shocks, according to two people with direct knowledge of the investigation.

The collection of evidence has to do with a yearlong grand jury investigation led by the office of Attorney General Martha Coakley, said Kenneth Mollins, a New York lawyer who has filed several lawsuits against the school and who said he spoke to a representative of Coakley's office about the Rotenberg investigation. Mollins said he was told the grand jury is also examining possible financial improprieties by the school.

The second source, who works for the state and asked to remain nameless because this person is not authorized to speak about grand jury proceedings, said State Police investigators came with a search warrant and left with boxes of documents. The source said the investigation had an ambitious scope and involves multiple government agencies.

Reached last night, Ernest Corrigan, a spokesman for the school, did not confirm that a seizure of documents had occurred last week. He said only that school officials have been cooperative with state and local police ever since they reported the prank phone call to police last summer.
"We've been supportive of the investigation," he said.

A spokesman for Coakley declined to comment, saying the office never confirms or denies an ongoing investigation.

The special-education school, which serves about 250 adults and children from across the country with emotional and behavioral problems, has been the target of numerous government investigations related to its unorthodox behavior-modification methods, including skin-shock treatments to deter inappropriate behavior. Rotenberg officials, who have weathered two attempts by Massachusetts officials to close the center, have defended its treatment methods as effective for some students.

School officials have also said they have instituted numerous safeguards to prevent a repeat of the Aug. 26 incident, in which two emotionally disturbed students wrongfully received dozens of electrical shocks based on instructions from a caller posing as a supervisor. The incident was caught on 24-hour surveillance tapes, which were shown to investigators last summer. The tapes were subsequently destroyed by school officials, even though investigators had instructed them to preserve the tapes.

After hearing about the destruction of the tapes, Senator Brian A. Joyce, a Democrat from Milton who has sought to ban shock therapy at the school, said he intended to ask the attorney general's office to look into the matter.

And this from Education Week:

[In DC] Private placements for students with disabilities, some costing tens of thousands of dollars a year, are also under review. For fiscal 2007, the school system paid $118 million in tuition for out-of-district placements, out of a total budget of about $1 billion.

One achievement that district officials note is finding alternative placements for eight of the 12 Washington students enrolled in the Judge Rotenberg Center in Canton, Mass., which uses “aversive skin-shock treatment for severely disturbed students,” according to information from the school. Placements at the center cost the system $250,000 per student, per year.

Tameria Lewis, the interim assistant superintendent for special education in the District of Columbia Office of the State Superintendent, the equivalent of a state education agency for the nation’s capital, said she participated personally in each of the individualized-education-program hearings for the students enrolled in the Rotenberg center.

Alleged Rape at the Shock School

This from the Sun Chronicle (Massachusetts):

Center worker accused of raping fellow employee

NORTON - A mental health supervisor at the Judge Rotenberg Center on Shelly Road is in jail after he was charged with raping a fellow employee. Ellison Livingstone, 24, of Providence, was ordered held in jail on $100,000 cash bail after pleading innocent Wednesday to sexually assaulting the woman.

The incident is alleged to have occurred early Sunday in a bathroom at the Rotenberg Center...

This from Maia Azalavitz at the Huffington Post:

Will Rape Shut the Shock School?

When I wrote recently about the Judge Rotenberg Center -- the facility for autistic kids and other children with "behavior problems" that uses electric shock to gain compliance -- I asked rhetorically what it might take to shut it down. If the latest incident doesn't do it, I simply cannot imagine what would.

Of course, you would think exposure of its methods would be enough. Especially given our increasing knowledge about oversensitivity in autism and the fact that many "inappropriate behaviors" are actually attempts by people with autism to soothe themselves when overwhelmed. Brilliant treatment, this is:
Take a kid who is distressed and trying to soothe herself-- and punish her with
more distress to try to make her stop.

Ok, so that's not enough for the state regulators. How about the fact that a former inmate of the program can call in and order employees to shock other kids -- for no reason -- and the employees comply, replicating Milgrim's chilling "obedience" experiment? That's the one where ordinary people become "good Nazi's" simply by being told what to do.

