Nestled away in Canton, Massachusetts is an institute which has, over the years, gathered a reputation of sheer infamy. The Institute is the Judge Rotenberg Center and despite the rainbow that is placed on its sign, the Judge Rotenberg Center is a place of brutal torture.
The Center was originally founded by Matthew Israel in 1971 over in California. It then moved to Providence, Rhode Island. After a judge saved the institute in 1994, it was renamed the Judge Rotenberg Center in honor of said judge. In 1996, the JRC moved to Massachusetts.
The controversial aspects of the JRC, which services the mentally disabled, is in their application of B F Skinner’s principles. Skinner was a highly influential American psychologist who believed that punishment was the way that living organisms learned. His studies, however, were flawed in that they were conducted on lab animals and never on humans. He merely extrapolated the results he saw in a closed system of animals and tried to apply them to mentally disabled people, most notably Autistic people.
The JRC decided, essentially, to test Skinner’s ideas on human subjects. The result has not been pretty. Among their treatments are such tactics as withholding food, forced inhalation of ammonia and prolonged restraint, but the most controversy comes from the graduated electronic decelerator (GED). This device is an electric shock device that was designed to be more powerful than a police taser.
The device is noted as being used extremely liberally for minor offenses, such as the failure to remove a jacket or flinching from either the pain of being shocked or the fear of being shocked. It has also brought the Center under investigation several times, with the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture stating that the practices of the Center would be illegal to use on a convicted terrorist. When New York State investigated, they found deplorable conditions. One incidence, as shown in the last link, led Matthew Israel to leave the JRC to avoid the criminal charge of destroying evidence.
Why did New York State investigate? You might ask, and I will answer. New York state investigated because roughly $30 million of New York City taxpayer money goes there annually. Your tax money going to a torture facility in another state. One I’d bet you never even heard of.
Back in 2014 the FDA held a hearing in regards to the GED. This year we learned that their opinion of the device was that the device should be banned as “evidence indicates a number of significant psychological and physical risks are associated with the use of these devices, including depression, anxiety, worsening of self-injury behaviors and symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder, pain, burns, tissue damage and errant shocks from a device malfunction. In addition, many people who are exposed to these devices have intellectual or developmental disabilities that make it difficult to communicate their pain or consent,” which is a damning opinion.
The battle, however, is far from over. As long as people don’t know the history of the JRC and the GED then we are doomed to repeat it. We are doomed to repeat the torture of American citizens due to their disability, doomed to repeat the invisibility of this issue. Below this I’m going to place several additional pieces of reading on this issue. It is the responsibility of citizens to educate themselves on important issues and just because you may have never heard of this one before does not make it less important- rather it makes it all the more important.
Additional reading:
https://autistichoya.net/judge-rotenberg-center/
https://autistichoya.net/2016/04/22/jennifer-msumb...
https://www.propublica.org/article/nyc-sends-30-mi...
https://www.propublica.org/article/nyc-sends-30-mi...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/emilywillingham/2013/0...
http://www.bostonmagazine.com/2008/06/the-shocking...
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/controversy-over-shocking-people-with-autism-behavioral-disorders/
