Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Judge Rotenberg Center

Episode Date: January 11, 2022

Today Robert and Aidan Bonacci talk about a school that makes tons of money abusing kids with autism.  https://autisticadvocacy.org/actioncenter/issues/school/climate/jrc/ https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/16/health/judge-rotenberg-center-appeals-court-ruling/index.html https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-judge-rotenberg-center-uses-electric-shocks-on-students-now-a-court-says-thats-totally-fine?ref=scroll https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/decades-long-fight-over-electric-shock-treatment-led-fda-ban-n1265546 https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna22347088 https://edsource.org/2015/state-suspends-certification-tobinworld-matthew-israel-aversive-therapy/85342 https://autistichoya.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/doctor-hurt-by-ric-kahn-1985-text-transcription-by-lydia-brown-20131.pdf https://www.bostonmagazine.com/2008/06/17/the-shocking-truth/ Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's Behind the Bastards, the podcast that yet again opened with atonal noises because I couldn't think of an introduction. This is partly the fault of Sophie, who is not here today for reasons of pure selfishness. No, she has a bunch of unbelievable number of meetings. My guest today is Aiden Bonacci.

You want to tell the audience a little bit about yourself? My name is Aiden Bonacci. As of today, 28-year-old autistic theater major. I tweet a lot. I do a lot of freelance work. It's nice to be here. Nice to have you on, Aiden. It's your birthday, so happy birthday. Thank you for making the time to show up in the episode.

Today, we're going to talk about something, well, fun is the wrong word. Have you heard of the Judge Rotenberg Center? That sounds familiar, but not 100%. Yeah, it's not a good place, obviously. This is the show that this is. One of the reasons you're obviously an actor, you do theater stuff, but you're also, as you said, autistic. I wanted to bring in somebody who was for this episode because we're going to be talking a lot about kind of... Well, I would say the Dark Ages of Autism Treatment, but this is still going on. Although it's bad. It's really bad.

I think when I reached out online wanting to do an episode that was going to touch on a lot of issues of like health care for autistic people, folks expect that I was either going to do Hans Asperger, who is absolutely a bastard, or talk about... There's a number of things that this could have been, but we're talking about the Judge Rotenberg Center. Specifically, we're talking about the guy who started it. I want to start by noting that autism didn't enter the DSM as like a diagnosis until 1980. Obviously, people were using the term before then. It was a thing that a lot of medical professionals recognized existed, but there's often a gap between when something is sort of like recognized and when it actually enters the DSM.

When it entered the DSM in 1980, the diagnostic criteria for being declared autistic were to put it bluntly more or less bullshit. Somebody couldn't be autistic if their symptoms weren't apparent before they were 30 months old, which we now know a lot for a lot of people. It's like not until you're three or four that like stuff that symptoms become apparent. And a bunch of things we now recognize as signs of autism weren't recognized back then. It was bad. Just in terms of like from a clinical standpoint, they didn't have a good handle on like how to know if somebody was autistic or not yet. And kind of making matters more complicated was the fact that many of the doctors

who were kind of pioneers in autism research were shit shows as well. Again, Hans Asperger, the guy whose name gave us Asperger's syndrome, worked with the Nazis to euthanize disabled people. Oh, you gotta love that. Yeah, we'll talk about him at some point. I bring all this up to acknowledge that the history of even like recognizing autism is fraught. And the history of educating autistic people through like the school system is equally problematic. Because obviously, like once you know that this is a thing, schools are going to, you know,

try to develop standards for how to teach people who have autism. And generally, they're going to do a bad job of this. That's been most of the history of the education system and autism. And I have a little bit of personal knowledge here. I was a paraprofessional for a special ed classroom for about 18 months. The kids I worked with. Yeah, and it was not, we had, there were kids with a variety of different kind of things going on. A lot of them were autistic.

We had a kid who had a severe, who'd had a head injury and like had literally had like a chunk of her brain scooped out in a car accident. We had kids with down syndrome, we had, you know, in my classroom, they were mostly, I think the term we used at the time was nonverbal, which meant they couldn't communicate well or at all in a lot of cases via language. You know, we would develop, we would use sign language, we would use like cards. We had a bunch of different kind of systems we would try to use to help the kids communicate. And all of my co-workers cared a lot, but we also had effectively zero academic training.

There were like out of, I don't know, 20 or so people in the unit that I was in, there were like two people who had gone to school to any extent for what we were doing. And the rest of us were just kind of, yeah, we didn't know what the fuck we were doing. Yeah. And I would say, you know, from the, I've mentioned being a special ed a couple of times and some people, I think, make assumptions about the kind of the worst case scenario for that. I don't believe we did anything that was like harmful in terms of our teaching techniques. We weren't using any of the stuff that we'll be talking about today,

any of like the really brutal methods that have been used. But I don't think anything we did, most of what we did was very useful either because we didn't really know what we were doing. Like we, that's part of the problem with, I don't know, the whole, when kind of the education system intersects with healthcare in any way is most of the teachers. You don't really get good results. Yeah, exactly. You don't.

Yeah. And as somebody who was in special ed from like first grade through fifth grade, you definitely got a lot more of, they really wanted to try, but there really wasn't much they could do in terms of like helping out and whatnot. They really cared. But you can definitely tell compared to like other classes that they're kind of shorthanded. Yeah. Shorthanded and not, you know, there's a lot of specialized knowledge that is required,

both in terms of like how to educate kids who may, you know, interpret kind of verbal command or verbal stimuli or whatever in a different way, who may be, who may have kind of sensory, like, who may fundamentally like kind of see and hear differently than everybody else. Like that requires a lot of specialized knowledge to work with. Outside of that, there's also like medical stuff. Like again, I was going to this job with no training. And when I started, I was dealing with like a grand mall seizure every day.

And I didn't like, we didn't, we didn't like get good information on what to do with that stuff. It was kind of like learn on the job, which is not, not a good, you shouldn't be learning on the job if you're treating children having seizures. Seizures. Yeah, no, that's something you really want at least a few weeks, if not a lot more training off for sure. Yeah. Now, some of the students that I worked with had really serious issues with violence.

Again, I've mentioned this before. For most of them, this was an occasional thing. It would be maybe once a year, and it wasn't, you know, it wasn't their fault. It was something kind of flipped in their head, and they would, they would get aggressive generally because they were frightened. But there were some kids, one particular kid that was my major job to deal with, for whom violence was a really daily issue. And the problem was severe in this kid's case.