Oh yeah, that didn't do it. Comes now word that a staff member allegedly raped
another staff member at a Rotenberg facility. Police were called to the site just after the incident -- and the rape apparently occurred in a bathroom.

Can we please, please spend the $200,000 a year states give to this program each year per child instead on evidence-based, nurturing treatment at home? I mean, for that money, you could hire a psychiatrist full-time to see only your child.

It's time to turn the page on this shameful chapter in the history of treating troubled children.

Shock treatment

This from the Boston Globe:

How to 'decelerate' a teenager

In 1971, Dr. Matthew Israel founded the Behavior Research Institute in Canton. Its name was later changed to the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center to honor the jurist who upheld Israel's controversial methods in court.

At Harvard in the 1950s, Israel was a student of B. F. Skinner, founder of behavioral psychology and author of "Walden Two," a utopian novel whose heroes try to build a perfect society through behavioral conditioning. In "Walden Two," people are encouraged by a system of rewards and punishments to live simple, frugal lives, to express themselves through art and classical music, and to trust the wisdom of their leaders.

After college, Israel formed the Association of Social Design, a Skinner-esque utopian community in Boston. The community failed, and Israel went on to start what became the Rotenberg school.

In 1994, Matthew Israel and David Marsh obtained a patent for an "apparatus for administering electrical aversive stimulus." (An image from the patent is shown here.) They dubbed the device a Graduated Electronic Decelerator, or GED, its purpose being to "decelerate" a patient engaged in inappropriate behavior by administering an electric shock.

In the GEDs used at the Rotenberg Center, battery and receiver are bundled into a backpack, with electrodes routed through the straps to make contact with the patient's skin. Guards carry remote control devices with patients' photos emblazoned on them.

In filing his patent, Israel followed the example of Skinner. Among Skinner's best-known inventions was the operant conditioning box, or Skinner Box, a cage designed to allow researchers to administer rewards (food) and punishments (electric shocks) to lab animals without having to interact directly with the animal. Skinner also invented the "air crib," a box for taking care of infants without having to swaddle or diaper them. Among his most controversial inventions, it was also jokingly called an "heir conditioner."

"The method of treatment of this invention," according to the patent, consists in "securing a remotely activated apparatus for administering electrical aversive stimulus to a patient to be treated. The patient is then observed for signs of undesired behavior."

The patent specifies self-injury as the sort of behavior to be deterred. But, according to a January article in the Globe, therapists at the Rotenberg Center have been accused of being more liberal in their definition of "undesired behavior," delivering shocks for offenses such as swearing or shouting.

In August of last year, therapists at the school received a call from a disgruntled patient posing as a staff member, who ordered them to administer multiple shocks (in one case, as many as 77) to two students with whom he was having a dispute. The shocks were administered before the hoax was discovered.

In Skinner's "Walden Two" the founder explains that children in the community are taught to control their impulses "[b]y having the children 'take' a more and more painful shock" because, he explains, "[s]ome of us learn [self-]control, more or less by accident. The rest of us go all our lives not even understanding how it is possible, and blaming our failure on being born the wrong way." The problem with utopian solutions in real-life communities like the Rotenberg Center, of course, is that not only the children need to learn self-control; self-control is also required of those with their fingers on the shock button.

Matthew Battles is a freelance writer in Jamaica Plain and the author of "Library: An Unquiet History."

D.C. Wants to Stop Shock Therapy for Children

WASHINGTON (AP) - The D.C. Council wants to stop placing children in special education facilities that use shock and other possibly painful therapies.

The council has taken up the issue after dozens of youth from the city were sent to the Judge Rotenberg Center, a shock-therapy clinic in Canton, Mass.

Lawmakers are considering a bill that would bar the Office of the State Superintendent from transferring students to a school that uses aversive education techniques, including withholding meals, electric shock, deep muscle squeezes and chemical restraints.

Four D.C. students remain in the facility today. Attorney General Peter Nickles says the city is trying hard to get them out.

