Behind the Bastards - Part Two: The Judge Rotenberg Center

Episode Date: January 13, 2022

Robert is joined again by Aidan Bonacci to continue to discuss The Judge Rotenberg Center. 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. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast where we talk about real bleak shit. And boy howdy, my guest today, Aidan Banachi. Aidan, did I get it right this time? Yes you did, Ben. Thanks for having me, question mark.

Yeah, how are you enjoying learning about the Judge Rotenberg Center? I am not surprised, but I'm also very impressed. Yeah, well it's about to get a lot worse, actually, significantly worse, vastly worse. Fun. How do you feel about electrocuting children? Stuck. Yeah, that's the right response. Can we stop with the electricity once, please? God.

Yeah, no, no, no. We actually should start this episode by talking a bit more about the parents who have made Matt Israel's career possible. It should be clear by everything I've said so far that I think they're wrong and in some cases profound the abusive, but people who are wrong can have compelling reasons for being wrong that are not easily dismissed. George Nazareth, former head of the Rhode Island Human Rights Committee and the first person to take a serious deep look at the fucked up workings of BRI, probably put it best when he was asked by a reporter from the Boston Phoenix why so many parents would sign off on approval to have their children abused. Desperate parents will sign anything. You become desperate about a lot of things.

Some of the parents at BRI are now saying they want the program to continue. They think the state will send their children back home. Some parents would blow their brains out if the state sent their children back home. They've been through the mill. They have their reasons, but at the same time it's like just because it may seem like the right thing doesn't mean it is. It's certainly not. And I'm not trying to say. Part of what I'm getting at here is that a lot of these parents why they like the BRI isn't that it's helping their kids.

It's that it's keeping their kids away. And the Judge Rodberg Center is taking kids from multiple states. They're taking the most severe kids. And it's not right that a lot of parents are willing to accept this school because it keeps their kids away. But that's where they are. And it is not a thing of like they're not. It's not that I don't think they see themselves as being cruel. I think they're unthinkably desperate in a lot of cases. And they're not.

There aren't a lot of options for them. And that's that doesn't defend this because again, I'm we're spending 10,000 words and two hours talking about how bad this place is. Oh, yeah, it's an excusable. But yeah, it's. But it's not unexcusable. Yeah, it's not okay. It's not acceptable. But it is the result of a desperation more supreme than I think most people can grasp.

Especially and this becomes less the case because now I think the parents who are defending it have options. It's fucking 1985 like autism as a diagnosis is five years old. What options do you have? Not that this was the right one, but there's just not a lot of good ones. There's yeah, not or even any of them besides this one. Yeah. And it's, you know, even even if there were and you know, there are in some cases other options for parents. I don't want to also make it like look like it was more.

But also the amount of education the parents might have about what's available is minimal. Like it's just. Oh, yeah. You have to. And again, really want to emphasize that we're not we're not trying to whitewash either the parents or what's happening at this facility. But like. Oh, absolutely. It's a desperate situation.

And that's that that's part of what I think condemns Matt Israel more because he is taking advantage of this desperate situation to test his weird. Like human behavioral modification theories, he's taking advantage of this horrible, horrible situation. Yeah. Like what you mentioned in the last part, he sees them more as features than as actual children. This is just something to show off. Yeah. Something to show off how good he is at plugging in new stimuli to alter their behavior. And it doesn't matter to him, I think that this is that he's just torturing these kids into stopping behavior.

He's not changing anything. He's not he's not helping them. He's temporarily stopping them from doing something via violence. I don't think he cares because the behavior has stopped and he has no problem continuing the violence forever. In fact, he gets he gets paid if he gets to continue the violence forever. Yeah. It's real bleak. Oh, yeah.

So George Nazareth, the guy who gave that quote about some parents would blow their brains out if they sent their children back home. They've been through hell. Nazareth is number one, he's the guy who carries out the first big investigation of BRI and condemns it unequivocally. He's also the parent himself of a mentally disabled daughter. I don't know how to be more specific about her condition than that because in the 1985 article where I found this, she's just referred to as retarded. The fact that a thoughtful, compassionate and very ethical man like George Nazareth would use that term for his own daughter is a sign of how primitive the things were in that period in terms of the science. Because this was not considered an offensive term. There are advocacy agencies called like the organization for retarded persons and whatnot that use that word.

And I bring this up because the primitiveness of the terminology in use suggests how primitive the other methods of treatment were as well. While the Judge Rotenberg Center was marked out by experts at the time for its brutality, the gold standard of care during that period also involved a lot of unnecessary force in medication, which is a kind of force. When these parents say they're worried their kids would get stuck in an institution and drug to unconsciousness, that is not a lie or an unreasonable fear. A lot of these people are in impossible situations. Matt is real promised he could help their kids. And in many cases, he at least seems to have delivered. And one of the things that he does that makes him so good at getting these people to believe in him is these are beautiful facilities. These are not dank and frightening looking places.

They're not run down, they're colorful, they're filled with toys and statues of creatures. He makes them look extremely friendly and comfortable. So if you're a parent taking your kid and this place looks like a wonderful place for your kid to live and be treated. And he can say like, hey, your kid's been biting or tearing open his skin and that stops after a couple of weeks. And maybe you don't notice why it's stopping and what he's doing to stop it. It's also a lot of the parents who defend him aren't entirely aware of what's going on at the school. And you can blame them to some degree for not availing themselves of the information that's out because there are reports on this place. But that is the situation.