When you're talking about kids with problems like that, where they are either very self-injurious, and this kid I'm talking about injured himself more than he injured other people. That's a serious issue because he's not only a danger, he could seriously injure other people. He could seriously injure or kill himself. That's a real issue. And it's a real issue that our school, which was a normal high school,

was not at all equipped to handle. And I feel very comfortable saying, I had no business working with a kid whose needs were so specialized. So I understand the need for residential facilities that can take care of some, of kids with issues this severe on an ongoing basis. There's cases like that where you really need people who are specialized in that type of work and can be responsible and not have to be like, oh, shit, what did I do?

Yeah, and there are, for some of these kids, you need 24-7 care. Because, again, you can't necessarily predict their self-injurious behavior, or they need a tremendous amount of consistency in order to make progress. And you just can't do that in eight hours a day at a public school. No. So the problem, so again, I'm starting this by saying, I get that there is potentially a need for residential facilities. But as we've discussed on the show before,

many residential schools with kids for behavioral issues are fucking nightmares. And I'm talking about the Alon School here. I'm talking about troubled kids schools. And those places are nightmares in catering to kids who are, if not neurotypical, then at least not, generally not dealing with autism or a particularly specialist diagnosis. They're kids with like a behavioral issue. They're kids who got into drugs or something, right?

At a place like the Alon School. When you take it to a further step of specialization, where you're dealing with children with autism, or children with other very specific diagnoses, that's a whole other ballgame. And it gets a lot sketchier because there's a lot less specialization to deal with these places. So if you kind of can bill yourself as an expert in whatever these kids have,

you can get away with a lot of really terrible treatments. And people looking in from the outside will be like, well, I guess that's just what you do with those kids, you know? Yeah, that's not surprising. Yeah. And that's the subject of today, the Judge Rotenberg Center. So our story starts with a man named Matthew Israel. He was born at some point in the 1930s.

I have not found an exact year. He was a contemporary of Michael Dukakis. They were friends. So around when Dukakis was born, as I'm going to guess, when Matt Israel was born. He was born in Brookline, Massachusetts. His dad was a lawyer. He was the youngest of two brothers.

And to the extent that Matthew has told interviewers about his family, he claims that his parents were loving and seldom spank him. So that's good. And that's going to be relevant here in a little bit. But punishment was not a central focus of his parents' parenting strategies. He went to Brookline High School and he was good friends, again, with Michael Dukakis, who would later be governor of Massachusetts and would also fail to become the president.

Matthew and Michael ran cross-country track together. And we're good friends. This will become relevant later. Now, we know a lot less about Israel's early life than I would prefer, but we do know that in high school, Dukakis kicked out of an honor society after he spoke out against the school's plan to allow athletes and people who pursued

non-academic extracurricular activities into the club. He told one interviewer that it was too much of an artificial reward system. So he didn't like that the gifted program was being extended to people who were good at, I don't know, like music and theater. Oh, yeah. Okay. One of those. Yeah. One of those guys. If it's not math, it's like, yeah. It's not football. I mean, no.

He's just, he's a little bit of an elitist, maybe, like an academic elitist in specifics. So in 1950, Israel started at Harvard. He was fascinated with behavioral psychology, and he had the good fortune to be taught by one of the single most influential psychologists in the history of the discipline, a guy named B.F. Skinner. Skinner was probably the dominant psychologist of the mid-20th century,

and he specialized in what's called behaviorism. Skinner believed that all human behavior could be boiled down to environmental, operant conditioning and the reinforcing of selected responses with rewards or punishment. Skinner essentially rejected the idea of free will, which he acknowledged, quote, seems to question dignity or worth, as in, if people don't have free will, if we're just robots responding to stimuli,

maybe we don't have any dignity or self-worth. But as he pointed out, this also meant that under his analysis of behavior, blame for bad behavior and credit for good behavior were both shifted to the environment. So, you're never responsible if you do bad or good things. It's the result of the stimuli that has been fed into your brain. Okay. Which is, you know, not my view of reality.

It's a pretty bleak... No, yes. Very good, 70. Yeah, I mean, it's bleak in some ways, because it kind of reduces... It flattens the moral universe. But it also means that, like, potentially if you can figure out how to feed in

the good stimuli to people's brains, you can stop, you know, genocide and whatnot. You could deal with all of that just by feeding people different input. His hope was that accepting this, accepting this reality about how people worked, would lead to a new organization of society based around social controls

that would be more purposeful than the random positive and negative reinforcements in society. In other words, like, we're just the result of the stimuli that's been fed into us. But because it's being kind of fed in randomly, and nobody's making a concerted effort to make sure that, like, specific good stimuli, you know, kind of are put into people's heads,

that's why society is so messed up. And if you could just be consistent and whatnot, you could fix all these problems. That's Skinner's kind of roughly Skinner's idea. Again, I'm flattening a decades-long career in psychology. This is the gist of it. Skinner wrote, quote, It has proposed ways of escaping from them,

or weakening or destroying their power. It has been successful in reducing the aversive stimuli used in intentional control, but it has made the mistake of defining freedom in terms of state of mind or feelings. And it has therefore not been able to effectively deal with techniques of control which do not breed escape or revolt, but nevertheless have aversive consequences.

It has been forced to brand all control is wrong, and to misrepresent many of the advantages to be gained from a social environment. It has been prepared for the next step, which is not to free men from control, but to analyze and change the kinds of control to which they are exposed. So you see what he's saying there?

Yeah, I'm seeing what he's saying. But there's a lot of ways you can definitely misinterpret that and construe it. Yeah, absolutely. And you can see both sides of this, to where like right now in the US, the ideology of freedom, as it's often interpreted by particularly folks on the right,

has led to the situation where like people are showing up armed outside of schools, because they don't think kids should be made to wear masks during a pandemic. And that is a problem. And he's kind of pointing out that like, but kind of the angle he's looking at this from is that like the ideology of freedom

has kind of made it seem like a bad guy sort of thing to try and analyze the stimuli people are exposed to and alter them in order to change their behavior. And Skinner thinks that that's what we ought to be doing, right? So Skinner was interested in nothing less than the controlled future evolution of human beings. With proper conditioning techniques,

he believed all conflict responsible behavior and the calamitous consequences of freedom could be erased. As Skinner wrote, quote, a scientific view of man offers exciting possibilities. We have not yet seen what man can make of man. And I mean, can see that he's definitely looking at it from a positive angle,

but it's just there's a lot to work around with that, at least in my opinion. There is. And I think Skinner, a big chunk of what he's doing is kind of a response to everything that happened in the first part of the 20th century, the disasters under state communism, the genocides of the Nazis,

