“In the Dark” shines brilliant light on bungled Jacob Wetterling case

Long-dormant case spawned today's sex offender registries. But would these laws have made a difference? 

Twenty-seven years ago, a perfect storm struck a small town in central Minnesota, when a stranger jumped out of the shadows and snatched an 11-year-old boy out bicycle-riding with friends.

It was the rarest of crimes. But the Oct. 22, 1989 abduction of Jacob Wetterling struck at a pivotal moment in U.S. history, igniting a conflagration that still burns today. Stranger-danger hysteria was sweeping the nation. Day care providers were being rounded up and accused of Satanic ritual abuse of children. And in that potent milieu, an unprecedented national manhunt came up empty.

Embarrassed by their failure, law enforcement spokesmen claimed they were hamstrung by lax tracking of known sex offenders. Jacob’s distraught mother, Patty Wetterling, led a successful crusade that culminated in the Wetterling Act of 1994, requiring all U.S. states to collect and publicly disseminate information on convicted sex offenders.

But 27 years later, with an estimated 850,000 Americans on public sex offender databases, Patty Wetterling is no longer enamored of the opportunistic missing-child movement and its crass media stars, who used her to promote their own agendas. In an interview with award-winning investigative reporter Madeleine Baran, she said she regrets her role in creating a public registry that is counterproductive, in shaming and ostracizing individuals rather than helping them reintegrate into society.

That interview is just one of many remarkable segments in the serial In the Dark, a nine-part podcast from American Public Media that forces us to rethink everything we thought we knew about both the Wetterling abduction and the broader landscape of how police investigate serious crimes.

Danny Heinrich today and sketch of abductor in 1989

Coincidentally, Episode One of the meticulously researched series was just set to premiere when police announced last month that they had finally cracked the case. Daniel Heinrich, who lived about half an hour down the road from his victim, had confessed and led police to Jacob’s remains, in exchange for a plea deal in an unrelated child pornography case and an admission that he abducted and assaulted another boy nine months before killing Jacob.

Baran set out to answer the question of why it took the local police more than a quarter of a century to catch a small-town pervert who was right under their noses the whole time. But in the process, she learned something far more troubling: that police across the country lack any meaningful oversight, and inept agencies with crime-solving rates as low as zero percent face no accountability.

Baran reached this shocking conclusion after more than nine months of painstaking digging. In a monument to investigative reporting, she and her colleagues delved deep into archival records, conducted contemporary interviews with dozens of witnesses and experts, and reconstructed events to determine what went wrong.

What Baran found was missteps at every turn. Police didn’t thoroughly canvass the neighborhood immediately after the crime. They glossed over a rash of stranger molests of preteen boys in the nearby hamlet of Paynesville where killer Danny Heinrich – already known to police – resided. Ultimately, in the type of tunnel vision that we see all too often in cases of wrongful conviction, they set their sights on the wrong guy altogether, a quirky local music teacher, and hunkered down to build a case against him – destroying his life in the process.

Diving deeper, Baran found more systemic problems.

At the time of Jacob’s abduction, the media portrayed Stearns County, Minnesota, as an idyllic place where crimes like this didn’t happen: indeed, went the narrative, that’s why the local sheriff’s department was caught off guard.

But that wasn’t true. The Stearns County Sheriff’s Department had investigated crimes even more heinous, and had botched it every time.

There was the case of the Reker sisters, ages 12 and 15, who disappeared one day in 1974. Police shrugged it off as girls on a lark, until the bodies were found in a quarry a month later with multiple stab wounds. The case was never solved. And there was the mass murder of a woman and three children, shotgunned to death in their beds in 1978. Police questioned the killer, Joseph Ture, but released him to wreak carnage across Minnesota; he ended up raping numerous women and killing at least two before he was finally apprehended by Minneapolis police.

Baran’s delivery is masterful. In a pleasant and measured cadence, she methodically weaves together the micro strands of the flawed Wetterling investigation with the macro threads of an entire police system gone wrong, to create an eye-opening tapestry with profound implications for all Americans.

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It’s hard not to be dubious about the prospects for any expose, even the most brilliant, to produce genuine systemic change. On the other hand, there is no question that podcasts can change the fates of those lucky few whom they spotlight.