This from WTOP.com.

Court Orders Reconsideration in Case on Shock Therapy

A federal appeals court has ordered a lower court to reconsider its issuance of a preliminary injunction that barred the New York state education department from enforcing an emergency regulation against the use of "aversive interventions" for children with disabilities.

The aversive therapies at the school at the center of the case include "skin shocks, 'contingent' food programs, and physical restraints," says the opinion by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, in New York City.

The Judge Rotenberg Educational Center (Backstory.) is in Canton, Mass., but it has served hundreds of students from New York state who have been referred there as part of their individualized education programs under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, court papers say...

...The New York State Education Department issued a report in 2006 that was critical of the school, and it issued its emergency regulation barring their use, evidently with respect to students from New York state....

This from the School Law Blog.

Dr Phil's sweet talk fails Britney. This is a job for Matthew Israel.

The entertainment press reports ad nauseum on poor little rock star, Britney Spears. This week it was reported that she spent some time in a padded room. In theraputic settings, this is typically indicative of combative behaviors.

I'm certainly not up-to-speed on the particulars - but it sounds like she has defiantly engaged in some destructive behaviors while failing to respond to traditional therapies, including some drive-by counseling from Dr Phil.

It's time to crank up the reinforcers, and I know just the guy to do it.

When it comes to finding the most effective treatment for misbehavior (ethical considerations notwithstanding), one should ask, What would Matthew L. Israel do?

Since he once cured a spoiled 3-year old - and presently runs the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center where he practices aversive techniques including electric shocks regularly - he is not without skills. It's just a question of firepower. I wonder what he would think up for Britney.

Are 3 skin shocks enough?

Is 77 too many?

Shock and Awful: School destroys video evidence of shocks

We never heard back from B F Skinner disciple Matthew L Israel since our last posting about the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center's use of controversial shock treatments. He intended to allay our concerns by providing access to “an accurate summary of what JRC is really about.”

KSN&C didn't buy it and offered a retort.

Whether aversive techniques can work for the most difficult students is not the only question here. Water boarding would work too. Whether or not JRC is competent to administer any techniques in a professional, ethical and humane fashion is also at issue.

The Village Voice reported in 2006:

"The commonwealth of Massachusetts assessed $43,000 in fines to 14 current and former employees of the Judge Rotenberg Center (featured in "School of Shock," October 11–17) for describing themselves as "psychologists" without holding Massachusetts licenses, in violation of a 1996 state law."

But Israel's been too busy to write back. He's been spending time in front of the Massachusetts legislature.

The Boston Globe reported this week:

Lawmakers consider limits on skin-shock therapy

In many ways, the high-pitched scene that unfolded in a packed State House public hearing today was nothing new: Over the past two decades, critics of the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center have condemned the center's skin-shock therapy as cruel and barbaric, while supporters of this special education school, largely parents, have praised the facility as life-saving for mentally retarded and emotionally disturbed students.

He is apparently also spending time in the AV room.

This from AP and therawstory: Photo from Mother Jones.

Investigator: School Destroyed Video

It Was Ordered to Preserve of Students Being Shocked

A special education school destroyed videotape showing two of its students being wrongly given electric shock treatments despite being ordered to preserve the tape, according to an investigator's report.

One student was shocked 77 times and the other 29 times after a prank caller posing as a supervisor ordered the treatments at a Judge Rotenberg Educational Center group home in August. The boys are 16 and 19 years old and one was treated for first-degree burns.

The Disabled Persons Protection Commission planned to release the report Tuesday concluding that one of the teenagers was severely physically and emotionally abused by the treatments. The commission has referred the case to the Norfolk district attorney's office.

The videotapes compiled footage from cameras inside the home in Stoughton. An investigator with the commission, which examines abuse allegations and can refer cases for criminal prosecution, viewed the tapes and asked for a copy, according to the commission's report obtained by The Boston Globe.

But school officials declined, saying they "did not want any possibility of the images getting into the media." The investigator told the school to preserve a copy so state police could use it in their criminal investigation. A trooper later told the investigator the tapes had been destroyed...