the horrors of the world wars, and this idea that like, well, this is clearly terrible. If we can make people better, if we can feed them better stimuli, we can stop all this. At the same time, he's kind of doing... What he's saying, you can find not dissimilar things

that the Nazis were saying. Man, can we can make the human race better by kind of these... I wasn't going to bring up eugenics right away, but I was leaning towards that. And Skinner's not a eugenicist, but anytime you're saying, we can improve the human race

through selective decisions and whatnot that may limit people's freedom, you're not on a totally different wavelength. And you can also draw some comparisons to the idea of the new Soviet man. These strains of thought, and they're all coming from a similar place, which is that in the early half of the 20th century,

you're seeing all these horrible calamities, the human-caused calamities, these terrifying wars and famines and genocide. And you've got a lot of people being like, well, maybe we could do better than that. The problem is that it can lead you in some... And again, I really want to emphasize Skinner's not a Nazi, he's not talking about eugenics,

but you can see how people could take some of the things he's saying and turn them in unsettling directions too. The road can be paved with good intentions. Yes, yeah. And that's not so much Skinner, because he's certainly not the bad guy here, but that's kind of where his ideology

leads Matt Israel. So Matt fell in love with Skinner's theories. At the library, one day, he found a book his professor had written, but not assigned to the class, a book called Walden II. And I'm going to quote from a write-up in Boston magazine. Quote, The controversial book is about a utopian society

where behaviors can be modified for the benefit of all inhabitants. Skinner's theory of operant conditioning. If an action is rewarded, it increases the likelihood that the person will perform the action again. This is, after all, how Skinner had taught pigeons to play table tennis by rewarding the behaviors that led to their game.

Israel later said of the book, It was a real inspiration. I knew what I wanted to do with my life. It was a feeling similar to those claiming to have religious conversions. I wanted to start a real utopian behavioral community. And this is... He's not the only one who gets impacted this way

by Walden II. There's actually a whole subculture that forms around trying to build utopian communities based around Skinner's ideas of operant conditioning. Obviously, I'm also interested in utopian communities. I plan one day to start one that will build a paradise on Earth before it's torn asunder in a hail of fire and bullets from the FDA.

And Matt had the same ambition. Interesting. Oh, yeah. I mean, who wouldn't want to build a paradise based around the fundamental moral precept that you shouldn't be told by the government what pills are and aren't healthy? Or what pills do and don't contain lead?

I think we have the freedom to ingest all sorts of brain pills and to claim that they cure all sorts of diseases. And I challenged the FDA to increase their munitions budget enough to stop me. Okay. So Matt had a similar ambition about desiring an armed conflict with the FDA. But being a young PhD candidate

just getting started in the world, he didn't really have a way to achieve this dream. And sort of his desire to start a utopian community and his lack of resources led to a period of depression for him. He later said, it was a very difficult period. I thought about committing suicide.

If I couldn't bring a community into existence, what sense was life worth living? So he worked on his doctor and he helped BF Skinner teach pigeons to play ping pong. In 1960, he received his doctorate and he used his formidable skill as a hype man to try and raise capital to start a firm selling teaching machines.

His goal was to spend the profits from this business into a utopian social project. But the business didn't do well. And in 1966, Israel was not particularly close to achieving his dream. That year though, he attended a Walden II conference where other weird BF Skinner nerds

talked about how to start their own utopian societies. 83 people attended. And he met a couple of folks who were willing to get involved in such a project with him. And it was a very minor scale at this point. So in 1967, he and a couple of these folks started a communal home in Arlington, Virginia.

And as utopian communities go, very small. It's basically Matt Israel, a guy and his girlfriend, a teacher and her young daughter named Andrea. So not a big community. And this little girl, Andrea, was according to Matt Israel a real problem. He later said, quote,

she walked around the living room with a toy broom hitting people. She also screamed and threw tantrums off and enough that. Israel claims, I was forced to do behavior modification. So this is the first time that he tries to alter a human being through operant conditioning, right? Or at least his first recorded times. I don't know.

That's a weird, I guess you could see it's not any different than like any other parent being like, oh, this kid's doing something they shouldn't be doing. I'm going to, I'm going to like punish them or try otherwise to get them to stop doing the thing. Yeah, but it's not your kid. They start getting dicey.

Yeah, it starts getting dicey. And I guess like, it's kind of unsettling to, I don't, for whatever reason, it's less unsettling to be like, oh, you know, my kid is, is throwing tantrums. So I'm going to like do this in order to try to get them to stop.

That's less unsettling to me than saying, like, oh, this kid is engaged in bad behavior, and I'm going to condition them to do better behavior through like, yeah, operant training. Yeah, it's like, not you're grounded, but you're going to get modified. Yeah, you're going to get modified.

That's unsettling a little bit. He says he got the mom's permission to work on her child. We've got only his word here. I have not heard any interviews with any of the people who are in this with him. But given what comes next, he's really good at convincing parents

to let him experiment on their kids. So I don't have trouble believing that he got... Oh, there's some water to it. Yeah, I think he probably did get Andrea's mom's permission. The methods he used to alter her behavior were called aversives. Put bluntly, aversives are unpleasant stimuli

done to a person or animal in order to change their behavior. The classic example of an aversive would be a punishment. Although aversives are not always administered because a punishment is someone does something undesirable and you do something undesirable to them

to make them associate the two. Aversives can be punishments, but they can also occur before the behavior. There's a number of ways to apply them. We'll talk about that a bit later. The first aversive he used was time out. When Andrea would scream, Matt would put her in a bedroom,

close the door and hold it shut. He would keep track of how long she screamed at him through the door using a chart. Over time, her tantrums diminished, but Israel also found the act of holding a door shut on a screaming child to be exhausting and demoralizing for obvious reasons.

Seems kind of bad. At one point, his patients ran out and he slapped Andrea, saying there's no screaming and time out. This would mark the first time Matt used physical violence on a child to alter behavior, and he doesn't say in interviews what impact this had on her.

But according to a 1985 interview with Israel in the Boston Phoenix, here's what came next. He began to use a combination of rewards and punishments with Andrea. I was a tremendous source of reward for Andrea, he says. She was very cute, very smart, and very appreciative of attention.

I found that a combination of extraordinary rewards and occasional aversives made an environment that helped change her whole personality. Matt, Israel's training had begun with Skinner, who believed you didn't need to use aversives, but Israel could see the results. Punishment is a fact of culture, he says. When the police find you for parking

in a no parking zone, that's punishment. Andrea had been a spoiled brat, but she became a pleasant, attractive, charming feature in the house. So that's a little unsettling, too, right? I don't like that part. I don't like that, and I don't like describing a human being as a feature.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's a little unsettling, too. It's like two bedrooms, one bath, one attractive feature. Yeah, one attractive small child. Yeah. The way he talks about people is consistently unnerving.