So by 1985, Matt Israel School, which is still called the Behavioral Research Institute at this point, received $87,000 per student per year. And a lot of that wound up in Israel's pocket. His compensation topped out, I think, around $2,000 at $300,000 a year. So he's making a very comfortable income. But at the same time, he is putting most of the money into this facility. These are expensive facilities to run. There are, in many cases, multiple full-time employees per student. That Boston Phoenix article, which was a major source for episode one,

was written during the massive series of legal battles between the state of Massachusetts and BRI. Thanks to Judge Rotenberg, those struggles eventually went Israel's way. But at the time the article was written, he did not know that, and the peace ends on this ominous line. Quote, If Massachusetts shut down BRI, Israel says, he may open group homes in Rhode Island. Israel thinks the current crackdown may lead to greater understanding of his philosophy and allow him a greater array of behavioral modification tools. I've never used electric shock, he says in his calm, soft voice.

I wouldn't rule it out. Particularly if we were deprived of other procedures, it's more effective, and you wouldn't bruise or cut the skin. Oh, fuck off. Yeah, that's real bad. That's real scary. And I kind of flipped out a little when I read that in this 1985 article. And I should note here, the only reason I have access to that article,

because that's a 36-year-old article. It was originally published in a physical newspaper. I was able to read it because several copies have been archived by different disability justice advocates. Autistic civil rights advocates have a very particular interest in documenting Matt Israel's early career and his crimes. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, they're doing this because they think he's basically a war criminal, which, by the way, the UN agrees with.

And they're trying to make sure, like, I'm assuming an autistic civil rights advocate who came across an old copy of that, read that into piece where he starts talking about how he's looking into electric shock and was like, well, this needs to be preserved. Like, at some point there's going to be a reconciliation commission or whatever, and we need to document this shit. When we left off in the late 1980s, BRI was still BRI, but Judge Rotenberg had just saved it.

Or to be more accurate, the judge had saved its ability to use physical punishments on students. In 1990, another student, Linda Cornelison, died. Yeah, it's a weird C-O-R-N-E-L-I-S-O-N. I've never seen that last name before, but I think Linda Cornelison. In 1990, she died. And she was a nonverbal student at the facility, which means she's not really able to use language to communicate. And one day she started grabbing her stomach while she was on the bus to school.

And a lot of these kids, they'll go to a school and then they'll go home to a residential facility that BRI runs. When she arrived at her school, a nurse decided that she was just acting to try to get attention or something and sent her back to class. After school, she was sent back to a BRI-run residential home where she lived. Staff were angry at her bad behavior. They believed this nurse.

Basically like, oh, she's playing around pretending to have stomach pain. So they gave her 13 spatula spankings, 29 finger pinches, 14 muscle squeezes, and forced her to inhale ammonia five times. She died in the hospital the next day. And again, the cause of death was gastric perforation, which I don't think was caused by any of the aversives that were done at the school. But the fact that she was not taken to the hospital earlier, her pain was not treated seriously, that's certainly their fault.

Super negligible. Yeah, very, very bad. I would feel comfortable saying they killed her, even though maybe they didn't cause the thing that... I would say the ammonia was just like my help. They didn't help. Yeah. And Linda's mom insists she never,

her daughter never had gastrointestinal problems before. It's maybe, it might even be possible that like the stress from all the aversives had helped cause the gastrointest... I'm not a doctor. I'm not gonna speculate further. Other than to say that by not taking this problem seriously, when she started to complain. And this is again, part of like the bigotry, I guess you would say.

I think, yeah, bigotry is a fair thing to say. Yeah. Because she's not verbal. They assume she's not capable of expressing a serious concern about a health problem. Right? She has to be just like fooling around, trying to trick you. And that is a kind of bigotry. And it's a bigotry that led to this girl's death.

So, the state found after the autopsy and whatnot that while BRI had not caused her death, it had, quote, violated the most basic codes and standards of decency and how it treated her. And while, so while there were no charges on Matt Israel or the facility as a result of Linda's death, it did have an impact on him. He decided that there were too many different kinds of physical punishment at his school, and the nature and impact of those punishments varied too much from teacher to teacher. In other words, he was concerned that one employee's pinch could be a mild pinch, and another could cause a bleeding wound.

He wanted more uniform physical aversives, and he decided that electric shocks were the best way to do this. The machine he picked was called the self injurious behavior inhibiting system. It was made of an electrode and a radio transmitter, which were attached to the arm or leg via velcro. The shock was described as like being like struck by a rubber band. You know, somebody pulls back a rubber band, like not serious, not a real, like a very mild shock. And it lasted about a fifth of a second. One 1990 paper on the S.I.B.S. SIBS system said the shock caused quote, almost complete elimination of self-harming behavior.

We can debate whether or not this kind of treatment is ever ethical, but it is important to note, and whether it's ethical is again a separate question from whether or not it works. We'll talk about that a bit later. We can debate that. It is important to note here that this machine was not designed as a punishment. They were not trying to shock kids to punish them. They were trying to interrupt them when they were harming themselves, right? The people who made this machine felt that such extreme measures were justified

if the mild shock would stop a kid from biting through their hand or bashing their head against a wall. And again, I am not saying this is the right move. And in fact, the evidence suggests that this doesn't really work all that well. I get why I don't think these scientists who say, well, let's try this. We're being monsters. Even though we can say this was a bad road to go down and did not help, they are not trying to punish kids. They're trying to stop kids from hurting themselves.