...Earlier this week, the school's founder and director Matthew Israel said the tapes were reviewed by several investigators and were not preserved because the investigation "seemed to be finished." ...

... State Sen. Brian Joyce, who has long sought to ban shock therapy from the school, said Israel and his staff should be investigated for obstruction of justice.

"I believe the tape was intentionally destroyed because it was incriminating," said Joyce, a Democrat. "I intend to ask the attorney general to investigate." ...

Below is a parent's description of how Israel's controversial techniques were applied to his son. Let's not forget, his son did not get to JRC by being an angel. JRC works with tough kids - kids who understand their own treatment protocols, maybe even better than the staff. Read it and decide for yourself.

This from the Boston Globe:

Parent details toll taken by shocks at group home

A Taunton [MA] man said his 19-year-old emotionally disturbed son seemed to be thriving at a group home, run by the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center, before staff members were duped into giving him 77 punishing electric shocks one night last summer...

...But, according to graphic details from a state investigative report made available to the Globe this week, his son encountered a night of horror on a weekend last August, after experiencing 10 months without any shocks.

The incident, triggered by a caller who pretended to be a central office supervisor giving punishment orders, is now the subject of a criminal investigation. The case was also the focus of a State House hearing this week as lawmakers considered a bill that would severely restrict the school's shock-treatment programs.

The report, issued by the Disabled Persons Protection Commission, outlined a motive for the hoax: The alleged caller, Stephen Ferrer-Torres, a runaway from the group home who has not since been located by police, asserted to other students that he had been bullied by Dumas's son and another resident, who received 29 wrongful shocks based on the caller's instructions, according to the report...

...In the report, the commission gave a harsh assessment of the group home's staff. It found that three of six staff members assigned to the Stoughton group home had been employed for less than three months. Two had repeatedly failed basic training tests, and two had been on probation for various infractions...

After the hoax call came in at about 2 a.m. Aug. 26, according to the report, Dumas's son told staff numerous times that they were violating his shock treatment protocol and suggested that the caller may be a prankster. At one point, he said, "Get on the phone and find out what is going on. . . ."The 77 shocks he received were, in part, based on his unwillingness to passively receive the shocks.

...half-hour standoff occurred in the hallway...But after that, the staff tied Dumas's son to a board, restraining all four limbs. The teenager, resigned to his fate, said, "Let them know I'm being compliant." During the next hour, he received dozens of rapid-fire shocks to his abdomen and limbs, which in fact violated his treatment plan. At one point, he complained, "Mister, I can't breathe."

...Of the two power levels of shock treatments used by the school, Dumas's son received the most powerful each time, school officials have said. Shift supervisor Michael Thompson, on the job for two months, left the room at one point, saying he wanted to "either cry or throw up," the report said...

Today's editorial from the Globe shoots right down the middle: Fix JRC or close it down.

The battle over skin shocks

ON WEDNESDAY, desperate parents begged lawmakers at a State House hearing not to interfere with the work of the controversial Judge Rotenberg Center in Canton. They had reason to be concerned.

Some state lawmakers take a dim view of skin shock treatments at the center, a view that may not be in the best interest of the school's autistic, retarded, and emotionally disturbed students. Even a new bill trumpeted as a compromise by sponsors could undermine treatment programs that many parents view as the best hope against self-destructive and violent behavior by their children. The state Department of Mental Retardation is better qualified than lawmakers to set limits on treatment
methods at the center - or decide whether it should operate at all.

The situation is tense. Senator Brian Joyce of Milton, a cosponsor of the bill, is passionate in his belief that the center is not only hurting patients but also manipulating their parents' emotions.

Joyce, who can barely disguise his contempt for the center's founder, Matthew Israel, says it is the Legislature's "moral obligation to stop the wholesale application of this so-called aversive therapy." Israel says the bill is just another in a long line of overboard attempts to close his center, which administers brief skin shocks to deter violent behavior by some patients who don't respond to traditional therapies.

