Psychopathy controversy goes primetime

More than a million people worldwide will get a chance to learn about psychology's internal controversy over psychopathy tomorrow, when Science publishes an article on the censorship allegations that I blogged about May 30.

Perhaps not coincidentally, just as the June 11 issue of the world's leading scientific news outlet hits the presses, the American Psychological Association is suddenly publishing the disputed article that was siderailed for more than three years.

Forensic psychologists Jennifer Skeem and David Cooke submitted the contested article to Psychological Assessment in 2006. It was peer reviewed, accepted, and scheduled for publication in 2007, but was derailed after Robert Hare, inventor of the Psychopathy Checklist (PCL), threatened to sue for defamation.

As you will remember from my previous blog post, the controversy surfaced in an opinion piece last month in the International Journal of Forensic Mental Health by two psychology-law leaders.

"[T]he threat of litigation constitutes a serious threat to academic freedom and potentially to scientific progress," wrote attorney John Petrila and psychologist Norman Poythress. "Academic freedom rests on the premise that advances in science can only occur if scholars are permitted to pursue free competition among ideas. This assumes that scholars have the liberty to do their work free from limitations imposed by political or religious pressure or by economic reprisals."

Hare now says he is "upset colleagues are suggesting he squelched academic debate," Science writer John Tavris reports, as his "lawsuit threat was meant only to get the 'attention' of APA, Skeem, and Cooke and force changes to the article."

The Science report is a sidebar to a larger piece on reform efforts over plaintiff-friendly libel laws in the United Kingdom. That country's laws, in which the defendant bears the burden of proof, are under fire from around the world over their allegedly chilling effect on scientific research on controversial topics. Critics say they encourage "libel tourism," in which corporations sue there over alleged offenses that occurred elsewhere.

PCL-R reification hampering science

The contested article by Skeem and Cooke, "Is Criminal Behavior a Central Component of Psychopathy? Conceptual Directions for Resolving the Debate," posits that the field of forensic psychology has prematurely embraced Hare's Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) as the gold standard for psychopathy, due in large part to legal demands for a tool to predict violence. Yet the PCL-R's ability to predict violent recidivism owes in large part to its conflation of the supposed personality construct of psychopathy with past criminal behavior, they argue:

[T]he modern justice context has created a strong demand for identifying bad, dangerous people…. [The] link between the PCL and violence has supported a myth that emotionally detached psychopaths callously use violence to achieve control over and exploit others. As far as the PCL is concerned, this notion rests on virtually no empirical support…. [T]he process of understanding psychopathy must be separated from the enterprise of predicting violence.

Criminal behavior weighs heavily in the PCL's 20 items because the instrument emerged from research with prisoners. But using the PCL-R's consequent ability to predict violence to assert the theoretical validity of its underlying personality construct is a tautological, or circular, argument, claim Skeem and Cooke. Or, as John Ellard put it more directly back in 1998:

"Why has this man done these terrible things? Because he is a psychopath. And how do you know that he is a psychopath? Because he has done these terrible things."

Rebuttal and response

Alongside the critique, Psychological Assessment has published a rebuttal by Robert Hare and Craig Neumann, along with a surrebuttal by Cooke and Skeem. Hare and Neumann accuse the critics of erecting a straw-man argument and misrepresenting their work:

The very title of their article is a straw man based on the unfounded claim that Hare and his colleagues consider criminality to be central or fundamental to the psychopathy construct. Their claim is bolstered by arguments misconstruing our published work and that of others and by quotes of our work that have been taken out of context or reconstructed in such a way that it appears that we have said something that we did not say. Skeem and Cooke also made highly selective use of the literature, often omitting published studies that directly contradict or do not support the points they attempted to make, particularly with respect to the role of antisocial tendencies in clinical and empirical conceptions of psychopathy. These tactics are inconsistent with their tutorial on the philosophy of science, compromise their arguments, and divert attention from any legitimate issues raised in their article. We contend that Skeem and Cooke did the field a disservice by presenting an inaccurate account of the role of the PCL–R in theory and research on psychopathy, both applied and basic.

