(NAME-MCE) School of Shock

Tue Oct 9 15:25:51 EDT 2007

Greetings,

This is not a cultural issue, per se, but it is such a mind-blowing article  
that I had to share.

The entire article can be read at: 
_http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/09/school_of_shock.html_ 
(http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/09/school_of_shock.html) 

School of Shock   
(http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/09/school_of_shock_photo_essay_1.html)  
NEWS: Eight states are sending  autistic, mentally retarded, 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 

 (http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2000/11/campfear.html) 

(http://oascentral.motherjones.com/RealMedia/ads/click_lx.ads/motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/09/school_of_shock.html/995873299/x03/MJones/36_MoJoSponsor
_200701/88x31_MJ_logo.gif/63646263373430353437306264346230?) 

(http://oascentral.motherjones.com/RealMedia/ads/click_lx.ads/motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/09/school_of_shock.html/366842080/Middle1/MJones/22_Ironwee
d_200704/300x250_award.gif/63646263373430353437306264346230?) 

(http://www.motherjones.com/mojoblog/archives/2007/10/5712_unqualified_sup.html) 
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 retarded, 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_ 
(http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/09/non_shocking_therapy.html) ?'" 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.") 
Rob's mother is not the only parent angry at the Rotenberg Center. Last year, 
 Evelyn Nicholson _sued_ 
(http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/09/2006_antwone_nicholson_lawsuit.pdf)  the facility after her  17-year-old son 
Antwone was shocked 79 times in 18 months. Nicholson says she  decided to take 
action after Antwone called home and told her, "Mommy, you don't  love me anymore 
because you let them hurt me so bad." Rob and Antwone don't know  each other 
(Rob left the facility before Antwone arrived), but in some ways  their 
stories are similar. Antwone's birth mother was a drug addict; he was  burned on an 
electric hot plate as an infant. Evelyn took him in as a foster  child and 
later adopted him. The lawsuit she filed against the Rotenberg Center  set off a 
chain of events: investigations by multiple government agencies,  emotional 
public hearings, scrutiny by the media. Legislation to restrict or ban  the use 
of electric shocks in such facilities has been introduced in two state  
legislatures. Yet not much has changed. 
Rob has paid little attention to the public debate over his alma mater,  
though he visits its website occasionally to see which of the kids he knew are  
still there. After he left the center he moved back in with his parents. At  
first glance, he seems like any other 21-year-old: baggy Rocawear jeans, black  
T-shirt, powder-blue Nikes. But when asked to recount his years at the 
Rotenberg  Center, he speaks for nearly two hours in astonishing detail, recalling 
names  and specific events from seven or eight years earlier. When he describes 
his  recurring nightmares, he raises both arms and rubs his forehead with his  
palms. 
Despite spending more than three years at this behavior-modification  
facility, Rob still has problems controlling his behavior. In 2005, he was  arrested 
for attempted assault and sent to jail. (This year he was arrested  again, for 
drugs and assault.) Being locked up has given him plenty of time to  reflect 
on his childhood, and he has gained a new perspective on the Rotenberg  
Center. "It's worse than jail," he told me. "That place is the worst place on  
earth."

************************************** See what's new at http://www.aol.com