Take Adnan Syed. Many will remember the viral popularity of Serial's debut season in 2014, with host Sarah Koenig recounting Syed's prosecution in the killing of his former high school girlfriend. Syed’s conviction was subsequently overturned and he was granted a new trial, much to the dismay of Maryland state attorneys, who are protesting that the appeal is "meritless" and a product of "sensationalized attention" that gave a legitimately convicted murderer the status of international superstar.

That was certainly the case for convicted killer Steven Avery after Netflix’s Making a Murderer, which spawned a large and vocal fan base insisting that he is innocent despite substantial evidence to the contrary. As I noted in my critical review of that spectacle, by cherry-picking which facts to air, a producer can energize an ignorant populism fueled by illusory knowledge. 

So, podcasters walk a fine line between educating the public about the realities of the criminal justice system -- as In the Dark does so well -- and pandering to the prurient, devolving into true-crime entertainment spectacles like “48 Hours Mystery." Or worse. The dangers of true-crime populism were perhaps best illustrated by the 2013 murder trial of Jodi Arias, where media corporations intent on audience titillation fomented a digital lynch mob.

Hewing to the educational function is Breakdown, an Atlanta Journal Constitution podcast that unabashedly acknowledges itself as a Serial knockoff. In Season One, “Railroad Justice in a Railroad Town,” reporter Bill Rankin plays on his experience as a senior legal affairs reporter, using the case of a small-town meth-head convicted of arson to illustrate how an underfunded public defense system is set up to fail poor Americans.

Season Two of Breakdown, Death in a Hot Car -- Mistake or Murder?, swings more toward the sensationalist side, presenting the case of a man who was so distracted by his sexting obsession that he left his toddler son strapped into a car seat on a hot June day in Georgia. The boy died. Justin Harris's case is generating major media interest, with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution hosting a dedicated web page with "minute-by-minute updates," and another site live-streaming the trial.

The PTA mom who was framed

Again going for the high road, some reporters are also adapting the popular serial format to the quaint, endangered medium of print journalism. A nice example is the recent L.A. Times series Framed: A Mystery in Six Parts, in which award-winning reporter and author Christopher Goffard tells the fascinating story of a PTA mother who was framed by a high-powered professional couple. Whereas most such series aim to expose justice gone wrong, Framed does the opposite, showcasing a refreshing example of a police investigation that went above and beyond the call of duty to get it right.

As you can see, there’s a lot out there to sample. But if you’ve only got time to check out one podcast series, I recommend In the Dark. It’s the cream of the crop, an edge-of-your-seat thriller and a compelling cautionary tale that deserves the ear of every American.

Spring reading recommendations -- forensic and beyond

Marauding bands of juvenile killers. Gang rapist-kidnappers. Wife beaters.

We’re talking elephants, dolphins and parrots, respectively. That's my forensic psychology angle on Animal Wise, a fascinating new book by nature journalist Virginia Morell.

Not long ago, it was taboo in science circles to claim that animal have minds. But the burgeoning field of animal cognition, having broken out of the strait jacket imposed by 20th-century behaviorism, is now mounting a full-on challenge to the notion of an evolutionary hierarchy with humans at the top. Morell, a science writer for National Geographic and Science magazines, traveled around the world interviewing animal scientists and observing their research projects on everything from architecturally minded rock ants and sniper-like archerfish to brainy birds, laughing rats, grieving elephants, scheming dolphins, loyal dogs, and quick-witted chimpanzees.

She found cutting-edge scientists who not only regard animals as sentient beings, but even refer to their study subjects as trusted colleagues. Professor Tetsuro Matsuzawa in Kyoto, for example, has set up his lab so that when the chimpanzees "come to work" each morning, they enter on elevated catwalks and sit higher than the humans, which makes them feel more comfortable. He cannot understand why humans feel so threatened by his discovery that chimpanzees are capable of holding much more information in immediate memory than can we humans.

"I really do not understand this need for us always to be superior in all domains. Or to be so separate, so unique from ever other animal. We are not. We are not plants; we are members of the animal kingdom." 

 

 

YouTube video of Alex the parrot showing his cognitive skills

Animal researchers are realizing that not only do all animals have individual personalities, but some -such as chimpanzees and dolphins - even develop cultures. This engaging and thought-provoking book can be read on many levels. It is highly informative while also being quite entertaining. But on a deeper level, it probes the moral dimensions of science.

Morell’s 2008 National Geographic article in from which the book grew is HERE. Her Slate article, "What are animals thinking?" is HERE.  My Amazon review (if you are so inclined, click on "yes," this review was helpful) is HERE.


