L.A. Times investigates "Titanic State Hospital"

"BREAKDOWN"

California's sex offender treatment and detention center in shambles

Two days ago, I posted about the continuing problems at Coalinga State Hospital, California's expensive new detention facility for civilly committed sex offenders. Today's L.A. Times features an in-depth look at the institution's problems. The article, "Breakdown: Turmoil replaces treatment at Coalinga hospital," is written by Scott Gold and Lee Romney, who have been covering California's troubled state hospital system over the past couple of years. Astonishingly, the reporters found a former psychiatric technician from the hospital who was willing to assert on record that many of the men being detained at Coalinga pose little risk to the community if released.

Excerpts of the hard-hitting article follow; the full article (plus a photo gallery) is available online.

Two years after California opened the nation's largest facility designed to house and treat men who have been declared sexually violent predators, Coalinga State Hospital is described by both patients and staff as an institution in turmoil.

Convinced that they stand little chance of being released and angry about perceived deficiencies at the hospital, patients are engaged in a tense standoff with administrators, according to interviews with more than 40 patients and staff members.

… "We're calling it the Titanic State Hospital," said a psychiatric technician who, like most other current employees, spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing reprisal from administrators. "We've lost control. I've been saying for a couple of months now that the monkeys are running the circus."

Patients, meanwhile, are despairing.

"It's hopeless," said Robert Bates, 41, who was sent to Coalinga after serving a 10-year prison term for committing a lewd and lascivious act. "This is a therapeutic setting, supposedly. But it's nothing more than a mock-up prison. They can call it what they want. But it's prison."

… Michael Feer, a psychiatric social worker with more than three decades of experience, worked at Coalinga for a year before leaving this spring. He now works in San Diego County with recently paroled sex offenders, men who in some cases committed the same crimes as those at Coalinga but who are being released into the community, he said.

Feer said that although all Coalinga patients qualify as violent predators on paper, he believes that more than a third of them would pose no threat if released.

"They did their time, and suddenly they are picked up again and shipped off to a state hospital for essentially an indeterminate period of time," Feer said. To get out, he added, "they have to demonstrate that they are no longer a risk, which can be a very high standard. So, yeah, they do have grounds to be very upset."

The hospital, Feer said, "is a setup" - ostensibly a treatment hospital but one built with a wink to a public that has little compunction about locking up sex offenders forever....

Article continues here.

A plague in Coalinga

You may have heard about the epidemic of valley fever at Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga, located in California's Central Valley. Today's news reported that more than 900 prisoners and 80 employees have been stricken.

The sometimes-lethal fungal infection is endemic to, and on the rise in, the American Southwest. Like something out of a body snatcher flick, the spores that cause it live in the soil, and are inhaled when the soil is disturbed.

"You don’t do stupid things like go out on windy days or dig in the dirt," the mayor of Coalinga was quoted as saying. (Eek!)

New construction is suspected in the alarming rise in cases at the prison, where 1 out of 10 prisoners now tests positive. News reports mention as a possible culprit an increase in custom-home construction in the out-of-the-way hamlet of Coalinga. But what the news reports aren't mentioning is the construction of a $400 million state hospital immediately adjacent to the prison. Coalinga State Hospital, built primarily to house the state's burgeoning population of civilly committed sex offenders, opened just two years ago, right before the peak in valley fever infections at the prison.

Coincidence? Hmm.

Whatever the cause of the plague, revelations of its ubiquity in Coalinga will likely add to the hospital's already massive problems in recruiting qualified professional staff.

See my previous posts on the Coalinga State Hospital woes here and here.

Brits agog over U.S. sex offender practices

A spate of media coverage of wacky U.S. sex offender policies is encouraging a sense of smug superiority among the British public. From sex offenders dumped under bridges on one side of the country to those locked in high-tech prevention detention facilities on the other, it isn't the most flattering portrait of the Land of the Free.

Most recently, BBC aired a special report on the ongoing disaster under the Julia Tuttle Causeway in Florida (which I’ve blogged about several times over the past two years). The community living in squalid conditions in makeshift huts and tents under the bridge, with no running water, electricity or toilets, has hit about 70 and just keeps growing.

"Welcome to American justice," Dr. Pedro Jose Greer of Florida International University told the visiting European journalist. "This is the stupidest damn law I have ever seen…. We have people living together with mental and physical illnesses in an environment where people can't possibly sleep because of the cars going by overhead -- where you can smell the urine and see the trash mounting all around us."

If that dirty laundry isn't bad enough, the other recent coverage of U.S. sex offender policies is no more flattering to us Yanks.

