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.

More About Stigma

Miri at Brute Reason has a very thought-provoking post up about social stigma, and whether anyone deserves to be stigmatized.

She doesn't think so, and she gives lots of very good reasons, including these:

When a group is stigmatized, they are considered less than human in some ways. Whichever aspect of them is stigmatized becomes the whole of their identity in our eyes,  and often this means that even if they change the actions that caused them to fall into that category in the first place, the stigma remains. ...
...
[W]ielding psychological manipulation as punishment really, really rubs me the wrong way. The attitude that if someone does something bad they deserve to be cast out and hated and seen as inhuman scares me. I think it's very normal and understandable to want to punish someone for doing a horrible thing, but, as I wrote after the Steubenville verdict, I'm not sure that's the most useful and skeptical response. I feel that our primary concern should be preventing people from doing bad things (both first-time and repeat offenses) and not satisfying our own need for revenge by punishing them.

But, as good as these arguments are (and I am still turning them over in my head, and will probably keep this idea, that stigma and ostracism are inhumane and that there is nothing anyone can do that is bad enough to make them deserving of such treatment, for a very long time*), I'm not sure I can follow them all the way.

Between the ongoing story I've been following in my local newspaper about a girl in my city --- identified only by the initials LP --- who was found locked in a closet in her mother's apartment and my discovery of the Homeschoolers Anonymous blog, and also Libby Anne at Love, Joy, Feminism blogging somewhat regularly about the disturbingly popular child-rearing philosophy of Michael and Debi Pearl, my mind has been more preoccupied than usual with the vilest, most extreme forms of child abuse.

I commented on Miri's blog that, if anyone does deserve to have a stigma permanently attached to them, it's the perpetrators of those horrors, particularly the Pearls (who were not content merely to abuse their own children, if indeed they followed their own method, but who wrote books proclaiming their combination of hard-core obedience training, enforced by frequent beatings, and withholding food from "defiant" children is the only thing that will guarantee a child will grow up to be a Godly person who is saved from Hell) and the mother in this ten-part personal narrative on Homeschoolers Anonymous.

Doing that to a child, for as long as the anonymous author's mother did --- from the spread in ages of the various children in the family, and the author's Conclusion where she mentions that her two youngest brothers are still with her parents and the abuse is ongoing, it had to have been more than a decade --- is a world away from, say, committing an armed robbery. This wasn't a single act, this was a long-term campaign this woman waged against her children. She stayed at home, ostensibly "homeschooling" her children throughout this period, so it's hard to see a line between these acts and the rest of her life. 

Yet, with the LP story, which is just as horrific, and which makes me feel just as much rage on the victim's behalf, I can see more of Miri's point. LP's mother was very young when she had LP, and at several points in the story you can see hints of someone who was overwhelmed, and who might never have done what she did to her daughter if she had gotten the help she needed but probably never asked for. It's hard to see whom it would help to stigmatize her, when she was already probably stigmatized for other reasons (poverty, blackness, living in a subsidized apartment, being an unmarried mother of three children by two different fathers), which might well have contributed to her feeling that the only thing she could do with her eldest daughter was to keep her out of sight.

But the Pearls, and the parents in the anonymous woman's story? They're not stigmatized at all, except by people like me, who have no power in their lives or social contact with them, or people who have left the conservative evangelical Christian circles those people move in. Within that community, they are revered as leaders and role models. I'm sure that this knowledge is part of the reason I want so badly to rain down opprobrium upon them: because, unlike Jacole Prince, they're getting off scot-free, and they continue to believe that what they are doing is right.

And Miri does grapple with the problem of great evil in her post, too --- where I chose to focus on child abuse, she wrote about rape. And she made another great point in doing so:

Being a convicted rapist is actually a very stigmatized identity -- it's just that rapists rarely become convicted rapists. Rape is known to be a Very Bad Thing, but rapists know that they can get away with it if they commit it in certain ways. Despite the stigma, rape is pervasive and rape culture exists.