The Signal and the Noise

If you haven't yet read Nate Silver's important The Signal and the Noise, it’s past time to grab a copy. Silver’s analytic method is central to forensic psychology. Best known for his spot-on predictions of U.S. presidential races, Silver argues that accurate predictions are possible in some (limited) contexts -- but only when one learns how to recognize the small amount of signal in an overwhelming sea of noise. And also when one approaches the prediction using Bayes's Theorem. This is one of those engrossing books that really stays with you, and has very practical applications in forensic assessments. I find it especially useful in writing reports. Plus, it helps one understand current events involving prediction, like the story of six Italian scientists being sent to prison for failing to predict a deadly earthquake. (Earthquakes are inherently unpredictable, and Silver explains why.) 

* * * * *

Speaking of forensic report writing, if you want to tune up your own report writing skills, or you are teaching or supervising students, I highly recommend Michael Karson and Lavita Nadkami's book, Principles of Forensic Report Writing, due out at the end of this month. Karson and Nadkami take an innovative and thoughtful approach, helping us to think outside of the box about this essential aspect of our trade.


Other  recommendations

Beyond forensics, here a few other worthwhile books I've read recently:

If American history interests you, check out bestselling author Tony Horwitz's Midnight Rising, about John Brown's ill-fated raid on Harpers Ferry and its role in the abolitionist movement, or Tim Egan's The Big Burn, about the massive fire in the U.S. Northwest that helped change the political landscape and establish the national Forest Service. Both are engrossing and educational; I listened to the audio versions during lengthy road trips.

* * * * *

If you are into dystopic fiction, I recommend Hillary Jordan's When She Woke. In the not-distant future, the government has gone broke, and can no longer afford to maintain its massive prison system. So, instead of incarceration, law-breakers -- in a modern-day riff on The Scarlet Letter -- are dyed bright colors for the length of their sentences. In a globally warmed Texas ruled by Christian fundamentalists, Hannah Payne wakes up bright red, for the crime of aborting her baby. This edge-of-your-seat tale isn't too far-fetched, given current trends, as laws are being passed in Oklahoma and elsewhere to criminalize abortion, and as the public shaming of sex offenders (who in the novel are "melachromed" blue and killed on sight by vigilantes) becomes more and more entrenched.

* * * * *

Finally, I'm just launching into Gary Greenberg's hot-off-the-press book on the DSM, The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry, and I can already tell it's going to be a doozy. More on that soon, time permitting....

Damning reconstruction of notorious false confession case

Here's one from the annals of outrageous true crime cases:

On April 17, 1989, a woman was practicing tai chi in New York's Central Park, when a man sexually assaulted her. The rape was interrupted by a passerby who heard her yelling, but not before the woman was severely beaten to the point of requiring hospitalization. The woman gave police a detailed description of her attacker, including the fact that he had fresh stitches on his chin. Checking local hospitals, a detective found a match to an 18-year-old Puerto Rican man who worked nearby.

Mysteriously, the man was never questioned. The victim left town, the detective was transferred out of the sex crimes unit, and the case was closed as unsolved.

But as it turned out, this wasn't just one more rape in the Big Apple.

The East Side Slasher

The man escalated his attacks, terrorizing women in New York City. Dubbed the "East Side Slasher," he raped at least five other women and murdered one. His pattern was to beat or stab the women around the eyes, so they would not be able to identify him.

He was finally caught, when a woman broke free from him and alerted her doorman and a neighbor, who subdued him. Within hours, he had confessed on videotape to four rapes and the murder. With eyewitness identification and DNA evidence conclusively tying him to the crimes, he took a deal of 33 years to life.

Have you recognized this case yet?

While police knew that Matias Reyes was slashing and raping women around Manhattan's East Side during 1988 and 1989, there was one case they didn't think to link him to. That was the assault on Trisha Meili on April 19, 1989, as she was jogging in Central Park -- an assault that would quickly rivet the world.

Trisha Meili

In hindsight, it seems incomprehensible that Reyes was not a suspect. The crime fit his modus operandi, in that Meili was beaten most heavily around her eyes. The assault occurred just two days after the one on the tai chi practitioner, also in Central Park. And, most amazingly, a police officer who knew Reyes chatted with him as he strolled out of the park just minutes after Meili was raped and left for dead.

On his head, Reyes was wearing the victim’s distinctive headphones.