Filmmaker Louis Theroux, a quirky British-American best known for his television series Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends, was granted unprecedented access to the infamous Coalinga State Hospital in California, home to about 800 men serving "indefinite sentence for offences that they haven't yet committed and might never," in the words of the review in the (London) Independent.

The resultant documentary aired on BBC, "A Place for Paedophiles," depicts "a Kafkaesque place" where not just the sex offenders but also many members of the staff look pretty darned "creepy," says the Independent.

A Sun profile of Theroux and his film took the opportunity to paint an even kookier picture for the British public:

"They have karaoke nights, put on plays, and on their birthday are thrown a party with cake, ice-cream and gifts…. [They] spend their days at the £268 million centre playing ping-pong or watching DVDs, and they even stage Coalinga Idol contests based on Simon Cowell's talent show American Idol."

After experiencing Coalinga up close and personal, Louis expressed doubt that the Americans know what they are doing when it comes to sex offenders:

"The British system is that when an offender finishes his sentence, he is released on the sex offenders' register. If he then puts a foot wrong he is hauled back to prison. It's a lot cheaper than a system like Coalinga -- and a little bit more realistic."

"Coalinga is the weirdest place I've ever been to," Theroux says in the film. "I can't quite believe it exists. In America this is the latest way of getting a handle on sex offenders…. You assume the people who run this place know what they are doing, but you do question it."

Trapped in a treatment mall

The article by that title in this month's California Lawyer reminds me of the Eagles lyrics:

You can check out anytime you want,
But you can never leave.

"Pause for a moment in the sun-dappled area they call The Mall at Coalinga State Hospital, and it looks for all the world like Anytown, U.S.A. Against the south wall is the barber shop ("Back at 3:30" announces a sign in the window), and close by is the post office and the Union Square Cafe. Other destinations are known by names that make the facility sound more like a California theme park than a hospital: the Calistoga Dental Office, the Moss Landing Lending Library, the Candlestick Park Visitor's Center. Everything is Disneyland spotless, down to the buffed tile floors.

"But things aren't all they appear to be at Coalinga State Hospital--not by a long shot. The compound's theme-park veneer masks a much harsher reality: Coalinga is a long-term treatment facility for rapists and pedophiles. And most of the 762 patients currently in residence may never leave--except in a box."

The article continues here. The online version has lots of statistical trivia on California's Coalinga State Hospital, a frequent topic of this blog:

• A plague in Coalinga
• Titanic State Hospital
• Problems continue at newest California commitment center

Problems continue at newest California civil commitment center

I haven't seen much media coverage of a 3-month strike by civilly detained sex offenders at the new Coalinga State Hospital in California.

Today, the detainees issued a press release claiming that a patient's death last Thursday illustrated a pattern of inadequate medical care for the aging men. Frank Valado, 45, apparently collapsed and died while playing basketball last Thursday.

Although hospital administrators are denying the strike's existence, sex offenders say the nonviolent revolt is in its third month and that they have effectively shut down all sex offender treatment. Among the patients' main grievances are inadequate psychological evaluations and medical treatment. The average age of detainees is 51, about 20 years older than the average state prisoner in California, and many of the men have substantial and costly medical problems.

The $400 million hospital, which opened two years ago amid great fanfare, houses more than 600 patients out of a capacity of about 1,500. Most are sex offenders who completed their prison terms and were then civilly committed as Sexually Violent Predators.

The hospital has had enormous trouble recruiting staff; I personally have received multiple enticing offers to relocate to the tiny, out-of-the-way Central Valley hamlet that in my mind will always be connected with its 1983 earthquake. (After the quake, a popular T-shirt read, "Where the hell is Coalinga?") Last year, the L.A. Times reported on unrest among both patients and in-house police over the hospital's suspension of normal staffing levels due to an inability to recruit qualified staff. According to detainee spokesman Michael St. Martin, the hospital currently has only four licensed psychologists and only three psychiatrists, the latter recruited from India.

The latest problems come as the U.S. Department of Justice continues its probe into deficiencies in the state hospital system, including at Coalinga.Four of the five state hospitals in California are operating under a sweeping federal consent judgment reached last year. Earlier this year, staff members at Coalinga and other state hospitals protested outside their facilities to decry unsafe and deteriorating conditions, according to an L.A. Times article on May 22.

The detainees have a web site that is worth checking out. Other sources of information include a web site at Geocities and the Sex Gulag blog. On Aug. 27, KPFA radio also covered the strike, which started Aug. 6.

My related blog posts are here and here.

