SEX PANIC: Highly recommended

As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air – however slight – lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.

-- Justice William O. Douglas 

The strands of modern American containment were woven so gradually that today's prison culture has come to feel almost natural. But imagine how the landscape might look to someone who was experimentally cryopreserved in, say, 1981, and thawed out 30 years later:

People cheerfully taking off their shoes and queuing up to be x-rayed by robotic agents of "Homeland Security," GPS satellite monitoring, DNA databases, civil detention for future crimes, online registries of drug offenders, surveillance cameras everywhere, "zero tolerance" schools where children are viewed as pint-sized criminals.

And, underlying it all, the new carceral state: A massive underclass of surplus labor (one out of every 99 adults) quarantined in prisons, with large swaths of the former industrial and agricultural laboring classes transformed into a security force of prison guards, parole agents and police working to generate yet more prisoners.

"By design this penal system churns the poor and marginal, rendering them all but unemployable, thus poorer and ever more marginal," writes anthropologist Roger Lancaster. "No legitimate theory of corrections, crime, or social order justifies this approach, which can only be understood as vindictive."

In Sex Panic and the Punitive State, Lancaster meticulously explains how 35 years of virtually nonstop panics over crime -- urban unrest in the 1960s, street crime in the 1970s, crack wars in the 1980s, predatory gangs in the 1990s, and terrorists in the 2000s -- have congealed into a durable regime dominated by irrational fear: "Power flows through the nervous system of a body politic paralyzed by dread. Ruled and rulers are equally trapped in fear."

Laying the groundwork for wave after wave of panics, Lancaster convincingly argues, is a synergy between deeply ingrained (but now covert) fears of black criminal-rapists and homosexual child molesters:

Sexual anxieties and fear of crime have come to form a dynamic feedback loop. On the one hand, it seems unlikely that revived sex panics would have put down such deep social roots except in the context of a wider war on crime. On the other hand, it also seems unlikely that crime fears could have become so finely woven into the fabric of everyday life without the element of sex panic.

The resulting system of social control is an amalgam of old and new elements. Its Puritanism, its paranoia about strange outsiders, its enactment of dramas of peril and rites of protection are as old as the United States itself; they are deeply embedded in the national psyche…. At the same time the resulting system of social control departs from long-standing liberal traditions that begin with a presumption of innocence, restrain the reach of law, defer to zones of privacy, and resist the application of excessive punishments or the tacking on of ex-post-facto provisions.

Lancaster sees the creation and privileging of a novel social category -- "the victim" -- as a powerful force in this new social order. In the name of this iconic crime victim, the enormously successful Victim's Rights Movement has led the charge to dismantle traditional legal protections, a trend that may be difficult if not impossible to ever reverse.

Perversely, increased repression of the American citizenry has arisen in tandem with the loosening of economic restraints on "capitalism’s most predatory forms" -- privatization, globalization and the corporations' relentless squeezing of what we now call the 99 percent.

In Lancaster's dystopic vision, America has degenerated into "a broken social order based on mistrust, resentment, and ill will," manifested in a mass addiction to dumbed-down, commercialized vengeance spectacles. We need look no further for evidence of this grim state of affairs than the vitriolic comments of YouTube viewers beneath the video of U.S. Marines urinating on the bodies of murdered Afghanis.

As with Abu Ghraib, we can safely bet that the four Marines will be sanctioned, while the structures that fostered their callous behavior will remain untouched. As Lancaster notes, this is all par for the course: "Any cultural system that equates punishment with justice will foster complicated forms of sadism. And any institutional system that inculcates intense fear and rage will produce technicians who periodically depart from standard operating procedures."

Many of you blog readers will have read other fine books on sex panic and the carceral state. But this meticulously researched and eloquently written analysis goes deeper and wider, masterfully integrating disparate historical, economic, religious and social trends. Lancaster delves at length into the complex interplay of racism and homophobia, even weaving in personal experiences as a gay man that helped to shape his thinking.

Bottom line: Read this landmark book; I guarantee it will enlighten.

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

-- Martin Luther King Jr. 

MANY THANKS TO BLOG READER JAMES H. FOR DONATING THIS BOOK.

AND THANKS TO THE ANONYMOUS BLOG READERS FOR THE OTHER BOOK DONATIONS.

As usual, if you appreciate this review, I will greatly appreciate your visiting the Amazon site (HERE) and clicking on "yes" (this review was helpful). 

Good tidings: Violence at all-time low

How does this sound for entertainment: Your date asks you out to the theater to watch a live cat slowly lowered into a fire and burned to death, howling with pain as it is singed, roasted, and finally carbonized?

If that isn't your idea of a good time, don't hop into the next time machine heading back to medieval Europe.

In 16th-century Paris, throngs –- including kings and queens -- flocked to watch such gruesome spectacles, shrieking with laughter as cats and other animals were tortured to death on stage.

"The Catherine Wheel"

Torture and violence were woven into the fabric of life, from the sexualized sadism of London, where elaborately designed and decorated torture devices were the pinnacle of artistic creativity, to the widespread practice of hacking off the nose of anyone who disrespected you (the source of the strange idiom, "to cut off your nose to spite your face").

