The Shocking Truth

The Graduated Electronic Decelerator was roughly three times stronger than SIBIS when Israel and engineer David Marsh finished it in December 1990. Its shock lasted two seconds, not two-tenths of one.

But the human body is a curious thing. It can adapt to almost anything, including 60 volts and 15 milliamps of electricity. So in 1992, with 52 students already on the GED, the school developed the GED IV. Israel himself has called its shocks "very painful."

It's probably best to provide some context here, in order to give a better understanding of what was about to happen. Behavior analysis is an evolving field. In the years before the GED's invention, clinicians and academics published studies concluding that positive reinforcement, with no aversives, could work on students as difficult as Israel's. If you did "functional analyses"—monitor patients day and night, figure out what was making them angry, sad, or frustrated, and then redirect those feelings to something positive—you could stop their behaviors. Hundreds of articles and entire books on this so-called positive-behavior support followed. Clinics and schools across the country, including some of the best in New England, began to implement (and continue to implement) its findings.

BRI came under intense pressure because of this burgeoning research. Undercutting the claims Israel made were those of O. Ivar Lovaas, a psychologist at UCLA. Like Israel, Lovaas once espoused the benefits of electric shocks. In the early 1970s, Lovaas even used cattle prods on children. But in 1987 he published a study finding that through 40-hour weeks of one-to-one therapy, autistic preschoolers could attain "normal functioning." In 1993, Lovaas condemned his former self, saying that shock therapy was a short-term solution that produced no long-term gains.

Into this milieu now stepped Philip Campbell, who in 1991 became commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Mental Retardation, the agency regulating BRI. He had previously been the executive director of the Massachusetts Association for Retarded Citizens, a nemesis of BRI and Israel. Campbell knew the literature. He despised the new GED, and wasted no time in going after its creator.

It was a nasty fight. Campbell was eventually found to have leaked erroneous reports about BRI to the press, to have hired a team with a known bias against the school to investigate it. BRI said the Department of Mental Retardation was in violation of the state's 1987 agreement with the school. In 1994, to show its fortitude and to honor the judge who had overseen that agreement, the Behavior Research Institute renamed itself the Judge Rotenberg Center.

The brawl would go on for three more years. But then in 1997 the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court affirmed a previous decision finding Campbell and his department in contempt of court for various things, including lying under oath. Campbell, who was never prosecuted for perjury, resigned. The state was ordered to pay JRC more than $1 million in court costs.

The court placed the department in receivership, leaving JRC to gain licensure and certification through an independent attorney appointed by the probate court. The move meant, effectively, that efforts to regulate the school would be difficult to carry out.

This is the machine as big business.

Protected by the court orders, JRC expanded quickly, its enrollment going from 110 in 2000, to 145 in 2002, to 228 last year. As enrollment increased, so did funding, because school districts and state governments pay to send their kids there. JRC's budget went from $18 million in 2000 to $56 million in 2006. What were once a few residences for the students grew to 33 homes spread across the southern suburbs of Boston, from Stoughton to Norfolk. JRC employs about 900 people: psychologists and teachers and night staff and orderlies and everyone it takes to care for a population that today comes from 10 different states. As of the last public filing, Matthew Israel made $321,000 a year.

Part of the increase in enrollment is due to the students JRC now serves. They are no longer a largely autistic and mentally retarded clientele. Today, roughly half of the students are considered to be "high-functioning," their impairment behaviorally based, such as kids with ADHD who've been in trouble with the law. Indeed, some of JRC's students come from jail.

Handling a population like that is tough. One former staff psychologist says around 2001, the school's policy switched from educating and treating to simply keeping students in line. "Israel couldn't stand them not behaving in a perfectly controlled way," the psychologist says.

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 these aren't 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 and night, a wall of television monitors and computer screens before them, watching everyone, and, because the rooms are miked, 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. But 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 station. The school has staffers whose job is to read and track these forms. Get enough of them, and you're gone.

"Oh my God, I hated that place," says Jessica Croteau, a teacher at JRC who started in August 2005 and quit seven months later. "I stood there for eight hours a day and basically watched their behaviors and marked it in their behavior logs." Susan Wilson taught science for six years at JRC. "There's a lack of dedication to education. And it's across the board," Wilson says. What bothered both women, too, was the constant surveillance. Croteau became so paranoid that she and a fellow teacher ate lunch in that teacher's Jeep. They vented until it was time to go back inside.