The public has reason to be confused about a center that has been embroiled in complex legal battles dating back decades. But the proposed legislation only makes matters worse. It might seem reasonable to pass a law that limits skin shock treatment to cases involving "a clear risk of injury to self or others." But the bill would also bar shocks to treat "minor behavior problems, even if said behaviors are identified as antecedents to targeted challenging behaviors." So, if a disturbed patient is known to rub his head vigorously for several seconds before biting or gouging himself, the shock could not be administered during the "antecedent" behavior, but only at the onset of the actual attack. The whole point of aversive therapy is to discourage the attack before it begins.

Both the patients and public will be best served if the Department of Mental Retardation, which certifies the Rotenberg Center, concentrates fully on the competence of the center to administer the treatment, instead of the treatment itself. There are plenty of reasons to scrutinize the center closely, not the least of which is the questionable quality and training of the workers who administer the shocks.

Rotenberg staffers made a mind-blowing error of judgment in August when they shocked two emotionally disturbed students on the phoned-in order of a former patient posing as a medical supervisor. And Rotenberg top officials followed that up with a gross error in judgment, or worse, when they destroyed videotapes of the incident despite a warning not to do so by a state investigator who had viewed the tapes.

If the Rotenberg Center can't do its job consistently and ethically, then DMR should shut it down. But the Legislature shouldn't foreclose the option of skin shock treatment as a last resort for desperate patients.

Autism Diva reports:

The Judge Rotenberg Center Charges $216,000 a year in tuition room and board.

According to the 2005 JRC tax return, Dr. Matthew Israel has a salary of $306,831.

In addition, he uses a tax vehicle known as a deferred compensation plan (where he doesn't pay taxes on deferred income) of $58,360 for a grand total of $365,000 in yearly compensation.

The Judge Rotenberg Center received $41.7 million in public support from state governments. Only $4,585 was contributed by indirect public support. JRC earned approximately $76,000 in interest and investment income in 2005.

The JRC had $708,000 in legal fees for that year?!

Another $100,000 in postage?! ...

More background from:

Mother Jones, August 2007, "Why Can't Massachusetts Shut Matthew Israel Down?"

The Village Voice, October 2006

Anderson Cooper, March 2006

Left Brain/Right Brain

Autism Diva, March 2007 - with a highly-edited (distracting musical soundtrack, no less) 10-minute YouTube video from Christschool.

Matthew Israel Interviewed at Mother Jones

Stirring the Pot, January 2008, responded to particular claims made by Israel, like this:

"Prove it. Prove that the improvement in students over years of therapy is due to that therapy, not in spite of it. Show us the hordes of thankful graduates who should be swarming the blogosphere with congratulations to you, Mr. Israel, if your 100% success rate is truly due to skin shock therapy's intrinsic benefits, not to the fact that aversives subdue aggression by force, not through learning."

"The percentage of overall people who have graduated away from the shock therapy
is only 4% of those at the center. 4%. Another point that I think we all should be aware of is the portion of the aversive's program that deals with the withholding of food (http://www.judgerc.org/faqs.html#foodrewards)."

The Boston Herald, Feb. 15 and 23, 1995 - Reported here. ABUSE UNCOVERED IN DEATH AT BRI Victimization of 19-year old Linda Cornelison called "inhumane beyond all reason"

You Tube video from AutTV

B F Skinner: The Next Generation

On December 20th I picked up a story from ABC News about the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center being snookered by a prankster who convinced school officials to deliver “77 shocks to one student and 29 to another.”

I found the story shocking on two fronts. First, I was shocked to learn that the punishment involved was an actual shock. I didn’t know that was still going on anywhere.

Second, I was shocked that any responsible treatment facility would punish a student on orders received over the telephone. Any behaviorist worth his salt would admit that a therapy’s effectiveness is wholly dependent upon proper application, including the timing of the consequence - and that misapplication of consequences is counterproductive to the therapy. Throw off the schedules of reinforcement and what have you got?