I absolutely see a dynamic like this playing out in mainstream society's attitudes about child abuse; child abuse is so heinous, so evil, so stigmatized that we can't ever believe anyone we know is abusing their child. So we second-guess ourselves when we start to wonder about a child's suspicious bruises, unexplained absences, dirty clothes, poor hygiene etc. The stigma attached to child abuse is terrible, so we are reluctant to call it down on our neighbors' heads, even if we suspect they are abusing their children. What if we're wrong? We'll have ruined an innocent person's life! 

(This will sound painfully familiar to anyone who has been raped, or who has spent any time reading about rape culture.)

Another thing worth pondering about this problem as it pertains to child abuse is that, when the child who is being abused, neglected, or even murdered has a disability, the abusive, neglectful or murderous parent is not stigmatized so much as they are pitied. The poor dear, she was carrying an impossible burden. 

A mother can appear in a film in which she tells the camera she has thought about putting her autistic daughter in the car and driving off a bridge with her, and the main reaction to this film will be sympathy, not shock or horror. 

I point this out not to argue that parents of disabled children don't deserve sympathy, or much better support than they're currently getting from society at large, but to argue that this reaction leaves no room for the child. They're a person too, and they have the right to food, shelter, medical care, education, love, and as much freedom and autonomy as is developmentally appropriate**. Focusing on how hard it is to care for a disabled child, even if you're only trying to explain the parent's actions, works to excuse the parent and put some of the blame for their fate onto the child. It also works to make life harder for all disabled people, because it makes it sound like we're being unreasonable just by existing, and that attitude is exactly the kind of attitude that resists making accommodations for us, even when those accommodations are not particularly expensive, awkward or difficult.

Particularly when we're talking about children whose disabilities are behavioral, this idea that it's just too hard works to excuse awful things like restraint and seclusion, at home and in school. At its extreme, it can lead to parents keeping their disabled children in dog cages; they see no other way to treat them because it's too hard and it's not like the children are normal children, for whom such treatment would be abusive, no, they're abnormal children for whom it is necessary.

So even while I see that a heavy stigma attached to child abuse can be counterproductive, in that it might discourage people from reporting their suspicions, I also think there are some kinds of abuse that are not heavily stigmatized, that are even excused (i.e., abuse of children with disabilities, which is often framed as a tragic consequence of disability) or met with approval (i.e., abuse within insular communities that don't share the wider culture's norms).

And it makes me furious that there isn't a heavy stigma, that people like, say, Michael and Debi Pearl don't even think they've done anything wrong, and sleep the untroubled sleep of the just.

*"Keeping an idea" is what I do when I read or hear something that blows my mind, but that I do not immediately know whether to accept it as truth. I kept a lot of ideas related to feminism in the (long) time before I decided I was a feminist, and I kept an idea of Richard Dawkins's that I now think I do believe is true, that raising a child to believe in Hell (at least, a Hell that they could go to --- I'm not sure it's true if Hell is only for big evildoers like Hitler and Stalin) is an abusive practice. I'm also keeping the idea that veganism is a moral imperative for those who are able to adopt it. A lot of the ideas that I keep are of the form "actually, this thing that we do all the time is bad, and you should stop doing it/get other people to stop doing it.")

**This notion --- that freedom and autonomy can't be absolute when you're talking about children --- is actually more complicated than it sounds, especially when we're talking about children with disabilities, or dependent adults with disabilities. How can you define what is "developmentally appropriate" for a child whose development has been atypical? Especially if said child is ahead of his age in some ways while also being delayed in others? (This was me, and I suspect it is most autistic people!) I know only this much: the way these decisions are currently made gives too little freedom to developmentally disabled adults.

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.

"I Don't Care If They Hit You; You're Not Supposed to Hit Back!"

(Photo by Allison Long, for the Kansas City Star)

A recent article in the Kansas City Star covered a group with a different sort of anti-bullying campaign: it's a boxing-based fitness class just for teenagers who've been bullied or whose friends have been bullied.

