In 1985, the weekly magazine The Boston Phoenix published a long exposé of what was then called the Behavior Research Institute, following a series of allegations levied against the facility by various licensing agencies, former staff, and parents of former students. The thirteen-page long article (in its original PDF format), titled "Doctor Hurt: The aversive therapist and his painful record," includes excerpts of formal complaints and reports filed against the BRI, and its author, Ric Kahn, interviewed Matthew Israel and dozens of other interested parties.
I couldn't find any copy of this article posted in any form anywhere online, and the original PDF that has been quietly circulating via email wasn't text-accessible, so I have spent the last two weeks transcribing it verbatim into a text-accessible PDF. This is important information that needs to be publicly available to shed light on the JRC's long history of abuse and torture. Advocates have known about this for a long time, and yet the JRC remains in operation.
The article itself carries a massive trigger warning for detailed descriptions of torture and abuse of disabled people, murder, justifications for abuse, and otherwise potentially triggering descriptions of violence.
Click here for the PDF with the original scan of the article (scanned as image, so not text-accessible). Alternatively, click here for the transcribed version, which includes a note from Jonathan Dosick of Occupy the JRC (text-accessible version.)
For the Phoenix's website, click here.
If you cannot access either version of the article and require a different type of format for accessibility reasons, let me know, and I'll see how else I can make it available.
You can also read the entire transcribed version in text below. The copyright belongs to the Phoenix Newspaper Group and the author is Ric Kahn. I am not benefiting in any way, including through any form of financial gain, from the posting of this article, but the Judge Rotenberg Center is gaining more bad press. (If a representative of Phoenix Newspaper Group would not like this article to be posted in HTML on this page, kindly let me know, though it would be great if it could be re-published to the Phoenix's own website. I have provided the PDF text-accessible transcription as a public service.)
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Note from Jonathan Dosick
(used with permission): It’s a long and bold article, published nearly 30 years
ago, about what was then the Behavioral Research Institute (BRI) - which was
later renamed the Judge Rotenberg Center, and its founder, Dr. Matthew Israel.
This was published when BRI was operating in Providence, RI and before electric
shock began to be used there, although the end of the article shows that at the
time, Dr. Israel was seriously interested in shock. It also shows that the
public was made very aware, in great detail, of Dr. Israel’s methods and
abuses...28 years ago - but Massachusetts has done very little since then!
Note from transcriber: I
have indicated what appear to be typographical mistakes with italicized [sic]
following the original language. (Un-italicized [sic] indicates a typographical
mistake in a quotation that the original article author noted.) Otherwise, the
transcription should be an exact match to the original, including punctuation
and paragraph breaks. The only material that I have added are text descriptions
of each image, marked within brackets [] and rendered in italics. I have
included these for the benefit of anyone who cannot see the pictures from the
article and thus have written myself to the best of my ability. — Lydia Brown, 4
February 2013
Article and related pictures arranged by Derrick Jeffries, March 10, 2008. Used
with the exclusive permission of Clif Garboden, Senior Managing Editor, Phoenix
Newspaper Group, Boston, MA.
The
Boston Phoenix
One dollar
November 26, 1985
Boston's largest weekly
Three sections
108 pages
Doctor Hurt
The aversive therapist and his painful record
by Ric Kahn
Photos by Michael Romanos
Little Janine flashes on the screen groaning, a wild child star in a Matt
Israel home movie. She jumps up and down, whacks her face with both palms. She
squirms on the floor, bashes her head against the ground. She's pulled so much out
of her hair that you can't tell if she's a boy or a girl. Her scalp resembles a
golf course scarred by divots. She used to abuse herself so often she'd wake up
with blood on her pillow. Then the child in the child somehow returned while
she was at the Behavior Research Institute (BRI) in Providence, Rhode Island.
Eight-point-five months later, captured by Israel on film, Janine is smiling
and playing on the swings and flinging a Frisbee.
And say, hey, José. Before BRI: big belly bulging from an open shirt;
drinking vodka, smoking weed; ready to kick, punch, bite anything in sight.
After 14 months at BRI, José's lost 50 pounds, looks like a new man, in shirt
and tie and sweater. "You're looking pretty handsome," BRI executive
director Matthew Israel says to his student. "Yeah," José replies.
Wayne was in another program before he came to BRI. He used to play with a
"rectal gouge" until he bled. Blood on the sheets, blood smeared on
the furniture. Room smelled of urine. Wayne once reportedly tore out a
hundred-pound radiator. Broke into a Li'l Peach store, naked. In the film of
his first few days at BRI, he's rocking, ripping sheets, going after a worker's
throat. Three and a half years later, Wayne is happily disco roller-skating.
"Wayne, what's your favorite reward?" Israel asks his student.
"I like ice-cream sandwich," Wayne tells his mentor.
Matthew Israel, this self-styled savior, is a radical Skinnerian
behavior-modification psychologist. He is vehemently opposed to drug therapy.
He has emerged as the country's most outspoken proponent of aversive therapy,
saying positive reinforcement alone can't eradicate the most bizarre behaviors.
Over the past 14 years he has devised and revised a complex system of rewards
and punishments and pain that he claims can eliminate inappropriate and
life-threatening behaviors in the most hard-core autistic, mentally retarded,
emotionally disturbed, and just plain too-troubled children and adults.
Currently, Israel is also trying to modify the behavior of the state of
Massachusetts, which he claims is acting too aggressively. On September 26,
after a seven-month review of the program that intensified following the death
of a 22-year-old autistic BRI student, the state's Office for Children (OFC)
issued an emergency measure to shut the program down. OFC charged that Israel's
operation — the school and its group homes — was jeopardizing the health,
safety, and welfare of its students through food deprivation, excessive
punishment, and disregard for regulatory requirements. OFC suspended the
licenses of the seven group homes in Massachusetts where BRI houses its 64
residents, ages 13 to 28. A magistrate upheld the OFC emergency suspension,
though she ruled against the state on her findings of fact. A full hearing on
whether BRI's group-home licenses will be revoked is not expected to take place
until January. In the meantime, the Providence school has been allowed to
remain open but under severe OFC restrictions (OFC has influence over whether the
school remains open or closed even though it's in Providence, because Massachusetts
children are in the program). Now the staff of BRI can no longer use physical
punishments, also known as aversives; they cannot withhold meals as a
punishment; they cannot take in new students or implement any new aversives or
restraints.
In 1983 OFC approved a hierarchy of aversives that Matt Israel was already
using in the school and group homes to treat the bizarre behaviors of many of
his students. The hit list ranged from ignoring the behavior and the benign
"no" response to ammonia sprayed near the nose, harsh tastes applied
to the tongue, spankings, muscle squeezes, pinches, and brief cool showers. The
agency now claims that Israel not only went too far with the approved
punishments but also instituted new aversives without its okay. OFC's own
ambiguous regulations and restrictions, however, make it hard to decipher where
the aversives were supposed to end and where the abuse may have started.
In his dealings with other states as well, Israel has often translated his
understanding of leeway into "my way." His current conflict with the
commonwealth has brought attention to the fact that he has never published the
results of his findings at BRI. Critics in his field wonder why a man who
claims he's on the cutting edge has not submitted his work to the scrutiny of
scientific, blind review.
"If he's found The Way, why not share it with the rest of us?"
asks a source who works with autistic children. Anne Donnellan, a professor in
the Department of Studies in Behavioral Disabilities at the University of
Wisconsin, says, "He's running around showing his movies, why can't he
show his data?"
