SHOCK - Prank Call Leads to Kids Getting Electro Shock

Post Reply New Topic

State probes prank call that prompted shock treatments on 2 teens in hospital

3 hours ago

BOSTON - Massachusetts state officials are probing a prank call that resulted in two teens receiving electric shock treatments at a residential centre for people with special needs.

Officials said Tuesday that the incident at the controversial Judge Rotenberg Education Center occurred back in August.

An initial investigation indicates that a former student called in the orders to the centre on Aug. 26.

The state's Disabled Persons Protection Committee is investigating a complaint that a third resident of the centre - an adult - also received shock treatments after the call.

According to the school website, it treats people with a wide variety of behaviour problems, including autistic-like students who have aggressive, self-injurious or destructive behaviours and high-functioning students with psychiatric or emotional problems.

The centre has survived two attempts in the past by the state to close it over allegations that its unorthodox methods amount to abuse.

The complaints related to the prank call were referred to the state police and the Norfolk District Attorney's Office.

The state Department of Early Education and Care said the call allegedly came from someone claiming to be on the staff of Dr. Matthew Israel, the psychologist who founded the school.

The centre is believed to be the only school in the United States that uses two-second bursts of skin-shock punishments to change destructive behaviour.

Such treatments are used in a minority of cases as part of overall therapy for "very deeply emotionally disturbed young adults," the centre says

Ernest Corrigan, the school's senior counsel, added that they are applied "only after obtaining prior parental, medical, psychiatric, human rights, peer review and individual approval from a Massachusetts Probate Court."

Hosted by
Copyright © 2007 The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.
http://canadianpress.google.com/article ... U8nOo-phqQ

Yeah I've seen many debates about the place on this site before. It's pretty bad. Thing is, the shock therapy is shown to stop the behavior they are trying to stop, so to them it seems like a good idea. But kids who come out of that place are worse then before, which defeats the purpose.
Our mental health care system is horrible.

Here is the story from boston.com:

I would have to call it felonious child abuse, and the staff that did this are morons.

That place should be shut down. With a bunker buster missile to drive the point home.

I sent the following to Senator Joyce, with a copy to my own State Senator:

School of Shock

NEWS: Eight states are sending autistic, mentally ret*d, and emotionally troubled kids to a facility that punishes them with painful electric shocks. How many times do you have to zap a child before it's torture?

By Jennifer Gonnerman
August 20, 2007


Rob Santana awoke terrified. He'd had that dream again, the one where silver wires ran under his shirt and into his pants, connecting to electrodes attached to his limbs and torso. Adults armed with surveillance cameras and remote-control activators watched his every move. One press of a button, and there was no telling where the shock would hit—his arm or leg or, worse, his stomach. All Rob knew was that the pain would be intense.

Every time he woke from this dream, it took him a few moments to remember that he was in his own bed, that there weren't electrodes locked to his skin, that he wasn't about to be shocked. It was no mystery where this recurring nightmare came from—not A Clockwork Orange or 1984, but the years he spent confined in America's most controversial "behavior modification" facility.

In 1999, when Rob was 13, his parents sent him to the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center, located in Canton, Massachusetts, 20 miles outside Boston. The facility, which calls itself a "special needs school," takes in all kinds of troubled kids—severely autistic, mentally ret*d, schizophrenic, bipolar, emotionally disturbed—and attempts to change their behavior with a complex system of rewards and punishments, including painful electric shocks to the torso and limbs. Of the 234 current residents, about half are wired to receive shocks, including some as young as nine or ten. Nearly 60 percent come from New York, a quarter from Massachusetts, the rest from six other states and Washington, D.C. The Rotenberg Center, which has 900 employees and annual revenues exceeding $56 million, charges $220,000 a year for each student. States and school districts pick up the tab.

The Rotenberg Center is the only facility in the country that disciplines students by shocking them, a form of punishment not inflicted on serial killers or child molesters or any of the 2.2 million inmates now incarcerated in U.S. jails and prisons. Over its 36-year history, six children have died in its care, prompting numerous lawsuits and government investigations. Last year, New York state investigators filed a blistering report that made the place sound like a high school version of Abu Ghraib. Yet the program continues to thrive—in large part because no one except desperate parents, and a few state legislators, seems to care about what happens to the hundreds of kids who pass through its gates.

In Rob Santana's case, he freely admits he was an out-of-control kid with "serious behavioral problems." At birth he was abandoned at the hospital, traces of cocaine, heroin, and alcohol in his body. A middle-class couple adopted him out of foster care when he was 11 months old, but his troubles continued. He started fires; he got kicked out of preschool for opening the back door of a moving school bus; when he was six, he cut himself with a razor. His mother took him to specialists, who diagnosed him with a slew of psychiatric problems: attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Rob was at the Rotenberg Center for about three and a half years. From the start, he cursed, hollered, fought with employees. Eventually the staff obtained permission from his mother and a Massachusetts probate court to use electric shock. Rob was forced to wear a backpack containing five two-pound, battery-operated devices, each connected to an electrode attached to his skin. "I felt humiliated," he says. "You have a bunch of wires coming out of your shirt and pants." Rob remained hooked up to the apparatus 24 hours a day. He wore it while jogging on the treadmill and playing basketball, though it wasn't easy to sink a jump shot with a 10-pound backpack on. When he showered, a staff member would remove his electrodes, all except the one on his arm, which he had to hold outside the shower to keep it dry. At night, Rob slept with the backpack next to him, under the gaze of a surveillance camera.

Employees shocked him for aggressive behavior, he says, but also for minor misdeeds, like yelling or cursing. Each shock lasts two seconds. "It hurts like hell," Rob says. (The school's staff claim it is no more painful than a bee sting; when I tried the shock, it felt like a horde of wasps attacking me all at once. Two seconds never felt so long.) On several occasions, Rob was tied facedown to a four-point restraint board and shocked over and over again by a person he couldn't see. The constant threat of being zapped did persuade him to act less aggressively, but at a high cost. "I thought of killing myself a few times," he says.

Rob's mother Jo-Anne deLeon had sent him to the Rotenberg Center at the suggestion of the special-ed committee at his school district in upstate New York, which, she says, told her that the program had everything Rob needed. She believed he would receive regular psychiatric counseling—though the school does not provide this.

As the months passed, Rob's mother became increasingly unhappy. "My whole dispute with them was, 'When is he going to get psychiatric treatment?'" she says. "I think they had to get to the root of his problems—like why was he so angry? Why was he so destructive? I really think they needed to go in his head somehow and figure this out." She didn't think the shocks were helping, and in 2002 she sent a furious fax demanding that Rob's electrodes be removed before she came up for Parents' Day. She says she got a call the next day from the executive director, Matthew Israel, who told her, "You don't want to stick with our treatment plan? Pick him up." (Israel says he doesn't remember this conversation, but adds, "If a parent doesn't want the use of the skin shock and wants psychiatric treatment, this isn't the right program for them.")

continued with photos - http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature ... shock.html

Electroshock is torture, ABU GHRAIB style. How can you be silent?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYYdIfFcMtM[/youtube]

from the Boston Globe:

I have sent the following email to Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick:

The attendants should have had a clue when the caller couldn't stop giggling while he was giving the orders. Or should they? I can just see a comedy sketch where one asks the other "How do you know it was Dr. So and So who gave the order?" "Because I know his high pitched giggle and childish voice."

Don't forget the 'people' that put their children into the hands of these psychopaths, I mean, you have to lack in normal human feelings, empathy and love, when you send your child there.