Shocking
corrective therapy
Paul Kix (thanks, Dan): This is the machine.
It is a gray square of hard plastic, looks like a garage door opener but is perhaps double the size of one. Inside this square is the circuit board and all that is evil and beneficent and contentious about the machine. But the square itself couldn't be more pedestrian. Fastened to it, by Velcro, is another casing of hard plastic, another square, which houses a 12-volt battery. Dangling from the machine's corners are wires, and at the ends of these wires, electrodes that emit 60 volts and 15 milliamps of electricity in two-second bursts. The electrodes are attached to the arms, legs, or stomachs of roughly half of the 209 students at the Judge Rotenberg Center in Canton. The machine's sole purpose is to shock these students. The shocks are viewed by JRC, and pretty much only JRC, as a corrective therapy.
It is a painful shock; you hear all sorts of stories about it. JRC's lawyers used to let journalists receive it, but not anymore. They can watch, though. They can watch Ralph Antonelli, director of quality control training at JRC, a wiry man with swept-back black hair, secure an electrode to his right forearm, the machine on the table before him, and the transmitter for it, the little remote control that staffers hold at all times, sitting next to that. They can watch as Antonelli presses the button and his forearm tenses and his middle and ring fingers shoot downward toward his palm. Then they can watch his face, relaxed even as the transmitter is beeping and the electrode is bzzzing his skin. "See?" he says. "Just two seconds and it's over." Some liken it, as Antonelli does, to a bee sting. Others, including a student who's received it, call it the longest two seconds of their lives. One thing is certain about the machine, known as the Graduated Electronic Decelerator: What we just witnessed isn't it at its most powerful. There is a version that is three times stronger.