And again, it doesn't work, but it's not... The start road for this technology is not monstrous. Yeah, it's not fully malicious. It's just not wise. You can say unethical. You can say unwise. You can say ineffective. They're not doing what mad Israel comes to do.

They're not trying to hurt these kids. They are trying to interrupt dangerous behavior. I just think that's important to note because you... Again, it's this thing that you see in science where like someone will have an idea that isn't inherently horrible, but because of how another person takes it and evolves it, it becomes something profoundly abusive. I just think it's important to note this doesn't start as an abusive behavior. It starts as a desperate attempt to stop people from hurting themselves. Israel School was an early adopter of Sibys.

Matt liked the consistency of the shock. He liked that applying it required less manpower than holding down a child to assault their feet. The BRI tested it on 29 students over 14 months. One early guinea pig was Brandon Sanchez, an autistic boy who was also the nephew of a state representative from Wired. Brandon banged his head until he cracked it open. He once chewed off part of his tongue. He was a ruminator too. He would vomit, chew the vomit, swallow it and vomit again.

The acidity was burning his esophagus. The vomiting was causing him to lose weight. Israel thought Sibys might be the only way to save this 12 year old's life. Brandon was down to 52 pounds. Israel and his staff started with the treatments. 50 shocks became 100. 100 became 500. 500 became 1000 and they still shocked more. Brandon wasn't responding, so 2000 shocks and then 3000, 4000.

After roughly 5000 shocks in a day, Israel told his staff to stop. The shocks weren't strong enough, Israel thought. He asked Sibys' developers to increase the voltage. They refused and that's when Israel made his own machine. So you see what's happened here? First off, horrific. If you're doing that 5000 times and it doesn't work, the problem isn't it's not strong enough.

The problem is it doesn't work. After shocking a kid 5000 times to be like, hey, maybe we're not doing it right. And the people who developed this, again, didn't intend it to be used this way. Because he is using it the way he uses all the versits as a consistent punishment for a thing that they do. So they do a behavior they're not supposed to do.

You punish them with a shock. That's not what this is intended for. This was intended to disrupt someone physically from an action. It was kind of like a tourniquet. It was an emergency procedure, you know? And he is not using it that way. And the way he's using it doesn't work. But instead of realizing maybe you're going down the wrong road,

he decides they just need to be electrocuted more. The machine that they built was called, and he works with an engineer on this, right? He doesn't do it all on himself. But the machine that Israel has built, he calls the graduated electronic decelerator. Like decelerate, like the opposite of acceleration. This machine, the GED,

would become Matt Israel's main claim to infamy. It was three times stronger than Sibis, and its shock lasted a full two seconds instead of one-fifth of a second. Now, this is a significant escalation, and it's a dangerous one. But after around a year of testing the GED, Israel became convinced that it still was not strong enough. Students had gotten used to the shocks. So he developed a new, even more powerful device,

one that could deliver extremely painful shocks. Israel was not the first psychologist working with this community to use electric shocks. Ivar Lavas, a doctor with UCLA, had experimented with cattle prods on children in the early 1970s. He was a major advocate for electric shocks as a behavioral modification aid early on. But in 1987, this doctor, Lavas,

published a study that showed that after 40 weeks of one-on-one therapy, autistic preschoolers could attain what he called normal functioning without any kind of aversives. In 1993, Lavas admitted that he had been wrong and he strongly rejected his early work, saying that shock therapy was at best a short-term solution that did not fix problems and was not worth the pain it caused. So Lavas pretty fucked up to cattle prod kids,

but he eventually, he does his recent research. Yeah. He eventually used rockers. Yeah. I was wrong. This is fucked up. Don't do it. Now, when Matt is real, and I should also note that I don't want to make it seem too easy what he's saying here, like these 40 weeks of one-on-one therapy,

that's a lot of work. We'll talk about this more. Yeah, it's a commitment. It is a commitment. And it's what these kids deserve, obviously, but it's also not often what there's resources or what schools are willing to devote resources, what the state is willing to devote resources to do.

And there's further more of the thought that because the adults doing this work are not well paid generally. There are some, there are some specialists who are very well compensated. There are some specific facilities that train and hire professionals and pay them well. That is not the norm.

I got about $8 an hour. And again, no training. You are not going to get someone to perform the kind of one-on-one therapy that Lavas is showing, can work on these kids and can stop these kind of behaviors. You are not going to get that with someone making $8 an hour, working eight hours a day.

It's just not possible. And especially, we brought this up in part one, where they had to do a quick turnaround in like the two weeks with a lot of these kids. Exactly. And with that $8 an hour, and yeah, no, it's just, you don't have any means to do so.

You do not. And it's so much of the problem here. Again, Matt Israel is the primary bastard. But the fact that on the whole, all the state usually wants to do with these, it's a mix. They're willing to devote more resources to the kids who will be able to work a full-time job

and like make a living, right? A lot of these kids, for whatever reason, aren't going to be able to do that. They're not going to be able to live what I guess what you would say the state considers to be a normal life, which is an economically productive life. And so the goal becomes, how do we warehouse these kids for the least amount of money?

As opposed to, is there anything we can do to give them a richer life to help them be healthier? And it's something we've seen time and time again. Not just here. How can we take these people who aren't going to be productive, quote unquote, in our society? In an economic sense.

And help them out for the least amount of money. It's honestly depressing and infuriating. It is. And it's, again, part of the villain here is the reduction of human beings to their pure economic potential. So when Matt Israel started applying aversives to children with behavioral issues in the early 1970s,

data on how aversives worked was severely mixed. By the early 1980s, though, clinicians and researchers had published significant studies showing positive reinforcement could work in the most difficult cases. What it required was constant, quote, functional analyses, which is monitoring patients all day and night to discover what is causing the behavior and then to redirect those feelings.

