The text below in black font is taken from www.judgerc.org/history.html
The words are quite complex, so I have translated it into simple phrasing in red font.
A thoroughgoing behavioral approach differs markedly from these traditional approaches in certain ways. Some of these differences, which are itemized below, have caused JRC to experience difficulties with licensing agencies from time to time.
Our approach is unethical, unproven and torturous. Some agencies just don’t get that we are getting results and that is all that should matter.
• Near-zero rejection and expulsion policy.
In order to have victims we take all cases. We have always accepted any and all individuals for treatment and have tried to maintain a zero or near-zero rejection and expulsion policy, provided that the needed treatment procedures are made available to us.
As long as you do what we want, and sign our many waivers, your child is most welcome to come here to be subjected to our abuse. So no worries, you will never have to deal with your child again! We do not limit those whom we accept to persons with certain psychiatric diagnoses and labels. In fact, once we have determined that the least restrictive and most effective treatment for a student is behavioral treatment, we really pay relatively little attention to psychiatric diagnoses which are essentially labels for groups of behaviors. Instead, we look directly at the behaviors that are the individual’s problem and simply set about treating each of those individual behaviors. Of the first two students we worked with, one was labeled autistic and one was labeled schizophrenic.
We don’t give a flying fuck what disabilities your child has. Blind? We will zap her until she can see! Emotional disturbed? We will spank them till they get over it! We make no allowances for anything-in our school your child will do what we want…. Or else.
Our policy of near-zero rejection and expulsions, coupled with the success we demonstrated in treating our students, resulted in agencies referring their most difficult behavior problems to us.
Most agencies do refer us! And please don’t read that bit about agencies not getting us-we wouldn’t want you to realize just how full of it we are. Seriously folks, no other school or hospital will let you dump your child off? They will be welcome here! Most of our referrals had been unsuccessfully served in numerous other private and public mental health and educational facilities before they were referred to JRC. Many of our students arrive directly from unsuccessful psychiatric admissions.
Your child will live here with some of the most troublesome cases. Because we don’t give a shit what your child is like, we blend together children of all different ability levels. The psychotic child with violent tendencies will bunk with the child who compulsively needs to tap their nose.
• Active treatment rather than warehousing. We do not solve behavioral problems by simply accepting the problem behavior as it is and adjusting our treatment environment to allow it to occur; instead, our goal is apply active treatment and educational procedures to change the behavior so that the individual can function successfully in the normal environment outside of our treatment facility.
While we are an institution, a warehouse for children whose families drop them off to us, because we will torture your child into behaving we like to be called an ‘active treatment centre’ because it sounds more friendly. Our goal is to employ untrained goons to spank and zap your child!
The fact that our mission is to provide active and relatively rapid treatment of severe behavior problems, with a no-rejection and no-expulsion policy, and not merely to serve as a care facility for children whose only problem is that they lack a normal home environment, explains some of the issues we have had with licensing agencies from time to time. Licensing standards that are set up for the latter type of facilities are not appropriate for programs that are designed for the active treatment of extreme problem behaviors.
The fact that our mission is to quickly punish your child for any behaviour we feel is a problem, with all children’s disabilities not considered, and not only to house these unwanted children, explains why we have been allowed to torture children for this many years.
• Treatment with a unitary, coordinated and comprehensively Skinnerian, behavioral approach, rather than with a “multi-disciplinary” approach. The hallmark of JRC is that it is makes use of a behavioral approach and that this approach guides and informs all services provided by the agency to staff, students and parents. Although JRC has always employed nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists, psychiatrists, physicians, medical consultants and teachers, all of these special services are administered in a manner that is as consistent as is possible and practical with an overall Skinnerian, behavioral approach. JRC is probably the most consistently behavioral treatment program in existence.
JRC is famous as the ‘school of shock’. We employ a wide variety or persons, from nurses to joe blows, and all of them are involved in torturing your child. Each and everyone of our employees is a sadist.