I encourage readers to analyze all three papers, along with the two reports in Science, and draw your own conclusions.

• My original post on the controversy is HERE; a brief followup is HERE.
• Science writer John Travis' blog post on the story, in Science Insider (with more links), is HERE.
• Coverage at Mind Hacks is HERE.
• For more background and links on the UK libel law reform campaign, see my March 27 post, "Lie detection critic silenced by lawsuit."
  

The current issue of Psychological Assessment contains another article pertaining to the controversial psychopathy construct. In their abstract of "Validity of Rorschach Inkblot scores for discriminating psychopaths from nonpsychopaths in forensic populations: A meta-analysis," authors James Wood, Scott Lilienfeld and colleagues assert:

Gacono and Meloy (2009) have concluded that the Rorschach Inkblot Test is a sensitive instrument with which to discriminate psychopaths from nonpsychopaths. We examined the association of psychopathy with 37 Rorschach variables in a meta-analytic review of 173 validity coefficients derived from 22 studies comprising 780 forensic participants…. The present findings contradict the view that the Rorschach is a clinically sensitive instrument for discriminating psychopaths from nonpsychopaths.

Canada: Parent complaints deterring custody evaluators

Speaking of censorship...

Fear of complaints by disgruntled parents is deterring professionals from working in the child custody arena, creating a "major social and legal problem," according to a group of lawyers and forensic evaluators in Canada. The group is urging the Canadian government to change the law in order to restrict disciplinary complaints.

A plea signed by 11 psychologists, psychiatrists, lawyers and social workers “urges changing the rules so disciplinary bodies can only consider complaints from such parents if they have been first approved by the judge in the case or by the other, winning parent, or have been screened to weed out frivolous grievances,” according to an article in the National Post. As reporter Tom Blackwell explains it:

Experts are appointed jointly in custody cases to interview, observe and sometime conduct psychological testing on family members to help determine who is best able to care for the children of divorces. The work can take months and cost the parties up to $75,000. The lobby group is not looking to gain "immunity" for assessors from disciplinary charges, only to curb the high number of spurious complaints, said Nick Bala, a Queen's University law professor.

Hat tip: Ken Pope

Study: Actuarials fail to predict sexually violent recidivism

In a new prospective study out of Austria, none of the actuarial instruments commonly used to predict sex offender recidivism were able to predict sexually violent recidivism among a group of sex offenders released from prison after treatment.

The interesting study, just published in the International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, was designed to validate German versions of commonly used actuarial tools, including the Static-99, RRASOR, SORAG, and SVR-20. It followed about 400 Austrian prisoners for an average of three years in the community.

The main problem obtaining significant results was that recidivism was so rare. Obviously, the less likely an event is to occur, the harder it is to accurately predict. Only seven offenders in the entire sample committed a new hands-on offense during the followup period, and most of those were extrafamilial child molesters. Recidivism base rates were especially low for rapists and incest offenders.

The results echoed findings in two other recent studies in which the actuarials failed to demonstrate good predictive validity for predicting sexually violent reoffending.

Most of the instruments did better when recidivism was defined more broadly, to include all sexual reconviction, even hands-off offenses such as voyeurism or exhibitionism that is not typically defined as sexually violent under civil commitment laws. Even including these lesser offenses, the overall base rate for all sexual recidivism among this sample was still quite low, 4.3% (12% among extrafamilial child molesters, 1.7% among rapists, and about 1% among incest offenders).

When extrafamilial child molesters -- the group most likely to reoffend -- were examined separately, all of the instruments except the RRASOR had some predictive utility, with the SVR-20 doing the best. Still, neither the Static-99 (the most widely used actuarial tool) nor the RRASOR could significantly predict sexually violent reoffenses even for that relatively higher-risk group.

