The Judge Rotenberg Center in Canton, MA provides behavioral treatment to Autistic and Disabled residents using the methodologies of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA). JRC’s behavior modification program relies heavily on aversion therapy.
Aversives that are used to modify behavior include: food deprivation, restraint, solitary confinement, and GED skin shocks. While the JRC contends that they only use the shock device for dangerous behaviors their own literature states they can predict a dangerous behavior and will use aversives for things as simple as raising a hand, standing up, making noises or stimming, a self soothing behavior used by people on the spectrum such as flapping their hands here are multitudes of documented cases refuting those claims.
Matthew Israel opened The Judge Rotenberg Center under its original name, the Behavior Research Institute, in Providence, Rhode Island in 1971. He Later opened a sister school in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, California despite not having licenses to run a group home, practice psychology or use aversives.
California state’s investigation found that residents of the BRI were beaten, restrained (cuffed to chairs), severely bruised, starved, refused bathroom access, and humiliated. Matthew Israel was kicked out for “practicing as a clinical psychologist & directing both day and residential programs in the state of California without obtaining a professional license.”
Israel then opened 3 residential homes in Attleboro, Massachusetts, followed by a residential home in Rehoboth, Massachusetts. Despite corporal punishment being illegal in Massachusetts, the Department of Children and Families allowed the Behavior Research Institute to use aversives and approved the hierarchy of aversives. (Currently houses over 200 residents)
In 1988 Matthew Israel began using a cattle prod to administer skin shocks to autistic students. He then purchased a Self-Injurious Behavior Inhibiting System (SIBIS) which was the only skin-shock device on the market. He later invented his own skin shock device called the Graduated Electronic Decelerator (GED).
The Graduated Electronic Decelerator was roughly three times stronger than SIBIS. Its shock lasted two seconds, not two-tenths of one. In 2013 a Special Rapporteur concluded that the GED violates the UN Convention Against Torture. The most updated device is currently at least 6 times stronger than a police taser and is a tool of institutional violence and intimidation.
Before introducing the decelerator in 1990, teachers and clinicians programmatically handcuffed students, pinched their feet, squeezed their muscles, dumped buckets of cold water on their heads, sprayed ammonia vapor in their faces, and withheld food.
Medical examiners autopsied the bodies of students who died under suspicious circumstances. But no criminal liability was attached to the school until 2011, when Matthew Israel was indicted on charges of obstructing justice for destroying evidence of a resident being strapped to a board and shocked 31 times over 7 hours for not removing his coat.
A deferred prosecution agreement secured his resignation instead of prosecution. By then the school operated under a consent decree that continued to allow the JRC to use electric shocks on disabled people. The center changed its name to the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center “to honor the memory of the judge who helped to preserve the program from extinction at the hands of state licensing officials in the 1980s by issuing the consent decree.
Examples of the abuse inflicted by their General Electronic Decelerator (GED) skin shock device include.
- JRC staffers received a prank phone call from a person pretending to be from the quality assurance department. The caller had staff wake up 2 residents ages 16 and 19, in the middle of the night, restrain them to boards, and shock them a total of 106 times – one was given 77 shocks, the other 29. Six staffers participated. One of the boys was treated for second-degree burns.
- Andre McCollins, a autistic teenager was strapped face down, spread-eagle to a board & shocked 31 times over 7 hours. The first shock was given for failing to follow directions after he did not take off his jacket. The next 30 shocks were given for screaming while being shocked or tensing up in anticipation of the next shock. In a video, McCollins can be heard screaming “Someone, help me, please!” Andre’s mother said, “I never signed up for him to be tortured, terrorized and abused. I had no idea; no idea that they tortured the children in this school.”
The battle to make this practice illegal and protect our most vulnerable citizens has been fought by state agencies, politicians, human rights orgs, and hundreds of advocates, spanning across not only the USA but the world for decades.
In 2013 the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture concluded that the GED violates the UN Convention Against Torture. The Association For Behavior Analyst International (ABAI) stated “we strongly oppose the use of contingent electric skin shock (CESS) under any condition”. Regardless of these statements, over the past few years, many attempts have been hit with roadblocks by our state courts and politicians.
Most horrifically, despite the state agencies battling to ban the practice, DCF began sending kids taken from abusive conditions to this abusive facility in September of 2021.
JRC is a non-profit organization paying no taxes to our state. It costs $291,414 per year to keep ONE resident at the JRC, paid for in tax dollars. For the fiscal year 2021 the center got $89 million or 98% of its total public support and revenue from state government agencies. By the fiscal year end, DCFS had spent $2.8 million and government grants totaled $4,651,447.
JRC, currently operates under the protection of a thirty-six year old consent decree. That decree was entered, and has remained in place, after State agencies resorted to bad faith regulatory practices to disrupt JRC’s operations in the 1980s and 1990s. The State agencies that remain bound by the decree have since moved for its termination without success.