On a visit to BRI in Providence, before you can reach either Israel or his
program, one of his minions guides you into a plush library with mirrors, a
sectional couch, ceramic dogs, a fireplace, and nine fans humming overhead.
Here, seated at a large table facing a big screen hooked up to a Sony Betamax,
you are required to receive a heavy dose of visceral videotapes starring Israel
and his children.
Caroline arrived at BRI in an ambulance, the film relates. Restrained. She
wore a helmet and hammered her head on the floor. "What's your favorite
reward?" she's asked. "Restraint," she says. Seven years later,
Caroline is sitting in the parlor combing her hair. Her nose resembles a
boxer's. Self-abuse. "I think you're really pretty without the helmet,
don't you?" Israel asks, smiling.
Over the past decade, this film has been shown more often than The
Wizard of Oz. Israel has used the before-and-after tape to sell his
supercontroversial [sic] program to parents, peers, and the press.
Besides his attorneys, his greatest allies have been the majority of the moms
and pops of the students themselves and the media, all of whom have elevated
Israel to the rank of martyr.
Israel's favor with the Boston Globe peaked on October 25 with an
extraordinary Globe editorial that admonished the state for trying to
shut down his school. "The program has drawn the ire of a group of
advocates who describe BRI's treatment as inhumane," reads the key
paragraph. "Unfortunately, the state's Office for Children has overreacted
to the complaints of these advocates and sought to close the institute."
Last week the New York Times rang in on the side of BRI with a story
that reported that some students had regressed when the aversives were stopped.
The story questioned OFC's motives in suspending BRI's license, suggesting that
OFC had jumped the gun because it feared drawing the sort of criticism it had
received previously for reacting slowly to sexual-abuse cases in day-care
facilities.
But far from overreacting, the state has ignored, or been ignorant of, the
unsettling facts about Israel's operations dating back to 1973. Like the tapes
Israel has peddled at conferences and conventions, the state-versus-BRI scene
has been played out in varying degrees in Rhode Island, New York, and
California. Even in Massachusetts advocates of the developmentally disabled
were posing many of the same questions to the state back in 1979 that the state
is now posing to BRI.
Rather than prompting a close look at the state's relationship with Israel,
however, current controversy has degenerated into a public debate about the
merits of aversive versus nonaversive therapy. For two decades the debate has
been sizzling within the psychological community and burning within a subgroup
of that community, the behavior-modification advocates. It's a debate best left
to the professors and researchers. Already this war of words has obscured the
fact that BRI received special permission to employ its controversial
physical-aversive therapy. And authorities in Massachusetts and California,
plus some parents, have charged that Israel and his associates have abused this
privilege, and abused the children.
At the beginning of his promotional films, Israel issues a caveat. The
films do not reflect scientific data, he says, but rather a student's best and
worst behavior, the ultimate in before-and-after transformations.
From across the country, a critical mass of state and professional reports,
investigations, and recommendations laced with testimonials from former BRI
parents is beginning to fill the void and tell the true tale of the tapes: what
goes on in the in-between. Call it the unedited version of the Matt Israel/BRI
story.
* * *
Matt Israel looks pale. He is standing in the cramped confines of Room 413
at 1 Ashburton Place. Magistrate Joan Fink is presiding over BRI's appeal of
OFC director Mary Kay Leonard's emergency suspension order. He is wearing a
black three-piece suit with the belt buckle halfway between his navel and his
right hip. Later he would say that he felt like this was a rerun of the Scopes
trial and he was the evolutionist.
Over the next seven days in October, he passes notes to his attorney. He
sees a woman in the audience he doesn't know, asks her name, and then jots it
down with three question marks next to it. When he needs coffee he politely
asks one of the mothers to get him some, explaining that he can't leave the
room. She obliges dutifully. Later he shows his videotapes.
On the witness stand he seems less in control. He testifies in great detail
about his intricate reward-and-punishment system. But when asked to name the
three people who train the school's personnel, he initially draws a blank,
nervously admitting that he's terrible with names. Attorney Gerald Caruso,
representing OFC, asks Israel, "Do you know what a blind review of your
techniques would be?" "A blind review?" Israel asks.
"Yes," Caruso says. Israel, a Harvard PhD in psychology who studied
under B.F. Skinner, says, "I have not heard that expression."
But Israel is surrounded by a great supporting cast: the parents of his
students. Magistrate Fink allows them to intervene as a party in the emergency
proceedings. Their children all entered BRI carrying the same broken baggage.
Numerous and severe behavior problems, including life-threatening self-abuse
and aggressiveness; a history of unsuccessful placements, many in psychiatric
hospitals or state institutions; failure to respond to other therapies;
rejection from other treatment facilities because of their severe acting out,
and a poor prognosis for entering a less restrictive environment or the
community.
On the witness stand, Kettee Boling speaks for all the desperate mothers
and fathers who went to BRI as a last resort. Boling says, "My son's
primary. . . very dangerous behavior is running away and stealing cars."
She pauses. "He's managed to do this without benefit of driving
lessons."
[Image: Black and white image of a white man with short, dark hair and a serious expression, wearing a suit, collared shirt, and tie. The image's caption reads, "Israel: menace or martyr?"]
|
Her son was in eight programs before entering BRI, in July 1982. He had
walked out of a school in New York in the middle of the night and stolen a car.
He returned home, and was placed in a psychiatric hospital for three months.
Then for nine months he was at Metropolitan State hospital, in Waltham. But he
couldn't stay there forever. At the next school he went to, the staff placed
two-by-fours on his window and locks on his door. But he still managed to run
away and steal cars. His mother took him to the psychiatric unit of Waltham Hospital.
"They said he wasn't psychotic," she says. Later he was arrested in
Boston after going the wrong way down a one-way street. There were court
appearances in Boston, Framingham, Newton. "I couldn't keep him at home .
. . I'm a single parent," Boling says.
She sent him to BRI, which refuses to turn down any student. She knew about
the aversive techniques, she says, and every year signed a consent form okaying
their administration. In August 1982 her son ran away from BRI, taking an
autistic student with him. Later he stole a car and drove off the road into a
gully. For running away, according to BRI officials, for one hour he had to
wear what's known in BRI parlance as a white-noise visual screen (a football
helmet with an opaque screen to occlude vision while white noise fills the
wearer's ears), undergo vapor spray III (compressed air mixed with water
sprayed on the face or back of the neck for about two minutes), and have
ammonia sprayed near the nose every 15 minutes. At one point, OFC maintains, his
beard was shaved off, he was prohibited from interacting with staff or
residents, he had to wear a helmet for a month, and he had to wear the same
clothes for 30 days (the clothes were washed regularly). OFC says these
punishments were in violation of the spirit of its regulations.
After
staying put for a couple of months, BRI gave him more freedom to "test his
self-control." In July 1983 he ran away, was struck by a car on Route 95,
and was hospitalized for 10 days. In February 1984 he ran away again, stole a
garbage truck, and tried to run over several cops. He was arrested and charged
with assault and battery. He received a six-month suspended sentence and one
year of probation. To avoid his having to go to prison, Boling says, she and
the judge and her attorney and Matt Israel agreed to have leg restraints put on
her son. In September 1984 OFC licensing inspector Michael Avery discovered the
student had been placed in ankle cuffs connected to one another by an 11-inch
chain. He told Israel the punishment went against regulations. In March 1985,
seeing the boy still in shackles, Avery says he told Israel again that this was
a violation of BRI's "mechanical-restraint waiver" and had to stop.
