This Article About the JRC Is Very Enlightening, If You Can Stand to Read It

"Prisoners of the Apparatus": The Judge Rotenberg Center, by Quentin Davies of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network

The article is very long (though very much worth reading in full, if you have the time and concentration for it), so I'm going to excerpt the section at the end that talks about what the best avenues for shutting the place down permanently would be:

Policy Recommendations
The Judge Rotenberg Center's abusive behavior is a civil rights concern, and should be addressed by policy at the federal level. As the New York Psychological Association Task Force said, the use of shock aversives on the students at the Judge Rotenberg Center would be considered corporal punishment and would be illegal if the nondisabled people were treated the same way in a school setting. Regulations that selectively allow abusive punishment for disabled students that are not allowed for nondisabled students is not only a terrible allowance of abuse, but also is a discriminatory action on the part of the United States and Massachusetts governments, regardless of whether we call this "corporal punishment" or "aversive behavioral intervention" (Ahern and Rosenthal 27). Additionally, the lack of actual instruction within the Judge Rotenberg Center, the social isolation, the food deprivation, the use of restraints and seclusion as punishment and for long periods of time mean that preventing the Judge Rotenberg Center from using shock aversives, while it would be a step in the right direction, would not be broad enough to stop the abuse at the Center. The Judge Rotenberg Center (formerly called the Behavior Research Institute) has tortured disabled children and adults for over forty years, and it needs to stop now. 

This policy must be passed at the federal level. The Judge Rotenberg Center has been located in three different states over its history, and there is a real possibility of the JRC moving again if protections were only ensured on a state level (Méndez). Currently, there is some federal policy that is applicable to the Judge Rotenberg Center, but much of that legislation has been weakened by court action. For example, in 1975, Congress passed the "Developmental Disabilities Assistance and Bill of Rights Act" (DD Act), which states, that "the Federal Government and the States have an obligation to ensure that public funds are provided only to institutional programs, residential programs, and other community programs, including educational programs in which individuals with developmental disabilities participate, that  ... meet minimum standards relating to provision of care that is free of abuse, neglect, sexual and financial exploitation, and violations of legal and human rights that subjects individuals with disabilities to no greater risk of harm than others in the general population ... and prohibition of the use of such restraint and seclusion as a substitute for a habilitation program" (Ahern and Rosenthal 29). However, in the case, Pennhurst State School and Hospital vs. Halderman, where a former Pennhurst resident alleged that the hospital was unsanitary, inhumane, dangerous, and used cruel and unusual punishment, the US Supreme Court ruled that the DD Act did not create any new legal rights or protections and [that] the language of the DD Act was "hortatory not mandatory." That court opinion, written by William Rehnquist, stated that "[t]he Act does no more than express a congressional preference for certain kinds of treatment" (Ahern and Rosenthal 30). Consequently, new legislation that has similar goals but expresses them in a way that is clear about the mandatory nature of the legislation is necessary. 

Although the President's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health has said that "restraint will be used only as safety interventions of last resort, not as treatment interventions" and the US Department of Health and Human Services Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration has said that restraint and seclusion are "detrimental to the recovery of persons with mental illnesses" (Ahern and Rosenthal 12), no federal legislation has enforced these goals. Restraints and seclusion are still used in almost every state in the United States, and no federal law limits the use of restraints within schools (Ahern and Rosenthal 28). The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) states that alternatives to aversives should be considered, but does not explicitly prohibit aversives (Ahern and Rosenthal 29). None of these recommendations have protected the students at the Judge Rotenberg Center from the torturous treatment they have experienced. 

Federal law could draw from the state laws of California, Connecticut, Florida, North and South Dakota, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Nevada, and Colorado, all of which have taken steps to ban or limit the use of aversives on disabled children and adults (Cobb 9). A US Court of Appeals found in Bryant vs. New York State Department of Education (2012) that bans on aversive interventions did not violate IDEA as was alleged by the plaintiffs. The decision reads "[w]e conclude that prohibiting one possible method of dealing with disorders in behavior, such as aversive intervention, does not undermine a child's right to an individualized, free and appropriate public education, and that New York's law represents the State's considered judgment regarding the education and safety of its children that is consistent with federal education policy and the United States Constitution" (Bryant 2). Federal law prohibiting aversive interventions would provide protection throughout the US for disabled children and adults subjected to aversive techniques, including the students of the Judge Rotenberg Center.