As JRC admits, “The best-laid behavioral programs in the world are to no avail if they are not carried out as designed by the direct care staff.” I'm not sure how a telephone call from the outside squares with that.

I linked to a related ABC story that called the Judge Rotenberg Center (J.R.C.) “One of the most controversial schools in the country… [that] tries to eliminate the use of psychotropic drugs, and instead uses aversive stimulation -- specifically behavioral skin shock -- to treat children and adults with the most severe cases of autism and emotional and behavioral challenges.”

On Christmas Day I linked to a New York Times story that reported New York Governor Spitzer’s call to remove any New York students from the program. The Times also misreported that amount of shock being used at JRC which “ranges from 15 to 45 milliamperes, or thousandths of an ampere — not 15 to 45 amperes” as the Times reported.

Finally, I linked to a Boston Globe report that Massachusetts officials required JRC to “stop electric shocks for "seemingly minor infractions," such as getting out of a seat without approval or swearing. And it must show greater commitment to phasing out shock treatments, especially for those about to leave the school to enter mainstream society...”

Recently Kentucky School News & Commentary heard from Matthew L. Israel, JRC’s founder, offering KSN&C readers “an accurate summary of what JRC is really about.”

So I followed up a bit.

Dr Matthew L Israel tells us he studied psychology under the late B.F. Skinner (wiki & Skinner Foundation) as an undergraduate, as a graduate student (like Richard Herrnstein who co-authored the controversial book, The Bell Curve which prompted wide-spread backlash in the social science community for its views on race and intelligence), and as a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University.

Skinner was best known for his “baby tender,” an enclosed crib better known as the “Skinner Box.” This “operant conditioning chamber” was an instrument of his Radical Behaviorist philosophy which has been very influential in the treatment of students with special needs including behavioral pharmacology.

In the 1960’s Matthew L. Israel was looking for an opportunity to apply these principles and techniques in the treatment of a wide variety of behavior disorders. He found it writing “self-instructional materials” and “in two behavioral communes that [he] started in 1966 and 1967” – once curing a 3-year old “some considered to be extremely spoiled.”

After some consulting and establishing a “unit for the treatment for autistic children,” in 1971, he “started the Behavior Research Institute by offering behavioral treatment consultation in the homes of parents of autistic-like (sic) children.” By 1985 the program accommodated 65 students. He sees the school as a last resort for students and uses “the application of rewards and punishments” to change undesired behaviors.

It is Israel’s tolerance for more severe forms of aversive punishments that seems to draw the most criticism.

Israel writes that, in 1985, “a young man died at [the Behavioral Research Institute] while being restrained at one of our residences.” He says, “The cause of death was ultimately determined to be natural causes related to his condition of tardive dyskinesia and not due to the restraint procedure that had been employed.” But that precipitated the ire of numerous state agencies and groups who have attempted to close down JRC over time and there is a long history of litigation, settlement agreements and Receivership.

The Behavioral Research Institute changed its name in 1994 to JRC to honor the memory of the judge “whose courageous decisions and actions helped to preserve our program from extinction at the hands of state licensing officials…”

“Today, JRC serves over 200 students and adults from many states. These individuals live in 37 apartments, town houses and homes which JRC operates in Canton and neighboring communities. All attend JRC's day school at its Canton facility each day. The program is staffed with approximately 900 employees.

Israel’s effort to present an accurate summary of events ignored the circumstances that lead to school officials to delivering 77 shocks to one student and 29 to another on the word of a prankster over the telephone.

Photo from judgerc.org.

Massachusetts lets center use shocks for one year

Extension requires a series of changes

State authorities have given a controversial special education school in Canton a one-year extension of its authority to use electric shock treatments on students, provided the center makes a series of significant changes.

Among them, the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center must prove that it uses shock treatments only for the most dangerous and self-destructive behaviors and that the aversive therapy actually led to a reduction of those harmful actions.

The center must also stop electric shocks for "seemingly minor infractions," such as getting out of a seat without approval or swearing. And it must show greater commitment to phasing out shock treatments, especially for those about to leave the school to enter mainstream society...