In contrast, whether we know it or not, we are now enjoying the most peaceful period in all of human history. Indeed, the precipitous decline in violence of all types may be “the most significant and least appreciated development in the history of our species,” argues Steven Pinker, a renowned professor of psychology at Harvard University, in an epic tome, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.

"The Judas Cradle"

Given the tenor of the daily news headlines, Pinker knows his claim sounds far-fetched. But in 800 pages of research and analysis, augmented by hundreds of charts and tables, he convincingly establishes that violence is indeed heading in one direction: down.

The decline is drastic across-the-board, in both state-sanctioned and individual violence: International wars, civil wars, terrorism (an obsession far out of proportion to its prevalence), slavery, sexual violence, child abuse, infanticide....

Click HERE to read my full Amazon review of this recommended text. If you appreciate the review, please click on "yes."

Russell Banks' new novel explores sex offender banishment

The Kid is all alone in the world, hiding in the shadows under the freeway, part of an ever-growing mass of exiles electronically shackled to a society that despises and shuns them.

But who are these modern-day lepers? And why are there so many of them? What if sex offending is a symptom of a malfunctioning society, and these men are just the canaries in the coal mine, carrying the burden of society' shame? What if the Internet is the snake in the Garden of Eden, and pornography is the forbidden fruit?

In Lost Memory of Skin, best-selling novelist Russell Banks explores the deeper ironies of a culture that condemns pedophiles even while turning its children into dehumanized sexual commodities. But on a deeper level, the novel is about the profound loneliness and alienation of the digital age, the inability of people to get beyond false facades to truly trust and connect with each other.

My review continues HERE.

(As always, if you appreciate the book review, please click "yes" at the Amazon site, to boost the placement of my Amazon reviews.)

Dangerous People: An international discourse

Dangerous People marks an important moment in risk discourse. Leading scholars from around the Western world join together to discuss the problematic science, ethics and morality underlying contemporary approaches to populations deemed high risk. These include not only sex offenders (the focus of this week's New York Times op-ed) but also suspected terrorists, illegal immigrants, violent youth, and the mentally ill.

Not surprisingly, contradictions over risk prediction play out even within the pages of this international and interdisciplinary work. Consider these offerings:

• Forensic psychologist David Cooke and statistician Christine Michie of Scotland issue their strongest warning yet about the fraud being perpetrated by proponents of “actuarial” risk prediction, whose illusion of scientific certainty camouflages predictions that are highly inaccurate and misleading:

At the heart of the matter is the fact that simple linear models cannot explain complex behavior…. Individuals are violent for different reasons: any one individual may be violent for different reasons on different occasions. This inherent complexity dooms simple-minded statistical prediction.... The only way to deal with this complexity is to think psychologically, not statistically.

• Lorraine Johnstone, another Scot, warns that the actuarials' inaccuracies are dangerously magnified with juvenile offenders, who present a "moving target" because they are still in the process of developing.

• Yet, on the other side of the fence, law professor Christopher Slobogin of the USA continues in his vociferous campaign for preventive detention of a litany of groups -- including the mentally ill, enemy combatants, violent juveniles and persons who spread communicable diseases -- based on these very same faulty statistical methods.

Meanwhile, legal scholars Eric Janus and John La Fond continue to shine a spotlight on the United States' costly experiment with civil detention of sex offenders.

Janus's intriguing theory is that the Sexually Violent Predator (SVP) laws are a tool of conservative ideologues to roll back feminist gains in the struggle against sexual violence and gender inequality. He advocates for a return to an empirically guided, public-health approach as the sanest way to combat sexual violence while also safeguarding tax dollars from waste.

"Predictably," agrees La Fond, "the American SVP experiment has been an abysmal and costly failure. Other countries should learn from our terrible mistakes."

Overviews of practices in other Western nations -- including Australia, England and Canada -- suggest that despite this warning, various U.S.-style detention schemes based on remote future risks are gaining traction internationally.

Several chapters in the volume, however, focus on a somewhat different model out of Scotland, the Order for Lifelong Restriction (OLR). This order, rendered at the time of initial sentencing, involves the imposition of an indeterminate sentence to be followed by lifelong supervision. To maximize consistency, risk assessors are accredited by a special Risk Management Authority. Although Scotland abides by the European Convention on Human Rights, which contains a guarantee against arbitrary detention, concerns have been raised about lengthy detention and lifelong sentences for juveniles. Additionally, as the volume editors point out, "it is too early to say whether the Scottish system has been successful in reducing violent and sexual recidivism."

On a somewhat different note, Jennifer Skeem, Jillian Peterson and Eric Silver challenge the widespread assumption that mental illness is a direct cause of criminality in mentally ill offenders. Rather, they say, many mentally ill people may engage in criminal behavior because they are poor, and therefore exposed to contextual risk factors for crime. We should stop regarding mental illness as a master status, they argue, in favor of a more nuanced approach to mentally ill offenders.

Many of the chapters in this timely collection -- edited by Australian legal scholars Bernadette McSherry and Patrick Keyzer -- will no doubt prove prophetic. The current state of fear-based hysteria, like all social movements, will wane in time. Politicians and the public will realize how costly and ineffective are many of the currently cherished practices and will reverse course. As the editors conclude:

What is clear from many of the chapters in this book is that schemes for imprisoning or detaining people for what they might do are costly, likely to contravene international human rights obligations, and have not proven to be effective in reducing crime, particularly sex offences. Detaining more and more people gives rise to the risk that detention regimes will collapse under the weight of numbers.