That was a lot of densely written text, so I will attempt to paraphrase: To close the Judge Rotenberg Center, we need legislation that is 1) federal, not state; 2) comprehensive in what types of abuses it prevents (i.e., not narrowly focused on the skin shock devices); and 3) unmistakably binding and mandatory.

It needs to be those things because the JRC's own history shows that it can survive measures that do not meet all three of those criteria. If you outlaw what they do on a state level, they move. If you call attention to the barbarity of one particular method of punishment, they switch to others. If you say, "This is not a school and we will not give you a license to operate it," they re-incorporate, changing their paperwork but not their methods. If you sue them on the grounds that they violate an existing federal law (like, say, the DD Act), a court might well rule that the law is not absolute. And, finally, if you threaten to ban the device they use to administer the infamous skin shocks, on the grounds that it's not safe, they will stop using it -- but only on new students. Students who have been living there since before 2011 will continue to be shocked as before. 

It needs to be torn out, root and stem.

Carthago delenda est.

I Am Spartacus! You Might Be Spartacus, Too

So the Judge Rotenberg Center has been in the news again, this time because of an article in New York magazine about Andre McCollins, a young man from Brooklyn who had been sent there in 2001, when he was sixteen. His mother had sent him there because she thought it looked like a pleasant place, with dedicated and competent staff, where he might learn to control the rage attacks he sometimes had. 

Here's the part of the New York article where she talks about what motivated her to enroll him there; it very much gives the impression she didn't know how brutal the disciplinary regime was going to be:

She called the Board of Education for help finding a new school, and an employee told her about the Rotenberg Center. Stepping inside for the first time, Cheryl [McCollins] was dazzled by the décor. There was nothing institutional about this place; the carpet felt five inches thick. "I thought the place was beautiful," she recalls. "I thought these people really took pride in what they did." She loved that residents lived in lavishly decorated houses -- not dorms. The boys wore button-down shirts and dress pants. And there were surveillance cameras everywhere; she couldn't imagine a better way to ensure that Andre wouldn't be victimized again. 

School officials told her about their program and explained how the electric-shock device worked. The staffers showed her a video, too, of other students who'd been hooked up to the GED ["Graduated Electronic Decelerator," the name for the shock device] and appeared to have been completely transformed by it. "I was so excited," she says. "I was like, 'He's going to be cured? This can really stop all those behaviors, the aggression? And he won't break up my furniture, he won't fight?' 'Yes, this device does it.' I was like, 'Wow! You're kidding! Why didn't anyone tell me about this before?'"  

Twenty months into his stay there, Andre McCollins was strapped down and shocked repeatedly for a period of seven hours. The way punishment at the JRC works, they have a list of "behaviors" targeted for each person. Whenever the person does something on the list, they get a shock. Andre's list apparently included such things as screaming and tensing up his entire body, which he did throughout his seven-hour ordeal.

I have to say now that I really, really identify with Andre, even more than I normally identify with the victim in such cases of abuse of disabled children or dependent adults. Andre and I share several things: we're the same age, both born in the year 1984 (poor, poor Andre, he has seen the inside of Room 101), both diagnosed with a pervasive developmental disorder in early childhood. 

Most importantly, we share a pattern of behavior.

The "full-body tense-up."

Obviously, I'm not Andre and I can't tell you what's going through his head when he tenses up his entire body, but I can tell you what it's like when I do it. 

First, some background: though I can speak fluently, I can really only do it when I'm not doing anything else. If I'm intent on something, I won't answer you if you speak to me. I probably won't even acknowledge you until a few minutes later, or until I can tear myself away from whatever it is I'm doing. Especially if I'm doing something mentally taxing, especially something nonverbal and mentally taxing, like math, I may need to wait a few beats to remember how to speak: what the words are, how to put them together in ways that make sense. 

I don't have to be doing hard or creative work for this problem to arise: physical pain and emotional stress are also mentally taxing, and also effectively put words out of my reach for a while. 

As such, my primary response to fear or pain has never been to vocalize. Most of the time it just doesn't occur to me. I react with my body instead, stiffening my posture, recoiling back and tensing every muscle simultaneously. (Sometimes when I'm in pain I also make a hissing noise, but not always). This is what I do whenever anyone touches me. I have reacted that way to touch since I was a baby: my mom says I used to stiffen up in her arms when she tried to hold me. 