Judge upholds indefinite detention of California sex offenders

In a long-awaited ruling, a San Diego judge has ruled that indefinite detention of Sexually Violent Predators (SVP’s) is constitutional, even though other forensic patients are entitled to periodic reviews.

The ruling in the legal challenge by sex offender Richard McKee came after a 6-week hearing featuring experts from around the United States. The California Supreme Court had ordered the hearing, saying prosecutors must justify the differential treatment of SVP’s by proving that they are categorically different from two other types of forensic patients. The other two classes of   people who are civilly committed based on criminal behavior are Mentally Disordered Offenders (MDO’s), who are hospitalized when they come up for parole due to the immediacy of their threat of violence to the public, and persons found not guilty by reason of insanity (NGI). Jessica’s Law, enacted by voters in 2006, eliminated the right of committed sex offenders to a recommitment trial every two years.

In his 35-page ruling, Judge Michael Wellington said prosecutors had met their burden of proving that SVP’s are a distinct class that is harder to treat and more likely to commit additional sexual offenses.

After hearing from all of the experts, the judge acknowledged the significant controversies regarding the reliability of the paraphilia diagnoses, the accuracy of actuarial risk prediction instruments such as the Static-99, and the base rates of recidivism.

If anything is clear from the evidence presented in this case, it is that key factual matters are controversial. It is also apparent that the evidence of the relative danger the classes represent is analytically nuanced and deeply rooted in developing medical and psychological science.

Psychiatric diagnoses unreliable

Interestingly, the testimony of state hospital representatives lent some support to McKee’s legal challenge.

For example, Dr. Alan Abrams, Chief Psychiatrist at the California Medical Facility at Vacaville, testified that sex offender diagnoses (pedophilia and other paraphilias) are imprecise, and he has little confidence in their accuracy.

Two professionals from Coalinga, the state hospital built to house SVP’s, also testified that they favor having an external review every two years. Dr. Robert Withrow, the hospital’s acting medical director, said indeterminate terms reduce hope in both patients and staff, and discourage patients from signing up for treatment. Dr. Kasdorf, also from Coalinga, agreed. He said patients work harder in treatment and have more trust in the system when they know they will get a hearing.

This contradicted testimony by David Thornton of Wisconsin's Sand Ridge civil detention center, who argued that periodic recommitment hearings are disruptive to treatment.

Actuarials controversial

Among the most controversial issues emerging from the trial was the value of actuarial instruments -- and the much ballyhooed Static-99 in particular -- to assess sex offenders' risk of recidivism.

Mark Boccaccini, who teaches psychometrics and psychology and law at Sam Houston State University in Texas, testified about his research showing that "the Static-99 has only marginal to moderate predictive reliability, little greater than chance." Boccaccini also testified that use of a single good actuarial tool is a better predictor than the use of multiple tools. Many government evaluators in California report data from other actuarial tools in addition to the Static-99, such as the MnSOST-R and the RRASOR.

California need not be enlightened

McKee's attorneys, from the San Diego Public Defender's Office, were allowed to present evidence of two alternate models: Texas's outpatient halfway house model, and Canada's Circles of Support and Accountability, which provides support to ex-convicts returning to the community. But ultimately the judge ruled that testimony irrelevant:

The [Canadian] representative who testified presented an impressive picture of a successful community-based program. While this evidence was offered to show that less restrictive alternatives exist to SVP treatment, it fails to gain traction in an equal protection context…. California is not obligated to follow Texas or Canada's examples however much more enlightened they may seem.

Bottom line, ruled the judge, is that we must make do despite the controversies and uncertainties:

It is this court's conclusion that the evidence presented satisfies the People's burden of establishing, by a preponderance of the evidence, that the different treatment given to SVP's under Proposition 83 [Jessica's Law] is "based on a reasonable perception of the unique dangers that SVP's pose rather than a special stigma that SVP's bear in the eyes of California's electorate." (McKee, supra, at 1210.) The fact that the evidence supporting this may be subject to controversy does not detract from its reasonableness or from the validity of the legislative distinctions based on it.

As someone who evaluates all three categories of offenders here in California --SVP’s, MDO’s and NGI’s -- I was astonished by the argument that the harm caused by SVP’s is categorically greater than that inflicted by members of the other two categories. Violence need not be sexual to inflict severe trauma. Some of the most disturbing cases I have been involved in were MDO and NGI cases in which psychotic individuals inflicted horrific brutality, torture and even death upon women and children. In contrast, I know of one young man who is currently committed to Coalinga as an SVP whose only offenses since age 18 were two consensual affairs with late teenage girls, one of whom even testified on his behalf at trial (saying she initiated the relationship and was a willing participant). Triggering his civil detention was not any sexual recidivism, but rather a parole violation for smoking marijuana.