OFC regulations forbid the use of physical restraints for punishment or for the
convenience of others. In 1983 BRI had received special permission to use
mechanical restraints in these general cases: when a student is likely to
injure himself or others, or damage property (which could lead to injury or
self or others); when restraint is one of the only available effective rewards;
when restraint is necessary to protect the student while another aversive is
being applied or during medical or dental treatments. No stipulations were made
regarding the length of time such restraints could be applied. According to
Avery, Israel told him the cuffs had to stay or the boy had to go. Avery
believes the boy was forced to wear shackles from February 1984 to March 1985
for every waking and sleeping hour, save shower time. But in one of her
rulings, Magistrate Fink maintained that the boy's shackling did not violate
BRI's restraint waiver, evidence that the state's restrictions on Israel were
vague.
[Image: Black and white image of a young white man facing the viewer and
holding something in his hand, while another white man faces him with his arms
outstretched. The first figure is seated on a rocking horse with a mane that
appears to be made similarly to a mop head. The image's caption reads,
"Rewarded with a ride."]
[Image: A woman of indeterminate race is standing over a young white boy
sitting at a keyboard in front of a computer monitor in what appears to be a
classroom. The image's caption reads, "Students and staffers (above and
below): most of Israel's charges failed in other programs."]
Back at the hearing, attorney Robert Sherman asks Boling how she would
characterize her son's care at BRI. "I would characterize it as very good
care and very caring people," she says. "Does he show any fear of the
staff at BI?" he asks. "No, he doesn't," she says. "He
considers the staff his friends." Sherman asks, "Have you seen any
evidence of abuse of your child at BRI?" Boling says, "No, I have
not."
Earlier, Sherman had asked, in all seriousness, "Has he run away since
he's been in restraints?"
"No," Boling had said.
On September 30 the State Department of Mental Health had sent a small team
of experts to Providence to assess the situation at BRI. One of the residents
they'd talked to was Boling's son, who's now 23.
"Why did you steal the garbage truck the last time around?"
they'd asked him. "Because I wanted to go home," he'd replied.
* * *
"Desperate parents will sign anything," George Nazareth was
saying from his home in Cumberland, Rhode Island. Nazareth is the chairman of
the Rhode Island Protection and Advocacy System. He's the former head of the
Human Rights Committee of the Rhode Island Planning and Advisory Council on
Developmental Disabilities, a state organization. He has a 22-year-old retarded
daughter. "You become desperate about a lot of things. Some of the parents
[at BRI] are now saying they want the program to continue. They think the state
will send their children back home. Some parents would blow their brains out if
they [the state] sent their children back home. They've been through the
mill."
When Nazareth heard about the charges against Israel in Massachusetts, he
scurried for his old documents. A fellow advocate had produced a copy of a
report on BRI that Nazareth's Human Rights Committee had put out in 1973.
Earlier Nazareth had started hearing from people that BRI's basic therapy
program advocated pinching kids and squirting water in their faces. Nazareth
was horrified.
"Rhode Island kids were there at the time, but the state wasn't doing
anything about it," Nazareth recalls. "As advocates we wanted to see
for ourselves." They didn't see much. "We were given a show," he
says. Nazareth went back two, three times. He talked to former BRI employees.
They told him they were under extreme pressure to put an end to each bizarre
behavior in their students within two weeks, according to Nazareth. If a
student hadn't responded as the deadline approached, the workers claimed, they
"started pinching harder and harder to meet their goal," says
Nazareth. Nazareth says the workers told him "they were turning into
monsters."
[Image:
Black and white image of Matt Israel, a white man with dark hair, wearing a
suit, collared shirt, and tie, holding and hugging a young white child of
indeterminate apparent gender or sex, in a room with what appear to be circus
or fair style stalls, with one having dark and white vertical stripes on a
canopy, and another labeled Cotton Candy. The image's caption reads,
"Meting out a hug."]
After two and a half months Nazareth wrote the 1973 report. The committee
was concerned about the effects such a rigorous behavior-mod program could have
on an individual. "This is especially true when the individuals are
severely handicapped children who may not comprehend the reasons for being
subjected to such intense systematic procedures," the report said. Without
specific criteria for determining deviant behaviors, it warned, "an
individual with behaviors of questionable deviancy might be subjected to a
therapy program of excessive intensity merely because his parent or teacher has
a low tolerance for the particular behavior exhibited."
Nazareth says that the students he saw were robots, whom Israel controlled.
"He controls everything," says Nazareth. "He's an egomaniac.
It's either his way or no way. I'm absolutely amazed he's still in business. He
hasn't changed one iota."
In 1976 Rhode Island removed all its children from BRI after Israel hiked
up the tuition. Advocates in Rhode Island say the state also had philosophical
reservations about BRI's heavy reliance on physical aversives. Today,
exhibiting a severe case of state split personality, Rhode Island continues to
license BRI as a special-education program but refuses to send any of its
students there.
In April 1976 Israel expanded his program by founding a parallel
reward-and-punishment school/group home for six children in Van Nuys,
California. The National Society for Autistic Children (NSAC) (now known as the
National Society for Children and Adults with Autism), the country's leading
advocacy group for those with autism, took a long, hard look at Israel's
expansion.
On December 27, 1976, Israel was officially bounced from NSAC following
allegations that he was "practicing as a clinical psychologist directing
both day and residential programs in the state of California without obtaining
a professional license." Israel denies the charge.
But authorities in California had a none-too-approving eye on Israel's new
branch. In a January 17, 1977, letter to Israel, the California Department of
Health rejected his application for a license to operate a group home. A
department review criticized BRI for its "lack of meaningful peer
review" and charged that "pain infliction and other physically
coercive techniques are employed when it is not necessary to do so."
Israel was chided for his apparent lack of respect for rules and regulations.
"There is unsatisfactory evidence that you are 'reputable and responsible'
in relation to the operation of a licensed facility and/or that you have the
ability to comply with applicable regulations," the department wrote.
"First, you have shown a disregard for the law by operating your program
without first obtaining a license from this Department to do so. . . . Also,
you are apparently engaging unlawfully in the practice of psychology without securing
a California license."
Israel was ordered to "cease and desist" operation or face legal
action that would close his school. The day after the scheduled shutdown,
according to published reports, the students' parents proclaimed that they had
taken over the facility and were running it as a co-op. The school, which had
begun as a branch of BRI in Providence, formally severed ties with the parent
institute and formed its own indigenous corporation, BRI of California.
Instantly Matt Israel went from head honcho to "consultant." The
"new" school applied for a license. The move was aided by former
California governor Pat Brown, whose law firm represented BRI of California.
The institute got its group-home license. Later it received the only permit
ever granted by the state of California to use physical aversives.
[Image: A black and white image of two young white women holding hands. The
girl to the left-hand side is wearing a light-colored bow in her hair, while
the woman on the right-hand side appears to be wearing a two-colored clown
costume and matching hat as she holds a ball in her left hand. The younger
woman is frowning and looking away from the woman dressed as the clown. The
sign behind them says "Candy Store" in script with an arrow pointing
to the right. There is no caption.]
Meanwhile, back east Israel was scuffling with the state of New York. In
1978 New York was in the midst of a drive both to inspect out-of-state
facilities where New York children were housed and to bring some of its
handicapped boys and girls home. Israel's request for a per-pupil tuition
increase from $31,600 to $38,000 heightened the state's interest in his
Providence program. After an investigation, according to the New York Times,
the state education department found that the BRI program was not in compliance
with New York state law and ordered Israel to stop using physical aversives on
its students. Israel threatened to kick out the 15 or so New York students if
the state didn't back off. A group of New York parents sued the state in federal
court to keep their kids at BRI and won. The kids stayed.
