August 31, 2007

The ongoing debate: Does sex offender treatment work?

In the wake of the attempted rape arrest of a man who had spent eight years in sex offender treatment, Vanessa Ho of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has a thoughtful article about the controversies surrounding the efficacy of sex offender treatment:

… While the overall climate for sex offenders has radically changed - with longer sentences and more restrictions - treatment has largely remained static, relying on the same cognitive-behavioral methods introduced in the 1980s.

"It's an ongoing question, there's no two ways about it," said Roxanne Lieb, director of the Washington State Institute of Public Policy, on the effectiveness of treatment. "Certainly, it's not a cure-all," she said.

Last year, Lieb's office released a study that found that Washington's prison treatment program for male sex offenders - one of the largest in the nation - had virtually no effect on reducing recidivism rates.

The study echoed a landmark 2005 study, in which researchers found that a California hospital program for confined sex offenders had no significant impact on curbing repeat crimes.

Both studies, however, have detractors who point to other studies showing that treatment works....
The full story, along with some nice graphs, is available online.

August 30, 2007

The fascinating tale of San Quentin's murals

. . . another reason not to tear down the walls

A couple of years ago, while dining in San Quentin's cafeteria, I found myself surrounded by the most amazing, multifaceted murals I have ever seen. Painted in muted sepia tones, they ranged from pastoral scenes of California history to surrealist chaos. No matter where I stood in the cavernous hall, the eyes of a gypsy woman appeared to watch me from one of the enormous, floor-to-ceiling murals.

Until recently, the murals were shrouded in secrecy. Almost no one outside of prisoners and guards had seen them, and few knew anything about the man who had painted them. San Quentin's prisoner rolls from the 1950s are long gone, so prison officials had only a name - Alfredo Santos.

The murals' sophistication, and the fact that such subversive imagery of the working class was painted during the McCarthy Era, intrigued the few art historians who knew of the work. People speculated about the artist. Some thought he might have been an apprentice to the WPA artists who painted the famous Coit Tower frescoes in the 1930s. Others speculated that he must be dead.

"You look at the magnitude of what's on those walls, and it's hard to accept that a muralist of his caliber, if he were still alive, could just vanish," an art historian told a journalist a few years ago.

About a dozen years ago, San Quentin spokesman Vernell Crittenden blew a chance to solve the enduring mystery. He got a call from an ex-convict claiming to be the artist, and asking to come and photograph the murals. Crittenden turned him down.

"I essentially blew him off, and, to be honest, I've regretted it ever since," recalls Crittenden (who happens to be a very nice man).

The murals remained a mystery for another decade. Indeed, if Marin County developers had gotten their way a few years ago, the prison might have been torn down before the outside world ever learned of Santos and the art treasures he created inside California’s oldest prison.

Another hazard has been the setting. Over the decades, steam from the prison kitchen has taken its toll. In the late 1960s, the prison tried to restore the art by applying a protective coating, but it made the original reddish oil turn brown. In the 1990s, the room's skylights were removed in another effort to prevent fading. More recently, as San Quentin has seen an influx of shorter-term prisoners, vandalism has become a problem.

Suddenly, however, the prison murals have been discovered, and Santos is enjoying a burst of fame. The New York Times carried a feature, with an amazing online slide show. An art studio in the Catskill Mountains of New York is currently featuring a retrospective on the artist, now 80 years old and living on Social Security in a small apartment his native San Diego.

So, who was the artist, and what is his story?

Alfredo Santos was the son of a carpenter and union organizer who imbued in his son the socialist spirit manifested in the murals. Santos began getting into trouble in high school, and by the time he entered San Quentin at age 24 to serve time for transporting heroin, he’d already done a stint in federal prison for smuggling immigrants from Mexico.

Two years into his term, he had the good fortune to win a prison competition for the right to paint a mural in the dining hall. He spent the next two years (from 1951-1953) on the project. As he did so, he honed what was to become his lifelong profession.

"I was always going to be an artist," he told journalist Ron Russell in 2003. "In that sense [San Quentin] was good for me. It was really the first time I could focus on what I wanted to do without any distractions."

But upon his release he hid his remarkable feat from others.

"The murals are something I never cared to talk about publicly because I didn't want people to know that I had gone to prison as a young man," Santos said.

He went on to become a successful artist. For a time, he was on the lam and living in Guadalajara and Mexico City, where he thrived as an artist; he eventually settled in a small town in the Catskills, where he had an enthusiastic following.

A longtime patron and friend recalled the scene back in the early 1970s.

"People would come and watch him work and just hang out and talk politics, art - you name it. There was always a crowd. It was its own little world, with Alfredo the charismatic central figure."

Now, thanks in large part to the notoriety over his prison murals, Santos is coming full circle - returning to the small towns of Fleischmanns for a long-overdue celebration of his work.

Photo credit: CommandZed (Creative Commons license)

The New York Times has an interactive slide show that is well worth checking out.

Photographs of the murals are available for purchase at another site.

A friend has set up a website dedicated to Santos' artwork.

Ron Russell's excellent overview of Santos' life is at the San Francisco Weekly.

Art et cetera is the Catskills studio currently featuring Santos' work.

August 29, 2007

Astronaut to claim insanity

Last year saw two high-profile insanity cases - Lee Boyd Malvo and Andrea Yates. Next up, it looks like we will be seeing an insanity trial for Lisa Nowak.

Remember the case? Nowak is the astronaut who assaulted a romantic rival back in February. She armed herself with pepper spray, a steel mallet, a knife, and a BB gun, then drove 1,000 miles - wearing diapers so she would not have to stop for bathroom breaks - to confront the girlfriend of a former space shuttle pilot she had dated.