• Behavioral rather than a psychiatric, approach. A behavioral approach essentially views a treatment problem as one in which the individual has certain behaviors that need to be decreased and certain ones that need to be increased. The fundamental technique for accomplishing these increases and decreases is the application of rewards and punishments. We use as one of our most important measures of effectiveness, the frequency of problem and desired behaviors. Behavioral frequencies and trends are displayed on Precision Teaching Charts that had been designed in the 1960s by Dr. Ogden Lindsley, another student of Skinner. Behavioral treatment decisions are based on the data shown on these charts, rather than on clinical impressions, hunches, or observations alone.
As mentioned before, we really do not care about your child’s existing disabilities. We will simply decide how we want your child to behave and then enforce our wishes by shocking, spanking and restraining them when they do not comply.
• Behavioral, rather than traditional counseling. At JRC counseling is done as a fully coordinated and integrated component of a total behavioral approach. We call our counseling “behavioral counseling.” This means, for example, the following: the counseling is not given on a regular schedule but rather on an as-needed basis; the counseling is not given at points where it might function as an inadvertent reward for some problem behavior that has just occurred; the counseling is given by clinicians and other trained staff that are employed by JRC, rather than being provided by persons outside of JRC; the content of the counseling session is not necessarily kept private between the counselor and the counselee, but instead is shared with other professionals in the agency as needed; and the purpose of the counseling is to enhance the student’s cooperation with, and progress within, the JRC program and to change his/her behavior toward the treatment goals set by JRC.
We don’t give a fuck about your child’s tortured past. What we do care about is getting results. Fear is much faster, although a lazier, way of ensuring compliance. Everyone involved with your child has been screened by us and will not tattle.
• Behavioral procedures as the means of treatment, rather than the use of normalization. The dominant philosophy of the care of mentally disabled individuals during much of JRC’s existence, which continues even today, is that of normalization, also sometimes referred to as social role valorization. This approach, which insists that such persons should be placed in, and cared for, with as “normal” a set of procedures as possible, is frankly opposed to the notion of behavioral treatment. In behavioral treatment, normalization is accepted as the goal of the treatment process, but not as the means for reaching that goal. Indeed, behavioral procedures that will effectively eliminate problematic behaviors and help the student improve his/her condition and live a more normal life often have to be highly abnormal at first until the behavior changes sufficiently. As the behavior changes, however, the environmental conditions can and are made increasingly normal.
The key word is DOMINANT. We ignore the standards of accepted behavorial treatment and do the opposite.
In this respect, JRC is like a medical hospital. The goal of most medical hospitals is to return the individual to good health and to a normal living situation outside the hospital; however, in order to reach that goal it may be necessary to do some highly “abnormal” procedures within the operating rooms and in the emergency and intensive care wards of the hospital.
Like a hospital we get cranky when you try to remove someone from our care. We provide a physically colourful environment with an emotional sterile lifestyle.
• A complete treatment facility—i.e., not tossing the treatment problem to others when the problem becomes difficult. We view our program as a “hospital of last resort” where whatever behavioral treatment is needed will be applied to solve the problem. If a student becomes difficult to handle, we do not turn the problem over to a psychiatric facility or to the criminal justice system; instead, we adjust our treatment procedures to adequately deal with the problem behaviorally.
Because we do not wish for other professionals to note the abuse your child has been subjected to, we treat all problems in house. If your child needs medical or dental problems, we will deal with it. If your child should be turned over to the police for their actions, instead we will up the intensity of their physical punishments.
• No or minimal use of psychotropic medication. We have always employed either no psychotropic medication at all, or the very minimal amount that is needed. Psychiatrists are employed to help us assess whether such medication is needed and to help us diminish or eliminate the psychotropic medication when it is not needed. Our psychiatrists make considerable use of our behavioral charts as they make these decisions.
