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House blocks
latest attempt to restrict electric shocks at JRC in Canton
By Jay Turner
Citizen Staff
A 20-year
legislative odyssey aimed at ending the practice of electric
skin shock treatment at the Judge Rotenberg Center in Canton
will apparently continue, after the latest proposal, sponsored
by State Senator Brian Joyce (D) of Milton, recently stalled in
a conference committee after facing opposition from members of
the House.
 Attached to
the 2009 state budget as Amendment EHS 874, the measure had
previously passed the Senate and was being hailed by Joyce as a
true compromise between an outright ban and the current
requirement that the school get permission from a state probate
court before administering shocks to any of its students.
“We have
been stymied by the House and it’s incredibly frustrating,” said
Joyce in a telephone interview on Friday.
The
legislation, authored by Joyce and Representative John Scibak
(D), a licensed psychologist, would have limited the
controversial treatment to cases in which the student’s behavior
presented an “immediate risk of serious physical injury or harm
to self or others,” and only after all other “less intrusive”
treatments had proved unsuccessful.
Currently,
the Rotenberg Center, which treats both high- and
low-functioning students with behavior problems, employs the
two-second electric shocks to address a range of behaviors,
including some that the JRC admits might seem too “innocuous” if
viewed out of context, such as mumbling, deliberately providing
a wrong answer, and getting out of one’s seat without
permission.
According to
its website, www.judgerc.org, the school as of August 2007 was
using skin shock treatment on 43 percent of its 154 school-age
students, as well as 85 percent of its 65 adult residents, most
of whom are lower functioning. JRC also uses other behavior
modification techniques, including water spraying, known as
“sensory punishment,” and “movement limitation” as a form of
physical punishment.
“I think
what they’re doing there is wrong,” Joyce said. “I think that
innocent children are being harmed.”
In addition
to pointing a finger at JRC founder Matthew Israel, Joyce said
he also faults House leadership for repeatedly blocking attempts
to ban what he considers to be “barbaric” acts committed on the
“most vulnerable citizens,” including many with autism and
mental retardation.
Joyce
himself has now been rebuffed twice in three years, including in
2006 when he went for an all-out ban — a proposal that also died
in a conference committee after passing the Senate.
Further
complicating matters is the fact that the JRC has a powerful
ally in Representative Jeffrey Sanchez, whose nephew attends the
school and has reportedly benefited from skin shock treatment.
In fact, according to a State House News Service report,
Sanchez’s nephew hit himself repeatedly during a January
legislative hearing, and then Sanchez, after restraining him,
stated that the treatment has “kept [the child] alive.”
Meanwhile,
Joyce, who was recently honored as “Legislator of the Year” by
the Massachusetts Developmental Disabilities Council, has vowed
to “continue to push this issue” until children in Canton and at
some of the JRC’s nearby residential facilities are no longer
shocked.
“The
government has a fundamental duty to protect vulnerable
populations,” he said in a press release, “and the Commonwealth
of Massachusetts has a moral imperative to address this issue
once and for all.”
It isn’t
just the treatment that has the senator concerned, either. He
pointed to an incident last August that made national headlines,
in which staff members wrongfully shocked two students dozens of
times after being ordered to do so by a caller posing as a
supervisor. The caller was later determined to be a former JRC
student.
Citing a
story printed in the Boston Globe, Joyce pointed to the
fact that surveillance tapes of the incident were shown to
investigators, but that school officials later destroyed the
tapes despite being instructed to preserve them.
The story
also reported that State Police in May seized boxes of documents
from JRC offices as part of a yearlong grand jury investigation
into the prank call incident led by the office of Attorney
General Martha Coakley. The Globe quoted an unnamed
source who said the investigation “had an ambitious scope and
involves multiple government agencies.”
Joyce also
detailed other alleged “horrors” in a press release, including
children receiving second degree burns from the skin shocks, and
children who have been shocked as many as 5,000 times in one
day.
“We don’t
allow shock therapy on our prisoners and we should not allow it
to be used on innocent children,” he said in the press release.
“We have an obligation to stop the unfettered use of shock
therapy on a very vulnerable group of disabled children and
adults.”
July 24, 2008
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