[Image: A variety of circus and fair style stalls, two recognizable from
the earlier image, blocked by typical crowd barriers consisting of poles and
chains linking the poles, with a pathway separating the stalls and a variety of
toys and enormous animal plushies, including one recognizable as a polar bear
and another as a llama, with a disco ball hanging from the ceiling. The image's
caption reads, "A small world: the Reward Store."]
In January 1979 the state sent a follow-up team from the New York Office of
Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities on a three-day unannounced
visit to BRI. They found the institute extraordinary. "The January team
found BRI to be a professionally conceived, well documented, and rigidly
implemented behavior modification program. Its effects on the students was the
singular most depressing experiences that team members have had in numerous
visitations to human service programs," the report said.
The New York report offers a peek into the gains-through-pain world of BRI.
One student's program contained the following behavior-consequence sequences:
biting self — 15 minutes helmet (no vision, white noise); hand play — spank
(butt); noises — pinch (butt); out of seat — spank (butt); biting others — cool
shower, five pinches (foot); hands to head — muscle squeeze (shoulder);
clapping — say "no"; rocking — water squirt.
One of the most bizarre measures they saw was an Israel technique dubbed
"behavioral-rehearsal lessons." Israel believes that for his
treatment to work, particular behavior must occur often enough for the people
to get "consequated," that is, rewarded or punished. When targeted inappropriate
behavior comes at a low frequency, Israel believes it makes it more difficult
for the student to grasp the connection between the behavior and the
consequence. At BRI Israel has solved his problem by having the staff encourage
the beginning stages of bad behavior.
Kathy, one of the New York students, was stealing food and drink. To get
her to stop, the BRI staff first urged her to steal so they could punish her.
The New York team found these instructions taped her classroom table: “Kathy is
to receive one stealing opportunity
per hour. She should be prompted to steal a juice squirter and a spank is to be
administered. If Kathy does actually steal the juice she is to receive the
helmet and white noise for 15 minutes.”
Eric was being trained to “accept disappointment.” His instructions read:
“Three times during the hour, when Eric earns juice or food for task completion
or good working – do not give the reward and say ‘no reward this time, go back
to work please.’ Wait a few minutes and if Eric accepts the disappointment
(does not display any inappropriateness) reward with sip of juice. If Eric does
not accept it, consequate the behavior displayed.” The New Yorkers did not
refer to this as behavioral-rehearsal lessons. They called it “entrapment.”
The team members summed up their impressions of BRI this way: “Rather than
being a program of neglect which harms children by not assisting them in
growth, the BRI program utilizes a current professional ideology to deny
children the opportunity to grow; to deny them any choices; to deny them normal
experiences in leisure-time pursuits; to deny them any opportunities for fun;
to deny the man opportunity to demonstrate anything other than a few
pre-selected responses.”
As a result of its evaluations, in 1979 the state restricted BRI’s use of
physical punishment on New York students. Under an agreement the state struck
with BRI, physical aversives can be used only when a child is likely to cause
“serious physical danger” to himself or others and after positive reinforcement
and less dramatic aversives have proved ineffective. In addition, such physical
aversives can be used to control patterns of behavior that are “extremely
detrimental” to a student’s development after all nonphysical aversives have
failed. In such cases, the New York State commissioner of education must be
given 10 days’ notice before the treatment is applied. He can veto the physical
punishment and try to place the student in another school.
On January 10, 1979, while the New Yorkers were on a second leg of their
visit to BRI Providence, the board of directors of the North Los Angeles County
Regional Center (NLACRC), a placement agency that distributes state moneys for
the disabled, voted to halt the funding of clients at BRI of California. After
a review of the operation, according to court records, NLACRC charged that BRI
had “abused its allegedly ‘therapeutic’ processes,” inflicted “serious injury”
to one of its residents, administered nonapproved aversives, and applied
“inadequate” controls on its use of aversives. Three parents went to court to
block the move. They said their children would land in state hospitals, where
they would be subjected to drugs, solitary confinement, and electric shocks. The
parents won. According to a California investigator familiar with the case, the
judge’s ruling centered around the regional center’s lack of authority to
defund the program and not the specific allegations. Former governor Pat Brown
again was on the case for BRI.
“There’s been a lot of political action of [sic] behalf of BRI,” says California Supervising Deputy Attorney
General Elisabeth Brandt. At one point in the LA fray, the state tried to
revoke BRI’s special permit to use aversives. A bill was then filed in the
California legislature specifically to give BRI binding approval to employ
physical aversives. The bill was killed. But the courts blocked the
special-permit revocation.
The anti-BRI action of NLACRC was prompted in part by the accusations of
Kathy Corwin, a former treatment worker at BRI. On October 28, 1978, according
to court documents, Corwin says she saw Israel fingernail-pinching the bottoms
of 12-year-old Christopher Hirsh’s [sic]
feet. Israel was administering a behavioral-rehearsal lesson to get Hirsh [sic] to stop defecating on rugs and in the
shower. Corwin said she heard the boy cry and scream in pain. The next morning
a BRI worker named Nancy Thibeault got sick to her stomach when she saw
Hirsch’s feet. “There were open blisters and a reddish substance oozing from
them,” she testified. BRI workers continued to pinch the boy’s feet. Corwin
returned to work after two days off. She was horrified at what she found. “The
insteps of both of Christopher’s feet had a considerable amount of blisters and
a considerable amount of open bloody patches where the skin had been entirely
removed,” she said.
In a 1979 30-page rebuttal entitled “The Corwin Allegations,” Israel
described the evolution of the behavioral-rehearsal lessons he had designed for
Christopher Hirsch – pinching him to elicit the correct answer about where not
to defecate – on that October 28:
“It took about thirty minutes to design and try out this procedure,” he
wrote. “It was tried out about eight times, with variations in the wording each
time and with variation sin the places Chris was brought to. . . . Since the
procedure had three parts, and since the pinch was given in each part, each
lesson involved three pinches. Since it required about eight trials before I
was satisfied with what the final procedure should be, Chris received about 24
pinches during this half-hour period.”
Israel said he monitored the condition of Hirsch’s feet over the next three
days. “As I recall,” he wrote, “no skin was broken. The normal pinch marks that
pinches make on the skin were produced. The only abnormal effect was one tiny
blood blister approximately 1/16 of an inch in diameter, which cleared up in a
few days. . . . Meantime Christopher Hirsch is alive, well, happy, healthy,
behaving better than ever, and with not a single serious or semi-serious injury
from any treatment procedure administered by me or the staff of B.R.I.
California.”
Soon after Christopher had received his “lessons,” the boy’s father,
Clement Hirsch, began receiving reports that his son had been abused at BRI,
according to court records. On November 6, 1978, he took Christopher to a
doctor. It took three adults to hold him down. The doctor testified that a
petrified look came over the boy’s face when they tried to examine his feet.
“He was absolutely terrified,” a friend of the family who was there recalled in
an interview recently. “There was no part of this skinny boy’s body that didn’t
have a bruise. Then they took off his shoes. It was horrible.”
Christopher’s father said the insteps of his son’s feet “were covered with strange
wounds which can only be described as holes. It looked as if the skin or flesh
had been removed and that it was healing and growing back to the level of the
skin. They [the holes] were about the size of the circumference of a
cigarette.”
It was true that BRI had been granted state permission to use the pinching
procedure. But the school and the regional disagreed over whether the type of
pinch allowed was the “rolling pinch” – skin held between thumb and forefinger,
pressure applied – or the nastier “nail pinch.”
