8:33pm August 3, 2015

Experiences at the Judge Rotenberg Center - Telling People’s Stories

andreashettle:

I would like to interview people who have been residents of JRC and people who have worked there.  It is incomprehensible to me that JRC still operates and my sense is that putting an end to the cruelty may hinge on people in positions of power hearing from people who have experienced life there. Until the Andre McCollins video became public, people were able to buy JRC’s story that the shock from the GED was like a pinch or a bee sting. Being able to witness the inhumanity of the shock has changed people’s understanding in important ways.

Offering people a way to tell their story in a safe way may make a difference. I am proposing an oral history/story project in which I help people tell their stories of life at JRC by interviewing people, writing their stories and giving people the opportunity to review/revise their story. It would then be up to each person to decide what he/she wants to do with the story. Some people may just want it as a personal record of their time there; others may want to share it more broadly. This could be done anonymously at the person’s discretion.  Each person will own and control his/her story.

Some people know all about JRC but when they hear about it in a person’s own words it can make it so much more real and only then does the horror of the situation hit them. One person’s story can make a difference.

If you are interested in sharing your story, knowing you will have complete control of it and if and how it is eventually shared, please email me at nancy-weiss@comcast.net.  If you know people who have been at JRC either as residents or staff, please forward this email to them. The best way for me to reach people will be people sending this request to others who may be interested.

Thanks for your help and interest,

Nancy Weiss

Signal boosting, because I would love to see this initiative succeed in gathering stories and maybe getting the Judge Rotenberg Center closed down. Nancy Weiss has been fighting against the atrocities at the Judge Rotenberg Center for MANY years, she’s awesome. 

Signal boost.

62 notes

8:36am June 2, 2015

jrcabuse:

Part of my actual official recording (behavior) sheet from Judge Rotenberg Center. Just some of the things I was shocked or it in trouble for. There is much more too. Under MDIS2 is I get shocked for having “5 IVB1 in an hour” at bottom shows what IVB is- talking to self, laughing etc. JRC claims they only shock major behaviors. Liars. See MDIS1- I also got shocked for “touching telephone, tic like body movements (I have Tourettes), hand movements in front of face, jumping up and down etc and much much more. This is only part of my sheet

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8:35am June 2, 2015

jrcabuse:

Proof JRC was shocking us on the board. This was mine. So many other students got this too. See number 3, where it directs staff to make sure the torture is good by being discrete, so the student (me on this one) “doesn’t know the application (shock) is coming”

51 notes

8:34am June 2, 2015

The Day I Spoke Up

jrcabuse:

     One of the last houses I lived in before I finally got out of that place was one I hated the most. The supervisor of that house had a really bad mean streak. I did my best to stay on her good side because if she didn’t like you she made sure your life was hell. Mostly I got along with her and bit my tongue when she tested me. But I was always stressed at that house, especially when she was in charge. I remember one day one of the other girls commented that we were being tortured. She got angry and said that we didn’t know what torture was, referring to her home country. But she was wrong, We knew torture very well. She had no empathy towards what we went through every day mentally and physically. She had the nerve to try and make us feel guilty for commenting on our own abuse. 

     It was a Saturday or Sunday. We were all sitting in the living room having some free time. One of the other residences called saying that a certain girl in our was on the list to go on a field trip with them. So the staff had to get her ready to go. She needed help dressing and stuff and she didn’t have any socks on. Staff didn’t feel like going upstairs to get the girls own clothes so they dug through the laundry that was downstairs with us. When they were giving her the socks I noticed they had another girls name on them. She was kind of my friend, and not even thinking I said, “hey —- aren’t those yours?” She said “yes”. Now I just want to say I didn’t do anything wrong. It was against the rules for staff to give our clothes or property to other students, although they did it all the time. And it was free time so I didn’t need permission to speak to my friend. But the supervisor got really mad that I said that. Her face turned nasty and my stomach dropped. She told me “No talking out!” I tried to hold it in, but the oppression, the fucking oppression, the power tripping staff who saw us as less-than. The policies and the “program” that stripped us of our basic rights to freedom of speech and freedom from cruel and unusual punishment. The program that denied my intelligence and personhood. I couldn’t take it another day. I came right back at her, saying “I was just helping my friend”. She says “no arguing with staff”, and it went back and forth from there. I knew I was going to lose all my privaleges by this point so I just kept talking. There was nothing I was doing on my program that she could shock me for. But she searched and searched my sheet. Finally she stopped and called the monitor from next door over. They had to call the monitor over to shock us ever since the prank phone call fiasco, so I knew what was coming. And I knew it was for a lie she made up. She lied and told the monitor I was tensing up, and they shocked me.