It's basically saying that like, well, you need a level if you're going to change these behaviors in positive reinforcement. It's a full like 24 hours a day job, monitoring these kids, seeing what's causing the behaviors and redirecting them. That's obviously very expensive and difficult. The best solution is the most

effortful and the most expensive one. Meanwhile, electrocuting kids works in the short term to stop behavior that's undesirable. And, yeah, that's kind of why this happens. In 1991, a guy named Philip Campbell became commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Mental Retardation,

which is, again, that's the name of this government ages. Yeah, again, the Dark Ages. And this, the Massachusetts Department of Mental Retardation, regarded BRI as horrible, like rightfully so. They were also the organization that was supposed to regulate it. So Philip Campbell comes into running this department and hates this school that his department is regulating, with good reason.

Oh, absolutely. And he goes after BRI, but unfortunately, he decides to break the law to do so. And he was eventually found to have leaked false reports about the school to the press. And there's plenty of bad reports about the school, but he does not go through this in a legal or ethical way, and it causes a worse problem,

because BRI is able to go to the court and argue they had been wronged by Philip Campbell, and the court agreed. And Campbell's irresponsible behavior led in 1997 to a Massachusetts Supreme Court ruling that found he and his department were in contempt of court. The state was ordered to pay more than a million dollars in court costs,

and the department was effectively dissolved. So now the Judge Rotenberg Center, and they start calling it the Judge Rotenberg Center in honor of the judge who was most responsible for getting them through this period of legal fighting. The Judge Rotenberg Center no longer is monitored by a state watchdog. Instead, they're only being monitored

by an independent attorney hired by the probate court, which means they're effectively unregulated for a while. Oh, that's fun. Yeah. And this is the period in which the use of... He starts to experiment with electric shocks in like 1990, 1991, but after 1997, it really explodes.

Now that they're free to do whatever the fuck Matt Israel wants, the school expands massively. It's enrollment more than doubles from 110 kids, and this is just the Providence facility, to 228 in the space of about four years. The school's budget balloons from 18 million to 56 million dollars. The patient base grows to include kids whose problems were not just like the result of a diagnosis,

but also largely behavior based. So kids who'd gotten in legal trouble, kids who in some cases come from jail, some of them are like kids with ADHD who like steal a car or something. In the early aughts, the school's educational policy also changes, and they switch from teaching kids and the goal being at least ostensibly,

this is still a school. We're trying to alter their behavior, but we're also trying to educate them to... They stop trying to educate them really. They move on to simply managing the behavior. One psychologist who worked at the Judge Rotenberg Center later told Wired, quote, Israel couldn't stand them not behaving in a perfectly controlled way.

And so now that he's in total control and without oversight, Matt Israel turns the Judge Rotenberg Center into a perfect prison, one in which every single kind of behavior can be tracked, judged, and punished at the push of a button. But you know what's also a perfect prison? Oh, dear God. Capitalism, baby. Capitalism.

Yeah, you gotta love it. Oh, it's a perfect prison. So lock yourself in with these products and services. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right.

I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story

is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of goods. He's a shark. And on the good-bad-ass way. He's a nasty shark. 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? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic

and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23,

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All right, we are back, and we're talking about horrible things. So I just told you that he is able to, after 97, turn the Judge Rotenberg Center into a perfect prison. And I'm going to read a quote from Rob Wired that I think makes the point of what a fucking nightmare this place is. Here we go.

Yeah, strap in. JRC has always believed in punishing not only the negative behavior, but also the actions that presage it. A face slapper could be shocked for simply raising his hand. This is called treating the antecedent. A lot of things can be antecedents at JRC. Yelling, refusing a teacher's order, talking out of turn. Another psychologist who left in 2002 says

those are precursors to violence so much as ordinary classroom disturbances. JRC has video monitors in every room of the school, in every residence, has had them since 1975. Certain staffers, called Quality Control, sit in a control room day at night, a wall of television monitors and computer screens before them, watching everyone, and because the rooms are mic'd, hearing everything.

The control room is ostensibly to ensure that students are shocked for the inappropriate behaviors that an employee might miss. When that happens, Quality Control phones the staffer in the room, who then applies the shock. The people who sit in the control room serve another purpose. They're watching their own. If, say, a teacher in a classroom refuses to shock a kid, he or she is written up.

The write-ups carry the Orwellian title, Performance Improvement Opportunities. Anyone can tattle on anyone else, regardless of the station. The school has staffers whose job is to read and track those forms. Get enough of them, and you're gone. So, yeah, that's... Wow, buck. That's horrifying.

It also, it's making the point here with the treating the anesthesia and stuff. So, again, they have to go to a judge to get approved to use aversives and to shock kids or to go to a probate court, so they have to get legal approval to do this. And the way they do that is by saying the only option, they're violent, they're hurting themselves or hurting other people, and the only way to stop that is by applying the shocks, right? That's how they justify this.