That's the problem with separating criminals into artificial groups and then pretending they are all the same.

The art on this page is by Ricky Romain, an internationally acclaimed human rights artist in the UK whose work focuses on themes of justice, alienation and sanctuary. Mr. Romain has kindly given permission to showcase his art here. I encourage you to check out his extensive online gallery (HERE).

 

California court upholds indeterminate commitment of Sexually Violent Predators

An appellate court yesterday denied a challenge by a group of civilly committed sex offenders to the state's new Jessica's Law.

The sex offenders had argued that the indeterminate commitment provision of Jessica's Law did not apply retroactively to them. Prior to last year's passage of the Sexual Predator Punishment and Control Act (Proposition 83, or Jessica's Law), civilly committed sex offenders were entitled to a jury trial every two years on the issue of whether they remained mentally disordered and dangerous. Now, commitments are for an indefinite period. A group of previously committed sex offenders whose recommitment petitions were pending when the law passed had argued that they should either be released or, at minimum, should remain entitled to a new hearing every two years. A new law cannot be applied retroactively unless it specifically says so in the text of the law, they pointed out.

In the ruling, Bourquez v. Superior Court, the Third District Court of Appeal disagreed. Using rather strained logic, the court held that it is not a retroactive action to apply the new law's commitment criteria, because an extension hearing is "a new and independent proceeding" aimed at determining the person's current mental state. Under California's SVP law, a sex offender may be civilly committed if he has a mental disorder that keeps him from controlling his sexually violent behavior, making him dangerous and likely to sexually reoffend. (See Hubbart v. Superior Court, 1999, 19 Cal.4th 1138.)

The intention of both Jessica's Law and a similar bill passed by the state Legislature earlier last year (the Sex Offender Punishment, Control, and Containment Act of 2006, SB 1128) was to increase the punishment and control of sex offenders, not to let some SVP's go free, the court pointed out.

Much of the media coverage of Jessica's Law has focused on its residency restrictions banning sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of schools or parks, its longer periods of parole, and its requirement that sex offenders be monitored for life using global positioning technology.

But the changes in the SVP laws under which people may be civilly committed after serving their criminal sentences were also significant. The previous requirement of two separate victims was reduced to only one victim. The single offense may have been committed as a juvenile. And the requirement of "substantial sexual conduct" in crimes against children was eliminated. Theoretically, then, the new law might allow lifetime commitment of a 16-year-old who had fondled a child on a single occasion.

Yesterday's ruling will likely further foment the unrest I've been reporting (here and here) among the men being held at Coalinga State Hospital.

The full text of the ruling in Bourquez v. Superior Court (2007 SOS 6712) is available here. The changes to California statutory law made by Jessica's Law are viewable here. (The SVP provisions fall under Welfare & Institutions Code sections 6600 et seq.) California's Department of Mental Health also has a listing of related statutes and legal cases, online here.
Photo credit: lyzadanger - "The End of Coalinga, California" (Creative Commons license)

Costly SVP law enriching psychologists without netting more predators

With California children sharing textbooks in dilapidated schools where "riding the bus" is slang for mental illness, California is throwing away an extra $27 million a year evaluating more sex offenders under a new state law that's netting almost no additional culprits.

"Sex predator laws coming up empty" is the headline of that sad story in today's Contra Costa Times.

Under the expanded Sexually Violent Predator law passed by voters in 2006, more than 10 times as many men are being screened for possible civil commitment before being paroled from prison. But this drastic increase isn't radically increasing how many are being civilly committed as a danger to the public, because the old law was already catching most of the real bad guys.

The extra $27 million is only for psychological screenings. It doesn't include the added costs to house the backlog of prisoners awaiting evaluations. Almost six times as many prisoners are being detained at the state mental hospital in Coalinga past their parole dates, at a cost of about $12,500 a month each (more than twice the cost of a prison bed), according to the Contra Costa Times article.

Critics point out that the state has spent more than $1 billion on the SVP program to date, including the cost of building the new hospital in Coalinga, all to get fewer than 600 men off the streets.

Although this might not sound like much of a catch, there's one group I haven't heard complaining: the state evaluators. Some have seen their annual earnings from SVP evaluations and court testimony skyrocket to about $1 million. And that doesn't include their income from other work.

You can be sure that the largely working- and middle-class folks who serve on the typical jury at SVP civil commitment trials raise their eyebrows when they hear about this bonanza.