     I was so incredibly frustrated. I was at my breaking point. Staff did whatever they wanted and got away with it. And we weren’t even allowed to defend ourselves or speak up. At JRC, even if a staff is pinpointing you wrong, you are expected to accept it and the punishment, and then later write a “business letter” to your case manager telling them what happened. They teach us that we are punching bags and must accept all the shit done to us with out so much as a peep. That is teaching us to be victims that don’t matter.  I was sick to my stomach. I had to get away. I requested to call my legal guardian but was denied. I felt so unsafe there, with her. I knew she could make up any lie she wanted to hurt and shock me. 

     I gathered the strength, and ran up the steps and out the front door. As soon as I hit the cold winter air, my lungs tightened up from my asthma and I barley could make it across the icy front yard. I just crossed the street and I got grabbed from behind. It was the supervisor, and I felt like I was in a fight for my life. I couldn’t let her take me back inside, because now that we were outside, she could say I did anything and there was no camera to prove I didn’t. I knew she would. She tackled me into a snowbank and was sitting on me. I was trying so hard to get up. Cars were going by, and one finally stopped. A man got out, and told her to get off of me. I was yelling “help help”. She told him she had a right to do what was because I was in a “group home” and she was in charge. I kept asking him for help, and he got between us and made her get off of me. I remember I hugged that man, and I felt safer with that stranger then these staff I had been stuck with for years. He had called the police and when they came she kept arguing that she had a right to take me back to the house. But thankfully they wouldn’t let her. The police called an ambulance which took me to a nearby hospital. I felt so relieved to be away from her, like the world off of my shoulders, I had been so scared. They put me in an empty room at the hospital, and soon after, the supervisor arrived. She tried to come in the room with me and I freaked out. the security guard told the doctors that I was calm until she came near me, and they made her get out. After a while the weekend administrator came. She told me because of what I did I had to move to another residence with more staff. I actually felt relieved. I would be away from her. 

     I am so thankful to that stranger who stopped to help me. If he hadn’t pulled her off of me and called the police, she would have gotten me back in that house and shocked the hell out of me. It is amazing to me how all those strangers had more common sense and compassion then the staff and JRC program. It shows that what society considers wrong, is excused at JRC. Strangers saw me as more human the staff did. I was lucky that day, but there were many other days when I wasn’t.

Okay the following is not meant to take away from the impact of the story above at all, it’s just a reminder because of the symbolic super-importance the JRC has taken on in the minds of many people who have never been there or never been anywhere like it.  This should not detract at all from the horribleness of the JRC or the experiences of the people who have lived there or have been at risk of living there.  (I’m glad I didn’t have different parents, I would’ve easily been a candidate as a teen and young adult.)

So this is for everyone who wasn’t at the JRC:

Just a reminder that no matter where you are, these things are happening in  your backyard, right now.  You probably don’t even know how to recognize half the institutions in your area (many of them look almost like ordinary houses, these days), and your eyes may even glide over some of the more obvious ones as background scenery.  And things just as bad or worse are happening there, too.  The JRC sucks but there’s very little unique about it.  Focus on its uniqueness only contributes to the torture of others at other places.  Closing it may not even help some of its inmates:  Many will be sent to other institutions, and those institutions may do more damage than the JRC did for all anyone knows (and that can happen whether or not the person is consciously aware that the place is worse: it’s very common to be in a Stockholm Syndrome situation or one where you think a place is better because it lacks one specific thing that happened to you at another place, meanwhile it’s actually worse than the other place and you only realize it ten or twenty years after the fact when you look at the impact both actually had on your life – the worst place I was at had no locks on the doors, no bars on the windows, the windows were regular glass, no restraints, but it was utterly diabolical in ways that are far worse than things that other people would think are “objectively” worse… similarly many people I know who’ve been in both private and state institutions would take the state institutions any day, which causes surprise and disbelief among people who’ve only been to one or the other or neither – there’s no measuring stick you can easily use to say “this one is the worst” and I worry when JRC is singled out as the worst place anyone could possibly be… it’s an utterly horrible place, but unfortunately for disabled people everywhere, it’s one among many thousands, probably (I am not good at numbers but I think thousands at least)… so if you care about shutting down the JRC, please care about shutting down all the other places too, including the ones that are deceptively beautiful-looking but sometimes the most awful of all).

49 notes

2:11am October 25, 2014

dendriforming:

There actually seems to be a very specific “institutions trying not to look like institutions” aesthetic style. The JRC’s “non-institutional” furnishings look eerily similar to the furnishings in the new pediatric psychiatric inpatient ward they’re bragging about here. Same with the pediatric psych ward at Johns Hopkins.

How long will it take for the combination of aggressively cheerful colors and geometrically ~innovative~ but ergonomically dubious furniture to become a known thing?