But, and so the probate court is saying, okay, in order to stop this kid from hurting or even killing themselves, you are allowed to shock them, okay? But the Judge Rotenberg Center, because of how they view antecedents, can define raising their hand, not sitting down when told to, refusing to take off a jacket,

refusing to put on shoes, all of that. They can call antecedents to a violent behavior, and so they can electrocute kids for anything, for flapping their hands, by saying, that will lead to violence if we don't electrocute them early. Yeah, they can just do fast and loose. Exactly. So, they are always saying, and when they defend themselves,

we only do these shocks in order to prevent kids from hurting themselves, but they define hurting themselves as basically fucking anything. Yeah, whatever they want it to be. Yeah. So, staffers at the time, and this is again the early or late 1990s, noted the complete lack of fucks given to the education of kids in the center and the absolute obsession with surveillance and punishment at all times. Some teachers would eat in their cars

just to avoid being listened to via hidden microphones. Meanwhile, the electrocution panopticon built by Matt Israel had a profound impact on children. One teacher told an interviewer that he'd been warned by a staffer to announce to the class whenever he reached into his pocket. One time he didn't, and the kids he was with started screaming. They thought he was reaching for a shock buzzer. But because they'd screamed,

which was an antecedent to violent behavior, they now had to be punished. Quote, all of these behaviors had to be consecrated with a GED electric shock. There were no exceptions. A scream was a scream, a grab was a grab, and we had to follow court-approved orders. So these kids are so fucking PTSD'd out by being electrocuted that they see a guy reach into his pocket

and they freak out, and then they have to be electrocuted for freaking out. Yeah, so it's... You see what a fucking nightmare this is? Yeah, it's a fucking nightmare. Like, holy shit. Yeah, it's really bad. Now, in interviews,

Matt Israel and other representatives of the school will claim that students are only eligible to be shocked if they've engaged in seriously dangerous behavior. This is untrue, at least according to a 2006 report by the New York State Education Department. It claimed that the JRC was shocking kids. Quote, without a clear history of self-injurious behaviors. It is hard to exaggerate how profoundly abusive this treatment can be.

To make that point, I am going to quote from an NBC News article about a kid named Rico Torres. Quote, Gee, oh. Yeah. Yeah, woof. Like, the fact that they would do it while he was sleeping and it's like, and with the urination thing,

it's also like it was being caused because of the shocks. Yeah, yeah. If you electrocute a child while they're sleeping, they might pee the bed. Yeah. But it's not a behavioral issue. That's a you were electrocuting a child issue. Yeah, like, oh my God.

Yeah, it's, um, it's rough. It's real rough. Yeah, no. Yeah. My one thing is like, uh, I would just hate the, if they did this with like the more non-communicative kids, you know, the ones, it's like, uh, it's just rough all around. Yeah.

Um, it is rough all around. And it's like, I think, uh, I think a lot of these kids are non-verbal. I don't know. It's, it's, it's, it's a mix. It's hard to get like the exact data on that. But yeah, I mean, that, that is an additional level. If the kid can't even tell you, well, it gets the same thing with that, that girl who died.

Yeah. Um, yeah. They can't tell you and it's like, oh, you're misbehaving. Here you go. Yeah. They're just trapped in this world of adults electrocuting them. Never understanding really why. Um, it's pretty bleak.

Yeah. So obviously also pretty bleak for the staff, a lot of whom get this job. They see it's this nice facility. They see it's, I'm helping kids. They go and they realize like, Oh no, I'm torturing children. You know, there's a huge turnover. And they don't, you know, you have to understand too. A lot of these people who come to realize what they're doing is wrong.

Initially, maybe like, well, this guy's a doctor. This school has a great reputation. It's like it's got a approval from the state and whatnot. Maybe I'm just being squeamish and I don't understand why this is necessary. Right. A lot of them do come to realize like, Oh no, this is horribly fucked up. School has caught like most workers don't last a fucking year. I don't think, um, which of course makes it hard to get decent staff because the

kind of people who are going to do that job are maybe sometimes going to be monsters themselves. Yeah. Well, it doesn't pay well, but I get to hurt people, you know, prison guard shit. Oh yeah. Yeah. The consequences of this situation where you have constant turnover, the good people leave,

the folks who are able to stay for a while or maybe terrible. The consequences of this are made abundantly clear on August 26th, 2007. When a prank caller calls the staff in the middle of the night and poses as a supervisor. Remember, there's always people watching and they'll call rooms and be like, Hey, such and such kid did this behavior and you didn't catch it. You need to shock him now. You know, so this person calls a supervisor who's awake on the night shift and he orders punishments for two teenagers who are asleep at the time.

The kids are 16 and 19 and the person on the phone claims they had misbehaved earlier in the evening. Now, the staff weren't supposed to administer shocks long after bad behavior and this had been hours ago, but also the thing that Israel had established is that if you are a staff member and you're told to shock a kid and you don't do it, you'll get fired. Right. If you don't instantly obey orders because again, he's kind of operant conditioning his employees too.

Yeah. If you delay it all once told to electrocute these kids, you'll lose your job. So they, they, they wake these kids up to shock them. Other students who are awake at the time, beg the staffers not to do this. And one of them is even like, Hey, this, this might be a hoax. This phone call might not even be like an actual supervisor. Yeah. But the staff wakes both boys up and electrocutes them repeatedly.