The Judge Rotenberg Educational Center in Canton uses electric shocking devices similar to this for many of its students. (JOHN TLUMACKI/GLOBE STAFF/FILE 2006)

This from the Boston Globe.

Shockwork Orange: Hope as justification for cruelty

As a young principal - I confess - I joked more than once that I'd like to have a device that would combine the effects of a television remote control and a small spark igniter.

In my imagination, every student would have a number. Then, if a child did not listen to their conscience, say, and did something evil anyway - I could punch up their specific number and press a button which would cause them a little shock.

This aversive therapy is what behaviorists call negative reinforcement, with an attitude.

The theory is that the recipient of this little reminder would come to associate bad feelings with bad acts; and, in time, would cease the bad acts.

As the person in charge of discipline for 500+ students, I couldn't help but think of this piece of Clockwork Orangeian administrative efficiency with an evil smile - one, no doubt, deserving of a little shock itself.

Today's New York Times did a follow up to the recent Judge Rotenberg Educational Center story that gives readers a little better peek at what is at work here.

Parents Defend School’s Use of Shock Therapy

Nearly a year ago, New York made plans to ban the use of electric shocks as a punishment for bad behavior, a therapy used at a Massachusetts school where New York State had long sent some of its most challenging special education students.

But state officials trying to limit New York’s association with the school, the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center in Canton, southwest of Boston, and its “aversive therapy” practices have found a large obstacle in their paths: parents of students who are given shocks.

“I understand people who don’t know about it think it is cruel,” said Susan Handon of Jamaica, Queens, whose 20-year-old daughter, Crystal, has been at Rotenberg for four years. “But she is not permanently scarred and she has really learned that certain behaviors, like running up and hitting people in the face, are not acceptable.”

Indeed, Rotenberg is full of children who will run up and hit strangers in the face, or worse. Many have severe types of dysfunction, including self-mutilation, head banging, eye gouging and biting, that can result from autism or mental retardation. Parents tend to be referred there by desperate education officials, after other institutions have decided they cannot keep the child.

While at Rotenberg, students must wear backpacks containing a device that allows a staff member to deliver a moderate shock to electrodes attached to the limbs, or in some cases palms, feet or torso, when the students engage in a prohibited behavior.

Both the children’s parents and a court must consent to the shocks.

Michael P. Flammia, the lawyer for Rotenberg, defended the practice in an interview.

“People want to believe positive interventions work even in the most extreme cases,” he said. “If they did, that is all we would use. Many of these kids come in on massive dosages of antipsychotic drugs, so doped up that they are almost comatose. We get them off drugs and give their parents something very important: hope.”

But for state officials, many behavior experts and even some former Rotenberg parents, the shock therapy at the school represents a dangerous, outdated approach to severe behavioral problems, reminiscent of the electric shock helmets used on some autistic patients into the 1980s and now discredited...

Shocking story out of Massachusetts

This from ABC News: Steven Senne/AP Photo.

An apparent prank phone call to a Massachusetts special-needs school led to at least two students unnecessarily receiving electric shock therapy treatment, according to a spokesman for the school.

"This [incident] happened, we reported it and we've taken steps necessary so that this doesn't happen again," said Ernest Corrigan, spokesman for the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center, where the shock therapy was mistakenly administered. "This was not a normal day at Judge Rotenberg."

The prankster, believed to be a former student of the Canton, Mass., school, reportedly posed as a member of the administration and phoned in instructions for shock therapy on Aug. 26, according to a report by the Department of Early Education and Care, the organization that licenses the residential program at the school and is conducting the investigation.

Unaware that the phone call was a prank, school officials delivered 77 shocks to one student and 29 to another, according to the report.

Both victims, males under the age of 22, were seen by medical professionals after the incident and later cleared, according to the school. Only one of the students has remained at the insitution since. The names of the victims have not been released.

"I think it's fair to say that [giving someone] 77 shocks is unusual," said Corrigan. "It is excessive to what is normal protocol. Giving 22 shocks is also excessive." ...

Related Story: School of Shock