I remember writing years ago about how the moment I saw the decor in the JRC I knew it was not just a bad place but a very, very bad place. Most parents unfortunately don’t know how to spot that stuff. Institutional veterans do. There was a time when I begged to go to a state institution rather than this one place, and I ended up having to go to that place anyway because there were no beds at the state institution, but everyone thought I was just crazy for begging to go there instead. But what I saw was a place trying too hard to look good. And I was right. By the end of my 6-9 months there, my entire family used the name of the place almost like a swear word. And my mom actually, when hearing the name of the family therapist (whose job it was to tell my mom that she had caused my “infantile psychosis that led to schizophrenia in adolescence”) said “may she rot in hell”, which is extremely out of character for my mom. My family still uses that place as a benchmark of the most stress you could possibly be under. Like “it’s not just bad, it’s [name of institution] bad.” And they had beautiful grounds, beautiful everything, with a heart from hell.

22 notes

12:43pm August 9, 2014

➸ “Prisoners of the Apparatus”: The Judge Rotenberg Center | Autistic Self Advocacy Network

autisticadvocacy:

By Quentin Davies

The Judge Rotenberg Center (JRC) in Canton, Massachusetts, has long been criticized for its treatment of disabled children and adults. It has been condemned by the current and previous United Nations Special Rapporteurs on Torture, many disability rights groups, current Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, and an FDA advisory panel (Hinman and Brown; Conaboy; Rothstein). It seems strange that the Judge Rotenberg Center is even still running, but it is, and is still using electric shocks as punishment for many of the disabled children and adults who currently live there. Through studying the Judge Rotenberg Center’s historical background, the current situation that exists at the facility, and how the Judge Rotenberg Center attempts to justify its actions, I hope to show that the Judge Rotenberg Center must be shut down, and to suggest policy changes that could be used to facilitate this goal. […]

Thank you to Quentin for allowing us to post this to the ASAN site’s blog! 

39 notes

3:31am June 9, 2014

➸ This is how I feel when I read a lot of posts about the Judge Rotenberg Center.

Close the Judge Rotenberg Center.  For the love of everything holy, close the Judge Rotenberg Center.  Stomp it into the ground and dance on its fucking ashes. But. You won’t be done. You’ll just h…

So the above link goes to the permanent home on my main blog, of that really long post I wrote about why the Judge Rotenberg Center is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to closing down bad institutions, and how focusing on the “one bad institution” can make you lose sight of what actually makes an institution bad, and the fact that many of the “good institutions” could be doing far worse damage.  (Someone referred to the damage done by “good institutions” as “subtle”.  It’s not subtle at all, it’s grievous gaping wounds in your soul.  It’s just not recognized for what it is.  That’s different than ‘subtle’.  Most damage done by 'good institutions’ is seen as simply mental illness on the part of the inmates, and that is seen as cause for building more and more 'good institutions’, which creates a nightmare scenario.  Basically all your most utopian institutions are dystopias at heart, and many of them are capable of damage at least as bad, if not worse, than the institutions that everyone agrees are bad.)

Anyway, that’s the post’s new home, so if you want to direct anyone to it, that’s a good place to look.  It’s extremely long, but I couldn’t think of a single idea that I could cut out to make it shorter.  The problem with trying to explain things that people really have never heard of before, is that it takes a lot of… length, because you have to tell them what they think they know, explain why what they think they know is wrong, and then tell them what’s actually going on.  And this is definitely an “everything you know is wrong” kind of post.

15 notes

7:32pm June 8, 2014

➸ She shocked me on the 4 point board

thegreenanole:

jrcabuse:

They shocked me on the 4 point board

One of my first programs I had at JRC was unbearable. I was on food portions where I would lose my meals for any little behavior, like rocking or talking to myself (there was a huge list of behaviors I couldn’t do). They also put in my program that I get…

One survivor’s story.

33 notes

3:17am June 8, 2014

➸ What I think when I see twenty bazillion posts about the JRC on my dash.

youneedacat:

Close the Judge Rotenberg Center. For the love of everything holy, close the Judge Rotenberg Center. Stomp it into the ground and dance on its fucking ashes.

But.

You won’t be done.

You’ll just have eliminated the most obvious of a huge number of places that torture and abuse their patients in…

Holy crap I had no idea I’d written that.  It’s worth reading the whole thing, even though it’s long.  I should think of putting this on my main blog.

96 notes

8:57pm February 20, 2012

➸ Why Students Praise the Judge Rotenberg Center

An old blog post of mine where I describe a video the JRC uses to manipulate parents into disregarding their children’s complaints about the institution. It also teaches parents how to manipulate their children into only saying good things about the JRC.

10 notes