"From the results of these studies and of the present study, the actuarial prediction of some reoffence categories in at least some offender subtypes is less accurate than generally assumed,” the authors concluded. "One major aim of most criminal justice systems is to calculate risk by predicting the probability of severe sexual crimes. This goal obviously is not yet achieved satisfactorily by actuarial risk assessment, because results are far from ideal, especially when time-at-risk periods are relatively short."

An important implication of this study is that evaluators need to consider offender subgroups separately, rather than lumping all types of sex offenders together. Recidivism varies tremendously by type of offender (e.g., rapists versus child molesters) and by how recidivism is defined, with the various instruments doing better at some types of predictions than others. Furthermore, so little outcome research exists on certain groups (such as hands-off offenders, juveniles, the intellectually disabled, and offenders with only adult male victims) that the actuarials may be inappropriate to use at all.

The study is:

Rettenberger, M., Matthes, A., Boer, D.P., & Eher, R. (2010). Prospective Actuarial Risk Assessment: A Comparison of Five Risk Assessment Instruments in Different Sexual Offender Subtypes. International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, 54 , 169-186.

Hat tip: Jeffrey Singer

FURTHER READING: For those of you interested in the actuarials, I also recommend "More prejudicial than probative?," a stastical critique by David J. Cooke, a forensic psychology professor in Glasgow who is an expert scholar and trainer on violence risk assessment. Cooke argues that the actuarials are compelling because they are simple to use by paraprofessionals and have a scientific veneer, but "the scientific basis for actuarial scales, as applied to individuals, may be more illusory than real." The article, in the journal of the Law Society of Scotland, is available online. It also includes useful references to other sources.

Furor over France’s "pornographic" anti-smoking ads

A French anti-smoking campaign comparing smoking to sex slavery is being accused of everything from dissemination of pornography to insensitivity to child sexual abuse victims.

The ads -- set to be published in newspapers and posted in bars -- feature teens smoking cigarettes in such a way that they look like they might be performing oral sex on a man in a suit. The caption reads, "Smoking means being a slave to tobacco."

"Traditional advertisements targeting teens don't affect them. Talking about issues of health, illness or even death, they don't get it," a spokesperson for the Association for Nonsmokers' Rights told AP in explanation. "However, when we talk about submission and dependence, they listen."

The 16-year-old who alerted me to the controversy thought it was quite a hoot. But the family minister of France is not laughing. She is calling for a ban on the ads as "indecent exposure" and "an affront on public decency." Likewise, a child welfare group called the ads cruel and insensitive toward young child abuse victims. Tobacco company representatives are also incensed at being compared to pedophiles. "It's no longer prevention, but out of place provocation," one tobacco association said on its web site.

Ironically, the advance uproar is giving the anti-smoking campaign so much publicity that it will make the formal ad campaign unnecessary.

Hat tip: Greg

UK may end controversial "dangerous and severe personality disorder" program

In what could signal a seismic shift against civil commitment based on pretextual mental disorder, England is rumored to be considering an end to its controversial "Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder" (DSPD) program.

The program was launched in 1999 and has so far cost an estimated 200 million pounds (more than $300 million USD), with little evidence of efficacy in identifying dangerous criminals or curbing violent crime. The four DSPD units -- two at Broadmoor and Rampton high security hospitals and two at Whitemoor and Frankland prisons -- house about 300 offenders. Critics say the label Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder is a political invention, not a true psychiatric disorder.

According to an exclusive report by London's independent Channel 4 News, the Ministry of Justice is considering a halt to the program based in part on a report that concludes that the program "has been largely ineffective and should now be abandoned." The report, co-authored by former government advisor Peter Tyrer, is under review for the journal Medicine, Science and The Law, published by the British Academy of Forensic Sciences.

The report follows on the heels of another critical analysis that I recently blogged about, due to be published in the International Journal of Law & Psychiatry. That study, "Dangerous and severe personality disorder: An investigation of the construct," by authors Ullrich, Yang, and Coid, found a very high rate of false positives -- that is, people categorized as DSPD and at high risk of serious reoffending when they actually did not reoffend when tracked in the community.

