A Witness to Torture at the Rotenberg School

I recently came across this commentary by Greg Miller, a former teacher’s assistant at the Judge Rotenberg Center, in response to an article on a ABC Nightline News story about the "Rotten-Berg" school. We commend him for his courage in speaking out, and for his honesty.

My name is Greg Miller. I used to work at Judge Rotenberg Center and spoke against the abuses in the ABC Nightline documentary. I appreciate reading your thoughts on the documentary.

ABC Nightline did leave out many facts. For example, I told ABC in my 2+ hour interview with them about JRC tying students into restraints on a four-point board and shocking them five times consecutively (over 10 minutes, or 40 minutes, whatever is on the student’s plan) for certain behaviors. The person with the remote control in one hand that you saw on the documentary, and a timer in the other hand, would remain out of sight from the student on the board to administer the shocks. That is to create as much panic and fear in the student as possible to make the punishment far worse than the shocks itself. This was all pre-approved by parents and the judges and the laws of Massachusetts.

There are worse things I’ve seen at Judge Rotenberg Center. Imagine watching a 40+ year-old adult male, in there with suicidal tendencies from a young age, get attacked three times per week by an adult male staff with a plastic knife. The student was left in restraints all day long for this procedure so that he was unable to defend himself. Then while the student is screaming for his life, TRYING HIS BEST TO DEFEND HIMSELF WHILE TIED IN RESTRAINTS, and the staff tries to jam the knife down the student’s throat while yelling the words,”Do you want to swallow a knife? DO YOU WANT TO SWALLOW A KNIFE???,” someone with the hidden remote control presses the button to shock the student. The student had tried to commit suicide by swallowing a small Exacto Knife blade, and this was their “treatment” for suicide! Ever see the movie Clockwork Orange?

Not only was this “treatment” traumatic for this student being attacked by the staff with the plastic knife and shocked while defenseless, the “treatments” were done right in front of 40+ other students and 7 - 9 staff in the large Workshop room. If other students screamed or jumped up in response to watching their classmate get attacked like this, they too would get shocked!

Again, all of this was pre-approved by the judge and is legal in Massachusetts. I have papers from the Department of Mental Retardation (DMR) who investigated it to prove that this “treatment” was not “abuse” because it was ordered by the judge.

The student was not permitted a counselor to offer any type of counseling or psychotherapy, as they believed that it would be counterproductive to their stimulus-response behaviorist approach.

Dr. Matthew Israel, the owner and Director of Judge Rotenberg Center, was a personal student of Dr. B.F. Skinner, the behaviorist behind ABA. Dr. B.F. Skinner even visited Dr. Israel at the Behavior Research Institute, later renamed to Judge Rotenberg Center, while the Behavior Research Institute was located in Rhode Island. They relocated to Massachusetts after Rhode Island became outraged by the death of one or more students at that school.

The investigator from the Department of Mental Retardation told me that he was not a doctor to diagnose the bloody scabs as “burns”, that I was also not a doctor to diagnose the bloody scabs as “burns”, and therefore the accusation of “burns” from the electric shocks could not be validated - even if we could provide photographs of the actual injuries. He said even doctors could not diagnose the injuries from photographs, and would risk lawsuit to diagnose the bloody scabs (scabs on top of previous scabs, resulting from so many scabs that anywhere you move the electrodes on the arms, legs or torso will result in placing the electrodes on top of another scab) because doctors have not studied the phenomena of these types of injuries from these specific electric shock devices enough to be able to call it “burns”.

I came to the conclusion myself that there is a scam and coverup taking place, and that people are prevented from knowing the truth about the laws in Massachusetts that they support.

Best wishes to Massachusetts Senator Joyce while he tries to change those laws.

- Greg Miller
Former JRC Teacher’s Assistant

In response to this commentary, there is this comment by Phil Schwarz, who is the Vice President of Asperger’s Association of New England.

What is even more disgusting in many ways than the restraints and the electrical shocks is the inculcation of *learned helplessness* in the JRC students.

In the report compiled for the New York State Board of Education on JRC (NY State sends over a hundred kids to JRC at a cost of $200k per student per year, so you can begin to comprehend the lucrativeness of Mr. Israel’s dirty little business and the fierceness with which he defends it), students are described as being set up in patently unfair situations and then rewarded for not complaining about them, and punished for speaking up either for fairness for themselves or for classmates.

Mr. Miller, did you witness situations like that? Could you elaborate further if you did?

The parents are psychologically intimidated too: Israel holds the sword of Damocles over them, threatening them that if JRC is shut down, their children who are intractably unmanageable without those electrified fanny-packs will be deposited overnight on their doorsteps without a shred of further support. No wonder they clamor and sing JRC’s praises upon command.

Legislation that would indeed have shut down the abuses at JRC was killed in committee in the Massachusetts legislature — by a single spoiler vote held by Rep. Jeffrey Sanchez, who has a nephew attending JRC.

Israel is a clever manipulator: he orchestrated the derailment of the career of Philip Campbell, the former commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Mental Retardation, who attempted to shut JRC down.

Half a dozen JRC staffers recently acted in the capacity of licensed mental health professionals — and were advertised as such by JRC — *without* appropriate licensing. As far as I know, criminal litigation on this matter is still proceeding through the state court system.

The whole thing stinks to high heaven and is a blot upon my home state.