It's called Fight Club, and in general I think it's awesome. It sounds, in a lot of ways, like exactly what I needed in middle school.

There's only one thing that bothers me about the program: it's not an actual self-defense class. The article stresses that the kids taking the class are encouraged not to fight back against their abusers, and that the boxing serves more as an outlet for emotions than as practical training:

It's not a self-defense class. Holly Reynolds, the woman who started the program, can't call it that for legal reasons. It's not about fighting, either, though Reynolds gave it the same name as the 1999 Brad Pitt movie about underground fight clubs.

This Fight Club is about getting fit, feeling strong and fighting the good fight, she said.

These teens don't spar with each other. They spar with their feelings.

It's not that the things the classes do offer --- improved physical fitness, confidence, an emotional outlet, a roomful of other people who are having the same experiences as you, along with adult trainers and mentors who are clearly on your side --- aren't also hugely important; I just worry that explicitly discouraging these kids from fighting back if they're assaulted undermines what the program is supposed to do. It's supposed to give you confidence and enable you to stand up for yourself or your friends; how can you do that if you freeze up once the confrontation escalates?

We have a serious problem in mainstream American culture, in that we tend to put all the blame on victims of violence --- especially certain kinds of violence. If you were raped, you must've done something to draw attention to yourself, or gone somewhere you shouldn't have, or trusted someone you shouldn't have trusted. To use some philosophical terminology, the rapist may have been the immediate or proximate cause, but you were the ultimate cause of your own rape.

It's the same with bullying, whether of children in school or of adults in the workplace or in their communities. If one or more people decide to harass you, stalk you, follow you around in groups yelling things at you, try to scare you, subject you to unwanted, gross and insulting sexual advances, physically attack you or vandalize your property, it's bad, but you must've done something to make them choose you as their target.

And with school bullying, adults tend to tell children very stupid, unhelpful things when those children ask for help, like, "Just ignore them; they'll go away if you don't respond." (More victim-blaming: you're only being bullied because you let them get a rise out of you!) They also hold victims of bullying to a much higher moral standard than the bullies themselves: no matter how in-your-face, menacing or even violent they get, if you hit them back, you're just as bad as they are. They ignore bullying until it does turn into a physical fight, and when that happens, they act as if all combatants are equally at fault*.

So, against that kind of cultural backdrop, I don't think it's doing the kids any favors to try and convince them they don't want to hit the people who are abusing them. Of course they do. Telling them they don't, when they know perfectly well that they do, would (I think) just work to undermine any impression you've made of being the rare adult who understands what they're going through.

Don't get the wrong idea; I know teaching kids self-defense won't magically enable every one of them to win a fight with a bully (especially those who are bullied by a whole pack of people), and I know it's not fair to expect victims of bullying to solve the problem on their own. In my ideal school environment, teachers and bystanders would play a much more active role in defusing incidents of bullying; I just think physical self-defense is also a tool kids need to be given, without shaming or second-guessing them when they use it.

*That happens to grown women, too, when they try to defend themselves against rape or domestic abuse.

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.

Autistic Woman Writes Terrible Column; Speculation About Her Capacity for Empathy Ensues

There's this woman, Penelope Trunk, who writes about climbing the corporate ladder on her blog, and in her book Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success. She's founded several startup companies, has worked in marketing and is now a full-time writer, focusing on career advice for young people.

She also has Asperger syndrome.

A few days ago, she wrote a column about Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund who is accused of sexually assaulting a hotel maid. In her column, Trunk advances the bizarre hypothesis that women who occupy the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, who work low-paying, menial jobs with no possibility of advancement, have greater freedom than higher-paid, professional women do to report sexual abuse by bosses, co-workers or clients.

Her notion is that someone working a low-paying job will not have the same incentive to hold onto that job that someone with a better job would have:

It has been clear for at least a decade that women who want to have a high-flying career should not report sexual harassment. I have written about this a zillion times, and before you argue with me, read the quotes from all the labor lawyers (representing plaintiffs) who agree.