Reyes left his DNA behind. But police never thought to compare it to him. Not until more than a decade later, after he voluntarily confessed.

As we now know, police failed to consider Reyes as a possible suspect in the infamous Central Park Jogger case because they already had their suspects: A group of African American and Latino boys who were causing trouble in the park that night.

Sarah Burns

Through legal documents and myriad interviews (including with Matias Reyes), author Sarah Burns reconstructs this landmark miscarriage of justice, focusing on the role of racism in generating a collective hysteria that overwhelmed all reason: "Race not only inspired the extreme reactions to the crime; it also made it easier for so many to believe that these five teenaged boys had committed the crime in the first place, and no one was suggesting that they might, in fact, be innocent."

(Actually, a couple of intrepid columnists from New York Newsday, Jim Dwyer and Carol Agus, were expressing public doubts during the trial about the strength of the evidence connecting the youths to the crime, but their voices were not enough to turn the tide of public opinion. "We are waiting to see if there is any believable evidence that will connect these kids to the crime. So far, we haven't heard any," wrote Agus. And when referring to one of the youths' statement to police, both columnists placed quotation marks around the word confession, expressing skpeticism that it was authentic, Burns notes. Wrote columnist Dwyer, "nothing close to the words in this statement ... ever sat on the lips of a 14 and a half year old.")

Burns provides fascinating insights into the investigatory myopia that is so often present in false confession cases. Based on her access to the entire trial transcripts, she also critiques the weak defenses the boys received, which made their convictions all the more guaranteed. And she corrects much of the misleading mythology built up around the case. For instance, these boys were not the serious delinquents that the media portrayed them as, nor did most of them come from broken homes.

The first trial

Perhaps most amazing about this case is the vitriolic manner in which certain media outlets and high-profile people continue to insist that the boys are guilty, despite all evidence to the contrary. I hope this excellent historical reconstruction may help to set the record straight. I'm also looking forward to the documentary, which Burns is now working on with her father, filmmaker Ken Burns.

My Amazon review of The Central Park Five: A Chronicle of a City Wilding, is HERE. (If you like it, please click "yes," this review was helpful.) 

POSTSCRIPT:  You've read (or at least read about) the book; now see the movie. The Central Park Five just premiered at a special screening in Cannes. National broadcast on PBS is planned for 2013 or 2014. Meanwhile, the filmmakers -- who include book author Sarah Burns, her father Ken Burns and David McMahon -- are angling for a theatrical release. The Hollywood Reporter has the Cannes review (HERE).

Martin Luther King Jr. on maladjustment

Last year, in honor of Martin Luther King Day, I excerpted a large portion of a keynote speech the visionary civil rights leader delivered at the 1967 convention of the American Psychological Association, just seven months before he was gunned down and at a time when he was drawing larger connections between racial oppression and the Vietnam War. This year, I am excerpting only one short section, but I have made the entire speech, "The Role of the Behavioral Scientist in the Civil Rights Movement," available for download (HERE). It's 45 years old, but still remarkably relevant today.

There are certain technical words in every academic discipline which soon become stereotypes and even clichés. Every academic discipline has its technical nomenclature. You who are in the field of psychology have given us a great word. It is the word maladjusted. This word is probably used more than any other word in psychology. It is a good word; certainly it is good that in dealing with what the word implies you are declaring that destructive maladjustment should be destroyed. You are saying that all must seek the well-adjusted life in order to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities.

But on the other hand, I am sure that we will recognize that there are some things in our society, some things in our world, to which we should never be adjusted. There are some things concerning which we must always be maladjusted if we are to be people of good will. We must never adjust ourselves to racial discrimination and racial segregation. We must never adjust ourselves to religious bigotry. We must never adjust ourselves to economic conditions that take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. We must never adjust ourselves to the madness of militarism, and the self-defeating effects of physical violence....

Thus, it may well be that our world is in dire need of a new organization, The International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment. Men and women should be as maladjusted as the prophet Amos, who in the midst of the injustices of his day, could cry out in words that echo across the centuries, 'Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream'; or as maladjusted as Abraham Lincoln, who in the midst of his vacillations finally came to see that this nation could not survive half slave and half free; or as maladjusted as Thomas Jefferson, who in the midst of an age amazingly adjusted to slavery, could scratch across the pages of history, words lifted to cosmic proportions, 'We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. And that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.' And through such creative maladjustment, we may be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man, into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.