It is, you might imagine, a completely involuntary reflex.

So, when I got to this part of the article (TRIGGER WARNING) ---

Usually after Andre got a shock and was restrained, he'd calm down, but on this day he only got more agitated. The more upset he became, the more he tensed up his body -- and the more he tensed up, the more shocks he received. Between 10 a.m. and about 11 a.m., the workers shocked him fourteen times. Each press of the button delivered a loud, high-pitched alarm -- informing employees the shock had been delivered -- while Andre's cries echoed down the hall.

"No, don't do that!"

"I'm sorry. Sorry. Sorry." 

"I won't do it again."

"No, please."

"Stop! Stop! For real!"

"Help me! Help! Help!"

Employees came and went throughout the morning and into the afternoon. They attached two more electrodes, so Andre had five total: on both arms, both legs, and his torso. Following the usual protocol, they tested the batteries on his shock device; rotated his electrodes so they wouldn't leave marks on his skin; offered him water. They studied his "behavior recording sheet" to figure out exactly what behaviors they were supposed to punish. And they documented each shock with the reason it was given: "Scream" or "Tense Up." 

Hour after hour went by and nobody knelt down next to Andre to try to calm him. Attention was considered a reward -- and a student who's exhibiting "targeted behaviors" is not supposed to receive any. When the staffers did speak to Andre, they were required to follow a script, like a case manager did at 1:25 p.m., when she pressed the button for shock eighteen, then said: "Andre, no full-body tense-ups." If any of the workers thought these shocks were excessive, they kept it to themselves. They all knew that if they didn't shock a student when they were supposed to, the phone in the classroom would ring and there would be a monitor on the line ordering them to press the button. 

--- I felt horror, not only at what they were doing to him, but also because they escalated it whenever he physically reacted to the pain. When you realize that, and let it sink all the way in, you see how easily they could have killed him that day. The perverse logic --- tensing up his body (showing fear and pain) is bad, so we will shock him (make him feel fear and pain) whenever he does it until he stops --- reminds you of other no-win scenarios, like the witch trials where they would determine an accused witch's innocence based on whether she sinks or floats in water. If she floats, she's guilty, and her accusers have grounds to kill her; if she sinks, she was innocent, but she's dead anyway.

By now, you're probably asking, "Why is this woman* going on at such lengths about her feelings, and her weird stiffening-up reflex? What does any of this have to do with Andre McCollins?" 

That's a fair question --- I'm not Andre, and I don't have any better idea than you do what he was thinking or feeling on that day. But because of all the things I do happen to have in common with him, I get a strong sense of "there but for the grace of God random chance go I" from his story.

I also believe there's a very strong tendency for non-disabled people to "other" people like Andre McCollins --- they might be horrified at what happened to him, but at the same time they know how impossible kids like him can be. They're aggressive. Violent. They can't be reasoned with. They're a "they," never a "we." People might think they ought to be treated more gently than they are at the JRC, but they have to be put somewhere, controlled somehow, ... don't they?

That's why I have made this post so personal. I'm not Andre, but I share some things with him, and more than anything I think people need to see articles from people who are like Andre in various ways saying, unambiguously, "THIS IS NOT OKAY. IT WOULD NOT BE OKAY IF YOU DID IT TO ME, AND IT IS NOT OKAY THAT YOU HAVE DONE IT TO HIM." If I come across anything Andre himself has written, I will link to it.

*Bitch, to the uncharitable. Cunt, to the vulgar. Perhaps "mewling quim," if you are Loki.

New Medicaid Regulations Are Open to Public Comment

A little over a month ago, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services proposed some new rules for home- and community-based services for people with disabilities, trying to ensure that states do everything they can to make sure that disabled people covered by Medicaid can actually get the services they need in their own homes, or in supported residential settings where they have the same amount of freedom and control over their own lives that they would if they were living on their own.


That's the spirit of the law, anyway. Lots of advocacy groups made up of people whom this law is supposed to benefit have written recommendations for wording that makes sure the letter of the law honors the spirit --- that health-care providers receiving Medicaid funding to give people supportive housing don't just take the money and throw the intended beneficiaries into a group home that reproduces all the restrictions, power dynamics, and other bad things about institutions in a somewhat different setting.