The LA center also charged that BRI employed “sham administrators for
appearance-sake only.” When any clinical decision or staffing judgment had to
be made, it said, Israel had to be called in Rhode Island. “It was he who made
all of the decisions,” the complaint report said. The funding agency also said
that BRI conducted a “propaganda show” for visitors. “The real BRI is never
seen by any outsider,” it said. Two weeks before official state or parent
visits, it charged, aversives that causes bruises or marks were halted. “BRI,”
said the center, “informs its staff that it does not want any bruises on the
children’s bodies at the time of the visits.”
Commenting on the LA center’s unsuccessful 1979 attempt to stop funding BRI
clients, NLACRC’s attorney wrote: “Society has a great interest in the future
development of a child and avoiding diagnosis and/or treatment based on
erroneous information. BRI stands virtually alone for its advocacy of physical
punishment for behavior that is not life-threatening. . . . BRI should not be
allowed to use the children as human guinea pigs and make them suffer
needlessly.”
* * *
In general, there seems to
be a very high degree of professionalism, purposefulness and caring for
children among the B.R.I. staff.
— from the
Massachusetts Department of Education’s “A Position Paper on Behavior Research
Institute,” March 23, 1979
Barbara Cutler, a longtime advocate for the autistic community, calls the
Massachusetts white paper on BRI “a whitewash.” The paper was prepared
following the allegations of a New Jersey woman named June Ciric that her
autistic son, Michael, had been abused at BRI in Providence. Michael arrived at
BRI on April 28, 1978. To keep from running away, the staff handcuffed him to
his chair. His chair was cuffed to a fire-escape ladder. On June 28 Michael had
to be admitted to Rhode Island Hospital for acute cellulitis, his mother says –
blood poisoning of his right arm.
“Michael looked like Auschwitz,” his mother says by phone from her home in
Pitman, New Jersey. She says he he’d lost weight, had a black eye, eight-inch
black-and-blue marks on both inner thighs, and lacerations on other parts of
his body. She says the most severe aversive she was told he would receive was a
two-minute cold shower. “I never signed for a damn thing,” she says. She took
her son home after he was in the hospital for 10 days. He started having
seizures. Israel, she says, “is making these kids less than animals. If he can
control the so-called wild behavior, he can turn it on, too.”
The state of New Jersey investigated the incident. It determined that
Ciric’s charges of abuse were “unsubstantiated.” However, the state urged BRI
to maintain “closer medical monitoring of the children.”
Ciric says that like many BRI parents, she “fell for the dupe.” She thought
Israel was going to get her son to speak again. In a letter to the former
governor of Rhode Island, she expressed how much her attitude had changed after
her son’s two-month stint at BRI. “I feel,” she wrote, “Dr. Mathew [sic] Israel
is being licensed to freely practice child abuse and assault and battery in the
name of therapy.”
[Image: A black and
white photo of a man of unidentifiable race standing to the side of the
background while looking at a younger boy, likely white or Latino, with short
dark hair, sitting at a table and performing a manual activity in a room that
appears to be a classroom with shelves and a clock on the wall. There is no
caption.]
[Image: A black and white
photo of Matthew Israel wearing a suit and sitting on the edge of a desk with
his hands resting against each other while he smiles. There are a desk lamp, a
phone, and various papers and trinkets on the desk. There are three windows
behind him, and shelves with books and framed photographs to his left and the
viewer’s right. The image’s caption reads, “What makes this man smile?”]
Meanwhile, up at the Massachusetts State House, Senator Jack Backman was
sending off an avalanche of letters about BRI to state officials. In an April
19, 1979, letter to former OFC commissioner John Isaacson, Backman pointed out
that Massachusetts had a statute prohibiting corporal punishment. “I believe
that this statute, which I personally introduced in the legislature, is being
violated by the Behavioral [sic] Research Institute in their Massachusetts
residential care facilities.” In a memo also dated April 19, 1979, Barbara
Cutler suggested to former senator Joe Timilty an outline of items for a
legislative hearing about services for autistic children. The points she listed
could easily be put on an agenda for November 1985. Among the issues raised:
“Report on BRI . . . poor monitoring methods, lack of clear policy on use of
aversive behavioral techniques.” Under “present needs,” she wrote: “statewide
planning for services; more residential programs – more clear options for
parents; state policy on human rights of these children, including use of
punishment as a learning tool.”
The scrutiny of BRI intensified. In the late afternoon of October 30, 1980,
Robert Cooper Jr., a 25-year-old autistic student at BRI, was taken to the
emergency room of Rhode Island Hospital. He was throwing up. He had diarrhea.
At 11 p.m. Cooper was pronounced dead. The medical examiner announced that
Cooper had died of natural causes, a “hemorrhagic bowel infarct,” or blockage
resulting from a twisting of the bowel. An investigation by the Massachusetts
Department of Mental Health (DMH) found no negligence on the part of the BRI
staff. But DMH was mildly critical of BRI for transporting Cooper to the
hospital by personal car instead of ambulance and for failing to notify the
emergency room that a patient was on the way.
Shirley and Robert Cooper Sr. came to the defense of BRI. “It was difficult
for myself and my wife to allow Bobby to be pinched or spanked,” Robert Cooper
told the Boston Globe after his son’s
death. “But there were no alternatives. Every other alternative was no
alternative. In a state institution he would have become a vegetable.”
In the end it was the parents who had the final word in the Department of
Education’s (DOE) 1979 position paper. The report acknowledged the controversy
over aversive therapy and the lack of alternative programs in the state. But it
recommended that “parents should continue to be given the opportunity to make
informed choices and place their children at B.R.I.” The DOE had already taken
some steps to improve the safety of the students, making clear that it did not sanction
pinching between the toes, for example, and stipulating that the physical
condition of each student be reviewed daily by registered nurse. And the report
said OFC would be monitoring the program “at least every two months,” a promise
that has been broken.
Like many other state agencies DOE showed great faith in Matthew Israel.
“In a phone conversation on March 6,” the report said, “Dr. Israel indicated
that his program is committed to replacing the physical aversives which sometimes
leave bruises – the spank, muscle squeeze and pinch – with aversives like the
air blast. . . . Although the Institute leaves open the option of using
physical aversives when a child’s needs demand it, Dr. Israel and his staff . .
. are to be commended for their commitment to developing creative, effective
treatment alternatives.”
* * *
On one occasion
during the period September 3 to December 15, 1980 Matthew Israel, consultant
for respondent [BRI of California], instructed Nicolas DeCila, a staff member,
to grow his fingernails longer so he could give an effective pinch. Such pinches
were administered with the fingernails and caused excessive and unnecessary
cuts and bruises. . . .
On occasion during
the period from September 1978 through October 1980 Matthew Israel and Steve
Starin would threaten residents with a pinch if they did not respond to
statements or to questions in the appropriate fashion. These threatened actions
were not called for by the residents’ program and did not constitute a proper
use of behavior modification principles: (1) Matthew Israel would pinch the underarms
of Eric R. and make Eric repeat phrases. (2) Matthew Israel would ask Toby W.
in various tones of voice whether Toby wanted a pinch. . . .
On or about March 1,
1981, Richard L. was restrained in a large black chair by himself in the
kitchen. Richard’s hands were tied to the chair, his feet were tied to the
bottom of the chair, and a huge box covered his head and torso. He was kept in
this position for at least one hour. . . .