Cause again, the person on the phone says, keep shocking them, keep shocking them, keep shocking them. They shock them so many times that they have to bind their legs and arms so they can continue to electrocute them. One teen was shocked 77 times, the other 29 times, the former had to be treated for two first degree burns. It's horrible, horrible. Now the caller is believed to have been a former resident of the center because he knew the

staff, he knew the number, he knew the other residents. Um, so it may have been someone who was there and had an issue with these two kids and like wanted to fuck with them. I don't know as far as I can tell the person who did this has not been caught. NBC wrote quote at the time of the call, five of the six staffers had worked double or triple shifts and most had been on the job less than three months. The staffers were described as concerned and reluctant about the orders, but they failed to verify them with the central office or check treatment plans to make sure the teens could

receive that level of shock therapy. The report said staffers also did not know who was the shift supervisor that night. One reason staffers might not have been suspicious of the phone call is that the Rotenberg Center uses surveillance cameras in its group homes to monitor residents and staff. And a central office employee is allowed to initiate discipline by phone. So again, these guys haven't been there long. They don't know who's supposed to be giving the order so they don't recognize that anything's really fucked up.

You know, they should have obviously. Yeah, they should have at least double checked like once or at all. Sometime between the first and 77th time they shot the child. They had tied to a fucking chair. Um, but it's also the fault of the system he's developed. Not to take blame off of these people for doing something horrible, but like. Oh, absolutely. Matt Israel built a system where this was inevitable.

The staff responsible were fired immediately, but the incident was so horrific that it sparked another set of investigations into the Judge Rotenberg Center. A court demanded video footage of the two students being shocked for three solid hours. Matt Israel ordered the footage destroyed, which was a crime and led to him. Oh, yeah. Dicted by a grand jury in 2011 in order to avoid criminal charges. Israel agreed to leave the school. He'd found it.

So 2011 he quits because he illegally destroys evidence and the court is like, Hey, we won't charge you criminally if you get out of here. Fun. I don't know. I think maybe lock the fucker up. Yeah, he should be in jail, but he shouldn't be around kids. No, I'll say that. So the very next year, 2012 is when the general public finally got their first good look at

what the Judge Rotenberg Center had been doing to children all those years. This was thanks to the case and the mother of Andre McCollins. Andre's mother had enrolled him in the Judge Rotenberg Center, not because he was super violent, but because he was special needs and he had been raped in a public school by another student. And she, a big selling point of the GRC, first of all, it looks very nice. It looks like a well run facility. She also likes that it's heavily surveilled.

It's covered in cameras. So she feels like nothing bad can happen to her kid here because someone's always watching. And that's like, you have to understand, like that's all. It's reasonable that like the fact that this place is so surveilled, that it's comforting to her. Because what happened to her kid? You know? Oh yeah.

That's reasonable. Yeah, totally reasonable. In short order, Andre was taken off his medication because again, the Judge Rotenberg Center in Matt Israel don't believe in medicating kids. He was put back on and after he started acting out and engaging in self injurious behavior and like the school couldn't correct it and they didn't have approval to give him electric shocks. So after they have to put him back on his medicine, they go to court to get him approved

to receive electric shocks. The court approves it and the treatment plan listed that shocks could be applied if he was aggressive, if he screamed or if he tried to remove his electric, remove like the electrocution thing or if he engaged in what they called health dangerous behavior and they defined health dangerous behavior specifically in his case is tensing up his body. So if he gets tense, they can electrocute him. Famously relaxing electrocution. Yeah.

Man, they were horrifically creative with these excuses to shock kids. They were and it's one of the fucked up things is that like they're talking about how bad that he's on Rispridol and they're talking about how bad Rispridol is. So they want to, they take him off it, but then he gets worse when he's off it because it's a medication. Yeah. It's helping. And that's why they justify putting this kid on the electrocution treatment so that they

can take him off Rispridol again and then electrocute his behaviors away. Which is, yeah. They're basically doing the thing like, hey, have them steal something now we can shock them. Yeah. And it's one of those things obviously over medication is a problem. I've known a bunch of kids who were like an adult who were like, no, once I found the right medication, it was life changing.

And like the kind of blanket rejection of any sort of medication in favor of electrocution is pretty bad. Oh, yeah. And, you know, it comes out of a period when massive like unreasonable and unlike immoral levels of medication and drugging were common. And I get that, but it persists past the area where there are medications that really help and it rejects those in favor of torture, which is bad. So now that he's being electrocuted regularly, Andre has taken off of his meds again and

his mother visits him, you know, several times and sees that like his behavior has changed in a negative way as a result of being off his meds and probably as a result of being tortured and she begs the school to put him back on his meds. The school doesn't do this and the electrocutions continue and he has like a bad incident one day where he, the school alleges that he at least attempted to hit a teacher. So they shocked him and then afterwards hours after that violent incident, they shocked him again and I'm going to read a quote from New York magazine that describes what happens later in that day.

Like other students in the room, Andre sat at a desk facing a computer his back to the teacher. A worker told him, take off your jacket. Andre didn't move. Take off your jacket, please. Again, no response. An employee pressed the button to activate his shock device. He screamed.

Andre fell to the ground and tried to crawl under his desk. Your adults grabbed him and wrestled him to the floor, holding him down while he struggled. His psychologist brought in a restraint board and the employees moved him on to it. Face down. Eight of them surrounded him as they bound his wrists and ankles to the board. Usually after Andre got a shock and was restrained, he'd calm down. But on this day, he only got more agitated. The more upset he became, the more he tensed up his body and the more he tensed up, the

more shocks he received. Between 10 a.m. and about 11 a.m., the worker shocked him 14 times. Each press of the button triggered a loud, high-pitched alarm. Informing employees, the shock had been delivered. While Andre's cries echoed down the corridor. Yeah. I don't know what else to say at this point. Like, God damn it.

