The Massachusetts Department of Children and Families (DCF), formerly the Office for Children (OFC), is a part of the Office of Health and Human Services that is meant to provide services and supports to keep children safe from abuse and neglect. The DCF is responsible for regulating group homes, but it failed to stop Matthew Israel and the Judge Rotenberg Center from abusing and torturing disabled students.

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     The Judge Rotenberg Center, which was originally called the Behavior Research Institute, opened its first Massachusetts facility in 1975. Matthew Israel was given a license to use physical aversives/punishments on autistic and mentally ill students to modify their behavior. The BRI slapped, spanked, pinched, and squeezed autistic students. There were water sprays to the face, hot peppers under the tongue, ammonia pellets to smell, cold showers, humiliation, contingent food programs, sensory deprivation, restraint, seclusion, a helmet that emits loud static, and eventually an electric shock device that some disabled students would wear 24-7, 365 days a year. 

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     At the Behavior Research Institute in Rhode Island, on June 28, 1978, a non-speaking autistic boy, was so badly bruised from aversives on his thighs, arms, and face that he was admitted to the hospital with blood poisoning. He was covered in lacerations, was severely underweight, and started having seizures. A month earlier staff handcuffed him to a chair which was handcuffed to a fire escape ladder so he wouldn't run away. New Jersey investigated but found that the claims were “unsubstantiated” (2).

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     That same year, a former employee at the BRI of California, Kathy Corwin, reported witnessing Matthew Israel “fingernail-pinching” the bottom of a 12-year-old resident’s feet for going to the bathroom in the shower on October 28, 1978. He would receive about 24 pinches during a half-hour period of this therapy session. The boy was crying and screaming out in pain. Another employee, Nancy Thibeault, testified that his feet had bloody oozing open wounds on the soles of his feet the next day, but employees continued to pinch the bottom of his feet. When Kathy Corwin returned to the BRI after 2 days off the resident’s soles of his feet were bloodied, blistered, and skinless. Matthew Israel defended his treatment of this boy, “As I recall no skin was broken…[The student]  is alive, well, happy, healthy, behaving better than ever, and with not a single serious or semi-serious injury from any treatment procedure administered by me or the staff of B.R.I. California" (2).

     On April 19, 1979, Massachusetts Senator Jack Backman wrote to the Department of Children and Families (DCF) asserting that the Behavior Research Institute was in violation of a state statute prohibiting corporal punishment (2). The DCF allowed the BRI/JRC to use aversives on neurodivergent children and continued to approve the facilities hierarchy of aversive (2, 3). Whether the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families was aware of what was happening inside Israel’s facilities or not, it showed no desire to stop the abusive behavior until the mid-1980s.

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     In March and April of 1985, the DCF decided to investigate the use of corporal punishment at the BRI/JRC, sending Michael Avery, a Massachusetts licensing investigator, to the facility for a total of 250 hours. The BRI/JRC had changed the hierarchy of aversives without notifying the DCF. Avery not only witnessed aversives being administered to students but also experienced them himself. He discovered one student that had been spanked 133 times within 2 hours and another student was made to wear leg chains for extended periods of time. Some students wore wet clothes hours after they had been punished by water squirts and cold showers. Avery denied the BRI’s license concluding that their behavior modification program did not work and that they were in serious noncompliance with regulation (2).