We can’t be bothered with medications-it is too hard to track and impedes on a persons ability to fully feel our punishments.
• Use of powerful rewards. In order to treat individuals without drugs, and without traditional counseling or warehousing, a program will obviously need alternative effective procedures that can be used in their place. In JRC’s behavioral approach this means, among other things, that first and foremost the program must have available as powerful a set of rewards as is possible. The first area in JRC’s present school building that we created was a large arcade-type reward area to motivate students to behave well and learn. We also created a reward corner in each developmentally delayed classroom, reward boxes for the teachers to use, a contract store where students could pick rewards to purchase and work for, etc. We are not aware of any other treatment center that uses as wide a variety and as powerful a set of rewards as we do.
Not being tortured is a powerful reward. But on top of that we offer all sorts of things that are known to increase negative behaviours (sugar, video stims, electronics, flashy lights and confusing noises) to ensure we will have future opportunities to punish your child.
• Giving the parent the option to supplement the reward treatment with physical aversives when rewards and educational procedures alone prove to be insufficiently effective. If treatment with the use of rewards, loss of privileges, fines, other non-physical aversives, and educational procedures, prove insufficiently effective by themselves, then the parent should be given the option of supplementing the student’s program with carefully administered physical aversives. In the 1970s and 1980’s, JRC employed physical aversives such as the pinch, spank, muscle squeeze, water spray, vapor spray (mixture of compressed air and water), ammonia capsule, unpleasant taste, and white noise. During the 1991-1993 period, JRC substituted a 2-second remote-controlled shock to the surface of the skin for all of these procedures. This procedure is called the GED (Graduated Electronic Decelerator).
At the time that JRC was starting (1971), a movement to limit the use of punishments in the raising of children was already well under way. In that year, for example, Sweden passed a law banning the use of punishment with children. (Interestingly, no punishment was specified for failing to obey the law). The use of punishments in the education and treatment of children is still, today, vigorously opposed in certain quarters and has even been banned in the regulation of certain state agencies. OCCS regulations, for example, explicitly ban the use of aversive procedures. Every year or so a bill is introduced in the Massachusetts state legislature to ban the use of aversives. (This bill has never passed, however.) Because of all this, JRC and its parents have had to battle fiercely over the years to create and preserve this important component of its treatment.
Not only will we zap your child at will, but we will give you equipment to do the same! Just imagine, everytime you are annoyed you can push a button and BAM! A child terrified to disobey you! As an added bonus, you can shrug your shoulders with a ‘the school says to do it!’ and feel blameless!
• Video monitoring, 24/7 of staff performance. The best-laid behavioral programs in the world are to no avail if they are not carried out as designed by the direct care staff. Ever since JRC’s first residential program in 1975, we have used videos cameras in all rooms to monitor staff, and sometimes student, performance.
Your child will be videographed at all times, so that we can watch, rewatch and rewatch our favourite perverse moments of your child’s pain and torment.
This set of policies has always enabled JRC to provide unusually effective treatment. Ultimately, the parents and placement agencies are interested in is just that—effective treatment. As a result, during the period 1971 through 1985 JRC grew from 2 students to approximately 65 students. Our school and administrative offices were in Providence, Rhode Island during this period.
The fucked up system we follow allows us to torture, torment and otherwise create fear in children. Ultimately the parents and agencies that hand us children are just as effed up as we are and find sadistic pleasure in their charges pain and suffering.
From 1971 to 1975 JRC operated as a day school/treatment center. The program was approved by both the Rhode Island Department of Education and was licensed by the Rhode Island Department of Mental Health. In 1975 we opened a residence for some of its students in Seekonk, Massachusetts. In succeeding years we added other residences in Attleboro and Rehoboth, Massachusetts. These residences were licensed as group residences by the Massachusetts Office for Children (OFC).
We have grown! Please send us more children to abuse so that we can quote our number increase as being a way to validate what we are doing!