"It's silly, really,” Doug Tucker, a San Francisco Bay Area psychiatrist who does SVP evaluations for the state of Washington, commented to Times reporter John Simerman. "It's good employment for psychologists, but it doesn't really achieve anything. You're going to get a lot of people who don't have a sexual disorder, who just got drunk."

Photo credit: Rachael (Creative Commons license)

PCL-R inventor wringing his hands over forensic misuse

The first part of NPR's series on the psychopathy industry aired today and the transcript is now online (HERE), along with my sidebar essay on the cultural history of psychopathy (HERE). Most fascinating to me is recent efforts by Robert Hare, inventor of the popular Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R), to distance himself from growing evidence of its misuse in forensic contexts:

Robert Dixon Jr.,
featured in the NPR story

While Hare remains a strong believer that his test works well for the kind of basic scientific research that it was originally designed for, he and others have begun to wonder if it does as good a job outside the lab.

"I'm very concerned about the inappropriate use of this instrument for purposes that have serious implications for individuals and for society," Hare says. "It shouldn't work that way."

In fact, Hare says, he is so disturbed by some of what he has seen as he has traveled through America training psychologists in use of the PCL-R, that he sometimes has trouble focusing on the way his test could be affecting people's lives.

"I think about this periodically, and I probably try to suppress it," Hare says. "I do disassociate myself from it. I mean, if I thought about every potential use or misuse of the instrument, I probably wouldn't sleep at all."

"Alarming world of globe-trotting experts"

Hare goes even further in a series of interviews with journalist Jon Ronson, author of the new book, The Psychopath Test. Over late-night drinks at hotel bars, he tells the author that he is especially chagrined at the PCL-R’s use by poorly trained and biased evaluators in Sexually Violent Predator (SVP) cases in the United States:

“ ‘I tried to train some of the people who administer it. They were sitting around, twiddling their thumbs, rolling their eyes, doodling, cutting their fingernails – these were people who were going to use it.’

“A Coalinga psychiatrist, Michael Freer, told the Los Angeles Times in 2007 that more than a third of Coalinga ‘individuals’ (as the inmates there are called) had been misdiagnosed as violent predators and would in fact pose no threat to the public if released. ‘They did their time, and suddenly they are picked up again and shipped off to a state hospital for essentially an indeterminate period of time,’ Freer said. ‘To get out they have to demonstrate that they are no longer a risk, which can be a very high standard. So, yeah, they do have grounds to be very upset.’

“In the executive bar, Bob Hare continued. He told me of an alarming world of globe-trotting experts, forensic psychologists, criminal profilers, traveling the planet armed with nothing much more than a Certificate of Attendance, just like the one I had. These people might have influence inside parole hearings, death penalty hearings, serial-killer incident rooms, and on and on. I think he saw his checklist as something pure – innocent as only science can be – but the humans who administered it as masses of weird prejudices and crazy dispositions.”

If Hare’s conscience is really bothering him, he could do more than try to distance himself from miscarriages of justice in interviews with journalists after the fact. He could stop training the legions of government SVP evaluators in the United States, and/or issue a policy statement about the misuse of his instrument in court.

Of course, that would mean a significant loss of revenue. Even Ronson, the author of The Psychopath Test, had to pay 400 pounds (media discount) to gain access to Hare at a 3-day PCL-R training course. And that didn’t include the cost of the 30-page manual, another 361 pounds.

My review of The Psychopath Test at Amazon:

The power to label is intoxicating. That’s what Jon Ronson found after taking a 3-day training that gave him license to diagnose people as psychopaths. Armed with a 40-item checklist, the journalist went gallivanting around the globe, sniffing out prospective psychopaths from convicted murderers to corporate job-slashers and Haitian war criminals. Ronson’s chronicle of his two-year quest for the elusive psychopath is at times whimsical, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, and always riveting.

The review continues HERE. (As always, if you enjoy it, please click “yes.”)

Another one bites the dust: Hollow SVP prosecution no match for jurors' common sense

15 minutes.

After a five-week trial, that's how long it took a jury in a rural Northern California county to decide that an openly gay man who had served two years in prison for a forcible oral copulation of an acquaintance back in 2003 did not merit civil commitment as a sexually violent predator.