It will only get more so, but you know what's not consistently unnerving? Well, I don't know what. Products and services. Oh, yes, the products and services to help keep this afloat. And we guarantee here at Behind the Bastards that less than a fifth of our sponsors

have ever referred to a small child as a child. And that's as good as you're going to get in the podcast business, look. Honestly, that's impressive. Yeah, we work hard for those numbers. Nice. During the summer of 2020,

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Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, we're back. So, at around the same time that Israel started his Arlington Commune, he had formed a national organization with a very dystopian name,

the Association for Social Design. Its objective was to establish a network of associated experimental communities and cities throughout the world. He was essentially taking this subculture even to fans who were all trying to build these little utopias based off of Skinner's ideas

and he's trying to unite them in kind of like a physical social network. Now, there's a guy named Hilki Kuhlman who's a historian of this subculture. He's a historian of like specifically the people who like rallied around Walden too. And Kuhlman writes that Israel's goal was to take BF Skinner's

utopian experiments a step further. Privately, Israel started to call his work Walden 3. That said, his first utopian experiment did not end well. As happens with most of these experiments, the adults themselves couldn't get along and eventually the whole thing fell apart.

I've never heard an interview with the other adults who lived with Matt, but I would very much like to. I suspect his behavior was a larger part of things than he let on. He tried another communal living situation after that, which also fell apart. And this quote from the Boston Phoenix gives some context as to why.

The problem with the houses, says Israel, was that the residents weren't really buying the behavior mod mode. There was very little control over the participants, Israel says. They could always move out. Kuhlman, who has studied this whole subculture extensively, also blames Israel

for the collapse of his two utopian projects and the collapse of the Association for Social Design. From a right up and wired, quote, In living Walden 2, Kuhlman blames Israel, suggesting he, as the Commune's patriarch, wanted his inhabitants to live lives based on altering one another's behavior.

And the Commune's and the Association thought this was no life at all. So, you get what he's saying here. This is an extension of what he's saying about this kid. He's treating these people not like people, but like machines. And he's angry that they have the ability to leave. They don't just passively

take his input. They have the ability to say, well, I don't like this and I'm going. And he's not a fan of that. No, it's not enough control for him. And you can see how a guy whose attitude, who's, who's, who blames the failure of his utopian Commune's on free will

might not be the guy you want having total control over a group of, uh, autistic children who are forced to live in his residential facility. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. You can see how this is heading in a bad direction, right? When his issue is, ah, it's the fact

that these people can leave is the real problem. Ah, that's what we call foreshadowing. Yeah. So, it's my opinion that Matt Israel is sort of a predator. And I base that in large part of the fact that once his two utopic experiments failed because the adults wouldn't do whatever he said,

he decided to start a school. Specifically, he wanted to start a school for kids whose disabilities would render them less able to defend or advocate for themselves. This is not far from how he trained, framed it. And this is what he says in an interview about his decision to start a school. Quote,

maybe a school for the emotionally disturbed, he says. Behaviorism is the kind of thing, particularly in these days, that has been allowed to be applied to the handicapped. So, he's like, adults won't let me do this to them, but people let you do this to handicapped kids. And as a note here,

we're going to read a number of quotes from articles and individuals who use terms for people with autism and other, and other diagnoses that are not modern or appropriate terms. I am not changing the wording these people used because in part it's very useful

in understanding how they think about these kids. Yeah, you'll be erasing parts of it and that would be kind of lessening the monsters or the... Exactly. Exactly. I get it 100%. Yeah. And I don't want to be doing that.

So, Israel claims that he got the idea to start a school when he visited a hospital in Providence. And this hospital had a residential program for emotionally disturbed kids. And when they say emotionally disturbed, a lot of these kids I wouldn't even... I wouldn't call them... I'm sure they're emotional,

but they're kids with who are maybe autistic, who have something going on and there's not any kind of good treatment program. And so, people register that as like, oh, it's emotionally disturbed. And it's like, no, really, you don't know how to talk to this kid or communicate to this kid or help them

like integrate into society and so they're unhappy. Like, that's what a lot of times we talk about emotionally disturbed. That's what we're talking about is these kids who just nobody... people have not figured out a good way to integrate them into society.

Or want to integrate them into society. Or people don't want to integrate them. Yes. And they're unhappy for very justifiable reasons. So, the director of this residential facility, like Matt Israel comes to visit and like, look at how they're working with these kids. And the director

of the facility asks him, quote, do you think behavior modification would work on autistic children? Israel told him, yeah, I think it will. And so, he decides to, he starts a unit in that hospital to experiment on this with six kids using a mix of food rewards, spankings,

timeouts and spraying them in the face with a bottle of water to alter their behavior. Right? So, from the beginning... What are they cats? Yeah, what are they cats? He loves spraying kids in the face. That's actually a big part of, for decades, his...

When we talk about critiques of Skinner, Skinner, when he's talking about altering people's behavior is not really a big fan of aversives, but Israel really focuses down on them and seems to think that like punishments, and in a lot of cases, physically violent punishments like spanking, are the best

way to end behaviors that are bad from these kids. So, he starts this, he does this for nine months or so working with these kids, and it goes well enough at least by his just definition of it, that in 1971, he starts

the Behavior Research Institute in Providence, Rhode Island. Now, autism, again, was not a recognized DSM diagnosis in 1971. Right, right. But there were, of course, autistic people. There have been autistic people since presumably the beginning of the human race.

Absolutely. One of the things that's very frustrating is like the anti-vax people will be like, look, autism's gone up a thousand percent years. This is evidence that there's some poison. It's like, no, you just called these kids emotionally disturbed and hit them in the 70s. They were still there.

You just put them in psych wards. Yeah, you put them in psych wards. Some of times, they got killed. It was never very... They were around, though. You just pretended they weren't. They weren't. Yeah. So, on day one, as he starts the Behavioral

Research Institute, Israel has two patients. It starts from a very small standpoint. His first two patients are a schizophrenic adult male and a teenager with autism. From the beginning, Israel's plan was to alter behaviors in his patients that were antisocial by using aversive stimuli.