I have not lost hope. I must confess that these have been very difficult days for me personally. And these have been difficult days for every civil rights leader, for every lover of justice and peace.

Predicting behavior: The case of the missing militant

There is an oft-repeated axiom in our field that the most reliable predictor of future behavior is what a person has done in the past.

But is this axiom valid?

Let's take the example of Ronald Stanley Bridgeforth, featured on America's Most Wanted.

Forty-three years ago, while being detained on suspicion of trying to buy merchandise with a stolen credit card, the 24-year-old Black militant pulled out a revolver and shot at police. He jumped bail and, three years later, became a suspect in the killing of a police sergeant during an armed invasion of a police station in San Francisco.

Would this information lead you to predict that he was likely to engage in more violence in the future?

If so, you would be wrong.

Bridgeforth vanished from the radar screen, and eventually police figured he might have died. But the former community activist was far from dead. After fleeing to Africa, he moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, married, and raised two sons. Under the assumed name of Cole Jordan, he worked as a janitor, earned a bachelor’s degree from Wayne State University and a master's degree in counseling from Eastern Michigan University, became a licensed professional counselor, and eventually worked his way up to the rank of a full-time faculty member at Washtenaw Community College.

Bridgeforth with attorney Paul Harris (L) and wife Diane (R)

Last week, Bridgeforth finally turned himself in. Authorities were not closing in, but he had a troubled conscience. He plans to plead guilty in the assault case, in which he faces a maximum of five years in prison. Prosecutors announced they will not prosecute him in the infamous murder of Sgt. John Young at San Francisco's Ingleside Station on Aug. 29, 1971. That case unraveled two years ago in part due to allegations (aired in a documentary, Legacy of Torture) that police used torture with electric shock, cattle prods, beatings, sensory deprivation and asphyxiation to obtain confessions from three of the nine suspects.

One might argue that Bridgeforth is an exception to the rule. Only, he's not. Time and again, we hear about a long-time fugitive who lived a quiet life, surrounded by friends and co-workers who had no clue about his or her violent past.

David Gonzales, William Walter Asher III, Katherine Ann Power, Claude Daniel Marks and Donna Jean Willmott, to name just a few.

These cases are testament to the weak validity of the axiom that past behavior is a good predictor of the future. There are several flaws with the theory, among them:

• The base rate: Most serious crimes have a low base rate of recidivism. That makes us most likely to be correct if we predict that the behavior will NOT reoccur. For example, because of the base rate of rearrest for murder, we would be wrong in the broad majority of cases if we predicted that someone who has killed once will most likely kill again. The same is true for sexual offending. In one recent study, 95 out of 100 people arrested on sex charges had no prior sex crimes; an inordinate focus on the five percent lends an illusion of a higher base rate of reoffending than the evidence warrants.

• Desistance: A second major problem with static predictions is that people change. In fact, even hard-core criminals almost universally desist from crime as they age. This holds true across all eras and cultures. As scholars Shadd Maruna and Laub and Sampson have shown, crime is mainly a young man's game. As they age, offenders settle down and become less impulsive. Or, they simply burn out.

• Environmental context: The axiom of past as prelude also ignores the circumstances that contribute to offending. Criminologists have long known about the critical importance of context. For example, peer influence is critical to crime by adolescents and young adults, who have the highest rates of offending. Lifestyle circumstances that can -- and often do -- change over time influence other types of crimes as well, such as robberies and drug offenses. For Bridgeforth and others of the 1960s-1970s era, the context was a militant revolutionary movement that swept up many idealistic young people.

• Unproven allegations: The Bridgeforth case also highlights the problem of relying on allegations of past misconduct that may not be reliable. Bridgeforth has denied the charge that he was the getaway car driver in the San Francisco police killing, and now prosecutors have chosen not to prosecute him.   

Ultimately, the past-as-prelude axiom may hold better for some behaviors than others. Perhaps it is more reliable when predicting scripted or compulsive acts that a person engages in with high frequency over a lengthy period of time. However, it is less reliable when applied to context-influenced behaviors with low base rates of reoccurrence.

And never should we ignore the influence of aging. Bridgeforth is not the same man at 67 as he was at 24. Think back to your own adolescence or early adulthood; are you the same person now as you were then?

The viewpoint that past is prelude is fundamentally pessimistic, leaving little room to acknowledge that human beings are highly adaptive, and often capable of learning from mistakes and changing our lives.