The rule change is open to public comment until Monday; I'd like to add my voice to a chorus of voices emphasizing just how important autonomy and freedom from restriction are. If you have anything to say about it, especially if you've got any concrete ideas or relevant personal experiences, go here, click the big blue "Comment Now!" button, and let loose.


The Autistic Self-Advocacy Network and the Administration on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities have both written about this proposed rule change; AIDD's page  is an easy-to-read summary of what the rules entail, while ASAN's page is more of a critique.


Here is the proposed definition of "home and community-based setting":

(i) The setting is integrated in, and facilitates the individual's full access to, the greater community, including opportunities to seek employment and work in competitive integrated settings, engage in community life, control personal resources, and receive services in the community, in the same manner as individuals without disabilities. 

(ii) The setting is selected by the individual from among all available alternatives and is identified in the person-centered service plan. 

(iii) An individual's essential personal rights of privacy, dignity and respect, and freedom from coercion and restraint are protected. 

(iv) Individual initiative, autonomy, and independence in making life choices, including but not limited to, daily activities, physical environment, and with whom to interact are optimized and not regimented. 

(v) Individual choice regarding services and supports, and who provides them, is facilitated. 

(vi) In a provider-owned or controlled residential setting, the following additional conditions must be met. Any modification of the conditions, for example, to address the safety needs of an individual with dementia, must be supported by a specific assessed need and documented in the person-centered service plan: 

  (A) The unit or room is a specific physical place that can be owned, rented or occupied under another legally enforceable agreement by the individual receiving services, and the individual has, at a minimum, the same responsibilities and protections from eviction that tenants have under the landlord tenant law of the State, county, city or other designated entity; 

(B) Each individual has privacy in their sleeping or living unit:         (1) Units have lockable entrance doors, with appropriate staff having keys to doors;         (2) Individuals share units only at the individual's choice; and         (3) Individuals have the freedom to furnish and decorate their sleeping or living units. 

(C) Individuals have the freedom and support to control their own schedules and activities, and have access to food at any time; 

(D) Individuals are able to have visitors of their choosing at any time; and  

(E) The setting is physically accessible to the individual.

They also spell out what a "home and community-based setting is not:

Home and community-based settings do not include the following: 

(i) A nursing facility; 

(ii) An institution for mental diseases; 

(iii) An intermediate care facility for [people with intellectual disabilities] 

(iv) A hospital providing long-term care services; or 

(v) Any other locations that have qualities of an institutional setting, as determined by the Secretary. The Secretary will apply a rebuttable presumption that a setting is not a home and community-based setting, and engage in heightened scrutiny, for any setting that is located in a building that is also a publicly or privately operated facility that provides inpatient or institutional treatment, or in a building on the grounds of, or immediately adjacent to, a public institution, or disability-specific housing complex.

And here is the definition of "person-centered service plan": 

The person-centered service plan must reflect the services and supports that are important for the individual to meet the needs identified through an assessment of functional need, as well as what is important to the individual with regard to preferences for the delivery of such services and supports. Commensurate with the level of need of the individual, and the scope of services and supports available under the State plan HCBS benefit, the plan must: 

(1) Reflect that the setting in which the individual resides is chosen by the individual. 

(2) Reflect the individual's strengths and preferences. 

(3) Reflect clinical and support needs as identified through an assessment of functional need. 

(4) Include individually identified goals and desired outcomes. 

(5) Reflect the services and supports (paid and unpaid) that will assist the individual to achieve identified goals, and the providers of those services and supports, including natural supports. Natural supports cannot supplant needed paid services unless the natural supports are unpaid supports that are provided voluntarily to the individual in lieu of State plan HCBS. 

(6) Reflect risk factors and measures in place to minimize them, including Individualized backup plans. 

(7) Be understandable to the individual receiving services and supports, and the individuals important in supporting him or her. 

(8) Identify the individual and/or entity responsible for monitoring the plan. 

(9) Be finalized and agreed to in writing by the individual and signed by all individuals and providers responsible for its implementation. 

(10) Be distributed to the individual and other people involved in the plan. 

(11) Include those services, the purchase or control of which the individual elects to self-direct, meeting the requirements of [earlier section] of this subpart. 

(12) Prevent the provision of unnecessary or inappropriate care. 

(13) Other requirements as determined by the Secretary. 

... and rules for how the service plan should be drawn up:

Based on the independent assessment required in [earlier section] of this subpart, the State must develop (or approve, if the plan is developed by others) a written service plan jointly with the individual (including, for purposes of this paragraph, the individual and the individual's authorized representative if applicable). The person-centered planning process is driven by the individual. The process: 

(1) Includes people chosen by the individual. 

