THE FULL STORY:
The Judge Rotenberg Center
Recently, the JRC was banned from using aversives on any new student at their school. This is a great step forward. However, students who were at the school before a certain date still recieve the aversives. Is this fair? I think not! Since when does the date one was at a school dictate whether they get tortured or not?
I think the Judge Rotenberg Center is also due to corporate greed. They want to keep people for years and shock them for transgressions such as asking to go to the bathroom so that they can make all their fancy paperwork about having to shock this one or that one, and show it to the school board and the government, so that the school districts and the government will continue to give them enormous sums of money and maybe give them extra because they see how often the students "have" to be "dealt with". Pretty much anyone who can afford a lobbyist is bad news anyway.
List of tortures and excuses for the torture
Tortures:
Isolation
Food deprivation (The food was thrown away. A lot of food got thrown away, as they ordered fresh food every day to reward the “good” students and staff.)
Electric skin shocks, some leaving a red mark or even blister welts (especially when applied to the same part of the skin multiple times in a short time). Staff would often fail to rotate the electrodes strapped to the students’ skin and that was another reason students got first-degree burns.
Spatula spanking
Forced inhaling of ammonia
Taste aversives
Forced ingestion of hot sauce
Muscle squeezes
Pinches with fingernails
Restraint with or without a sensory deprivation helmet
Shocks at intervals while restrained on a restraint board
Removal of “rewards”
Denial of food, sleep, restroom breaks and clothing while kept in a room with nothing in it, until they do their work
What the student did to get tortured or threatened with torture:
Shredding a kleenex
Shredding a styrofoam cup
Walking down the carpeted hall with their eyes closed
Sneezing and asking for a tissue
Asking to go to the bathroom
Nagging
Swearing
Drooling
Spitting
Silly laughing
Failing to maintain a neat appearance
Self-harming (due to depression or for any reason)
Falling asleep in class
Complaining
Not eating all their food
Stopping work for more than 10 seconds
Having clutter on their desk
Reacting to other students getting punished
Being involuntarily incontinent
Failing to submit to a search
Noncompliance
Saying “You’re fat”, “You stink”, or “I hope you die” to staff (note: There’s a rule against students getting fat or smoking but for staff the wellness program is optional).
Other issues—last but NOT LEAST:
There were also “behavioral rehearsal lessons” where the student was forced to do something against the rules and punished for it, then punished also for not doing it.
They also set up unfair situations “to prepare the student for the unfair world”.
They also charged students reward points for counseling if the student wanted it, and the counseling was behavioral rather than traditional.
Once a former student, as a prank, called into one of the school’s residential houses pretending to be the school and telling the staff to punish two of the students in the house. The staff did it. Both students received over 70 shocks each while restrained on a board.
A girl escaped from the center by jumping out of a second-floor bathroom window at one of the center’s group homes. She was never found, so it was not publicized.
One mother uses the Graduated Electronic Decelerator on her son if he doesn’t “put on his seat belt, hand her that apple, or sit appropriately/quietly and eat his food”.
Students who said bad things about the center to the press were not allowed to speak with the press again.
A student says he got taken down on the ground simply for running his mouth.
Soome students are there for most of their lives and still “need” the GED and are working on the same learning programs on the computer for years. This is not quality of life.
Some students were forced to do the same exercise over and over on the computer, mindlessly tapping out the same responses.
One girl, Linda Cornelison, was punished for acting sick. They did not recognize she was ill and continued to punish her until she died.
The students who died there were written down to have died of natural causes because they wouldn’t have died if not for their neurological disabilities/differences. So it is okay to torture a person to death because they are disabled/different?
Parents were brainwashed into thinking that listening to their students’ complaints about the cruelty of the place were nothing but a reward the student hadn’t earned.
Many of the practises at the school are not done to convicted serial killers. The JRc’s answer to this is that “No, they’re not killers, they’re disabled and it’s not their fault.” So then they punish them for being disabled. “They need the punishment.” Then don’t the killers also need the punishment?
They say it is just like any painful medical procedure that is necessary. I say it’s nonsense. When a competent and kind doctor does a procedure, he will if necessary give painkillers to the patient. Whereas at the JRC, the punishment and pain are considered the actual treatment, not side effects to be treated.
Students are not allowed anything they haven’t earned. One student got into trouble for sharing a slice of pizza with a friend because his friend “hadn’t earned that reward”. Maybe he did, by being a friend to his friend!
That same student wrote a personal journal at the JRC and staff confiscated it.
That same student turned on the radio at his JRC residence but a staffer turned it off because not everyone in the house had earned the right to listen to music.
That same student was forced to stay at the police station and help clean it when there was a holiday and the JRC was closed.
Students’ punishments were eased up when their court dates neared, as an ex-teacher there admits.
Punishment like that does not work because it is cruel.
06 Jul 2012, 8:19 pm