MLK to psychologists: We need creative maladjustment

In honor of today's holiday, I am excerpting portions of a speech by Martin Luther King Jr. to psychologists, which remains prophetically relevant to our field today. I have made the entire speech, "The Role of the Behavioral Scientist in the Civil Rights Movement," available for download (HERE).

... For social scientists, the opportunity to serve in a life-giving purpose is a humanist challenge of rare distinction.... Social scientists, in the main, are fortunate to be able to extirpate evil, not to invent it....

On crime and urban violence

After some years of Negro-white unity and partial success, white America shifted gears and went into reverse. Negroes, alive with hope and enthusiasm, ran into sharply stiffened white resistance at all levels and bitter tensions broke out in sporadic episodes of violence. New lines of hostility were drawn and the era of good feeling disappeared....

Science should have been employed more fully to warn us that the Negro, after 350 years of handicaps, mired in an intricate network of contemporary barriers, could not be ushered into equality by tentative and superficial changes.... Negroes could contain their rage when they found the means to force relatively radical changes in their environment. [But] without a more effective tactic for upsetting the status quo, the power structure could maintain its intransigence and hostility. Into the vacuum of inaction, violence and riots flowed and a new period opened....

Urban riots ... are a distorted form of social protest. The looting which is their principal feature serves many functions. It enables the most enraged and deprived Negro to take hold of consumer goods with the ease the white man does by using his purse. Often the Negro does not even want what he takes; he wants the experience of taking. But most of all, alienated from society and knowing that this society cherishes property above people, he is shocking it by abusing property rights. There are thus elements of emotional catharsis in the violent act....

The policymakers of the white society have caused the darkness; they create discrimination; they structured slums; and they perpetuate unemployment, ignorance and poverty. It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society. When we ask Negroes to abide by the law, let us also demand that the white man abide by law in the ghettos. Day-in and day-out he violates welfare laws to deprive the poor of their meager allotments; he flagrantly violates building codes and regulations; his police make a mockery of law; and he violates laws on equal employment and education and the provisions for civic services. The slums are the handiwork of a vicious system of the white society; Negroes live in them but do not make them any more than a prisoner makes a prison. Let us say boldly that if the violations of law by the white man in the slums over the years were calculated and compared with the law-breaking of a few days of riots, the hardened criminal would be the white man....

The unemployment of Negro youth ranges up to 40 percent in some slums. The riots are almost entirely youth events--the age range of participants is from 13 to 25. What hypocrisy it is to talk of saving the new generation--to make it the generation of hope--while consigning it to unemployment and provoking it to violent alternatives.

When our nation was bankrupt in the '30s we created an agency to provide jobs to all at their existing level of skill. In our overwhelming affluence today what excuse is there for not setting up a national agency for full employment immediately?

... These are often difficult things to say but I have come to see more and more that it is necessary to utter the truth in order to deal with the great problems that we face in our society....

On taking a stand

There are those who tell me that I should stick with civil rights, and stay in my place. I can only respond that I have fought too hard and long to end segregated public accommodations to segregate my own moral concerns. It is my deep conviction that justice is indivisible, that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere....

On some positions cowardice asks the question, 'Is it safe?!' Expediency asks the question, 'Is it politic?' Vanity asks the question, 'Is it popular?' But conscience must ask the question, 'Is it right?!' And there comes a time when one must take a stand that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular. But one must take it because it is right....

On the role of the social scientist

Negroes have been oppressed for centuries not merely by bonds of economic and political servitude. The worst aspect of their oppression was their inability to question and defy the fundamental precepts of the larger society. Negroes have been loathe in the past to hurl any fundamental challenges because they were coerced and conditioned into thinking within the context of the dominant white ideology.... For the first time in their history, Negroes have become aware of the deeper causes for the crudity and cruelty that governed white society's responses to their needs. They discovered that their plight was not a consequence of superficial prejudice but was systemic.

The slashing blows of backlash and frontlash have hurt the Negro, but they have also awakened him and revealed the nature of the oppressor. To lose illusions is to gain truth. Negroes have grown wiser and more mature and they are hearing more clearly those who are raising fundamental questions about our society whether the critics be Negro or white. When this process of awareness and independence crystallizes, every rebuke, every evasion, become hammer blows on the wedge that splits the Negro from the larger society.