Yet in the short term, those who most need to hear this collective discourse -- including politicians, judges, prison officials, and even our very own misguided forensic practitioners -- are not listening. Isolated within a like-minded community, they are too busy searching for the magic potion that will make the world safe and appease a frightened public.

My Amazon review is HERE. If you appreciate this review, please go to Amazon and click "Yes" (this review was helpful). 

Positive approach key to sex offender change

Trailblazing authors have walked the walk for 40 years

John distorts his offense history and refuses to accept his sexual deviance. Although the other members of his treatment group vigorously challenge him, they are not fully transparent in their own disclosures. The therapist feels stymied. What should she do?

First, she should abandon confrontation and negative labeling. Next, she should race lickety-split for her computer and order a radical new book that will help her succeed as a therapist and also feel better about herself.

The visionary book is Rehabilitating Sexual Offenders: A Strength-Based Approach, written by the team at Rockwood Psychological Services in Canada. Under the leadership of Bill Marshall, a pioneer in the field, the program has successfully treated sex offenders for 40 years. Unlike most sex offender treatment programs, Rockwood has a negligible refusal rate and a negligible dropout rate. Offenders enter therapy, they complete therapy, and when they get out they are very unlikely to reoffend.

Therapist is the key

As psychologists know from the general treatment research, the therapeutic alliance is a primary factor in successful therapy, with more impact than any specific theory or technique. With sex offenders, who are often mistrustful and reluctant to enter therapy or disclose information that may be used against them, the therapist is even more critical, accounting for between 30% to 60% of change.

Like anyone else (only more so), John isn’t going to benefit from confrontation or shaming. Instead of being critical or judgmental, an effective sex offender therapist is empathetic, warm, respectful, and even humorous at times.

Toss out those iatrogenic labels

Language is powerful. When we call people names -- pedophile, rapist, offender, sex offender, deviant – we encourage their negative and harmful beliefs about themselves. That certainly doesn’t reduce shame or foster change.

Instead, the Rockwood authors (Bill Marshall, his son Liam Marshall, Geris Serran, and Matt O’Brien) focus on strengths, invoking a vocabulary heavily influenced by the positive psychology movement and motivational interviewing.

Their guiding principle:

Inside every offender is a good person waiting to throw off the burden of his dysfunctional past. It is the therapist’s job to facilitate the emergence of that good person.

(Ironically, they do use the term “psychopath,” if only to say that scores on the Psychopathy Checklist  are NOT predictive of treatment failure or recidivism. Of the 70 offenders in their outcome research who scored high on psychopathy, only one reoffended during the 8-year follow-up period.)

The authors do not mince words in critiquing the dominant treatment approach that emphasizes deficits and avoidance. When treatment fails, they say, it is most likely because it was too confrontational. When confronted, patients learn to say what the therapist wants to hear, rather than to genuinely engage.

Denial: Not necessarily a bad thing

One of the most unusual features of the Rockwood program is its emphasis on helping men who continue to deny their offenses despite having been convicted. The therapists do not challenge these offenders to admit their crimes. In fact, they don’t think admissions are that big a deal. They offer several reasons for this:

• Given what we know from the false-confession literature, some deniers truly are innocent. And it is impossible to know which ones.

• Forcing an offender to match his account to his victim’s is silly, because we know from research that victim accounts are highly unreliable. 

• Men who deny offending or offer excuses actually have lower rates of recidivism. As Shadd Maruna found in his research with criminal offenders in the UK, excuse-making is related to good mental health as well as to guilt, which (unlike shame) suggests prosocial values.

For those engaged in treatment, the manual gives loads of practical advice on how to structure and run a program. For forensic evaluators on the outside looking in, who have watched in mounting horror as iatrogenic practices are systematically mislabeled as “treatment,” this book lays out the research that can help you explain real treatment to judges, jurors, and attorneys.

Rehabilitating Sexual Offenders is an auspicious debut for the American Psychological Association series, Psychology, Crime, and Justice, edited by Shadd Maruna. I can’t wait to see what’s next.

If you found this review helpful, please visit my Amazon review (HERE) and click on "yes" (this review was helpful). 

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).

 

Justice perverted: Sex offense law, psychology and public policy

 Oxford University Press has just released this provocative new title of likely interest to many of my readers. It's written by esteemed forensic psychologist and attorney Charles Patrick Ewing, a law professor at The State University of New York, University at Buffalo Law School.

Summary:

Over the past quarter century Congress, state legislatures and the courts have radically reshaped America's laws dealing with sex offenders in an effort to reduce the prevalence of sex offenses. Most convicted sex offenders must now register with the authorities, who then make information about them available to the public. Possession of child pornography has been made an extremely serious crime often punishable by prison sentences that dwarf those meted out to child molesters, rapists, robbers, and even killers. Federal law now imposes a minimum sentence of ten years in prison for those convicted of using the internet to attempt to lure minors for sex. And the federal government and 20 states have "sexually violent predator" laws that allow the indefinite civil commitment of convicted sex offenders to secure institutions for treatment after they have served their full criminal sentences.