The bottom line is that just about every woman who has entered the workplace has experienced sexual harassment, but the women who report it face retribution. ... [W]omen who complain about harassment generally lose their jobs in some convoluted but ultimately predictable way.
...
But, what about women who don't care if they get fired? Those women hold a lot of power in this equation.

It used to be that women with low-level jobs did not have the socioeconomic backing to stand up for themselves in the face of harassment. Today, women feel more empowered - even women in a low pay grade. And women across the economic spectrum can identify what crosses the line.

These women have nothing to lose when they report men who cross the line sexually. So the maid reported. And then, it turns out, all sorts of women in higher-up positions spoke up against Strauss-Kahn. The women wouldn't report the harassment on their own. They don't want to suffer retribution. But now there will be no retribution, so it's safe to come forward.

This is why men are going to focus harassment at the higher ranks of the corporate ladder. These are the women who have to keep their mouths shut if they want to keep climbing the ladder.

But God help the guy who harasses a woman with nothing to lose.

It's a great moment in history. Poor women are empowered to fight against lecherous men, and rich women can finally come out of the sexual-harassment closet because of it.

Matt Yglesias at Think Progress and Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon have both covered why this is astonishingly, massively wrong --- not just off, but actually the opposite of what's really true, which is that poorer women working menial jobs are more, not less, vulnerable to exploitation and abuse at work, and have fewer options for escaping or combating it. In believing otherwise, Trunk seems to have forgotten that, for some people, losing a job means not being able to pay rent, not having enough money to buy enough food, having to put off needed medical treatments or go without needed medications because they can't pay for them.

She also assumes that, if one quits a menial job, one can quickly and easily find another. This is just not true in an economy where almost one-tenth of all people in the U.S. are officially unemployed, and many more are working fewer hours than they'd like to. These low-wage service jobs are actually really competitive right now, since there are relatively few of them (since companies have mostly been weathering the Great Recession by laying off all the employees they could conceivably do without) and lots of people needing work.

There's a lot of other important stuff she leaves out, but I think the most important failing in her article is her assumption that women working low-paying jobs don't need those jobs. As a commenter on Pandagon noted, it's as if she's assuming that everyone has well-off relatives who can support them for a time, or has a trust fund or significant savings to fall back on. She doesn't seem to understand what poverty is.

Anyway, enough about Trunk. She's ignorant, naive and starry-eyed, and her good fortune and financial security have given her the (mistaken) impression that life is as easy for everyone as it has been for her.

Now, I want to talk about her critics.

It shouldn't surprise anyone reading this blog that commenters on both Pandagon and Yglesias's site have brought up her autism as a possible explanation for her failure to grasp basic economic and social realities.

From Pandagon:

Penelope Trunk's deal is that she has Asperger's and spends a great deal of time and energy figuring out the "rules" for social interaction. (Note: she is open about this and has written a great deal about it.) I got reading her because her perspective can bring some real insight into human interactions. But she can also get things dead, dead wrong.

If Ms. Trunk actually suffers from an illness which damages her ability to feel empathy, that both absolves her (partially) and leads to the next question --- why is she indistinguishable from the average conservative/libertarian?

My understanding is that while the inability to read nonverbal cues is quite acute, the practical effect of Asperger's also includes a lesser capacity for empathy, especially in relatively swift interactions.

From Yglesias's:

Trunk is wrong, obviously. But Asperger's Syndrome makes what she's trying to do here --- put herself in both DSK's and the maid's position and see who's right --- incredibly difficult. This isn't Tom Friedman telling us we gotta say "suck on that" to Iraq b/c he's a dick, this is someone with a legitimate medical condition exercising poor judgment by choosing to comment on something it's very hard for her to understand given that condition.

These comments are actually not representative of the threads in which they appear; these four comments are the only comments on both websites to blame Trunk's classism on her Asperger's diagnosis, and both threads also include other comments telling the quoted commenters that they are wrong to do so.