In or about February
1980, it was confirmed that Willie R. is a deaf child, and his parents so
notified respondent. Respondent failed to modify Willie’s program, and
continued to inflict water squirts and corporal punishment upon Willie in
contexts where it was unlikely if not impossible that Willie could understand
the behavior he was required to exhibit to avoid punishment. For example,
Willie received water squirts for not responding to verbal commands to keep his
eyes closed while in bed. . . .
Prohibited by the courts from simply canceling BRI’s
special permit, the state of California in 1981, citing numerous violations,
moved to revoke the program’s license and special permit. BRI appealed. In
January 1982 the California attorney general’s office, acting as the attorney
for the California Department of Social Services (DSS) filed its first amended
accusation against BRI of California in administrative proceedings before an
administrative-law judge. Charging that BRI of California had “misused and
abused behavior modification therapy using aversives in a manner . . . inimical
to the health, welfare and safety of the residents,” the state complaint listed
more than 100 alleged violations of the license regulations, and special
permit. Here are excerpts from that report, in addition to those listed above:
On or about January
31, 1981, and on or about February 7, 9, 21 and 28, 1981, Glen R. had bruises,
cuts, and drainage from open wounds on his buttocks as a result of pinches.
On April 24, 1980
Willie R. was administered 77 spanks for hitting himself, 33 spanks for crying
and 64 spanks for other behavior. In addition, Willie received 100 water
squirts.
During the period
September through December 1980 and for an unknown period of time before and
after these months, respondent threatened to fire employees for not learning
hard enough on residents who were bent over to be spanked or for not giving an
effective spank or pinch. This procedure was unnecessarily punitive and
humiliating for the residents.
In or about February
1981 Eric K. was deprived of meals up to three times a week.
On occasion during
the period from September through December 1980 and for an unknown period of
time before and after that month, Richard L. was placed in the back yard of the
facility by himself while in restraints. Respondent fed Richard L. when he was
in the yard by placing a plate of food on the ground with no eating utensils.
Ricky would have to eat with his arms restrained to his sides.
When Carl was placed
in isolation respondent would not allow anyone to speak to Carl for 24 hours.
He would be restrained in the classroom behind the boxes until 11 p.m., then he
would be tied to a piece of furniture in the living room in a kneeling position
to sleep. On these occasions he would be deprived of a bed, pillow, and
blanket.
On occasion during the period from September through
December 1980 and on unknown occasions before and after that period, respondent
instructed its employees to administer pinches and spanks to the buttocks,
inner arm, inner thigh, and/or the soles of the feet, and to dress residents in
long pants and long-sleeved shirts to prevent relatives and other visitors from
seeing the bruises and abrasions resulting from pinches and spanks.
During the period from September 1980 through February
1981 and on unknown occasions before and after that period, respondent
cancelled medical appointments for a resident if that resident was too bruised.
In or about December 1980 Danny A. was prompted to grab
the secretary’s hair so it could be filmed. When Danny was eating Judy Weber
[who heads BRI of California] filmed a close-up of food spilling out of his
mouth. Danny would be prompted to misbehave, allowed to rehearse, then filmed.
Food was scattered around the room by respondent’s employees and filmed to make
it appear that Danny had thrown the food.
On the morning of July 17, 1981, Danny A. was restrained
in bed by an arrangement which kept him flat on his stomach in bed. Danny A.
died between 9:00 and 10 a.m. on this date while being so restrained.
The county coroner ruled that 14-year-old Danny Aswad’s
death had been from natural causes: “Mental retardation” and “cerebral
malformation.”
Israel says the California charges are a mixture of lies,
half truths, and exaggerations. Besides, he says, he was and is merely a
consultant to the program and not responsible for its day-to-day affairs. “Why
bop me with that stuff?” he says. “Don’t you have enough to hit me over the
head with?” Still, Israel maintains close contact with the school, which is run
by his friend Judy Weber. In fact, Israel helped draft responses to the above
allegations and was recently involved in the financial planning of the school’s
attempted expansion into Oakland. BRI of Providence’s own literature continues
to refer to the California program as its “sister school.”
According to the California Supervising Deputy Attorney
General Elisabeth Brandt, BRI of California admitted that DSS had “grounds for
discipline” but never specific what those transgressions might have been.
Shortly before the scheduled hearing, after a magistrate had ruled that TV
cameras would be allowed into the proceeding, BRI and the state reached an
out-of-court settlement. As a result of the agreement BRI had been virtually
banned from using all physical aversives, restraints, and meals as rewards or
punishments.
Brandt says, “The program they’re running now is
acceptable to the state. It’s not a preferred program, but parents should have
a variety of programs as long as they’re not abusive. As long as Matthew Israel
was in charge, there were doubts as to whether the changes would be made. We
felt that Matthew Israel firmly believes in severe aversives and wouldn’t stop
using them. If he were to come out here and be personally involved, there are
doubts as to whether there would be the peaceful coexistence that’s going on.”
* * *
The system is fucked up.
— A Boston-area psychiatrist involved
in the research and treatment of autistic children.
On March 18, 1983, the Massachusetts Office for Children officially gave
BRI here permission to punish children physically. In 1975 the State Department
of Education had approved BRI, even with its controversial
behavior-modification methods, as a special-needs program. From 1975 to 1978
OFC licensed BRI’s residences as foster-care facilities. In 1978 OFC decided
the residences should be licensed as group-care homes. Although for a time BRI
lacked the proper building certificates, the state figured the homes were safe
enough for autistics and retarded individuals. But even after BRI got the
certificates, the state dragged its feet on granting the program a license.
Programs for autistic people in Massachusetts are few. Matthew Israel,
despite the negative vibrations that have trailed him, seemed an attractive
ambassador for autistic people. He had an open-door policy. He refused no one
access. In a state that is still talking about developing adequate programs,
Israel came along and offered to take the state’s toughest kids off its hand,
no questions asked.
The state didn’t ask too many questions, either. “They stuck the kids on a
train and didn’t care where they went,” says the psychiatrist, who did not wish
to be identified, for professional reasons. As it turned out, they were all
headed for the same place – the last resort, BRI. “The state funneled the
bottom, bottom, bottom of the barrel there. Every kid there has flunked out of
everything. The kids should be sprinkled around [to different programs] with
support. The system is overloaded. It’s inevitable that something will go
wrong.”
The state nudged the inevitable to the brink with its hands-off policy.
* * *
Israel says he plots the course of every student’s behavior. Good behavior
is reinforced intermittently, with at least 15 rewards an hour, three of which
must be hugs, and contractually. A student earns rewards by acting
appropriately a certain number of times within a certain period of time. The
rewards range from a visit by a dancing girl to a trip to the Reward Store,
where “It’s a Small World, After All” plays in the background while students
eat cotton candy, listen to rock music, or ride on a rocking horse. Bizarre
behavior, defined by Israel as anything that wouldn’t be appropriate on a trip
to HoJo’s, is curtailed through the hierarchy of aversives such as pinches,
spankings, rubber bands snapped on wrists, and students being tied to a person
they dislike. In addition, there are eight “food-contingency plans” (different
ways to earn food); “self-instructional tasks”; “programmed opportunities”; and
“group-management situations.” If positive reinforcement doesn’t work, the
least intrusive aversive on the list is implemented. If after a minimum of two
weeks that doesn’t work, a student moves up the ladder of pain. Israel believes
tough problems require tough measures. He points out that rewards outnumber
punishments at BRI 10 or 15 to one.
This complex system is run by staff members who are compelled by Israel to
progress up the ranks of BRI at prescribed intervals or risk losing their jobs.
