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Hundreds of children no other school wants — from the autistic to the merely troubled — attend a centre in America where electric shocks are administered for even the smallest misdemeanour. Forced to wear 10lb backpacks with electrodes attached to their skin, they never know when their teachers will deliver this ‘behaviour-modification’ therapy. Why hasn’t the school been closed down? Rob Santana awoke terrified. He’d had that dream again, the one where silver wires ran under his shirt and into his pants, connecting to electrodes attached to his limbs and torso. Adults armed with surveillance cameras and remote-control activators watched his every move. One press of a button, and there was no telling where the shock would hit – his arm or leg or, worse, his stomach. All Rob knew was that the pain would be intense. Every time he woke from this dream, it took him a few moments to remember that he was in his own bed, that there weren’t electrodes locked to his skin, that he wasn’t about to be shocked. It was no mystery to him where this recurring nightmare came from – not A Clockwork Orange or 1984, but the years he spent confined in America’s most controversial “behaviour-modification” institution. In 1999, when Rob was 13, his parents sent him to the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center, in Massachusetts, 20 miles outside Boston. The institution, which calls itself a “special-needs school”, takes in all kinds of troubled kids – autistic, mentally retarded, schizophrenic, bipolar, emotionally disturbed – and attempts to change their behaviour with a complex system of rewards and punishments, including painful electric shocks to the torso and limbs. Of the 230 residents, about half are wired to receive shocks. Eight states send students to this institution, with New York providing the most. The price tag for a year there is $220,000; states and school districts pick up the tab. The Judge Rotenberg Educational Center is the only institution in the US that disciplines students by giving them electric shocks, a form of punishment not inflicted on serial killers or child molesters, or any of more than 2.2m inmates in US jails and prisons. Over its 36-year history, there have been numerous lawsuits and government investigations. Last year, New York-state investigators filed a blistering report that made the place sound like a high-school version of Abu Ghraib. Yet the programme continues to thrive – in large part because nobody, except desperate parents and a few legislators, seems to care about what happens to the hundreds of kids who pass through its gates. In Rob Santana’s case, he freely admits he was an out-of-control kid with “serious behavioural problems”. At birth he was abandoned at the hospital, traces of cocaine, heroin and alcohol in his body. A middle-class couple adopted him when he was 11 months old, but his troubles continued. He started fires; he got kicked out of preschool for opening the back door of a moving school bus; he cut himself with a razor when he was six. His mother took him to specialists, who diagnosed him with a slew of psychiatric problems: attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder. Rob remained at the Rotenberg Center for about 31/2 years. From the start, he cursed, hollered and fought with employees. Eventually the staff obtained permission from his mother and a court to use electric shock. Rob was forced to wear a backpack containing five 2lb battery-operated devices, each connected to an electrode attached to his skin. “I felt humiliated,” he says. “You have a bunch of wires coming out of your shirt and pants.”
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