But it still depresses me that her diagnosis comes up at all in a discussion of why her article is wrong. One of the reasons it depresses me is because --- as the last comment I quote indicates --- it effectively bars all autistic people from participating* in discussions about workplace harassment. "Oh, you're autistic, you don't understand how normal people act." Because our "condition" prevents us from understanding other people, nothing we say about anything other people do --- even things they do to us --- has to be taken seriously. This is especially troubling when it's workplace (or school) harassment we're talking about, since autistic people are especially likely to be targeted for such harassment. (Indeed, we are often blamed for being bullied --- it's our own fault for being so weird, we're told as children.)

It also depresses me somewhat to see Trunk's excessive optimism about most people's ability to quit jobs at will, and find new jobs quickly and easily, attributed to her Asperger's rather than to her having a lot of resources at her disposal that she takes for granted, when most people with autism, when they can work, have terrible trouble finding jobs, and then holding on to those jobs for longer than a few weeks. If anything, we probably have a keener grasp than most people do of the risks inherent in quitting a job, because those risks are heightened for us.

I'd also like to point out, in two of those comments --- both written by the same person --- the use of autism as a metaphor for a self-serving political philosophy.

I've seen this once before, in an article on CommonDreams.org:

The language used in this passage --- citing "self-centered" behavior as the characteristic feature of autism, for example, or saying autistic people lack "linguistic, social, cultural or logical constraints to manage [our] lives" --- draws strong, if implicit, parallels between autism (a neurological condition) and selfishness (a moral quality).

These comments do a similar thing, with the "lack of empathy" that is so often cited as the core deficit of Asperger's syndrome. In the psychological literature on autism, the "empathy" being spoken of is usually cognitive --- we are unable to understand non-autistic people's behavior, feelings or states of mind, even though we are perfectly capable of caring about them. Yet, in the comment quoted above, the implication is that this lack of understanding also entails a lack of feeling for these incomprehensible others.

Autism is not a moral failing. Autistic people have moral failings, but they have them because they are people, not because they are autistic.

*Not in the literal sense of "You are not allowed to speak," but in the more nebulous sense of "You can speak, but if I know that you're autistic, I will attribute everything you say to your being autistic, and if any of it conflicts with what I think is true, or right, I will disregard whatever you say because your mind is diseased and mine is not."

Does Teaching Emotional Literacy Foster Compassion?

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Time magazine ran an article this week describing a radical new anti-bullying program that tries to teach young children empathy by having them observe a mother and baby, and try to figure out what the baby is feeling. This is supposed to help them imagine themselves in another's place, and also to help them learn to put their own feelings into words. Evaluations of the program show that it does decrease "aggressive behavior" and increase "pro-social behavior," but I have doubts that it's really all that effective against the kind of cruel harrassment and intimidation campaigns so many of us remember from middle and high school. It doesn't seem to me like that's anger boiling over so much as a decision coolly reached that some people just aren't worth treating like people. And I'm not sure empathy training can address that.

An antibullying initiative sure to give Counselor Troi the warm fuzzies

I read this article in this week's Time magazine with great interest --- it describes an educational program called Roots of Empathy that aims to make children kinder, more peaceful and more considerate of others by teaching them to pay attention to how other people are feeling, and to the ways one's own behavior can affect other people's feelings.

Here's a description of how it works from Roots of Empathy's own "About" page:

At the heart of the program are a neighbourhood infant and parent who visit the classroom every three weeks over the school year. A trained ROE Instructor [link] coaches students to observe the baby's development and to label the baby's feelings. In this experiential learning, the baby is the "Teacher" and a lever, which the instructor uses to help children identify and reflect on their own feelings and the feelings of others. This "emotional literacy" taught in the program lays the foundation for more safe and caring classrooms, where children are the "Changers". They are more competent in understanding their own feelings and the feelings of others (empathy) and are therefore less likely to physically, psychologically and emotionally hurt each other through bullying and other cruelties. In the ROE program children learn how to challenge cruelty and injustice. Messages of social inclusion and activities that are consensus building contribute to a culture of caring that changes the tone of the classroom. The ROE Instructor also visits before and after each family visit to prepare and reinforce teachings using a specialized lesson plan for each visit. Research results from national and international evaluations of ROE indicate significant reductions in aggression and increases in pro-social behaviour.