All of these changes in sex offender law, as well as numerous others, have been based at least in part on input from psychology, psychiatry and the social sciences. Moreover, enforcement and administration of many of these laws relies to a large extent on the efforts of mental health professionals. However, many questions about this involvement remain largely unanswered:

• Are these laws supported by empirical evidence, or even by well-reasoned psychological theories? Do these laws actually work? 

• Are mental health professionals capable of reliably determining an offender's future behavior, and how best to manage it? 

• Are experts capable of providing effective treatment for sex offenders -- i.e., treatment that actually reduces the likelihood that an identified sex offender will re-offend?

Drawing on research from across the social and behavioral sciences, Dr. Ewing weighs the evidence for the spectrum of sex offense laws, to occasionally surprising results. A rational look at an intensely emotional subject, Justice Perverted is an essential book for anyone interested in the science behind public practice.

What others are saying:

Ewing …gives a lucid, objective analysis of the laws, easily separating myth from reality in this intensely emotional area.

-- Philip H. Witt, Ph.D., ABPP, President, American Academy of Forensic Psychology, co-author, Evaluation of Sexually Violent Predators

A remarkable, eye-opener of a book—Professor Ewing brings to this highly controversial subject his knowledge as both a law professor and as a practicing forensic mental health expert.

--Alan M. Goldstein, Ph.D., ABPP, Professor Emeritus, John Jay College of Criminal Justice

This book is a breath of fresh air. It debunks the media-driven frenzy of fear, hate mongering, and utterly irrational laws that do far more harm than good. Professor Ewing writes thoughtfully, carefully, and persuasively. This book should be read by all who care about—and think about—this topic.

 --Michael L. Perlin, Law Professor, Director of International Mental Disability Law Reform Project, New York Law School

 Ewing is a prolific author, and never disappoints. His other recent books, which I have reviewed, include:

• Trials of a Forensic Psychologist: A Casebook

• Insanity: Murder, Madness, and the Law

• Minds on Trial: Great Cases in Law and Psychology

Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche

A successful virus is adaptive. It evolves as needed to survive and colonize new hosts. By this definition, contemporary American psychiatry is a very successful virus. Exploiting cracks that emerge in times of cultural transition, it exports DSM depression to Japan and posttraumatic stress disorder to Sri Lanka.

Journalist Ethan Watters masterfully evokes the heady admixture of moral certainty and profit motive that drives U.S. clinicians and pharmaceutical companies as they evangelically promote Western psychiatry around the globe. On the ground in Sri Lanka following the tsunami, for example, hordes of Western counselors hit the ground running, aggressively competing for access to a native population "clearly in denial" about the extent of their trauma. Backing up the foot soldiers are corporations like Pfizer, eager to market the antidepressant Zoloft to a virgin population.

Watters has done his homework. Each of his four examples of DSM-style disorders being introduced around the world is rich in compelling historical and cultural detail. Despite their divergences, each successful expansion hinges on the mutual faith of both the colonizers and the colonized that Western approaches represent the pillar of scientific progress.

My review of Crazy Like Us, an engaging and enlightening book that I highly recommend, continues HERE.

Watters' Jan. 8, 2010 essay in the New York Times, "The Americanization of Mental Illness," is HERE.

How the Black man became schizophrenic

Psychiatry, the DSM, and the Black Power movement

Once upon a time, a strange thing happened at the Ionia State Hospital in Michigan: A diagnosis of schizophrenia exited the body of a white housewife, flew across the hospital, and landed on a young Black man from the housing projects of Detroit, burrowing into his body and stubbornly refusing to leave.

As you may know, Black men in the United States (as well as in the United Kingdom) are disproportionately diagnosed with schizophrenia. What you may not know is when this pattern emerged, or why.

Up until the 1950s, the overwhelming majority of those diagnosed with schizophrenia were white. They were the delicate or eccentric -- poets, academics, middle-class women like Alice Wilson in Jonathan Metzl's The Protest Psychosis, "driven to insanity by the dual pressures of housework and motherhood."

Then, in the mid-1960s, the Long Hot Summers hit urban America. Smoldering anger over racism and poverty erupted into mass rioting and harsh repression. In Detroit, a police raid on a party triggered an uprising that left 43 dead, 1,189 injured, and more than 7,000 arrested. Convinced that they would never win civil rights through sit-down strikes, a nascent Black Power movement became increasingly militant.

Coincidentally, just as this urban unrest was reaching its zenith, the American Psychiatric Association was busy revising its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Published in 1968, the DSM-II was touted as a more objective and scientific document than its 1952 predecessor.

"However, the DSM-II was far from the objective, universal text that its authors envisioned," writes Metzl, a psychiatry and women's studies professor and director of the Culture, Health and Medicine Program at the University of Michigan. "In unintentional and unexpected ways, the manual’s diagnostic criteria -- and the criteria for schizophrenia most centrally -- reflected the social tensions of 1960s America. A diagnostic text meant to shift focus away from the specifics of culture instead became inexorably intertwined with the cultural politics, and above all the race politics, of a particular nation and a particular moment in time."

The psychoanalytically imbued "schizophrenic reaction" of the DSM-I was an illness meriting pity and compassion rather than fear. In contrast, the DSM-II's more biologically oriented schizophrenia was menacing and required containment. In particular, the language that described the paranoid subtype foregrounded "masculinized hostility, violence, and aggression," implicitly pathologizing militant protest as mental illness.