And again, he was very focused on punishment. The BRI saw early success. And again, I don't know, like, I don't have an objective way of evaluating whether or not it was successful, but it was successful in the financial sense and that he was able to convince people that his work was good and get more money

and get more patients enrolled. And generally, it is the state enrolling these patients, you know? So, they probably saw it as a success, yeah. Yeah, they considered it a success. And it's also these are kids who have generally very severe behavior issues

and the state's certainly like, well, obviously a regular high school isn't a good place for them. This guy says he can help even the most extreme kids. Let's pay him to take them off our hands. We don't have to worry about them anymore. And there's always with this, it's always framed as like, well, no one else

could help these kids, but there's always a huge there's always a huge angle of like, well, but you didn't really want to. You wanted to get rid of these kids and he offered you a hole to put them in, you know? That's always a chunk of this. Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

So, the BRI, yeah, was financially successful early on in 1972 Israel opened a residential program for the school in a wing of a facility for schizophrenic patients. By 1975, he'd opened a second home in Seacock. Two years later in 1977, he founded a west coast

branch of BRI in California. He opened several more residential homes on the east coast after that. And by 1980, he had completely given up on his dreams of creating a utopia in favor of building schools for these kind of patients. Wired talks briefly

in their article about his early methods quote, they used aversive therapy at BRI. They used positive reinforcement to food and toys in a near continuous stream of compliments for behaving well. But it was the aversives that drew attention. Teachers pinched students, spanked them with spatulas,

stuck ammonia pellets beneath their nostrils and put them in white noise helmets. Israel saw aversive therapy and still sees it as the best response to self-injurious and disruptive behavior. He almost never doped his pupils, a position he holds to this day. He believes that drugs often only safe the patient.

They do not solve her problems. Israel then is now put his trust in punishment. So he didn't drug them, but he didn't drug them, but he'll give them a smack. He'll give them a smack. He'll

spray them with ammonia. There's all sorts of... Jesus. It is like he's right in that a lot of the medication treatments that are given to these kids are horrible. They're just... Oh, absolutely. Drugging them into non-existence in a lot of cases, which is fucked up.

And he's recognizing that. And he's also this is probably how he gets a lot of parents on his side because parents see what it's like to have their kids drug like this and they're horrified by it. And he's like, no, no, no. Simple punishment. I can stop these behaviors. The problem is that a lot of what he's doing is torturing them into

not doing these behaviors. And when you hear pinching, right, you may think that's kind of weird and that's kind of fucked up, but you're probably imagining something a lot less violent than the reality, right? Like a pinch, we don't consider to be serious violence. I wouldn't say. No, but now I'm nervous. Yeah,

yeah, you should be. So the very first report on abuse within the Behavior Research Institute came out in 1973 as the result of a an investigation by the Massachusetts Human Rights Committee. They produced a report on conditions in Israel's school

that pointed out that Matt advocated pinching kids and squirting water in their faces. Teachers were under strict pressure to end bizarre behavior in their students in under two weeks. They could lose their job if they did not eliminate a behavior by deadline. And so

as deadlines approached, teachers started quote, pinching harder and harder to meet their goal. Workers at BRI told one Human Rights Committee member they felt that quote, they were turning into monsters. A 1979 allegation of abuse in Israel's facility provides more graphic

context, quote. On October 28, 1978, according to court documents, Corwin said and Corwin's the person making the complaint, says she saw Israel fingernail pinching the bottoms of 12 year old Christopher Hirsch's feet. Israel was administering a behavioral reversal lesson to get Hirsch

to stop defecating on rugs and in the shower. Corwin said she heard the boy cry and scream in pain. The next morning, a BRI worker named Nancy Thibault got sick to her stomach when she saw Hirsch's feet. There were open blisters and a reddish substance oozing from them, she testified. Employees

continued to pinch the boy's feet. Corwin returned to work after two days off. She was horrified at what she found. The in steps of both Christopher's feet had a considerable amount of blisters and a considerable amount of open bloody patches where the skin had been entirely removed, she said. Oh, fucking

hell. So this is not like a pinch your mom would give you or something when she got like ticked at you, like these are causing bleeding wounds. Like trying to rip the skin off almost. Yeah. And a lot of it is because they're doing this over and over again, sometimes dozens of times because right, that's what you want to have

consistently be reinforcing, I guess, that whatever they did was bad. Yeah. Again, when he talks about this, Israel's always like, well, we're trying to stop self-injurious behavior and I think people think about that like kind of some of the stuff I saw. If that was, if that's

literally how it was being used, it was like, look, we're just trying to stop them from potentially killing themselves. I guess I would say, well, I don't know. But he's also defining self-injurious behaviors like pooping on the ground, which I don't is not going to kill. No. It's not good. Like you should not

poop on the ground, but that's not a danger to the child's life. And again, I'm not saying it would be justified to pinch bloody sores in them if they were slamming their head into something. But that's how he tries to frame it is that like, yeah, I know this is horrible, but we're trying to stop them from permanently

injuring or killing themselves and it's just such a serious situation. The reality is that they're doing this for any kind of behavior they consider unpleasant. And by trying to fix this problem, they're making dozens more. Yes. Yes. Significant issues. Now, the entire time BRI grew

and expanded across the east coast and over to the west coast, there were constant investigations and allegations of misconduct from the beginning. What is happening in these schools is marked out as locked up and problematic. That 1973 report by the Human Rights Committee ended with deep concern over the impact

of such aggressive behavior modification techniques could have on an individual. Quote, This is especially true when the individuals are severely handicapped children who may not comprehend the reasons for being subjected to such intense systematic procedures. Without specific criteria for determining deviant behaviors, an individual

with behaviors of questionable deviancy might be subjected to a therapy program of excessive intensity, merely because his parent or teacher had a low tolerance for the particular behavior exhibited. So they're saying what I'm saying, which is that like, well, you say this is only for the most severe cases, but the severity of

a bad behavior is determined by the person doing violence to the child. And sometimes it's just because they don't like a kid making noise. Again, I'm not saying that any of this would be justified if it was only being used on kids with severe behaviors, but it's being used on for anything that the staff find unpleasant.

The slightest excuse. Yeah, exactly. The head evaluator on that report was a guy named Nazareth, and he later told an interviewer that the students he saw at Israel school had been turned into robots. Quote, He controls everything. He's an egomaniac.