(2) Provides necessary information and support to ensure that the individual directs the process to the maximum extent possible, and is enabled to make informed choices and decisions. 

(3) Is timely and occurs at times and locations of convenience to the individual. 

(4) Reflects cultural considerations of the individual. 

(5) Includes strategies for solving conflict or disagreement within the process, including clear conflict-of-interest guidelines for all planning procedures. 

(6) Offers choices to the individual regarding the services and supports they receive and from whom. 

(7) Includes a method for the individual to request updates to the plan.

(8) Records the alternative home and community-based settings that were considered by the individual.

(That has got to be the greatest number of time I have had to type the word "individual" on any given day.)


I think this all sounds fairly complete, and airtight, but then I have zero experience actually living in this kind of environment.  


What do you, my readers, think? Do any of you have anything you would add, or change, to the above specifications? Without your input, I'm pretty much going to be echoing ASAN's recommendations in my comment on regulations.gov, but I'll hold off on commenting until, say, tomorrow night or Monday morning to see if I get any additional recommendations from comments here.  

Unspeakable

That's what we call the things that are so awful, so heartbreaking, they stop the words in our throats and the thoughts in our heads. Sometimes they even stop the tears in our eyes; the sadness we feel is so heavy it will not be cried out.

For me, the abuse, neglect and murder of people with disabilities* by the people who are supposed to be taking care of them calls up this heavy sadness.

From Leah Jane's blog:

A lot of my neurotypical friends don't understand why I am so paranoid about going to an institution. They think, for one, that it could never happen to me, because I'm intelligent and express myself eloquently, and secondly, they don't think it could be all that bad for someone like me, who is mostly able-bodied save for troubles with my back from scoliosis, since I could feed myself, ask for private time, and go to the bathroom alone. There is also often this assumption that goes unchallenged that the disabled have it made in the U.S., that we're lucky not to be living in a country where we'd be kept in cages or denied food and water. So I often end up shoving stories like this in their faces, reminding the world that being cognitively, not physically, disabled, or living in America is no guarantee of your human rights being respected.

From the news story she links to:

Jonathan Carey did not die for lack of money.

New York State and the federal government provided $1.4 million annually per person to care for Jonathan and the other residents at the Oswald D. Heck Developmental Center, a warren of low-rise concrete and brick buildings near Albany.

Yet on a February afternoon in 2007, Jonathan, a skinny, autistic 13-year-old, was asphyxiated, slowly crushed to death in the back seat of a van by a state employee who had worked nearly 200 hours without a day off over 15 days. The employee, a ninth-grade dropout with a criminal conviction for selling marijuana, had been on duty during at least one previous episode of alleged abuse involving Jonathan.

"I could be a good king or a bad king," he told the dying boy beneath him, according to court documents.

In the front seat of the van, the driver, another state worker at O.D. Heck, watched through the rear-view mirror but said little. He had been fired from four different private providers of services to the developmentally disabled before the state hired him to care for the same vulnerable population.

O.D. Heck is one of nine large institutions in New York that house the developmentally disabled, those with cerebral palsy, autism, Down syndrome and other conditions.

...

But the institutions are hardly a model: Those who run them have tolerated physical and psychological abuse, knowingly hired unqualified workers, ignored complaints by whistle-blowers and failed to credibly investigate cases of abuse and neglect, according to a review by the New York Times of thousands of state records and court documents, along with interviews of current and former employees.

...

Similar problems can be found across the state. The Broome Developmental Center in Binghamton has been cited for repeatedly failing to protect residents from staff members. One employee there was merely reassigned after encouraging adolescent residents to fight one another.

Patterns of abuse appear embedded in the culture of the Sunmount Developmental Center in the Adirondacks. Last year, one supervisor was accused of four different episodes of physical and psychological abuse of residents within a span of two and a half months; another employee bragged on Facebook about "beating retards."

The most damning accounts of the operations come from employees --- thwarted whistle-blowers from around the state --- and the beleaguered family members of residents.

...

For the Careys, the journey to O.D. Heck was a last resort. ... [They] raised Jonathan until he was 9, but became worried that they could not teach their son basic living skills, like toilet training. They enrolled him at the Anderson Center for Autism, a privately run school in the Hudson Valley overseen by the state.