The prosecution's case featured a lone government psychologist whose opinion rested on a hollow combination of homophobia, bogus psychiatric diagnoses and trumped-up risk estimates. The psychologist cited archaic (and discredited) Freudian theory to claim that the ex-offender's crime at age 23 was evidence of an "oral incorporation" fixation caused by a domineering mother and an absent biological father. As a legal basis for civil commitment, he cited the bogus disorder of "paraphilia not otherwise specified-nonconsent,” and he used the Static-99R actuarial tool to present a highly inflated estimate of risk.

Testifying for the defense were four psychologists, including two retained by the defense, a government evaluator who had changed her mind (or "flipped," in the current parlance) and the man's treating psychologist at Coalinga State Hospital, who testified in no uncertain terms that "Mr. Smith," as I will call him, is neither mentally disordered nor likely to reoffend.

The defense team had barely left the courthouse when the court clerk summoned them back, saying the jury had reached a verdict. Their astonishingly fast decision hints that the jurors agreed that this case was an egregious example of overzealous prosecution and a waste of their valuable time.

Prior to being screened for possible civil commitment, Mr. Smith had been on parole in the community for 14 months without getting into any trouble whatsoever. Indeed, he was busy doing good works. His sexually violent predator screening stemmed from an entirely accidental parole violation connected with his charity work for a local gay rights organization. He had a special parole condition forbidding any contact with children. When a fellow member of the executive board brought his child to an awards ceremony, Mr. Smith was exposed to "incidental contact as one might have while shopping at a market," in the words of the parole hearing officer. Unfortunately for Mr. Smith, this was just one month after California voters enacted Jessica's Law, which allows for civil commitment of sex offenders who have only one qualifying victim rather than the previous minimum of two.

The prosecutor's strategy, as is typical in weak cases, was to hurl as many prejudicial, pseudoscientific labels as possible in Mr. Smith's direction, and hope a few might stick and scare jurors into voting for civil commitment: Psychopath, antisocial, homosexual, paraphilic, high risk, etc.

While licensed as a psychologist, the government's expert had not done what clinical psychologists are trained to do: Psychological testing, individualized case formulation, etc. Rather, as he boldly admitted on the witness stand, he relied on an assistant to cull through Mr. Smith's hospital records and pull out negative behavioral reports for him to review. Wow! Can you spell B-I-A-S?

In my testimony, which stretched over the course of three days, I stressed that Mr. Smith was neither sexually deviant nor likely to reoffend. His risk of sexual reoffense, I testified, was no greater than that of any other garden-variety sex offender. (The base rate of sexual recidivism among convicted sex offenders in California -- similar to the rest of the United States -- hovers around 6 percent or less.) I explained how growing up gay in a homophobic family and community causes sexual identity confusion that can lead to sexual acting out and other delinquent behavior in adolescence and early adulthood, and how Mr. Smith had changed as he matured and accepted his sexuality. I further debunked the accuracy of the Static-99R "actuarial" risk estimates assigned in this case, and the pretextually applied diagnoses of "paraphilia not otherwise specified-nonconsent" (which I've blogged about repeatedly) and antisocial personality disorder, a red herring that was invoked despite Mr. Smith's exceptionally good conduct in the community and while in prison.

Stacking the deck

The prosecutor tried to stack the deck by striking from the jury all gay people or those who admitted having relatives or close friends who are gay; he also challenged those with advanced educational degrees. I guess he thought it would be easier to pull the wool over the eyes of an uneducated jury. It just goes to show that times have changed: Even in a rural county, antigay discrimination is no longer considered acceptable, and jurors don't need PhD's to recognize bias and pseudoscience when they hear it.  

The verdict was likely a bitter-sweet moment for Mr. Smith, who had spent more than four years incarcerated at Coalinga awaiting trial. Luckily, he has close friends to stay with while getting on his feet.

This is my third SVP case in a row that evaporated when finally exposed to the light of day. Like Mr. Smith's case, one of the other two also featured prominent antigay bias; the other targeted an immigrant. In neither case were the men either pedophiles or rapists.

I suppose I should feel pleased to see such gross miscarriages of justice thwarted. Instead, I find myself horrified by the unfettered power wielded by rogue psychologists, assigned to a case by luck of the draw. Whereas many government evaluators reserve "positive" findings for the rare sex offenders who are truly deviant and at high risk to reoffend, others are just hacks who are raking in obscene amounts of public funds while making little effort to truly understand these men, their motivations, their circumstances, or their pathways to desistance.

Especially frightening is the unconscious bias that creeps into SVP prosecutions. The constructs of "mental disorder" and "risk for reoffense" are malleable, lending themselves to use as pretextual weapons of prejudice wielded against gay men, racial minorities (especially African American men) and immigrants.