It's either his way or no way. I'm absolutely amazed he's still in business. Now, the article in which Nazareth gave this quote was published in 1985. And Nazareth was amazed because between 1973, when the reports of abuse at his facility started in 1985,

a ton of people in multiple states had tried to shut Matt Israel the hell down. And they all failed. From the Boston Phoenix, quote, In April 1976, Israel expanded his program by founding a parallel reward and punishment school home for six children

in Van Nuys, California, the National Society for Autistic Children, NSAC, now known as the National Society for Children and Adults with Autism, the country's leading advocacy group for those with autism took a long, hard look at Israel's expansion. On December 27, 1976, Israel was officially

bounced from NSAC following allegations that he was practicing as a clinical psychologist directing both day and residential programs in the state of California without obtaining a professional license. Israel denies the charge that pain inflection and other

physically coercive techniques are now employed when it is not necessary to do so. Israel was chided for his apparent lack of respect for rules and regulations. There is unsatisfactory evidence that you are reputable and responsible in relation to the operation of a licensed facility and or that you have the ability to comply with applicable regulations,

the department wrote. First, you have shown a disregard for the law by operating your program without first obtaining a license from this department to do so. Also, you are apparently engaged unlawfully in the practice of psychology without securing a California license. So his work in California gets shut

the hell down because he is abusing kids and he doesn't even have a license to be treating them in the first place. Yeah, that's why he was able to open that up in the first place. Yeah, it kind of seems like someone should have caught that before. Yeah.

Israel was ordered to cease and desist operation or face legal action that would close down his school. The day after the schedule shut down, according to published reports, the students' parents proclaimed that they had taken over the facility and were running it as a co-op. The school which had started as a branch of the BRI

in Providence severed ties with the parent institute and formed its own corporation BRI of California. Matt Israel went from the guy in charge to just a consultant. The new school applied for a license and the move was helped by California Governor Pat Brown, whose law firm represented BRI of California.

The institute got its group home license and it received the only permit ever granted by California to use aversives, physical aversives. So he's told you can't be teaching here because you're abusing kids and you have no license. And so immediately the school says, oh now

we're a parent co-op and Matt has nothing to do with this school. But also we're going to use our connection to the governor of California to get a license to use all of the techniques that he got in trouble for using. But hey, he's not around anymore. No, no, don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. Spoilers, he's

still there. Yeah. They just are claiming that now he has nothing to do with it. Yeah. And this is versions of this are going to happen again in the future. It would come to it would become something of a pattern for Israel. In 1978, the state

or the city of New York balked at Matt Israel's request to increase per pupil tuition from $31,600 to $38,000. The state investigated and according to the New York Times found BRI was in violation of New York state law. They ordered Israel to stop using physical aversives

on New York state students in his providence facility. Instead, Israel threatened to kick them out. This prompted a group of New York City parents to sue the state and federal court and keep their kids at BRI. Oh, fun. Yeah. The parents won. We'll talk more about the parents throughout this episode, but it's important

to note right here that from day one he has enjoyed tremendous support from a lot of parents who have kids in his facilities. Others have sued him, obviously. It's not universal, but a lot of them will sing this guy's praises to the heavens. This is partly because BRI's number one rule is that they will turn

no child down, no matter how severe or violent their behavior. So again, if there's a kid that you know you can't deal with as a parent, I can't, I'm not capable of handling my child's behavior. If you're a teacher and you know like we are school can't handle this kids behavior,

you know BRI will take them. And that's a big part of the support that he gets is because a lot of these parents and these these schools are just overwhelmed with dealing with these kids and BRI is a lifeline. So they're afraid that if the school shuts down,

they're going to have to take care of these kids again. Or, to be fair some of them are concerned well if the school shuts down the only place for my kid is a mental institution where they're going to be doped up 24 hours a day. You know? Yeah, so that's understandable in a sense. Sometimes you just

aren't capable of handling it, but yeah, it's again Israel is pretty clearly the bad guy here and I think parents are making questionable calls, but they're not

villains, they're not doing this to be cruel. I'm sure some of them are shitty parents, but a lot of them are just like I have no idea how to handle this kid and there's not resources for me, you know? It's the wild west in a lot of this period in terms of like any kind of treatment for particularly kids with much more

severe behaviors. And I get the desperation, even though I think it leads them in the wrong direction. It's not unreasonable that they're desperate. But you know who's not desperate? The products and services that

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We're back. In January of 1979, the State of New York sent a follow-up team to BRI for a three-day unannounced evaluation visit. And the report was remarkable. Quote, The January team found BRI to be a professionally conceived, well-documented,

and rigidly implemented behavior modification program. Its effect on the students was the singular most depressing experience that team members have had in numerous visitations to human service programs. So, they're both, this is a very professional, well-documented, rigid, they're very consistent, none of this is like

slap-dash or haphazard, depressing thing we've ever seen. That's saying something. That's saying something. The report listed the behavioral modification programs that a number of students were under. One kid's program was as follows, biting self, 15 minutes helmet,

no vision, white noise, hand play, spank, butt, noises, pinch, butt, out of seat, spank, butt, biting others, cool shower, 5 pinches, foot, hands to head, muscle squeeze, shoulder, clapping, say no, rocking, water squirt.

These are... Yeah, that's... that's a list. It is, and it's, again, as someone who did this and was, I think, bad at teaching special ed, I can't imagine punishing most of these, but, like, a lot of kids will do, like, you know,

they call it hand play, you know, they'll do, like, they'll flap or something, they'll make motions with their hands specifically, like, we never punish that, it's just a thing that, like, well, okay, whatever, who cares? Like, it's not hurting them or anybody else. Yeah, I know in my experience,

it was definitely one of those things where they never, I did get the timeouts, and obviously, like, some punishers, like, being grounded, whatnot, but then there be things where, because I do fidget a lot, and do the

hand waving thing, just to, like, focus, and yeah, it's weird how people who, at least we're trying to work in special ed were less reactive to it than people who weren't, it just seems like yeah, it's like you got to have kind of a right mindset

with dealing with that, because it's not harmful, it's just no, then to focus, it may look weird, but yeah, it's not hurting them or anyone else, as opposed to, like, there are some behaviors on this that would need to be dealt with, like, if a kid is biting themselves, you know, you want to stop that somehow, right, but like,

yeah, you got to stop that, but I'm not convinced a white noise helmet is necessarily the right way to deal with it, that said we had a couple of kids who did bite themselves, and I never, we never figured out a good way to stop the behavior, either so I don't know, like, but it does seem like

a lot of the things that they are dealing, punishing with aversives are not bad for the kids, they're not really problems other than that, the parents or the staff don't like the behavior, you know, they're rocking, they're clapping, they're waving their hands, that's not bad for them,

it's just that it annoys the staff, and so the staff punish it with punching, or with pinching and with spanking and stuff, and I find that pretty disturbing. Yeah. And I should note that the white noise helmet they're putting on these kids is described elsewhere as

basically being a football helmet with an opaque screen that blocks vision while white noise fills the person's ears. Now the squirting that they'll do, the water bottles, was generally water mixed with compressed air, but some students would also have ammonia sprayed near their nose every 15 minutes as an aversive,

which is real pretty fucked up, like I'm not wild about the water, but. That's fucked up. Yeah, ammonia is definitely worse. And while a lot of these aversives were administered as punishments in the traditional sense, that was not always the case. And to explain what I mean by that, I'm going to

quote again from the Boston Phoenix. One of the most bizarre measures they saw was an Israel Technique dubbed behavioral reversal lessons. Israel believes that for his treatment to work, particular behavior must occur often enough for the people to get consecrated, that is, rewarded or punished.