Almost overnight, the previous class of schizophrenics at Ionia State Hospital was relabeled with depressive disorders. As the formerly schizophrenic exited the hospital en masse in the wake of the Community Mental Health Centers Act of 1963, their places were taken by a new class of schizophrenics -- volatile young Black men from inner-city Detroit.

A mountain of archived charts from the defunct asylum at Ionia provided the raw material for The Protest Psychosis. In his four years of sifting through the treasure trove of data, Metzl found clear evidence of shifting racial and gender patterns in diagnosis. Because the DSM-II was published in the days before computers, clerk typists simply used hatch marks (/) to mark out the old diagnoses, leaving them clearly legible alongside the new.

Randomly selecting a subset of charts of white women patients, Metzl found schizophrenic diagnoses crossed out, and replaced with labels such as Depressive Neurosis or Involitional Melancholia.

In contrast, the charts of African American men saw Psychopathic Personality crossed out to make way for the DSM-II’s schizophrenia, paranoid type.

Neither set of patients had undergone a sudden metamorphosis. Their observable symptoms and behaviors, as documented by their chart notes, remained the same. The only thing that changed was the diagnostic manual.

Metzl is a lyrical writer who has thought deeply and profoundly about this topic. His asylum tragedy does not point fingers or blame the individual psychiatrists of the asylum. They, too, were victims of time and place, just doing their job. Doing it, indeed, by the book.

Lessons learned, or lessons lost?

The lessons of Ionia can be applied to almost any diagnostic saga. Today, the message -- if we choose to listen -- is especially profound. As Ethan Watters explores in Crazy Like Us, American psychiatry is sweeping the globe like a virus, importing PTSD to Sri Lanka and Western-style depression to Japan.

Big Pharma is responsible for much of this McDonald's-like expansion. The pharmaceutical industry is far and away the most profitable business in the United States, and accounts for almost half of the $650 billion-plus global market. In its quest to enlarge profits, this industry perpetually seeks to expand the range and scope of illness. As Christopher Lane describes in Shyness, this expansion is especially easy with psychiatric illnesses, because of their nebulous nature and subjective boundaries.

But Big Pharma did not revamp schizophrenia back in 1968. Nor were nefarious doctors consciously seeking to re-enslave a rebellious race. Like treatment providers today, psychiatrists undoubtedly saw themselves as helpers, even as they functioned as agents of social control, naturalizing today’s long-term containment and incapacitation of African American men.

Psychiatry, as Metzl points out, is inherently focused on the molecular. With their focus on matching individual symptoms to diagnostic codes, the psychiatrists who replaced one diagnosis with another were blind to how institutional racism shaped their choices. Nor did they reflect on their own internalization of the era’s cultural anxiety over menacing Black men, an anxiety that linked mental illness, protest, and criminality.

A focus on the micro-level blinds the actors to the larger forces at play, which construct the very frames governing observations and actions. Larger social and institutional forces rather than conscious intent on the part of individual actors typically drive bias, especially in the 21st century. This explains why “cultural competence” training programs are at best useless, and at worst reinforcing of stereotypes.

We are currently entering another period of diagnostic revision. What I find fascinating is how earnestly the proponents of new and expanded psychiatric diagnoses believe that they are agents of progress, advancing better science as opposed to ideologically driven agendas. Mesmerized by their own brilliance, they wear blinders that prevent them from seeing the larger cultural systems in which their ideas are embedded.

But science is never pure. There is no one objective truth. There are myriad ways to categorize and catalog. Bias is inherent in what is foregrounded and what, in turn, is neglected or ignored. Reification, in which hypothetical categories are transformed into tangible and real objects, keeps us from recognizing and naming the larger systems that dictate these choices.

Occasionally, a historian like Metzl comes along to sift through archival evidence and shine a spotlight on historical biases. But the biases inherent in the present moment remain largely invisible. With the arrogance inherent in power, privileged scientists have no need to confront their own cultural assumptions, or reflect upon how the world might look from the perspectives of their subjects.

Sadly for all of us, as the old axiom goes, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

The book is: The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease. An online essay adapted from the book is HERE. Metzl is also the author of Prozac on the Couch, Prescribing Gender in the Era of Wonder Drugs and editor of a book forthcoming from NYU Press, Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality. A University of Michigan press release about his published work on "medicalization" is HERE.

If you enjoyed this essay, please visit my abbreviated review at Amazon and click on "YES." This essay is also available at my Psychology Today blog, Witness and at AfroDaddy: A Black Man's Survival Guide (sadly, that site is now defunct, but the post is still available via the ever-amazing Wayback Machine).

Exciting new sex offender treatment model

Today, dear readers, is an exciting day. It marks the official release of a groundbreaking new book on sex offender treatment, one that may signal a pivotal turning point away from punitive practices toward a recognition of offenders' essential human dignity and the universality of crime desistance.

Scholars D. Richard Laws and Tony Ward have taken on a huge task in Desistance from Sex Offending: Alternatives to Throwing Away the Keys. They hope to bring mainstream criminological theories about crime desistance to an insular, risk-obsessed fringe of forensic psychology that has remained remarkably uninterested in the fact that offenders desist from crime, or the process through which that occurs.