Yeah, it's pretty bad. Yeah. After a lengthy court battle, his mother succeeds in making this video public. And this leads to widespread outrage against the Judge Rotenberg Center and more investigations. In 2013, a United Nations special report tour on torture found that students who were electrocuted at the Rotenberg school had their rights violated under the UN Convention on Torture. So the United Nations says, these kids are being tortured. Like, this is, this meets our definition.

You achieved a special level, fuck. Yeah, if the UN is coming after your school, like. You might want to reevaluate. You may be real fucked up. You know, what isn't, hasn't been declared torture by the United Nations. Hopefully the products and services that sponsors podcast. Well, most of them. Most of them.

Okay. Again, north of 80%. Northeast. Ah, good odds. Good odds. Yeah. Hard, like the strong odds are whatever advertisers are on our show have not been declared to be torturing people.

Almost none of them. That's a good thing. Yeah. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aaronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys.

As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. Standing inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way.

He's a nasty shark. 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? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful

lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all

bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories.

But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts. Oh, we're back. So as this, you know, this, this, the UN starts looking into shit. And as a result of this video coming out, the Justice Department launches an investigation that I think is still ongoing like a decade later. I haven't found a result from it, and I've read some recent reporting on it. So it seems like either it got kind of buried or they're getting real deep into it, but it's been a long time without kind of a result.

Another thing that's ongoing is Matt Israel's obsession with experimenting on children. If you'll recall, decades ago, he was forced to sever his relationship with the school he'd founded in California. It had been taken over by Judith Weber, who'd been the executive director of the West Coast BRI when it was founded. Judith and Matt eventually married, and in 2015, it was found that Matt Israel, while not on staff at the West Coast BRI, which had been renamed Tobin World Two and Tobin World Three, was working as a behavior analyst and an administrator at both facilities.

The schools had not notified the state that Matt Israel had been added to the roster of employees because Matt Israel was legally prohibited from entering the facilities. From a write up at EdSource.org, quote, in unannounced visits to Tobin World Two and World Three on January 16th and 17th, investigators also found that the schools were employing behavioral analysts with expired certifications and teachers without the required credentials to teach students with certain disabilities. The school also failed to comply with state regulations that require behavior plan reviews after staff members have physically restrained students or isolated them in rooms they cannot

leave. The Judge Rotenberg's Educational Center is the only facility in the country that still uses electric shock therapy in this way. Roughly 20% of their students receive shocks, although given what we know about how lax these facilities can be about rules and paperwork, it's hard to say if that's really all the kids who receive shocks. In March of 2020, the FDA banned the use of electronic shock devices in the contexts that they're used in the center, saying they caused, quote, an unreasonable and substantial risk

of illness or injury. But in July of this year, in a two to one decision by the Washington DC District Court of Appeals, it was ruled that the FDA's ban violated federal law by interfering with the authority of healthcare practitioners to practice medicine. The center's attorney, Mike Flamia, told CNN that the ruling was important because, quote, it protects what all of us cherish, and that is the right to go to our doctor and have our doctor decide what is the best treatment. Um, you do you, I guess.

What the heck? Well, you do your kids. Yeah, it's messed up. Yeah, I'm like, honestly, that's unbelievable because it's like, yeah, I know it could be a little bit so it's like, hey, my doctor can tell my kid that you need to be shot. And a lot of them didn't even have the credentials anyways. Yeah. So again, that's part of his like, well, I have a right to, you know, pick my doctor

and for him to pick his, well, but a lot of these people aren't legally qualified to prescribe any kind of treatment to your kids. Or to deal with kids of autism or anything, that's the thing that's pissing me off the most about this. It's like, these people are making super important decisions and they have no right to make. Yeah. And part of this issue is this thing I've complained about a few times on the show, which is that like they're framing this as like, well, we want the freedom to go to our

doctor and have our doctor decide what is the best treatment. You want the freedom to have absolute power to say what is and isn't okay for your kid. And I don't think parents should have that. You're not the God of your child and you're not the government of your child. And I don't think government should have a lot of the power that they have. But like, there's this problem of how parents are treated as the ultimate authority of what's good or bad for their kid, which has a lot of horrible consequences outside of this too. But this is one of those consequences where it's like, well, yeah.

Maybe within the context here where a kid is autistic and maybe not. It's like, well, the parents basically get the keys to the kingdom. They get to make the final call and they don't know what's going on most of the time. Yeah. A lot of parents suck. Maybe don't make them the absolute God of their child because that's a bad thing. I will say the full disclosure of my note. Yeah, but, you know.

I know. I know. I've known some people who had disabilities parents that weren't that great. Yeah, exactly. And it's a problem. Yeah. So the JRC was supported by a significant number of parents who has always argued that the facility was a matter of last resort for their kids.

In making this case, Flamie, the lawyer offered up the argument that absolutely no other treatment had worked for these kids, quote, I know that the people that opposed this treatment, they'll tell you over and over again that there are other treatments that work as well, if not better. And they'll talk about positive behavior supports, which JRC does all of that. They'll talk about drugs, psychotropic medications. These clients at JRC, they've tried all that. Numerous drugs, numerous diagnoses, numerous combinations of drugs.

That is, again, extremely common, this line of argument that they've tried everything. This is the last resort. I think the most dedicated example of this came from that Wired article I've cited a bit in this episode. And while that article goes into horrible detail about abuses at the JRC, it also includes this bit. You don't know what it's like to be the parent of a student at the Judge Rotenberg Center.