Clearly, people shouldn't get away with sexual misconduct. But none of these men had. All had pleaded guilty and served their time, only to be ambushed at the end of their prison terms with misguided efforts to indefinitely detain them based on purported future risk.

As it turned out, each case was about as solid as a house of cards. It didn't take gale-force winds like Hurricane Sandy's to flatten them.

Evaluators flipping like pancakes

The "flipping" of government evaluators illustrated this weak foundation. In two of the three cases, after reading the more thorough and individualized reports of the defense-retained experts, government psychologists abruptly changed their minds and decided that their previously proffered diagnoses of "paraphilia not otherwise-nonconsent" were invalid.

On the one hand, I applaud the openness and ethical backbone such a change of heart signals. But these "flips" also demonstrate the whimsical, nonscientific nature of the commitment process. The longer I work in these trenches, the more I realize that the random assignment of evaluators and attorneys (on both sides) exerts as much influence on the outcome as does the true level of future risk to the community that an ex-offender poses.

Indeed, the real reason Mr. Smith -- clearly not a sexual predator to anyone with a whit of commons sense -- was taken to trial, at a total cost to the citizenry of hundreds of thousands of dollars, was not because of his high risk, but because of a rigid prosecutor who was blind to the writing on the wall.

In contrast, the government dismissed the other two cases (one in the Midwest and one in the South) on the eve of trial. One case involved a gay man who had a brief sexual interlude with a teenage male relative; the other involved an immigrant who had gone on two dates with an underage teen girl he met on an online dating site (his misconduct never went beyond petting). Both had served substantial prison terms. But, again, garden-variety sex offenders, not the depraved, sex-crazed monsters likely envisioned by jurors when they are told they will be deciding a "sexually violent predator" case.

Bottom line: Should a random clinical psychologist, earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year churning out boilerplate pseudoscientific garbage, be allowed to decide the fates of others?

At least in this one case, 12 discerning and conscientious jurors answered that question with a resounding "NO."


ON OTHER,TOTALLY UNRELATED NOTES: If you're looking for an intelligent movie in theaters now (always a challenging search), ARGO earns a qualified thumbs-up from me; my review is HERE. (If you find the review helpful, please click on "yes" at the bottom.) I've also just finished reading a thoroughly researched and well-written cultural biography of John Brown, Midnight Rising, that positions his raid on Harper's Ferry as a seminal moment in the lead-up to the Civil War. Tony Horwitz previously wrote Conservatives in the Attic, which -- as the descendant of Southerners -- I found spot-on.

CCOSO offering innovative workshops in May

The California Coalition on Sex Offending has posted the details for this year's conference, taking place from May 12-14 in San Diego. Along with the usual topics one hears about at sex offender conferences, I noticed a couple of workshops on subjects that get too little attention.

Racial patterns in sex offending

Stroll through a hospital of civilly detained sex offenders and the racial patterns will jump out at you. But few in the field talk about them. Benjamin Bowser, chair of the sociology department at the California State University in Hayward, is an exception. Bowser's research on African American male sexuality is critical to a culturally nuanced understanding of sex offending. Here, in a workshop entitled "How race impacts on sex offender research, assessment and treatment," he and co-presenters Jay Adams, Ph.D. and Baltazar Villareal Jr., a therapist at Coalinga State Hospital, will discuss this topic and "offer suggestions to make treatment more meaningful and effective for minority clients." Significantly, the presenters propose that for African American and Latino men, much sex offending is NOT driven by sexually deviant paraphilias.

Vicarious traumatization and burnout

Working with child molesters can cause psychological harm. That is the conclusion of Robert Emerick, Ph.D., based on a survey of about a thousand professionals. The greater one's exposure to child molesters, the more stress a professional experiences, Emerick has concluded from professionals' scores on the "Silent Injury Questionnaire." (The anonymous questionnaire is online HERE.) At the workshop, Emerick will discuss ways to reduce the risk of these "silent injuries."

Sex Offender Management Board report

CCOSO leaders Tom Tobin and Gerry Blasingame are presenting a report on the progress of, and challenges facing, California's Sex Offender Management Board, created by the legislature in 2006 to systematize oversight of the state's sex offenders. This is an extremely timely topic, especially in the wake of the brouhaha over the Chelsea King case in San Diego.

The conference, cosponsored Alliant International University's Institute on Violence, Abuse and Trauma, will be held at the Marriott Mission Valley Hotel in San Diego; the deadline for early registration is Tax Day (April 15). Continuing Education credits are available for psychologists, attorneys, social workers, nurses, MFT's, and other licensed professionals. The complete conference brochure and registration info are online HERE.