That's the theory; here's a bit from the Time article describing how it works in practice:

At a public school in Toronto, 25 third- and fourth-graders circle a green blanket and focus intently on a 10-month-old baby with serious brown eyes. Baby Stephana, as they call her, crawls back toward the center of the blanket, then turns to glance at her mother. "When she looks back to her mom, we know she's checking in to see if everything's cool," explains one boy, who is learning how to understand and respond to the emotions of the baby --- and to those of his classmates --- in a program called Roots of Empathy (ROE).

...

One of the most promising antibullying programs, ROE (along with its sister program, Seeds of Empathy) starts as early as preschool and brings a loving parent and a baby to classrooms to help children learn to understand the perspective of others. The nonprofit program is based in part on social neuroscience, a field that has exploded in the past 10 years, with hundreds of new findings on how our brains are built to care, compete and cooperate. Once a month, students watch the same mom and baby interact on the blanket. Special ROE instructors also hold related classes and discussions before and after these visits throughout the course of the school year.

"We love when we get a colicky baby," says founder Mary Gordon. Then the mother will usually tell the class how frustrating and annoying it is when she can't figure out what to do to get the baby to stop crying. That gives children insight into the parent's perspective --- and into how children's behavior can affect adults, often something they have never thought about.

When Baby Stephana cries, an ROE instructor helps students consider what might be bothering her. They are taught that a crying baby isn't a bad baby but a baby with a problem. By trying to figure out how to help, they learn to see the world through the infant's eyes and understand what it is like to have needs but no ability to express them clearly.

That last part, the part I highlighted in bold text? I think that's a crucial thing to understand, but I'm not sure children are the ones who most urgently need remedial lessons in it.

Failing to grasp that someone without language will still have needs, and will use whatever other means of communication they have to try to call other people's attention to their need, underlies a lot of the most abusive, callous treatment of developmentally disabled people by their caregivers.

Accordingly, I'd love to see a similar empathy-building program for would-be paraprofessionals, special-ed teachers, home health aides, etc. I think caregivers often fail to put themselves in their clients' shoes, and appreciate the anxiety/stress/pain/hunger/whatever that the client was feeling, and the added stress of not being able to tell the caregiver what they needed, and instead either blame the client for "acting out" or, worse, consider hir beneath blame, so broken and messed up by virtue of hir disability that nothing ze does could ever possibly be a response to anything, just a "behavior" that happens randomly, like error messages from a glitchy computer.

Anyway, back to Time, and back to (some more of) the theoretical underpinnings of Roots of Empathy:

[L]ike language acquisition, the inherent capacity to empathize can be profoundly affected by early experience. The first five years of life are now known to be a critical time for emotional as well as linguistic development. Although children can be astonishingly resilient, studies show that those who experience early abuse or neglect are at much greater risk of becoming aggressive or even psychopathic, bullying other children or being bullied themselves.

That helps explain why simply punishing bullies doesn't work. Most already know what it's like to be victimized. Instead of identifying with the victims, some kids learn to use violence to express anger or assert power. [Bolding and italics mine]

After a child has hurt someone, "we always think we should start with 'How do you think so-and-so felt?'" Gordon says. "But you will be more successful if you start with 'You must have felt very upset.'" The trick, she says, is to "help children describe how they felt, so that the next time this happens, they've got language. How they can say 'I'm feeling like I did when I bit Johnny.'"

When children are able to understand their own feelings, they are closer to being able to understand that Johnny was also hurt and upset by being bitten. Empathy is based on our ability to mirror others' emotions, and ROE helps children recognize and describe what they're seeing.

I really like this idea in general, and think it's based on some pretty sound principles --- especially the ones about giving people the verbal tools to help vent their frustrations, or ask for help dealing with them, and about understanding that much of what we experience as "problem behavior" from others comes when they are experiencing stresses that overwhelm their ability to cope.