Ullrich and colleagues found that 26 DSPD offenders would need to be civilly committed to prevent one major violent act. In regard to sex crimes, the researchers found that most were committed by offenders who were NOT categorized as DSPD, undermining the UK Home Office and Department of Health assumption that offenders at the highest risk for future sex offending would be categorized as DSPD.

If Britain does indeed eliminate the DSPD program, it will be a major blow for those who advocate for civil commitment as a viable means of increasing public safety. Not only is it exorbitantly expensive, but also the civil liberties implications of wrongfully detaining people who are not truly dangerous based on unreliable prediction tools are ominous.

It will also be a blow against the creation of dubious new diagnoses to justify civil commitment on the grounds of purported mental disorder, as is being done here in the United States.

Finally, this scientific setback may also help to discourage those who seek to extend civil commitment to other populations, such as juveniles.

Bank account: A simple solution to crime?

Ever thought about how hard it would be to take care of basic business without a bank account or credit cards?

In the UK, an experimental project to open bank accounts for paroling prisoners has led to a remarkable finding: The ex-cons who got bank accounts were only half as likely as other parolees to reoffend.

And here's another remarkable finding: Four out of five of these guys had never had a bank account before.

What's the magic of banking?

The magic lies in being treated like a human being, says prison correspondent Eric Allison (himself an ex-prisoner) in today's Guardian of UK:

Some things are so blindingly obvious, their very dazzle prevents us from seeing them; of course having a bank account will go a long towards preventing reoffending; try getting a job, or accommodation, without one…. Prison service and the public take note, the more you do to integrate prisoners back into society, the less likely they are to reoffend. Treat those leaving our jails as normal human beings and you may be pleasantly surprised by the results.

Allison quotes a couple of prisoners saying pretty much that:

• "Having an account gave me a sense of self-respect, made me feel part of society."

• "It [the account] opened many doors and gave me a sense of identity."

Of course, science-minded readers will recognize that correlation does not equal causation. Perhaps there was some type of selection bias. Maybe prisoners motivated to "go straight" were more interested in bank accounts.

Nonetheless, just like restoring prisoners' right to vote, it is a pretty low-cost measure considering the potential benefits.

More information on the study is available from the Research Unit for Financial Inclusion at Liverpool John Moores University. Other interested articles on prison issues in the UK by Eric Allison are here.

Hat tip: Robert Forde

The Polanski debacle: Polish schizophrenia?

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New York Times reports on Czech castration furor

Last month, I reported on the controversy in Europe over Czechoslovakia's castration of convicted sex offenders. Yesterday, the New York Times ran a feature report, excerpted here:

... Whether castration can help rehabilitate violent sex offenders has come under new scrutiny after the Council of Europe’s anti-torture committee last month called surgical castration “invasive, irreversible and mutilating” and demanded that the Czech Republic stop offering the procedure to violent sex offenders. Other critics said that castration threatened to lead society down a dangerous road toward eugenics.

The Czech Republic has allowed at least 94 prisoners over the past decade to be surgically castrated. It is the only country in Europe that uses the procedure for sex offenders. Czech psychiatrists supervising the treatment — a one-hour operation that involves removal of the tissue that produces testosterone — insist that it is the most foolproof way to tame sexual urges in dangerous predators suffering from extreme sexual disorders.

Surgical castration has been a means of social control for centuries. In ancient China, eunuchs were trusted to serve the imperial family inside the palace grounds; in Italy several centuries ago, youthful male choir members were castrated to preserve their high singing voices.

These days it can be used to treat testicular cancer and some advanced cases of prostate cancer.

Now, more countries in Europe are considering requiring or allowing chemical castration for violent sex offenders. There is intense debate over whose rights take precedence: those of sex offenders, who could be subjected to a punishment that many consider cruel, or those of society, which expects protection from sexual predators....

The full article is online HERE. My Feb. 15 coverage of the issue (with links to other related stories) is HERE.

