A collection of proposals by Congress and the New York state senate are looking to end electric shock as a means of treatment on people with disabilities, The New York Daily News reports. There are two different ways in which the state, the house, and Senate are looking to tackle this issue.
Most of the controversy concerns The Judge Rotenberg Center in Canton, Massachusetts. The residential school has used a shock device to “prevent what the school describes as dangerous or violent behaviors.” Even today, school officials state the school continues administering electric shocks to roughly 50 adult residents.
The Daily News points out roughly half of the school’s 300 residents are from New York, including 62 students whose tuitions are covered by New York City. State senator Sen. Jabari Brisport (D-Brooklyn) has introduced a bill that would block more than $20 million in taxpayer dollars from New York school districts that account for most of the funding for the school.
“This is an inhumane practice that every other facility in the U.S. has stopped,” said Brisport, whose bill is named after Andre McCollins, a former Rotenberg student who was hospitalized in 2002 at age 18 after being shocked 31 times in a matter of minutes while strapped to a board.
Legislation currently sits in the Senate, which would provide the Food and Drug Administration power to ban the device that the Rotenberg Center uses to deliver the shocks. As the Daily News notes, FDA banned the device in 2020, but an appeals court ruled that the agency did not have the power to enforce the ban. Even resident families have come out and supported the shock therapy, arguing that this issue should “get a full public debate in the Senate.”
Considering the statements of former students who have received shock therapy, they speak to how traumatic and painful it is.
“It’s like nothing you can really prepare yourself for. It was terrifying,” said Jennifer Msumba, 46, who has autism, tics and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and attended the school between 2002 and 2009, receiving electric shocks for most of that time.
“They give you this huge list of things that’s a shockable offense. Tensing my hands, waving my hands in front of my face. They’re shocking you for saying more than five inappropriate verbal behaviors in an hour.”