Desistance provides a superb, highly readable overview of the criminological literature on desistance, the age-crime curve, and offender reintegration research, focusing heavily on the seminal works of Sampson and Laub and Shadd Maruna. The authors propose the Good Lives Model as a theory that can bridge the looming chasm between desistance theory and forensic psychology practice with sex offenders.

The voices of dissent against the dominant, pathologizing discourse of deviance are growing louder. The publication of this trailblazing book is yet another in a series of signals that the reign of penal harm may be losing steam, creating opportunities for implementing progressive reforms.

Desistance is essential reading for clinicians, researchers, academicians, attorneys, and anyone interested in the application of contemporary social science theory on desistance to sex offender rehabilitation.

The timing is propitious, coinciding as it does with next week's annual conference of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers (ATSA) in Phoenix, Arizona. At least one conference seminar, by Pamela Yates, Ph.D., will focus on applying the Good Lives Model to sex offender treatment. If you are attending the conference, buy this book early before it sells out.

We can only hope that the spirit of reform embodied in Desistance truly catches on, rather than being coopted by the entrenched forces of risk management.

NOTE: I am writing more detailed and formal reviews of Desistance for publication, and will link to those as soon as they are available. Also see my online review at Amazon (and please, as always, remember to click on “yes” if you like the review).

Mother California: Essential prison reading

Imagine serving 30 years in prison with no end in sight. Would you survive? Would you not just survive, but actually grow as a person?

While serving a sentence of life without the possibility of parole ("the other death sentence") in California's massive prison system, Kenneth Hartman morphed from a violent killer, "a 19-year-old thug from the blasted wasteland of South Los Angeles' urban, post-industrial decay," to an award-winning author, philosopher, and prison reformer.

The subtitle of his autobiography is "A Story of Redemption Behind Bars." But Mother California tells a story much bigger than one man's personal odyssey. Through Hartman, we witness how three decades of irrational, tough-on-crime rhetoric has plunged California's prisons into an abyss of despair, violence, and criminal recidivism, all the while emptying the state's financial coffers.

Take Christmas. When Hartman first came to prison, in the early 1980s, the cellblocks were decked out in holiday lights, wreaths, and trees. Prisoners decorated their cells with holiday cards from loved ones, the Salvation Army donated candy and nuts, and, in the visiting room, "one of the old guys dressed up as Santa Claus for pictures with the kids and the young wives."

Within 15 years, holidays had been banished. Santa was gone, along with the decorations and treats. Every day resembled the last in its dreary monotony. "The walls are the same unadorned concrete every day of the year. My first Christmas at Tehachapi, one of the guards got on the public address system to tell us about the great meal he would soon be enjoying, the time he would be spending with his family. We didn't deserve to be with our families, he ranted, we were just where we belonged and have a hearty Merry fucking Christmas."

Watching helplessly as his beloved weight-training equipment is loaded onto the back of a flatbed truck, Hartman realizes "how far the advocates of punishment-for-the-sake-of-inflicting pain will go to turn the clock back" and erase the progressive reforms won by prisoners during the 1970s.

Hartman articulately chronicles the divergent impacts of this tough-on-crime politicking on daily life in prison. At Tehachapi, one of the newer prisons, guards are hyper-aggressive and controlling. At Lancaster, in contrast, the guards have ceded control, locking themselves in their control centers and allowing unchecked chaos and violence. The chapel becomes a crack house, the odors of marijuana and pruno (home-made liquor) fill the air, and almost everyone is high and destitute.

The golden triad

That is how Hartman, in one of his many philosophical essays on the prison system, labels the three proven ingredients to reducing criminal recidivism:

• Increased and enhanced visiting to build and maintain family ties
• Higher education
• Quality drug and alcohol treatment

Despite (or perhaps because of?) their effectiveness, the special-interest prison lobby has vigorously sabotaged all three, he writes:

In my 29 years, visiting has deteriorated from a slightly unpleasant experience to a hostile and traumatic acid bath that quite effectively destroys family ties.

Higher education is virtually nonexistent but for those few with the substantial resources needed to purchase it. In those rare cases where innovative ways have been found to bring education back into the prisons the special interest groups have mounted vicious campaigns to terminate the programs.

The opposition to drug and alcohol treatment, much more widely supported in the body politic, is subtler. Using the proven method of compulsory participation by the least amenable, those programs that are instituted are crippled in the normal chaos of prison.

All of this opposition stands behind the banner of protecting victims' rights, as if only the desire for revenge by past victims of crime matters, over even the potential losses of future victims.

The Honor Program

Determined to put his accumulated wisdom and principles into practice, Hartman worked with other prisoners and non-custody staff to design a special program at Lancaster Prison called the Honor Yard. Founded in 2000, the program provides a separate community for 600 men who have committed to living productive lives in which they give back to the community and make amends for past wrongdoings. They must commit to abstaining from gangs, violence, drugs, and racism.

In its first six years of operation, the Honor Program functioned without a single major violent incident, and saved the state millions of dollars. In the wake of its success, state Sen. Gloria Romero sponsored Senate Bill 299 to expand the program to other prisons. Gov. Arnold Schwarzegger, in his infinite wisdom, vetoed the bill.