Image: Eunuch, 1749 - Wikimedia Public Domain

International outrage: Czechs versus Saudis

In a good example of cross-cultural variations related to sexual behavior, international human rights groups are going after two countries for officially sanctioned policies that could not be more different:

Castrating prisoners . . .

In the Czech Republic, first-time, non-violent sex offenders such an exhibitionists can be imprisoned for life. Unless, that is, they agree to be castrated. In the past decade, at least 94 sex offenders have gone under the blade.

In a cleverly entitled article, "The unkindest cut," Time Magazine tackles the controversial issue of castration in that nation.

The Council of Europe, a human rights body, is demanding that the Czechs immediately stop the "degrading" punishment. But as the Dallas Morning News points out, although the Czech Republic may be the only country in Europe that allows the practice, it is certainly not unheard of in the United States. In Texas, for example, three prisoners have undergone voluntary surgical castration in recent years. Many more sex offenders around the country undergo "chemical castrations" that reduce their sex drive -- and potentially their legal sanctions.

Study findings are mixed as to whether castration, either surgical or chemical, is effective at curbing sex offender recidivism.

. . . vs. allowing child marriages

Meanwhile, a little bit to the southeast, Human Rights Watch is up in arms in the wake of a judge's refusal to annul the marriage of an 8-year-old girl to a 47-year-old man. The girl's father reportedly arranged the marriage to his friend in order to settle a debt; when the mother protested, the judge made the girl's husband sign a pledge that he would not have sex with the girl until she reaches puberty.

The nation's top cleric defended the practice, saying girls as young as 10 should be allowed to wed. "Those who think she's too young are wrong and they are being unfair to her," CNN News quoted Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al-Sheikh as saying.

Laws about what age children may marry, or have sexual relations, are complex and vary tremendously from nation to nation, and even within some nations (such as the United States). The median age at which a child can consent to sexual activity is somewhere around age 14-16, but varies from a low of about 9 to a high of 21.

At least the Saudi newlywed should be happy he does not live in the Czech Republic.

Postscript: In an out-of-court settlement, the 8-year-old has been allowed to divorce her husband.

Criminal profiling strikes out again

British case also features missteps by police, prosecutors, tabloid media

In death, Rachel Nickell became an icon of the sexual brutalization of women. The London model was just 23 in July of 1992, when she was strolling across Wimbledon Common with her 2-year-old son and was stabbed 49 times, sexually abused, and almost decapitated in a frenzied, daylight attack.

As pressured mounted to solve the horrific murder and several other similar crimes, detectives turned to Paul Britton, a forensic psychologist with near-mythic stature in the field of criminal profiling.

Britton was suspicious of Colin Stagg, a lonely dog lover who had popped up on police radar when he replied to an ad in a lonely hearts magazine. With Britton’s help, police set a trap. They had a policewoman, "Lizzie James," befriend Stagg. Lizzie tried but failed to get Stagg to admit to killing Nickell. A judge threw out the case based on the illegality of the sting operation, but Stagg became Britain’s premiere pariah, villainized by the tabloid press as a black magic practitioner who had "gotten away with murder."

Britton, meanwhile, used the case to bolster his professional reputation, and featured it in his boastful 1998 autobiography, "The Jigsaw Man."

But Britton had made a catastrophic blunder. In pursuing his pet theory, he failed to connect the killing of Nickells and another young woman either to each other or to the "Green Chain rapes," a series of similar, frenzied, random knife attacks on women in the time period leading up Nickell's murder.

As forensic psychology professor Laurence Alison pointed out, "Frenzied random motiveless knife attacks on women are rare. Even more unusual are frenzied, random knife attacks on women with their young children present. Here was Britton with two of them under his nose and no one noticed."

Years later, the high-profile case came to a close when a paranoid schizophrenic named Robert Napper was tied to the killing by DNA evidence. Last week, Napper pleaded diminished responsibility due to mental illness and was sentenced to an indefinite term in a high-security hospital. He is suspected in at least 106 crimes involving 86 women.