At first, the school seemed a good fit, until Jonathan, who was always thin, began losing weight. During one visit, an employee told the Careys to take home a duffel bag they had never used. They discovered a logbook inside the bag detailing startling changes to Jonathan's treatment plan. Among other things, the school was withholding food from Jonathan to punish him for taking off his shirt at inappropriate times.

"They literally planned to withhold my son's meals," Mr. Carey said. "And when that was not working, then they began to seclude him in his bedroom for an extended period of time. He missed eight full days of school."

So, to save him from possible death by starvation, Jonathan's parents removed him from that school and tried to take care of him at home again, but his problems had gotten worse. He had tantrums, he would run away, and Mr. and Mrs. Carey didn't think they could keep him safe, so they were referred to O.D. Heck. There was maybe a year and a half between Jonathan's admission to that school and his death in the back of the van. During that period, he was hospitalized three times with unexplained injuries.

It should be obvious from what I've quoted of this (lengthy) article that this is systemic.

It should be equally obvious that this sort of abuse is not restricted to any one kind of institution: the New York Times investigation found that the same culture of abuse detailed above, at the nine large institutions, also pervaded New York's 2,000 smaller group homes. Nor is it just restricted to New York --- last fall, the Chicago Tribune investigated thirteen deaths at a single nursing home, Alden Village North, that occurred over the past ten years. Similarly, stories of people with disabilities being abused, neglected or killed in their homes by family members appear in the news with some regularity. (Most recently, in my area, a young woman was sentenced to eight years and six months in prison for confining her six-year-old son with Down syndrome to an attic and starving him. The boy survived, and is now in foster care with his two sisters).

I think there are a lot of factors that work together to make this such a ubiquitous thing in our culture; the two biggest ones I can come up with now are 1) horrible societal attitudes toward disabled people, and 2) horrible societal attitudes toward caregiving. It's easy to see how the first one would contribute to a culture of abuse: it's always easier to abuse someone if you don't see them as a person. But I also think the undervaluing of caregivers plays a role, too --- the institutions in those news stories wouldn't have hired people with criminal convictions (or previous dismissals from other institutions) if they'd really thought caregiving was an important task that can't be entrusted to just anyone. The chronic understaffing of institutions is another symptom of this undervaluing --- caregiving is hard work, with long, irregular hours, and the pay is low, so they're always short on people who are willing to do it. Then, because of the perennial labor shortage, the people who run institutions are unwilling to fire people even for serious offenses.

I'm also starting to think that "unspeakable" is precisely the wrong word for such atrocities. Unspeakable means something we never talk about, something repressed. It means we can sweep it under the rug and pretend it doesn't happen, or that when it happens it's an aberration. And people want very much to believe institutions are safe, that their children or parents will be happy there.

*I feel similarly about abuse of children or animals by their guardians, or of women by the men they love. But this post deals with issues specific to people with disabilities, so I'm going to restrict my discussion to that.

Small Victories

I saw something in this past Sunday's Kansas City Star that gave me a tiny bit of hope, both for our culture in general and the ongoing atrocity that is the Judge Rotenberg Center in particular: the Thayer Learning Center*, a boot-camp-style institution for "troubled teens," which has accumulated a fairly long list of complaints of abuse and neglect of its inmates since its opening in 2002, has closed, and been sold to a Cheyenne Indian educator named Lakota John, who plans to open a new, very different kind of school on the old Thayer grounds.

The new school will be geared toward Native American young people of all tribes, with emphases on sustainable agriculture (using traditional, Native American farming methods), outdoor skills, and Native American culture, art and spirituality.

While I'm sure the original proposals for the old Thayer Learning Center sounded equally high-minded, and while, at this early stage, all we really have are words, I still think that, based on what's been said about how the White Buffalo Academy will be run, there will be factors in place offering some protection against a Thayer-like pattern of systematic abuses taking root there once more.

First, and to my mind foremost, where Thayer kept its inmates isolated from their families and from the larger community of Kidder, Missouri, the White Buffalo Academy is meant to be extensively integrated with various communities: not just Kidder, but also with the various Native American tribes, international humanitarian organizations, and, eventually, other schools and youth organizations (like the Boy and Girl Scouts) across the region.