Hartman's dream, according to a news article on the program, is to be able to live the remainder of his life in a violence-free environment where he can devote himself to his writing. One of his essays won a $10,000 writing prize, with the money going to his wife and daughter, conceived before California took away conjugal visit privileges from lifers. He is currently involved in a campaign to eliminate life sentences.

Instead of reading endless meaningless studies on psychopathy and such, we should spend more time in the real world, listening to articulate autodidacts like Hartman.

Kenneth Hartman's philosophical essays on prison are online HERE. More on the Honor Program, and efforts to save and expand it, is HERE. More on lifers in U.S. prisons is HERE.

If you enjoyed this review, I would appreciate your taking a quick moment to let me know by visiting my Amazon book review and click on "YES," this review was helpful.

Hat tip: Jules Burstein

Handbook of Violence Risk Assessment

Best practices for violence risk assessment change from second to second. So, publishing a sourcebook on the topic is a bit like trying to capture and hold a hummingbird. Still, the authorship and range of content may make the Handbook of Violence Risk Assessment an authoritative resource for at least a minute or two -- and then they can publish a second edition.

The volume's first editor, Randy Otto, is a respected forensic psychology scholar. An award-winning professor in the Department of Mental Health Law and Policy at the University of South Florida, he is past president of both the American Psychology-Law Society and the American Board of Forensic Psychology. He also chairs the Committee to Revise the Specialty Guidelines for Forensic Psychology (which, by the way, has yet a new draft coming out next month), and he is a co-author of the third edition of the widely consulted text, Psychological Evaluations for the Courts. Co-editor Kevin Douglas is a former colleague of Otto's at the Department of Mental Health Law and Policy.

The book begins with an overview chapter by respected forensic scholar Kirk Heilbrun. Remaining chapters -- most written by leading practitioners and instrument developers -- review specific instruments for assessing both adult and juvenile risk for violence, including sexual violence. Tools reviewed include:

• EARL-20B and EARL-21G
• SAVRY
• Youth Level of Service/Case Management Inventory
• VRAG, SORAG
• Violence Risk Scale
• HCR-20
• Classification of Violence Risk
• Level of Service Inventory
• Spousal Assault Risk Assessment Guide
• Static-99
• SVR-20 / RSVP

I am impressed with what I have read so far. John Monahan wrote the chapter on the Classification of Violence Risk. David DeMatteo, John Edens, and Allison Hart have a nice chapter on the utility -- and limitations -- of using psychopathy measures to address violence risk. And Stephen Hart and Douglas Boer provide an up-to-the-minute summary of reliability and validity studies on the SVR-20 and a parallel instrument sex offender risk instrument, the Risk for Sexual Violence Protocol (RSVP), which I predict may overtake the Static-99 at some point, given the latter's instability and atheoretical basis.

My Amazon review is HERE.

Excellent overview of insanity evaluations

I just finished Ira Packer's new book, Evaluation of Criminal Responsibility, from the Best Practices in Forensic Mental Health Assessment series. I found it to be an excellent summary manual, and affordably priced to boot. Here is the start of my review; click HERE for the full review:

This crisply written manual provides a balanced summary of the case law, empirical research, and developing practice standards for conducting insanity evaluations. Ira Packer, an award-winning scholar and long-time leader in the field of forensic psychology, brings a wealth of wisdom and experience to this topic. His discussions of controversial topics, such as whether to provide an “ultimate issue” opinion and how to approach the possibility of malingering, are especially balanced and nuanced.

Criminal responsibility evaluations are difficult endeavors both because of their retrospective nature, and also because we can never know for sure what was going on in someone else’s head, especially when that person may have understandable reasons to distort....

My full review is HERE. (Please be sure to click on "yes" if you find the review helpful; that boosts my Amazon ranking.)

What is a gang?

A group of violent thugs? A social club? Troubled, homeless losers who are "hard to love"?

And what is gang membership? Is it a fixed identity, or something fluid, which urban youngsters claim or don't claim according to external circumstances and the flow of their lives?

How can we explain why, even in the roughest neighborhoods, at most 10 percent of youths belong to street gangs? Who are the other nine out of ten, and how do they negotiate survival without affiliation?

For answers to these complex questions, and more, I recommend a new book from New York University Press, Who You Claim, written by John Jay College of Criminal Justice sociology professor Robert Garot based on ethnographic researcher at a continuation school in Southern Calfornia.

Garot's nuanced analysis is a refreshing antidote to the kind of simplistic categorization that we see in corrections and in forensic practice, where young people being processed through the system are treated as if the label of gang member explains everything that we need to know about them.

His bottom-line message: Beware reifying gangs as fixed and essential components of identity, when even their members do not see them as such. As urban centers create increasingly fluid possibilities for identity -- exemplified by Polish-Brazilian and Mexican-Korean cuisines -- identity is becoming much more malleable and flexible than such a narrow and pejorative focus would lead us to believe.

My complete review, at Amazon, is HERE.

The "juvenile sex offender": Myth in the making?

Book describes harmful effects of labeling and treatment

In the past 30 years, a vast cottage industry has sprung up to treat and warehouse juvenile sex offenders. Whereas in 1982 the United States had 20 programs to treat such youths, by 2002 that number had skyrocketed to upwards of 1,300 specialized programs, most of them private, for-profit residential centers. What is especially startling about the continuing expansion of this fledgling industry is that rates of serious offending, including sex offending, by juveniles is staying steady or even declining.