You don't know what it takes to hear all this and still come out in favor of the school. And you don't know because you don't have a kid who pulls out her hair and bloody clumps, who seems to enjoy that. Okay. A kid who scalp resembles that of a frontier settler worked over by a furious native. And then to see her today, happy, smiling, a brunette, just like any other brunette. And all thanks to JRC, her life saved by the machine, saved. And that's just one kid, just one story.

You see, there's another side. There's a lot that's fucked up about that Wired article. And they cite some science that makes the situation seem much more muddled as to whether or not this is best. A lot of that science is at this point more than 20 years old. The most recent studies I think they cite are from 1999. Oh, yeah. And it's made more difficult by the fact that the JRC isn't exactly required to hand over

objective, reliable evidence about the efficacy of its methods, and those strong arguments that they're not fixing any problems these kids have, they're just temporarily suppressing them with violence. Yeah. And there's also the thing of like, are they actually trying these other methods or are they just going straight to the shocks? Are they just going straight to the shocks? And yeah, supporters of the school will argue that like these schools that don't use aversives

and that use only positive support will turn kids down. People say this kid is too severe for us. And eventually those kids have no other option but the Judge Rodenberg Center, which turns nobody down. Now most of the studies I've come across that purport to show a benefit to the aversives used at the JRC are more than 20 years old. And again, not at all conclusive. The preponderance of evidence seems to suggest that these kind of treatments are not necessary

even in the most severe cases, but the kind of treatments that help in the most severe cases are labor intensive and expensive. It is worth noting, regardless of what you want to get into the weeds on the science here, no other facility in the U.S. uses these methods. And many other facilities do treat children with problems just as severe using methods that do not evolve electrocuting kids. The Judge Rodenberg Center and the parents who support it argue that as unpleasant as the shock treatments are, they also represent the only viable treatment for patients who

would otherwise destroy themselves. Nancy Weiss is the director of the National Leadership Consortium on Developmental Disabilities at the University of Delaware. She has been a longstanding critic of the JRC, and when that court ruled they could keep electrocuting kids, CNN went to her for comment on this matter. She said, quote, Part of the reason that people with disabilities have behavioral problems, behaviors that we find challenging, is that they're protesting the crappy lives we offer them.

It's that person's only form of protest, and it's a critique of the life they're being offered. It's like there's no greater human impulse than to be in charge of your own life, and what JRC does, to an extent beyond what any other provider in this country does, is strip people of choice and control. Yeah, I mean, when you get down to it, it's ultimately, there are much better ways of doing it than electric shock. There are, and I find it compelling what she says about a lot of these bad behaviors of

these kids protesting in the first place, that their lives, even before the JRC, didn't offer them a lot of autonomy of choice. But also, what Israel did in his facility is strip choice, because he doesn't see people as having choice. He doesn't really believe in free will. He believes that we're just the product of stimuli that's put into us. He treats these kids like robots. He treats his staff like robots, and the belief that you can make this perfect system if you

just put perfectly consistently put the right stimuli in. And it does kind of work as long as the kids are getting electrocuted, for the most part. They stop the behavior, they comply. But that isn't because anything has changed about them. It's because they've been tortured into not doing certain things. He just didn't have an issue with that, because again, everyone's a robot. Yeah, it's just a feature. Yeah, it's a feature.

It's pretty weak, ain't it? It is. It is. It is pretty weak. Oh, God. So, yeah, the FDA has, you know, the FDA, to its credit, eventually did try to stop this. But then a judge was like, no, no, no, we're going to keep doing this shit. So are you still running today?

Oh, yeah. Yep. Jesus Christ. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, at the end, yeah, I, that's freaking bleak, man. Yeah. I wish I could have more to say, but I'm just, because the biggest problem, because as somebody

who is autistic, is there are some people who, like myself, are lucky enough to be able to do work and all that fun stuff. And a lot of times we get the name Asperger's, but fuck that shit. And so it's like, I just, I couldn't imagine something like this and just, it just makes me feel so angry. Sorry, I'm rambling on something. No, no, no, no. I mean, that's, that's really important.

Like the, I don't know, how do we, how are we, because we all have, we all have some form of mental disability, even if it isn't outwardly apparent, how are we able to be able to treat one another, support one another, without dehumanizing and freaking shocking them like cattle? Yeah, and it's some, part of the problem here is that a significant chunk of people with autism aren't legally in control of their own lives, which in some of them are not. That is true. A legal capacity capable of being in control, at least in a legal sense of the word.

They need some sort of caretaker. But that means they're not making decisions for themselves. And so like the, the industry that has developed around providing these people with care, often and in fact, largely does so without any real input from the people in it. And because the people who are kind of most vulnerable to this tend to be unable to express themselves in a way that is easy for most people to understand, it happens without most people being aware of it. And so there's no outcry and nothing is done and it continues on for decades and decades.

Because they think that's how it is. Yeah. That's the only option or the best option or, you know, we'll look their parents say this is fine and like, yeah, it's not great. No, it's not great. Well, Aiden, you got any pluggables to plug? You can follow me on Twitch at Notch the B, N-O-T-C-H-T-H-E-B. I post a lot there, social commentary, do that stuff.

But that's my big thing to plug. Sweet. Well, plug out, plug away, and I don't know, yell at the FDA or judge or something about this. I don't know. I guess the FDA is more or less on board. I don't know who to yell at at this point. Just yell.

Just yell. You can yell. Howl into the sky. You got to fucking stand up for people. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you, Aiden, and that's behind the bastards. Thanks for having me.

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, we're 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 person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass, and I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed

the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, 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 Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.