Critics say that Nickell and other women would have been saved if police and prosecutors had followed all leads rather than blindly pursuing an innocent man. Napper came onto police radar screens at least eight times dating back to 1989. Some tipsters specifically linked him to the sexual assaults; beat cops in one incident described him in their notes as "strange, abnormal, should be considered as a possible rapist," and his own mother turned him in for rape. Astonishingly, police still did not pursue him for Nickell's murder even after DNA tests in 1994 tied him to the Green Chain rapes in 1994.

The case features the same type of investigative tunnel vision and prosecutorial stubborness we saw in the Norfolk Four case (see my blog post here) as well as the dangers of reliance on alluring but pseudoscientific techniques such as criminal profiling.

As one commentator put it, "Britton would never have impressed detectives if he had said that Stagg was a bit of a weirdo. When he dressed up that same thought in psychological language and talked of 'deviant interests' and 'sexual dysfunctions,' he sounded fatally convincing."

After his acquittal, Stagg filed a misconduct complaint against Britton with the British Psychological Society, but the case was dismissed in 2002, two years before the DNA evidence conclusively proved Stagg's innocence.

Photos (from top): Rachel Nickell (murder victim), Paul Britton (profiler), Colin Stagg (innocent man), Robert Napper (serial killer).

Laurence Alison, chair of forensic psychology at Liverpool University, has a new book on the Napper case, Killer in the Shadows. Journalist Ted Hynds co-authored Stagg's account, Pariah. The Guardian of London has full coverage of the Nickells case. My previous articles on criminal profiling are here.

Guantanamo psychologist takes the Fifth

Court case may fuel debate at annual APA Convention

I've been trying to keep this blog out of the torture debate raging within the American Psychological Association, but I wanted to alert readers to this interesting news angle reported in today's New York Sun.

In a courtroom at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay yesterday, a psychologist asserted the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination when called testify about the treatment of a detainee. Her action implies that she could face criminal sanctions or licensure action for her role in the interrogation of detainee Mohammad Jawad.

According to court papers, the psychologist became involved when Jawad's interrogator became concerned over his deteriorating mental state. The detainee had begun speaking to posters on the wall.

The psychologist (whose name is being kept secret by court order) reportedly told the interrogator that Jawad was faking. She recommended that he be placed in isolation in order to weaken his resolve. Nine weeks later, Jawad attempted suicide.

Jawad's military lawyer, Major David Frakt, said the psychologist's refusal to testify is tantamount to admitting "that her conduct was criminal."

The case is likely to figure into the firestorm at this week's annual convention of the American Psychological Association in Boston. The APA is set to vote on whether to ban members from participating in these types of interrogations. A number of psychologists have resigned or are withholding dues in protest of the organization's refusal to take a stronger stand against torture, and more than 1,200 members have signed a protest petition.

The New York Sun article is here. Hat tip to Ken Pope, who has a page of online resources on the controversy. More information is available at the web site of Psychologists for an Ethical APA.

Using lie detectors to monitor sex offenders

Pro and con arguments

Polygraph testing is widely used with convicted sex offenders in the United States to assist in their treatment and supervision, and in 2007 legislation was passed in England enabling a national trial of mandatory testing in the probation service.

In next month's issue of Legal and Criminological Psychology, a British journal, a forensic psychiatrist and a forensic psychologist debate the pros and cons of this approach:

Don Grubin, MD of Newcastle University in the UK endorses the use of polygraphy to monitor whether sex offenders are adhering to their treatment plans. Polygraphy, he argues, is an effective method for "getting a complete sexual history, checking compliance with treatment and supervision and gaining information about an individual's offending."

Gershon Ben-Shakhar, Ph.D. of Hebrew University of Jerusalem objects: "Polygraph examinations have no value as a scientific method for detecting deception and uncovering information the examinee does not wish to disclose."

