Winner of a Casey Medal this year. Thanks to Alex Zayas for passing this along.
Jennifer Gonnerman: Cheryl McCollins got her first hint that something was wrong when she answered her phone on the evening of October 25, 2002. “Andre had a bad day.” It was a case manager calling from the residential school her son attended in Massachusetts, roughly 215 miles away. Cheryl had received calls like this before, but the news tonight was nearly incomprehensible: That day, her son had received 31 electric shocks as punishment for misbehaving.
“Thirty-one?!” gasped Cheryl, standing in her kitchen in Brooklyn. “What did he do?”
Andre, 18 years old, had been diagnosed with mental retardation, and for the past twenty months he’d been living at the Judge Rotenberg Center. A school of last resort for troubled children and adults, the Rotenberg Center runs a controversial behavior-modification program, where the repertoire of punishments includes painful electric shocks.
It’s easy to tell which students are hooked up to the shock device: They’re the ones with backpacks. The device stays hidden inside, with wires extending from the backpack, running beneath their clothes, and attaching to electrodes strapped to their arms and legs. Staffers carry remote-control activators; when students display certain “targeted behaviors”—like hitting, yelling, or trying to remove their electrodes—an employee presses a button to deliver a two-second shock.
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