In The Perversion of Youth, forensic psychologist Frank DiCataldo says this new field may be harming both youth and society, by labeling typical delinquents as sexual monsters and thereby forcing them down a deviant path from which there is little hope of escape. In other words, our very process of labeling and treatment may breathe life into the bogeyman of our cultural imagination.

Like many failed social experiments, this one is driven by good intentions. But its underlying premises are based not on scientific evidence but on misguided faith and lore. DiCataldo, a psychology professor at Roger Williams University, meticulously presents the empirical evidence suggesting that the "juvenile sex offender" is not a natural category distinct from other delinquents. Rather, youths so labeled are typical delinquents whose offending happens to include a sex offense. And their sex offenses stem not from sexual deviance, but from a panoply of developmental factors, including sexual experimentation, thrill-seeking, poor social skills, emotional neediness, and rigid gender scripts that encourage sexual conquest as proof of masculinity.

In the past, many of the so-called sex offenses for which even young children are now being locked up and subjected to treatment would have been regarded as sex play, experimentation, or -- more seriously -- evidence of general criminality. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the natural course is for youths to mature out of sexual misconduct and other delinquency as they become adults, the data show.

Since only a tiny handful of youths who commit a sex offense are budding sexual deviants, the dominant treatment -- a one-size-fits-all, deviancy focused relapse prevention model -- is not helpful. In fact, by labeling normal adolescent boys as deviants, it may be very harmful, encouraging them to see themselves as the very monsters that the label makes them out to be.

DiCataldo is not peering down from an ivory tower. Long-time director of the Forensic Evaluation Service for the Massachusetts Department of Youth Services, he devotes special attention to the practices in the treatment trenches. Instead of taking the time to really see the individual adolescent for who he is, well-intentioned but dogmatic clinicians administer manualized treatment based on a “mind-boggling” array of unsupported global beliefs:

All adolescents who have committed an inappropriate sex act must receive this particular form of treatment; all juvenile sex offenders have a history of sexual victimization, and if you look deep enough, you will find it; adolescents must admit that their sexual abuse was traumatic and damaging; their denial must be broken down with persistent in-your-face confrontation; they must admit to deviant fantasies or hidden perversions and are provided fantasy logs in which to record them; … they must make their offense fit a stock, prefabricated dynamic involving the need for power and control or the presence of perversion or deviancy; they must face the fact that they have an incurable condition, like a chronic disease….

Ironically, he points out, the only empirically supported treatment for juvenile sex offenders, Multisystemic Treatment (MST), does not endorse these unproven tenets. Indeed, it does not even directly address sexual deviancy, instead focusing on client strengths and environmental supports in the family and community.

Like the misguided treatment programs, efforts to design instruments that will accurately predict which juvenile will go on to reoffend are also doomed to failure. It is not the fault of the instruments themselves, the author contends. Rather, because the base rates of sexual recidivism are so low (an estimated 5% to 15% across many studies), the most reliable prediction for any individual boy is that he will NOT commit a future sex offense.

In warning of the siren call of the sex offender narrative, DiCataldo echoes scholars such as James Kincaid and Philip Jenkins who have written about its alluring promise to simplify simplify the world and safely contain its dangers. But unlike in previous historical cycles of moral panic and sexual hysteria, he points out, this time around the pathologizing discourse of deviance is more securely embedded in systems such as the schools and the juvenile justice system. The ever-expanding and lucrative cottage industry devoted to juvenile sex offending has so firmly entrenched itself as a part of modern culture that, absent some serious attention to the lack of underlying science, it is unlikely to fade away anytime soon.

The author could have benefited from a good editor, as the presentation becomes repetitive. Still, in meticulously summarizing virtually all of the existing research and case law pertaining to juvenile sex offending, this well-researched book is an essential one-stop resource for anyone interested in understanding the contemporary phenomenon of juvenile sex offending.

So, here's a modest idea:

In recent years, a small-scale civil rights movement has emerged among mental patients, former mental patients, and their allies. One of their aims is to remove mental illness as the core construct of a person's identity. As such, they recommend not using terms such as "schizophrenic" as nouns to describe a person. Rather than calling someone "a schizophrenic," they would say: "A person with schizophrenia" or, even better, "a woman who has had some bouts of psychosis." I would love to see this applied in the sex offender field. Instead of calling a child "a juvenile sex offender," why not call him "a 15-year-old who engaged in sexual misconduct" or "a boy with a sex offense arrest"? As DiCataldo so thoroughly explains, within the current legal and treatment climate, the mere act of labeling a child as "A SEX OFFENDER" can effectively derail that person's life, potentially forever.

* * * * *

And, finally, I leave you with a related book recommendation:

The Trauma Myth, by Susan Clancy. The New York Times book review is HERE.

Related Amazon book reviews:

• Failure to Protect: America's Sexual Predator Laws and the Rise of the Preventive State

• Evaluation of Sexually Violent Predators (Best Practices for Forensic Mental Health Assessment)

• Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

• Rape and the Culture of the Courtroom
  

• Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness

Photo credit: SOL Research