On top of this system the state has overlaid group-care regulations promulgated
back in 1978. OFC officials say the regulations must be general enough to cover
the activities of services ranging from a high school for the learning-disabled
to a school for the deaf.
Working with outdated regulations, the state granted BRI its
mechanical-restraint waiver and approved a hierarchy of aversives but never set
specific limits on pain, such as how many pinches could be allowed per day.
Instead it relied on the judgement [sic] of BRI’s impressive-on-paper
internal monitoring system of parental consent, local and national peer review
committees and a local human-rights committee (all of whose members serve at
Israel’s behest), daily body checks by nurses, and weekly visits by doctors.
Israel has portrayed the latest OFC action as a political playing-up to
advocates. He believes that licensing investigator Michael Avery had no problem
with BRI until the state sent him back to find something wrong. According to
OFC, however, the emergency measure issued in September was the culmination of
seven months of raised eyebrows and suspicions.
Michael Avery headed for BRI in March, when the school’s two-year
group-care licenses were up for renewal. During March and April Avery spent 250
hours at BI. He experienced some of the aversives firsthand. The finger pinches
on the bottom of his feet, he says, stung for two or three seconds but throbbed
later, when he put his foot no the gas pedal of his ’82 Honda. Three muscle
squeezes to his left shoulder left him with a dull ache for three days. Ammonia
near his nose kicked his head back, and for a brief time his breathing was out
of control. It took 10 minutes for him to breath [sic] normally, he
says. He took his shoes off and climbed into the automatic vapor-spray (AVS)
station. He stood barefoot on a ridged rubber mat. His ankles and wrists were
cuffed. He skipped the usual bucket of water dumped on the head. He got a hit
of ammonia two or three inches from his nose. Then he put on the remote
vapor-spray helmet – no visibility, white noise, and air-and-water combo
sprayed in his face. At first he was scared. The ammonia threw him, and then
the helmet went on. He thought he was going to pass out. He was in the station
for half an hour, but he says he became so disoriented that he felt it could
have been five minutes or two hours. When he got out he needed a minute or two
before he could put a whole sentence together.
Avery discovered that the hierarchy of aversives had changed since 1983,
the year the list was approved. The approved list was: ignoring the action,
saying no, token fines, water spray, vapor spray, taste aversive (among them,
lemon juice and jalapeño pepper), contingent physical exercise, time-out
helmet, ammonia, hand squeeze, spank, muscle squeeze, pinch, brief cool shower,
time-out helmet with safety tube and optional automatic vapor spray. According
to Avery, BRI had changed the list without notifying OFC. The new order, he
said, was: ignore, no, token fine, water squirt to face or back of neck, vapor
spray I (three seconds), air spray, white-noise visual screen (sitting), taste
aversive, white-noise visual screen (standing up), ammonia, vapor spray II (15
seconds), vapor spray III (two minutes), contingent physical exercise, remote
vapor spray, social punisher (student loosely tied to another student he
dislikes), hand squeeze, wrist squeeze, rolling pinch (to buttocks, inner arm,
inner thigh, bottom of feet, palms, stomach), finger pinch (same spots), water
spray III (bucket of cold water poured over head), brief cool shower, AVS, and
multiples of these.
Avery found one student who had been spanked 133 times within two hours.
Avery says he was told in March that BRI’s policy was no more than 10 physical
aversives in a five-minute period; no more than 40 physical aversives in an
eight-hour shift. BRI says there never were any absolute limits on the number
of aversives. After looking at charts, Avery concluded that there was no real
evidence that the behavioral-rehearsal lessons worked. He learned of one
student who was in long-term leg chains. He saw students in wet clothes,
shaking two hours after having been doused with cold water.
Avery went home, checked out his papers, and decided that BRI was in
serious noncompliance with the regulations. For only the second time as an
investigator, he would not be able to recommend licensing the facility until he
had more information.
Meanwhile, on May 24, as OFC inspector Avery was expressing concern about
problems at BI, the state Department of education was issuing BRI a clean bill
of health.
Then, on July 24 a 22-year-old autistic student at BRI named Vincent
Milletich died. He was going to be “consequated,” reportedly for making
inappropriate sounds. He became aggressive and started thrashing around. BRI
workers pushed his head between a staff member’s legs and handcuffed his hands
behind his back. Then they threw on the helmet with the white noise and the blocked
vision and put him down on the floor. Vincent went limp. He died at the Rhode
Island Hospital.
The Bristol County district-attorney’s office is investigating the death.
On August 28 Avery went back to BRI with Bette McClure, OFC acting director
of group-care licensing. For the first time, Avery says, he saw all the
aversive sign-off sheets together. There were 60 of them, he says. And a BRI
doctor had approved all 20 aversives for each kid, he says. “That absolutely
caused concern,” he says. “He [the doctor] had 1200 opportunities to say no,
and there wasn’t a comment.” For the first time Avery had come across “repeated
use of physical aversive” forms and could figure out the number of aversives
being administered to the students.
In early September advocacy groups started reacting to the death of Vincent
Milletich. On September 10, for example, John Roberts, the executive director
of the Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, wrote to Governor Michael
Dukakis: “We recognize that parents do agree to the treatment program when
children are placed at BRI, but many do so out of desperation that there is no
other placement available. However, even parents are prohibited from abusing
their children.”
On September 16 Avery received a call from a former BRI worker who tipped
him off about a change in the contingent-food program for some students, in
which “mini-meals” were either served as rewards or withheld as punishments.
Students who missed the meals as punishment supposedly received the rest of
their calories later. He also learned about the BRI’s food-intake charts, which
kept track of every ounce of food a student received.
On September 17 Avery went back to BRI alone and unannounced. He asked for
the food-intake charts. What the worker had told him was true, he says. BRI had
changed the food plan without telling OFC. Every student, he claims, now had to
earn his food through a system of rewards and punishments.
Avery left BRI with a pile of documents seven inches thick. He and McClure
went through the papers. What they saw scared them. They looked at each other
and said, “Oh, my God.”
What they found is reflected in these excerpts from the OFC complaint:
On July 16, 1985, student “H” received 173 spanks to the thighs, 50 spanks
to the buttocks, 98 muscle squeezes to the thighs, shoulders and triceps, 88
finger pinches to the buttocks, 47 finger pinches to the thighs, approximately
527 finger pinches to the feet, and 78 finger pinches to the hand between 6:00
a.m. and 9:30 p.m. for “aggressive acts and head to object.”
On July 27, 1985, student “G” received 170 spanks to various areas of the
body, 139 finger pinches to an unknown area of the body, 31 muscle squeezes to
the triceps, and 139 water squirts to the face between approximately 9:00 a.m. and
5:00 p.m. for “aggressive acts and destroy.”
During April 1985 the OFC licensor review[ed] student “G”’s behavior charts
and learned that from March 9, 1985, to March 20, 1985, student “G” was placed
in the A.V.S. on a continuous non-stop basis except for a time out of the
A.V.S. for bathroom and water opportunities and sleep time. Student “G” was
required to wear a white noise visual screen with the noise turned off while
sleeping.
Of the 84 meals recorded on student “L”’s food intake form for the month of
April, 1985, student “L” did not receive approximately 30 meals and did not
receive portions of 5 other meals.
Of the 73 meals recorded on student “P”’s food intake form for April 1 to
April 25, 1985, student “P” did not receive approximately 46 meals and did not
receive portions of 17 other meals.
On April 24, 1985, BRI’s staff physician examined “P” and determined that
student “P” had generalized edema in the lower extremities and significant
weight loss and directed that student “P” be kept out of the A.V.S.
