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School Disciplines with Electric Shocks
I thought this was a joke at first, but it looks real to me. What do you think?
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 to him where this recurring nightmare came from – not A Clockwork Orange or 1984, but the years he spent confined in America’s most controversial “behaviour-modification†institution.
In 1999, when Rob was 13, his parents sent him to the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center, in Massachusetts, 20 miles outside Boston. The institution, which calls itself a “special-needs schoolâ€, takes in all kinds of troubled kids – autistic, mentally retarded, schizophrenic, bipolar, emotionally disturbed – and attempts to change their behaviour with a complex system of rewards and punishments, including painful electric shocks to the torso and limbs. Of the 230 residents, about half are wired to receive shocks. Eight states send students to this institution, with New York providing the most. The price tag for a year there is $220,000; states and school districts pick up the tab. . . .
. . . Rob was forced to wear a backpack containing five 2lb 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.â€
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 10lb backpack on. At night, he slept with the backpack next to him, under the gaze of a surveillance camera. . . .
Comments
One of the news shows has an "expose" about this "evil school", and everyone gets riled up about at, and we yell and scream for it to be shut down. Then, it goes to court, and everyone forgets about it untill the next "expose". Or, more often, everyone forgets about it by the next week.
This kind of "aversive behavior therapy" bothers me, and that it's being used for minor offenses, in my opinion, means that there needs to be a huge investigatory to-do about this. But nothing's going to happen. Not to be defeatist, but they have two precedents about this. No judge is going to go against that, I think. But, as they say, I am not a lawyer.
My younger step-brother is autistic and the more stressed he becomes the harder he is to deal with. Seriously wow.
The process efficiency would arise from not having nasty shocks all the time.
What you're saying is like penicillin was discovered but only two or three hospitals in the nation used it even though it was great at curing bacterial infections.
Want more information on it? Read the wiki
This is aversion therepy, where they use pain to counteract a behavior they don't like.
I seem to recall an experiment with lab rats where they hooked up electrodes to their brains and had two buttons in the cage. One button released food while the other induced pleasurable feelings in the brain akin to orgasm. I think all of the rats died of starvation, but they were happy!
I'm also no lawyer, nor do I know about American legislation, but how can this be legal?
On a general note: there *are* things that you have to deny outright. No situation makes torture legitimate.
Also, like I pointed out before, Germany still has people who survived WWII and concentration camps running about, which influences the public discussion in a positive way.
Again. IF it works.
Edit: Also, it's very obvious that this approach will not work. Autism is a mental disorder where the patient is unable to process information the way normal people do, meaning he can't distinguish between important and unimportant input. Our world is very complex, and the human brain is designed to deal with it nevertheless. What you consider seeing and hearing is not like a picture or an audio file, it's already been processed, so your senses are basically a biological augmented reality system. And the autist's one doesn't work properly.