Some people are still kept there even decades after becoming adults.
Special fuck-you to state rep Jeffrey Sanchez
Massachusetts state Representative Jeffrey Sanchez, whose nephew, Brandon, has been detained at the JRC since 1992, is a major proponent of the JRC and their practices. Sanchez has repeatedly blocked the passage of legislation that would threaten the center.
So many of these "research" psychologists are just sociopaths
Israel then decided to build a school for people with disabilities, as he knew that he would be able to practice behaviorism on them with very few restrictions.[4] After starting the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center, he gave up on further attempts to build a utopia because he was getting so much satisfaction from running the school.
Guy is really gunning to make the nation of Israel somehow not the worst entity named Israel.
Decades and decades of torturing hundreds (thousands?) of people based on a fascistic ideology of forcing neurodivergent people to conform to American normalcy.
...
FDA in 2014: Let's form a committee to determine if using cattle prod-like devices 16x times more powerful than a stun gun on autistic people could use """"""""""""""increased regulation""""""""""""""!
...(Years and years pass of irreversible physical and psychological damage to hundreds of people)...
FDA in 2020: Okay, stop using your psyche-annihilating electric pain torture device for torture. You can use """"electrical stimulation devices"""" for other things though!
D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, 2021: Ummm, actually, you aren't allowed to issue a partial ban on a medical device. You can either completely ban it or not ban it at all. Respect our holy procedures! The grand institution has spoken! Anyway, you can get back to torturing now.
It took another year for them to amend the law to let them actually ban the device like this.
What they should be doing and should have done back when this device was first created:
everyone who works there needs to be dragged out into the street and shot
This is unfortunately perfectly in line with a big chunk of the US. There's a whole branch of theology in the James Dobson vein that dominates the US, which holds that disobedience is a sin and that the only "loving" response is physical punishment until the disobedience stops in order to save their soul
Jesus Christ what is there even to say to something like this? Literal torture and yet in good ol' Christian USA it's all legal.
my only response to this would probably best be depicted as a series of increasingly unhinged emoji
An autistic creator has done a miniseries on the Judge Rot(t)enberg Center here:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlODcc7GGsYTD7Nzg4F-pAuYe1fpZQ9hB
It was renamed after Judge Rotenberg who wrote a decision allowing it to stay open and continue shocking in the 1980's or 90's. This was despite plenty of evidence presented that it was frequently being used in violation of the centers own parameters for the "treatment". Low level staff had the unilateral power to administer shocks. Shocks were being administered for things like defecating in their diapers and refusing to eat.
Fuck Judge Rotenberg and the whole Massachusetts supreme court for allowing this to continue yet again.
I am actually crying. This is so horrible. It gets worse and worse the more you read about it. America is so fucking diseased.
There are no words truly capable of describing just how fascistic and omnicidal America is. You can only keep reading more and more instances of horrific acts and ideas present in this sick society until you barely have a glimpse of the USA's grotesque, sadistic nature.
Yet there are still so many libs who believe America is fundamentally good. They are either too isolated from the consequences of the US's actions (genocide, imperialism, the shit in this Wikipedia article, etc) and unaware or they believe it's just normal for people to treat each other this way... "human nature". They are like fish in water, incapable of seeing just how fucked up it all is because they grew up inside this empire. They view all these things as isolated from each other, not indicative of something fundamental or causative at America's core. Idk why I'm writing this. Just had to get it out of my head I guess. Maybe one of the apolitical fediverse people will see and consider it.
In a surprise to absolutely no one, when you give a radical behaviorist carte blanche to do whatever he wants and no shortage of resources, he turns into Josef Mengele
At one time, a group of parents sued the state for $15 million, contending that the state's attempts to close the institute violated their children's rights to treatment.[63] Additionally, Massachusetts state Representative Jeffrey Sanchez, whose nephew, Brandon, has been detained at the JRC since 1992, is a major proponent of the JRC and their practices. Sanchez has repeatedly blocked the passage of legislation that would threaten the center.[80]
Words really can't get across the rage I feel at reading about this betrayal of people by their own flesh and blood.