It is OFC’s information and belief that student “P” had a weight loss of
twenty pounds from February 4, 1985 to April 28, 1985.
It is OFC’s information and belief that student “P” was cuffed to a
restraint board for “medical” conditions and removed from the contingent food
program on April 27, 1985.
On July 5, 1985, the BRI staff physician diagnosed student “P” as suffering
from anemia.
Student records indicated that behavior [sic] rehearsal lessons were used
for student’s behavior such as stealing, inappropriate urination and defecation
and body tensing. Parental permission forms state that behavior [sic] rehearsal
lessons will be implemented only for serious problems such as pulling out hair,
biting others or self and opening a car door while driving.
“Over the past three years,” wrote Caruso, who represented OFC, in his
memorandum for Magistrate Fink, “BRI has demonstrated a significant lack of
concern for following regulatory requirements.” Caruso’s memorandum, in fact,
indicts both BRI and the state for creating the current conflict. Noting
that corporal punishment and food deprivation and mechanical restraints are
generally prohibited by the state, Caruso wrote that “the BRI program exists as
an exception to all these policies. As with all exceptions, its functions,
operations, and permissive authorizations must be meticulously reviewed and
narrowly construed.”
Until Michael Avery gained access to Matthew Israel’s own records, the
state did neither. Because it placed no specific limits on BRI, the state has
by and large been forced to take on the program with a nebulous and subjective
argument, stating that the school has denied each student “a fair and full
opportunity to reach his full potential.” In another hearing, scheduled for
January, a magistrate could well rule that BRI’s alleged behavior is a
violation of its students’ human rights but not a violation of any state
regulations.
“If we knew then what we know now, there’s no way we would have recommended
a license for BRI,” says Bette McClure, who was part of the team that okayed
BRI for licensure in 1983. But back when OFC was on the verge of being axed;
there was a high turnover of directors, and eight workers were handling 400
programs. “We knew it was a very controversial decision,” she says. And on
paper BRI appeared to have the checks and balances. McClure confesses now that
she was not aware of many of the allegations that have dogged Israel
nationally.
“The question,” says behaviorist Anne Donnellan, “is to whom do we give
that kind of control?”
* * *
Matt Israel is smiling. There is a newspaper photographer in front of him,
and he is smiling into the camera. He is finding it hard to keep it up. A woman
walks into his office. Israel says to her, “Think of things to make me smile.”
She says, “Money.” Israel says, “How about cutting Mike Avery into little
pieces? How about group homes for BRI? How about torturing Michael Avery?”
As in previous clashes, Matt Israel has transformed this one into a
personal duel. Take the problems with the state of New York. Israel says the
woman who wrote that report was biased; she was setting up a competitive
program with BRI. What about Kathy Corwin, the former worker in California?
Israel says she thought one of the students was possessed by the devil. June
Ciric in New Jersey? Israel hands over a thick file. In it is a letter he wrote
to the Massachusetts Department of Education: “Notice also the account of the
many different medical theories that Mrs. Ciric has tried – a search that has
apparently bordered on the desperate, as when she pretended Mike was her dog,
and asked the veterinarian what he would recommend for a dog with Mike’s
symptoms.” And her friend, another disenchanted former BRI mom? Israel says she
is a member of a witch’s coven. Nonaversive behavior modification? Israel pulls
out another file and charges that one of his critics, a proponent of positive
reinforcement, was caught using aversives. Israel sees the entire
coast-to-coast confrontation as a conspiracy by NSAC to do away with Matthew
Israel.
Mat Israel, 52, was born in Brookline. He went to Brookline High with
Michael Dukakis. He got kicked out of an honor society after he denounced the
school’s plan to offer entrance into the club if you pursued sports and
extracurricular activities. “It was too much of an artificial reward system,”
he says. While an undergraduate at Harvard he took a course on human behavior
taught by B.F. Skinner. At the library he picked up one of his professor’s
books that was not assigned for class: Walden Two. “It was a real
inspiration,” he says. “I knew what I wanted to do with my life. It was a
feeling similar to those claiming to have religious conversions. I wanted to
start a real utopian behavioral community.”
Israel knew his mission, but he didn’t know a practical place to start. He
had doubts about whether his goal was realistic. “It was a very difficult
period,” he says. “I thought about committing suicide. If I couldn’t bring a
community into existence, what sense was life worth living?” Israel spent his
spare time working in the lab with Skinner. In six weeks, using behavior
modification he taught a couple of pigeons to play Ping-Pong.
<
He received his doctorate in psychology from Harvard in 1960 and went on to
raise some capital and start a firm selling teaching machines. He hoped that if
he sold enough he could finance his trip into Utopia.
The firm never took off. In 1966 Israel attended a Walden Two conference
in Michigan that attracted 83 people. They exchanged ideas on how to start
their own WTs.
In 1967 Israel started a communal house in Arlington comprising Israel,
another guy and his girlfriend, and a teacher and her young daughter, Andrea.
“In that house,” Israel says, “I had my first opportunity to do behavior
modification”: Andrea. “She walked around the living room with a toy broom,
hitting people,” Israel recalls. She screamed and yelled at the top of her
lungs and threw awful tantrums. Israel says, “It was so irritating. I was
forced to do behavior modification.” He got permission from Andrea’s mother to
work on the child. The first aversive he used was time out. When she screamed,
Israel would put her in her bedroom, and shut the door and hold it closed. On a
chart he plotted how long she screamed. The tantrums diminished. But it was a
drag to have to hold the door shut. He recalls, “At one point I gave her a slap
to the cheek and say, ‘There’s no screaming in time out.’” He began to use a
combination of rewards and punishments with Andrea. “I was a tremendous source
of reward for Andrea,” he says. “She was very cute, very smart, and very
appreciative of attention. I found that a combination of extraordinary rewards
and occasional aversive made an environment that helped change her whole
personality.” Israel’s training had begun with Skinner, who believed you didn’t
need to use aversives. But Israel could see the results. “Punishment is a fact
of culture,” he says. “When the police fine you for parking in a no-parking
zone, that’s punishment. She [Andrea] had been a spoiled brat. And she became a
pleasant, attractive, charming feature in the house.”
Unfortunately, the adults didn’t do so well, and the Walden Two experiment
failed. As did another communal house in the South End. The problem with the
houses, says Israel, was that the residents weren’t really buying into the
behavior-mod mode. “There was very little control over the participants,”
Israel says. They could always move out.
That’s when Israel thought about starting a school. “Maybe a school for the
emotionally disturbed,” he says. “Behaviorism is the kind of thing,
particularly in these days, that has been allowed to be applied to the
handicapped.”
Israel went to the Bradley Hospital, in Providence, to visit a residential
program for emotionally disturbed children. There, he says, the director asked
him, “Do you think behavior modification would work on autistic children?”
Israel thought it would and started a unit there for six autistic children. He
used food rewards, spankings, a time-out room, and a plant-spray bottle.
In 1971, some nine months after going to Bradley, Israel started Behavior
Research Institute. Now he’s getting $87,000 per student. The miracle man has
escaped other scrapes, and he’s already plotting how to get out of this one. If
Massachusetts shuts down BRI, he says, he may open group homes in Rhode Island.
Israel thinks the current crackdown may lead to a greater understanding of his
philosophy and allow him a greater array of behavior-modification tools. “I’ve
never used electric shock,” he says in his calm, soft voice. “I wouldn’t rule
it out. Particularly if we were deprived of other procedures. It’s more
effective, and you wouldn’t bruise or cut the skin.”