I have no trouble at all believing that this type of training greatly helps kids learn to handle their own feelings in a safe, non-destructive way, and to be more considerate of their classmates' needs and feelings. (This is indeed what independent evaluations of ROE --- there have been nine so far --- have shown: lasting increases in prosocial behaviors like sharing, helping others, being fair and trying to include everyone; in social and emotional knowledge; in kids' sense of their classroom as a caring, safe place; and lasting decreases in aggressive behavior).

But I am not sure that bullying --- a sustained, calculated campaign of terror against targets chosen for their vulnerability --- is in the same category as the aggressive behaviors ROE nips in the bud. Bullying doesn't seem to me like a spontaneous outpouring of emotion too intense to be contained, from a person too inarticulate or emotionally illiterate to express it without violence. Most bullies know exactly what they're doing, and have enough self-control not to do it; I know this because they're able to keep the worst of their violence hidden from authority figures. Some bullies are also very articulate and emotionally intelligent, convincing their victims that they are "friends," and guilt-tripping victims for not doing everything they ask. (The comments section of this old post on Pandagon is full of useful insights about bullying, and similarities between bullying and spousal abuse).

I think bullying comes because the bullies have keen insight into social dynamics --- they see that some people are less powerful, less well-liked, less noticed, less valued than others. They see that, they realize they could do just about anything to one of those unfortunates, and they decide, coolly and rationally, that so-and-so isn't a person, or at least isn't anyone worth treating like a person.

In most cases, there might not be any deep emotional turmoil underlying their cruel treatment of so-and-so; they do it because they can, end of story. Empathy training might help somewhat by making potential bystanders more likely to intervene, and stick up for the person being bullied, and it might also make it harder for potential bullies to tune out their targets' feelings if they've been trained from preschool to notice people's feelings.

I also think one of the major factors emboldening bullies is the larger culture's tacit (and sometimes explicit) endorsement of the very ideas bullies are experimenting with: specifically, that there are people who matter and people who don't and that you treat people differently according to which group they're in. All the empathy training in the world won't wipe out bullying if that doesn't change.

Justice Department Launches Investigation of JRC

Good news from Left Brain/Right Brain: In response to a letter of complaint written by disability advocate Nancy Weiss, who is co-director of the National Leadership Consortium on Developmental Disabilities and an Assistant Professor of Human Development and Family Studies at the University of Delaware, and signed by thirty-one disability organizations (including Weiss's organization, the NLCDD, TASH, the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network, and the National Disability Rights Network, but not including the Autism Society of America, which Weiss says, was contacted but refused to sign), the U.S. Department of Justice says it's opened a "routine investigation" of the infamous Judge Rotenberg Center in Canton, Massachusetts.

The investigation will seek to determine whether the JRC's practices violate Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which prohibits discrimination against people because of their disabilities by any government agencies, nonprofit organizations, or private businesses that serve the public.

The initial letter of complaint that Nancy Weiss sent to the Justice Department (and also to the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Office on Disability within HHS, and to committees within both houses of the U.S. Congress whose areas of focus include education, and also to three international human-rights organizations: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights) spoke of the electrical shocks meted out to students every day at the Judge Rotenberg Center in broad terms as human rights violations; the language specific to the Americans with Disabilities Act and nondiscrimination appeared later, after the Justice Department responded that it may not have jurisdiction to enforce human-rights laws in a private facility, since the relevant law --- the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act --- applies only state-run institutions.

The logic in making this a claim of discrimination goes as follows:

(Quoted from Nancy Weiss's letter to the co-signers and other supporters of her September 2009 letter of complaint).

I suggested to [the Department of Justice] that they consider jurisdiction under the ADA on the basis that people with disabilities are being treated in ways that are neither legal nor would be tolerated if applied to people who do not have disabilities ... .

There's no way of knowing how long the investigation will take, but I am enormously glad the federal authorities are at least looking into it. What goes on at that "school" is nightmarish, and no living thing ought to be subjected to such treatment.

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.