When targeted inappropriate behavior comes at a low frequency, Israel believes it makes it more difficult for the student to grasp the connection between the behavior and the consequence. At BRI, Israel has solved his problem by having the staff encourage the beginning stages of bad behavior.

One of the New York residents was stealing food and drink. To get her to stop, the BRI staff first urged her to steal so they could punish her. The New York team found these instructions taped to her classroom table. Kathy is to receive one stealing opportunity per hour. She should be prompted to

steal the juice squirter and a spank is to be administered. If Kathy does actually steal the juice, she is to receive the helmet and white noise for 15 minutes. So what the fuck is the point then? That's pretty bad, right? Yeah. That's real

abusive. Forcing kids to engage in bad behavior or pushing them at least to engage in bad behavior so you can punish them often enough to stop the behavior. This seems kind of unhinged. Yeah. In the state of New York agreed, they called consecrating entrapment, which feels fair

to me. Absolutely. Yeah. The evaluation team summarized their feelings thusly. Rather than being a program of neglect which harms children by not trusting them in growth. The BRI program utilizes a current professional ideology to deny children the opportunity to grow, to deny them any choices,

to deny them normal experiences in leisure time pursuits, to deny them any opportunities for fun, to deny them the opportunity to demonstrate anything other than a few pre-selected responses. So you're not letting these kids evolve naturally as human beings. You're

even forcing them to do bad behavior so you can punishment. If you see like an occasional bad behavior, you're forcing it to become constant so you can punish it. You are, you're denying them the right to grow the way a person grows. Yeah. And so it could be like, hey, I don't like this kid. I can just

make them do this or plant something on them and then I can punish them. And then I can punish them. Yeah, you get the feeling that did happen. Yeah. Christ. You know, it's again, unfortunately, you know, yeah, it's messed up. Yeah. So the state restricted BRIs use of physical

punishments on New York students. That's the result of this investigation. But they made an agreement with BRI that physical aversives would only be used in situations where a child posed serious physical danger to himself or others and only after less violent aversives had already failed.

Well, all this was going on while this whole set of investigations and is going on a Los Angeles based placement agency, which like places, kids and facilities voted to halt funding to BRI after a review of their operation found serious injury had been caused by the programs aversive therapies.

Parents again fought to block the move saying their children would be sent to state hospitals where they'd be drugged, put in solitary confinement and worst of all, given electric shocks. Keep that in mind. The parents won again. California Governor Pat Brown was said to have been a major reason for this.

Surprise. The whole was sparked in large part by the Corwin allegations, which I quoted from above. That's the kid whose feet were pinched until he had bleeding blisters. In 1979, Matt Israel published a rebuttal to those allegations wherein he claimed that he didn't see any broken skin on the child he'd pinched,

just a tiny blood blister that cleaned up after a few days. Quote, meantime, Christopher Hirsch is alive. Well, happy, healthy, behaving better than ever and with not a single serious or semi serious injury from any treatment procedure administered by me or the staff of BRI California.

Shortly after that rebuttal was published, Christopher's father took his son to a doctor to have him evaluated. The boy was so panicked that it took three adults to hold him down while they tried to examine his feet. One observer at the time recalled, there was no part of the skinny boy's body that didn't have a bruise.

Then they took off his shoes. It was horrible. Christopher's father claims the in steps of his son's feet were filled with holes, the rough size and circumference of a cigarette burn. BRI had been granted special state permission to do pinching procedures, but the state argued that the specific kinds of pinching

that had been done to this kid was not allowed. And they actually had like legal definitions of the type of pinching you were allowed to do, which is weird to me. Even within the kind of fucked up standards of what you could do to a kid at the time, BRI is crossing lines. There were other victims.

In Massachusetts in 1978, Michael Cutler was admitted to the ER after being abused at the Providence facility. To stop him from running away, the staff had handcuffed him to a chair. He was hospitalized with blood poisoning in his arm. His mother claims when she saw him that, quote, Michael looked

like Auschwitz and was covered with black and blue bruises on his thighs and lacerations on his body. The only aversives she had approved for the school to give her son was a cold shower. In 1980, the school had its first death. Robert Cooper Jr., a 25-year-old autistic student

at BRI who was taken to Rhode Island Hospital after he started vomiting. He died at the hospital of a hemorrhagic bowel infarct. And a medical examiner's investigation found no negligence on the part of BRI but noted that they had not followed proper emergency procedures in taking him

to the hospital. Robert's parents defended the school, quote, It was difficult for myself and my wife to allow Bobby to be pinched or spanked but there were no alternatives. Every other alternative was no alternative. In a state institution, he would have become a vegetable. On June 17th,

1981, another student died. Donnie Oswad. He was restrained in bed by a contraption that kept him flat on his stomach. He died somewhere between 9 and 10 a.m. while restrained. The coroner ruled his death was also was caused by mental retardation and cerebral malformation,

which is pretty fucked up. Yeah, that's fucked. The first one, that first death may have had nothing to do with the school, right? The kid had bowel disorders. They were just irresponsible in not getting him to a hospital or somewhere proper. Yeah, but they may not have caused it.

I think the coroner's wrong on this one because we know that restraining people in this way, well, a lot of cops have killed people this way, right? And the fact that he's like, oh no, he died of mental retardation, not being restrained on his belly. For a long period of time.

Yeah, seems pretty messed up to me. The state of California decided there was enough doubt as a result of this case to put the school on a two-year probation. So even though the coroner says this isn't their fault, California evaluators are like, kind of seems like this is their fault. From Wired.

In 1982, the state's Department of Social Services filed a 63-page legal complaint alleging abuse at the school. The complaint claimed, among other things, that BRI withheld meals showed staff how to hide students' injuries from regulatory agencies and, strangely, encouraged students to act out

for a film crew. The footage to be used later to demonstrate how the children had behaved before BRI. Later that year, the state reached a settlement with BRI in California. The school couldn't use anything more punishing than a water spray. The state also forbade Israel, who says he'd turned over control

of the campus before Oswald's death, from stepping foot on the Northridge property. So, again, he would, he'd already been kicked out of the school, but California, I don't think they had evidence, hard evidence that he'd been working there, but they suspected it enough to legally forbid him from entering the property.