California: More sex offender commitment mess

I've written several posts (listed here) on various controversies surrounding Coalinga State Hospital, California's costly boondoggle for civilly committed sex offenders.

Here is the latest buzz. (I am hearing all of this third-hand and I haven’t seen it reported in any official sources, so take it for what it’s worth.)

Due to a severe shortage of staff, the hospital is operating at full capacity with only about 700-some out of a maximum of 1,500 patients. That means that if a patient goes to court, he cannot return "home" until a bed opens up. Since the "hospital" is really a long-term detention facility from which few people are released, this can take many months. Meanwhile, the sex offender is housed in a county jail's protective custody unit, which is much more restrictive than general population housing.

Worse, if a patient is called as a witness in a fellow patient's civil commitment proceeding, he too can expect to lose his bed. It is hard to find willing witnesses when they've got to be willing to go to jail for you, for an indefinite period of time.

I'm told that the hospital has about 700-some patients. It could hold 1,500 if it had a full staff. But despite an intensive campaign, recruiters have found only 900 people so far who are willing to work there, or about 55 percent of the 1,600 they need in order to run all of the units and programs.

Meanwhile, I'm hearing that the expert witness panel of the state Department of Mental Health is being disbanded. Less expensive staff psychologists are replacing the contractors, some of whom were earning upwards of $1 million per year. The massive earnings were becoming a focal point for defense attorneys during cross-examinations of state witnesses. I'm told that jurors' eyes practically popped out of their heads when they heard about the "boatloads" of money, as one expert described her earnings.

If anyone finds published news on these topics I would be grateful if you posted them in the Comments section, so others can access them.

An L.A. Times article on the beleaguered hospital is here.

Postscript: On Aug. 10, 2008, the L.A. Times published an expose on the massive earnings of state SVP evaluators. The article is here; my post on it is here.

Underground ruling on underground rules

SVP practice alert

This post is mainly to alert those of you practicing in the SVP area. The decision is from California, but may have relevance in other jurisdictions.

First, the background:

We all know about statutes and case law. But what about all those little government agency regulations that guide the enforcement of the laws? How are they issued and enforced?

Well, it turns out that in California, there is an Administrative Procedure Act (APA) that very specifically defines these rules and regulations and how they are to be issued and enforced. Rules include any "regulation, order, or standard of general application" that a state agency adopts in order to "implement, interpret, or make specific the law enforced or administered by it." And before issuing or enforcing any such rule, a state agency must file it with the Secretary of State and have it formally adopted as a regulation.

Who regulates the regulator? In California, that's the job of the little-known Office of Administrative Law (OAL).

OK, so now you understand the process. And here's why I am writing about it:

State's SVP protocol in violation

This month, the Office of Administrative Law handed down a decision against California's Department of Mental Health (DMH), saying its internal manual for SVP evaluators is an illegal "underground regulation." That's the OAL's term for a rule that is issued or enforced without the required approval of the Secretary of State.

The OAL held that the 68-page "Clinical Evaluator Handbook and Standardized Assessment Protocol" violates the law because it requires psychologists and psychiatrists on the state's panel of experts "to evaluate persons in accordance with the [manual’s] protocol."

The 2007 manual "mandate[s] how the evaluation is conducted and how the results of the evaluation are presented," despite the fact that the DMH "does not have the authority to dictate or control the standards or clinical profession of psychology or psychology," the OAL ruled.

The DMH had argued that the protocol was not a regulation, but just a general guide to assist clinical evaluators in making "case-specific determination[s] using their education, experience, and expertise ... in the exercise of their independent professional clinical judgment." The OAL found this argument unconvincing, quoting the manual as saying it "specifies the questions that must be answered and formats to be used." The handbook specifies how to conduct the clinical interview, collect historical information, and perform an assessment of a person's risk for sex offense recidivism.

The case was brought by Michael St. Martin, a leading activist among the sex offenders being civilly detained at Coalinga State Hospital.

What does the ruling mean in practice?

Once the OAL identifies a governmental rule as an "underground regulation," the agency is prohibited from enforcing it.

There is no muscle behind the proclamation, however, in that the OAL does not impose sanctions.

The OAL does mention that attorneys may bring up the regulation's status as an issue in any subsequent litigation. That means defense attorneys will have a heyday with state SVP panelists, some of whom are earning a cool half-million dollars per year cranking out these evaluations. Prepare for cross-examination questions on whether the evaluation methodology has any scientific basis and whether it has been peer reviewed.

The full decision is here. Photo credit: Eole (Creative Commons license).