When I first heard about the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center (JREC) in Canton, Massachusetts, I couldn't believe that such a school existed. The JREC is a school for that uses electric shocks to discipline students with disabilities including autism, mental retardation or emotional-behavioral issues. The school was founded by a Harvard-trained psychologist, Matthew Israel and has long attracted controversy among disability rights activists, parents and experts in the field of mental health.
Today, the Boston Globe reports that Israel faces criminal charges over an incident in 2007, when two teenagers with disabilities who were residents at the JREC were wrongfully administered a number of shocks after a prank phone call by someone posing as a supervisor ordered them.
If the use of electric skin shock on children with disabilities is not troubling and barbaric enough, the suit against Israel also suggests how woefully poor the JREC's administrative practices are and also brings into question the training and supervision of its staff at all levels. From the Boston Globe:
A court official who works at the Norfolk County Superior Court said that today's schedule of cases lists a defendant named Matthew Israel facing two charges, misleading a grand jury and accessory after the fact to a crime.
The charges against Israel are believed to be related to the destruction of some of the center's digital surveillance tapes that would have showed what occurred the night of Aug. 26, 2007, in one of the center's residential group homes in Stoughton. That night, staffers received a prank phone call from someone posing as a supervisor, saying two teenagers, including Dumas's son, should be administered electrical shocks as punishment for bad behavior earlier that day.
For more than 40 years, the