Social science is needed to explain where this development is going to take us. Are we moving away, not from integration, but from the society which made it a problem in the first place? How deep and at what rate of speed is this process occurring? These are some vital questions to be answered if we are to have a clear sense of our direction....

The problem is deep. It is gigantic in extent, and chaotic in detail. And I do not believe that it will be solved until there is a kind of cosmic discontent enlarging in the bosoms of people of good will all over this nation....

On creative maladjustment

There are certain technical words in every academic discipline which soon become stereotypes and even clichés. Every academic discipline has its technical nomenclature. You who are in the field of psychology have given us a great word. It is the word maladjusted. This word is probably used more than any other word in psychology. It is a good word; certainly it is good that in dealing with what the word implies you are declaring that destructive maladjustment should be destroyed. You are saying that all must seek the well-adjusted life in order to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities.

But on the other hand, I am sure that we will recognize that there are some things in our society, some things in our world, to which we should never be adjusted. There are some things concerning which we must always be maladjusted if we are to be people of good will. We must never adjust ourselves to racial discrimination and racial segregation. We must never adjust ourselves to religious bigotry. We must never adjust ourselves to economic conditions that take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. We must never adjust ourselves to the madness of militarism, and the self-defeating effects of physical violence.

In a day when Sputniks, Explorers and Geminies are dashing through outer space, when guided ballistic missiles are carving highways of death through the stratosphere, no nation can finally win a war. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence, it is either nonviolence or nonexistence. As President Kennedy declared, 'Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.' And so the alternative to disarmament, the alternative to a suspension in the development and use of nuclear weapons, the alternative to strengthening the United Nations and eventually disarming the whole world, may well be a civilization plunged into the abyss of annihilation. Our earthly habitat will be transformed into an inferno that even Dante could not envision.

Thus, it may well be that our world is in dire need of a new organization, The International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment. Men and women should be as maladjusted as the prophet Amos, who in the midst of the injustices of his day, could cry out in words that echo across the centuries, 'Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream'; or as maladjusted as Abraham Lincoln, who in the midst of his vacillations finally came to see that this nation could not survive half slave and half free; or as maladjusted as Thomas Jefferson, who in the midst of an age amazingly adjusted to slavery, could scratch across the pages of history, words lifted to cosmic proportions, 'We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. And that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.' And through such creative maladjustment, we may be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man, into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.

I have not lost hope. I must confess that these have been very difficult days for me personally. And these have been difficult days for every civil rights leader, for every lover of justice and peace.

King was assassinated seven months after giving this speech at the American Psychological Association's 1967 convention.

Blast from the past: "Sex offender myths"

Amidst all the hysteria over sex offending these days, stumbling across this list from 1955 gave me an eerie sense of deja vu. The author, a prominent sociologist, wrote his list of 11 "popular myths about the sex offender" during the zenith of the last sex panic, the Sexual Psychopath Era of the 1930s-1950s. Here are his myths*:

1. That tens of thousands of homosexual sex offenders stalk the land.
2. That the victims of sex attack are 'ruined for life.'
3. That sex offenders are usually recidivists.
4. That the minor sex offenders, if unchecked, progress to more serious types of crime.
5. That it is possible to predict the danger of serious crimes by sexual deviance.
6. That 'sex psychopathy' or sex deviation is a clinical entity.
7. That these individuals are lustful and oversexed.
8. That reasonably effective treatment methods to cure deviant sex offenders are known and employed.
9. That the sex control laws passed recently are getting at the brutal and vicious sex criminal and should be adopted generally to wipe out sex crime.
10. That civil adjudication of the sexual deviant in indeterminate commitment to a mental hospital is similar to our handling of the insane and therefore human liberties and due process are not involved.
11. That the sex problem can be solved merely by passing a new law on it.

As a wise poet and philosopher wrote way back when, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Kind of depressing that many in the sex offender civil commitment industry seem oblivious to 20th century history, in which an almost identical approach was vigorously pursued, only to be abandoned as an abysmal failure.

*Paul W. Tappan was a prominent sociology professor at New York University, an attorney, and a consultant to the New Jersey Commission on the Habitual Sex Offender. He published widely on criminology and corrections topics during the 1940s-1960s. "Some myths about the sex offender" was published in the June 1955 issue of Federal Probation. Robert Sadoff, a Temple University psychiatrist, republished them in a 1966 article, "Psychiatric views of the Sexual Psychopath statutes."