Abstract

These remarks are intended more to highlight certain themes in Paul Friedman's article "Legal Regulation of Applied Behavior Analysis in Mental Institutions and Prisons" than they are intended to critique its principal thesis. A full-blown critique would be out of the question, for Friedman and I have attended so many meetings together recently that our intellectual behavior has obviously been shaped by similar forces! Indeed, Friedman's proposed standards derive largely from those developed for state retardation programs by the Florida Task Force on Behavioral Procedures, a task force on which we both served.

I agree with Friedman's central thesis that, as a matter of policy and quite possibly of constitutional law, the state lacks a sufficient interest to justify thrusting an intrusive behavioral procedure upon an unwilling competent person, but that competent persons should be able to consent to the use of such procedures. I agree, too, that in appropriate instances, the state, upon certain findings made by a Human Rights Committee, may disregard the supposed desire of an incompetent client and may apply a behavioral technique believed to be in the client's best interest. Since the entire legal scheme of regulation seems dependent upon the notions of competence and informed consent, those concepts are worthy of highlighting.

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