In 1985, Vincent Militech died as, like, Vincent was a BRI student. He'd been acting out at the residential home in Seacock and was restrained in a chair. His hands and feet were put in plastic cuffs. His face was masked and helmeted with a white noise machine

and he suffocated to death. Yeah, that's pretty bad. But, of course, BRI was found again not to have caused the death. And you get the feeling that a lot of coroners are just saying, like, well, if a kid who's got some sort of mental disability dies in any way,

it's the fault of that disability. They suffocated him. It's, it's, it's depressing. It seems like, ah, what had happened, eventually, type of deals, what they're going at. Yeah. And a district court judge, though, did find that the school had been negligent in

approving the therapy for him as they hadn't been basically, isn't their fault that he, he suffocated while they had put him in all this stuff, but it wasn't, they should have monitored him more to make sure he didn't suffocate, which again, seems like it was their fault, but whatever, I'm not a fucking judge.

And I guess we should give the judge credit because the coroner was willing to let them off entirely and the judge does call them negligent, so I don't know, I guess that's your best fucking case scenario. You're only going to get a half when at this point. Yeah, exactly. Later that year, the Massachusetts Office of Children

carried out an inspection of BRI that ended with an order to close the school. The school appealed and countersued, and a judge suggested that they compromise the use of aversives. Matt Israel, Matt Israel complained that if aversives were ended, or Matt Israel complained and said basically

that like, okay, we ended all of our aversive training, and my students all regressed and started carrying out the behavior again. He took this as proof that his aversive therapy worked, right? As soon as we stopped it, they all regressed and got worse. New York state investigators though said this is actually evidence that aversives

don't work. The kids were not being treated in any way, they were being controlled by the threat of punishment and quote, when that threat is removed, they revert to their original behaviors. Yeah, so they're basically being able to be unfucked with

the mental torture they would be dealing with. Yeah, yeah, and it's he's not treating them in any way. He's not he's not ending the behavior. He's just they're stopping the behavior temporarily

because they're being tortured. And it's that's that's the core of what's happening here because to a lot of people it does work in the short term in that you've got a kid who keeps hitting himself, right? You

punish him with like some form of like you're pinching him or you're spanking him or you're putting him in this helmet, you're spraying him with ammonia whenever he hits himself, he'll stop hitting himself as long as you're applying those punishments whenever he starts the behavior. But that's

that's not helping him. It's really all it's helping is like the adults around him who are unsettled by the behavior but you're not providing him with anything better. I think you can make an argument that if this kid is like, I don't know, trying to like kill himself or whatever and you apply an aversive therapy that stops

the behavior, maybe that's the only option you have in that short term. But again, it's still not a long-term solution and the vast majority of these kids, it's not that severe. Again, if you've got a kid who's trying to put their head through a glass window and you will apply an aversive in the moment

to stop that behavior somehow I guess you could make an argument for it. I'm not saying that's the right thing to do but it's not it's still not going to solve the problem. You would need to they need long-term therapeutic help and that's not what is happening at BRI.

BRI is just saying as long as we keep torturing these kids, they won't engage in the behavior you brought them here for but also they can never leave or stop being tortured, which is a nightmare. Yeah. And it's interesting to me because he's rejecting the use

of like doping kids up in order to deal with this behavior. Yeah. It feels like it's just like doping in a different way. Exactly. Yeah. It's like, yeah sure, we're not drugging them but we are basically taking

ammonia and spraying it on their face. Yeah. And it's like, you know, drugging them doesn't work because you're just covering up the problem with drugs. It's like, well, you're just covering up the problem with fucking torture. Yeah. And I think a lot of kids would rather, if you have if your choice is be doped up or be tortured I'm going to guess a lot of kids would choose dope

if they can. Yeah. Dope and then we'll fucking get a choice. Not that I, not again, one of the issues you have in discussing this is that like for kids this severe, there's not a lot of good options at this point. That's not the case today and the school is still around today. Today there are a lot better options

but in the fucking 70s and 80s, it is the wild west for this. Yeah. And so you do have to have some understanding for parents who are like, well, what are my fucking options? You know? And yeah, they don't have a lot of them. Not to mitigate Israel's behavior here

but there's a lot of desperation on behalf of the parents and of the schools that are sending kids to BRI maybe. And they're also not fully aware of everything that's happening at BRI too. Yep. So as the court

battles raged on, Israel eventually hit upon the idea of bringing one of his most self- abusive students before Judge Ernest Rotenberg for a hearing at the Bristol County Probate Court in 1986. Rotenberg found Israel's presentation so convincing that the judge ruled that the patient would have chosen

to go to BRI if they've been mentally capable of doing so. The Office for Children in BRI settled in 1987. The states paid the school half a million dollars and Judge Rotenberg ruled that BRI would be allowed to continue using aversions as long as each student's treatment plan

was approved by a probate court. Matt Israel was so happy with this verdict that a few years later in 1994 he renamed his Behavior Research Institute in honor of the judge who had allowed his work to continue. From then on, BRI was known as the Judge Rotenberg Center.

Here we go. Oh, boy. Yeah. Bad shit. How do you feel, Aiden? Oh, well, I didn't think I mean, it's a lot,

but I kind of figured there's going to be some shit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's one of the things, unfortunately, especially with the whole Wild West thing.

It's definitely gotten a lot better in terms of getting treatment in terms of what not finding groups and finding people that can help you out in terms of this. I'm just let's see where this is going to go. Yeah.

Nowhere good. But you know what is going to go somewhere good? The products and services that sponsor this show? Yeah. Well, no, it's not products and services time. What's good

is your plugs, Aiden. Oh, yes, plugs. Yeah. You can with your, sorry, I'm just interrupting you. No, it's okay. I'm just trying to pull it up.

Don't have too much. My biggest presence is on Twitter it'll be and I just punch post a lot of political stuff, but the stupid stuff. It's a fun time. Yeah. Well,

um, that's the episode you can find us. I mean, where you found us, let's be honest, you found us, you know where we are. You're listening to us right now. Like, don't, don't fuck around with me like you know where we are. Yeah.

Yeah. It's not going to be hard. All right. Episode over. Hey. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into

an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside this hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was

trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow hoping to become the youngest

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What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without

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