In court papers released yesterday, Nowak's attorney gave notice that he intends to use the insanity defense. He plans to call two Texas psychiatrists, including Dr. Richard Pesikoff, who testified in Andrea Yates' successful insanity defense in the drowning of her five children.

The experts are anticipated to testify that Nowak was suffering from major depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, severe insomnia, and "brief psychotic disorder with marked stressors" at the time of the offense. One news report said Nowak was also diagnosed with Asperger's Disorder, a condition with autistic-like symptoms that causes problems with social skills and can lead to eccentric behavior.

"Even the most naive observer should recognize that Lisa Nowak's behavior on February 5 [2007] was uncharacteristic and unpredicted for such an accomplished person with no criminal record or history of violence," her attorney said in a separate public statement.

A Navy captain and pilot who was fired as an astronaut after her arrest, Nowak is charged with attempted kidnapping, battery and burglary with assault. She is out of custody pending trial, wearing an electronic monitoring bracelet.

Under Florida law, the burden is on the defense to prove insanity by clear and convincing evidence. To prove insanity, the defense must show that the defendant had a mental disorder that either (1) made her unaware of what she was doing or its consequences or, (2) caused her not to realize that the behavior was wrong.

Unfortunately, high-profile insanity cases like this one skew public perceptions of the insanity defense.

In reality, the insanity defense is rarely used. Once it is invoked, proving that someone did not know the difference between right and wrong is extremely difficult. One eight-state study found that the defense was used in less than 1% of cases, and was successful only about one-fourth of the time. In 90% of the successful cases, the offender had been psychiatrically diagnosed prior to the crime. To public knowledge, Nowak was not previously diagnosed with a severe mental disorder.

Another public misconception is that successful use of the insanity defense allows people to "get off" for the crime. In reality, most insanity acquittees are sent to locked state hospitals that look very much like prisons. They often spend more time locked up than if they had been convicted of their crime.

More information on the insanity defense is available at Wikipedia. A forensic psychologist colleague of mine, Paul Mattiuzzi, has an interesting take on Nowak's case on his blog.

August 27, 2007

Pioneering police psychologist (and In the News subscriber) retiring

From the Modesto (Calif.) Bee:
In the mid-1970s, Phil Trompetter decided he needed a better understanding of what the police officers he knew experienced every day in the field.

At the time, Trompetter was a clinical psychologist for Stanislaus County's mental health department. The laws had changed. The center could take in only those deemed a danger to themselves or the public. The rules created a tension between the mental health staff and the cops because some people clearly in need of help could not be held for treatment. They were back out on the streets, where the police were left to deal with them.

"The relationship between law enforcement and mental health was horrible," he said. "So I decided to start riding patrol with our (sheriff's) deputies, to listen to their stories, and explaining to them what's happening."

That was the beginning of his 30-year career as the shrink to law enforcement officers in Stanislaus County, a ride that made him a key player in every major critical incident here during that time, including the shooting death of an 11-year-old during a law enforcement raid and the Peterson case.

It's a ride that is coming to an end because he sold the police psychology part of his practice and is retiring, or at least semiretiring.

Trompetter, 63, will maintain the forensic psychology element of his downtown Modesto practice, continuing to evaluate defendants and suspects while serving as an expert witness in the courts.
The rest of the interesting story of Dr. Trompetter’s career is online at the Modesto Bee.

August 25, 2007

New study on background factors in false confessions

A growing body of research suggests that many of the factors that lead people to confess to crimes that they did not commit are environmental: The suspect is isolated, exhausted, intoxicated, pressured, misled, etcetera.

Some factors pertaining to the individual have also been clearly established. Juveniles and mentally retarded people are far more easily steered into confessing.

Now, Gisli H. Gudjonsson of Iceland, the foremost researcher on this topic, has published a new study examining what other individual factors may contribute to false confessions. The study indicates that a person who has been exposed to multiple traumas in his or her life is more likely to report having given a false confession during a police interrogation.

These traumas include victimization (being the victim of violence or bullying) and experiencing the death of a significant other. A history of substance abuse was also associated with reporting a false confession.

The abstract of the article, published in the Journal of Forensic Psychiatry and Psychology, is available online. The full article is available for a hefty fee.

Speeding up death

How is the Bush administration responding to the Innocence Project's announcement that the number of prisoners exonerated through DNA evidence alone has now exceeded 200?

With a plan to speed up - rather than slow down - the execution process.

The plan, authorized by the USA Patriot Act, will halve the time for prisoners to file post-conviction appeals in federal court from one year to six months. Judges will then have only 120 days to decide a case.

The one catch, under the regulations as currently being rewritten by the Justice Department, is that cases can only be fast-tracked from states that provide competent legal representation to indigent defendants. And who will decide that? Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, hardly an impartial observer.

The plan to speed the death machinery comes a decade after federal reforms that considerably limited federal appeals, resulting in far fewer convictions being overturned. According to a new study by law professors Eric Freedman and David Dow, the percentage of successful appeals has dropped from 40% to 12%, and is continuing to fall.

"The notion that the federal government wants to accelerate executions in the face of known mistakes, and wants to do so just as DNA is becoming available in more and more cases, is mind-boggling," one of the study's authors is quoted in the New York Times as saying. "It will increase the risk that some state executes a person we later find to be innocent."

Legal columnist Adam Liptak's take on the issue, "Greasing the Wheels on the Machinery of Death," is available online to paid subscribers of the New York Times. (I had heard that the Times was changing this policy of requiring payment to read its editorial columns, but apparently that has not yet happened.)

Hat tip to Gretchen White for alerting me to this column.


The photo, of "Old Sparky" at Sing Sing Prison, is in the public domain.