From the Chillicothe, Missouri Constitution-Tribune:

"If he does what he plans to do, I think it will be a huge asset to the community," says Kidder Mayor Melissa Gough of Lakota John. Her concerns about the future of the facility center on the controversies surrounding the former teen boot camp. ...
...
Mayor Gough has expressed her concerns about secrecy surrounding the former operation to Lakota John and he has assured her that students who may help with trash pickup and other community projects in Kidder will be allowed to talk to locals and give their names (Thayer cadets were not allowed to do so). In fact, he wants to be open and totally honest with the community and invites anyone who wishes to come and visit the facility and talk to him about his plans to open the academy in the next 30 days.

From the St. Joseph, Missouri News-Press & Gazette:

The school will become part of the Utah-based Sacred Path Recovery Program [link], with plans to open in all 50 states and Canada. The organization is composed of various tribes. An informational brochure said Sacred Path "is designed to help people identify, process, and release the issues that deny them the right to live happy, productive lives."

Traditional American Indian methods will be utilized.

"It's for all kids that want to achieve a higher level of learning," added Lakota, whose ancestors hailed from the North American plains.

The academy also will feature American Indian powwows, drumming, sculpting, equestrian arts, an amphitheater with surround sound for various performances, and other activities. Vietnam War veterans will be brought in as speakers.

Another emphasis will be placed on growing quality food, proper eating and overall wellness.

"We're going to start an agricultural program," he said. A slow-drying process for food will be created to benefit overseas humanitarian projects, and negotiations are under way with major companies for their assistance. Herbs will be grown on a farm and livestock will be raised. Outdoor skills will be taught.

"Our soils are going to be phenomenal," he said.

Plans also call for extending invitations to the region's scout programs and schools. The academy will serve perhaps 100 students.

"My thing is making sure we do things in moderation," Lakota said. "We want to build a community of solid individuals ... I want to do this very low-key. We want to do this with love."

The academy will offer preparatory education for students who wish to enroll at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kan., and other institutions. A grand opening date for the White Buffalo Academy will be announced later.

Besides the emphases on transparency and community involvement, which at the very least would make abuses harder to keep hidden for very long, as the Thayer owner-operators did, I also think I see an important difference in the two enterprises' attitudes toward the young people in their care. Thayer Learning Center's guiding principle was literally to break the wills of its young inmates: the harsh treatment and withholding of basic necessities (like, say, water, food, rest, opportunity to bathe) until inmates "earned" them by obedience were meant to teach these willful children "the meaning of no." A philosophy like this is practically a recipe for abuse and neglect, because when you treat people who depend on you like enemies to be vanquished, you will react to everything they say or do as if it's a threat or a stratagem. You'll learn to ignore their signs of distress, and you'll let them die --- of something as treatable or preventable as a spider bite or overexertion or dehydration --- before you'll risk letting them put one over on you.

I don't see this kind of alienation in any of the online material I've seen about White Buffalo Academy or its parent organization, the Sacred Path Program. Rather than stamp out behaviors/attitudes they don't like, these organizations seem more interested in empowering their students, teaching them to be the best they can be and restoring their ancestral heritage and culture to them.

So, on to the million-dollar question: What factors forced Thayer Learning Center to close, and can similar factors be made to converge on the Judge Rotenberg Center? What makes these two abusive institutions different?

*Pedantic linguistic aside: I *HATE* the euphemistic use of "learning center" to describe what is essentially a prison. While the mental and behavioral adaptations people make to survive in a prison/institution environment --- keep your head down, don't cause trouble, don't draw attention to yourself, keep quiet, mind your own business and do as you're told --- might be called "learning," in the Skinnerian sense of that word, they also tend to sabotage a person's capacity for any other kind of learning. You get really good at surviving that hostile environment, but the price you pay is that you lose those parts of yourself that don't help you do that.

Laura Tisoncik describes this kind of psychic shriveling really well in this 2004 conversation with Amanda Baggs:

I spotted [characteristic psychiatric-institution-survivor behavior] in you right away. How do I describe it? You were an obvious case of it. You had a kind of submissiveness ... you were oftentimes looking for where the rules were so you could follow the rules. ... You were waiting or looking for the institution around you, as if, it's like, "Where is it, it's hiding here somewhere!" This is not necessarily a very constructive behavior out in the real world, because it is particularly passive in many ways, and because it is sort of like looking around for it. I really got a sense that you were looking around all the time for the rules. And terribly terrified that you were violating all the rules.