The full arguments are in September's special issue on human rights in forensic practice; a press release from the British Psychological Society (the journal's publisher) is here. Unfortunately, although I have linked you to the abstracts, you have to pay or subscribe to a journal service to get the entire articles.

Australia: "Circle sentencing" ineffective

Speaking of restorative justice . . .

A restorative justice approach that involves the Aboriginal community in sentencing of Aboriginal offenders has no effect on recidivism risk, according to a new study.

"There was enormous hope that if Aboriginal offenders were brought before members of their own community, they would sit up and take more notice than if they were brought before a white magistrate or a white judge," said Don Weatherburn of Australia's Bureau of Crime Research and Statistics.

More important to reducing crime, he said, are treatment programs for the endemic drug and alcohol problems facing the Aboriginal community.

Of course, as pointed out by Douglas Berman at Sentencing Law & Policy, "the value of community involvement in the sentencing process may have benefits that cannot be measure just through recidivism rates."

The study, "Does circle sentencing reduce Aboriginal offending?" by Jacqueline Fitzgerald, is online in the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Reseach publication Crime and Justice Bulletin. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation also has coverage.

Canada: Restorative justice touted for hate crimes

Citizens of peaceful and tolerant New Brunswick, Canada, have been shocked by a recent outbreak of racist and anti-Semitic vandalism of churches and synagogues.

The answer?

Restorative justice, says criminology professor Elizabeth Elliott of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. Elliottt is a leading Canadian expert on restorative justice and author of the book, New Directions In Restorative Justice: Issues, Practice, Evaluation.

If religious leaders and other victims are willing to meet with the offenders and if the offenders agree to participate, "there is an excellent learning opportunity here," said Elliott.

New Brunswick already has restorative justice programs in place both for juvenile and adult offenders, as do other Canadian metropolises such as Nova Scotia and British Columbia.

Of course, the offenders have to get caught first, no small problem in a vandalism case.

New Brunswick's Telegraph Journal has the story.

Hat tip: Understanding Crime

Forensic psychology angles in the Josef Fritzl case

The whole world seems glued this week to the bizarre case of Josef Fritzl. As you know, Fritzl is the Austrian man who kept his daughter and three of their children together locked in an elaborate basement dungeon for 24 years. As the dust settles, I'm trying to set aside my moral and emotional reactions to parse out the intriguing forensic psychology angles. Among them:

Insanity defense

At the top of the list is the defense's announcement that it will pursue an insanity defense.

"I believe that the trigger was a mental disorder, because I can't imagine that someone has sex with his own daughter without having a mental disorder," said his lawyer, prominent Viennese attorney Rudolf Mayer.

If the attorney is thinking about the archaic concept of moral insanity, he has a point. From a lay perspective, Fritzl has got to be deranged. How else could he engage in such an elaborate, long-running scheme against his own flesh and blood? Indeed, "mentally deranged" was how he was described by a barman at a brothel he frequented, based on his sadistic and deviant sexual behavior with the prostitutes there. (Prostitution is legal in Austria.)

Pundits don't seem to know much about Austria's legal standard of insanity, and I couldn't find it online. But in most countries, including in Western Europe, the insanity defense is rarely invoked and is even more rarely successful.

As one criminal defense lawyer recently put it, "You can be extremely crazy without being legally insane. You can hear voices, you can operate under intermittent delusions, you can see rabbits in the road that aren't there and still be legally sane."

I could be wrong, but it's hard for me to see how a retired engineer and real estate developer who could maintain such an elaborate subterfuge for a quarter of a century would meet the legal standard of insanity in terms of not knowing the difference between right and wrong.

However, even were Fritzl to pursue the defense, it would not mean that he would "get off," a common misperception regarding the insanity plea. Rather, he would likely be locked in a psychiatric hospital for the remainder of his natural life.

You can listen to a half-hour conversation among experts on NPR's Talk of the Nation. Featured are law professors Christopher Slobogin and Alan Dershowitz and Slate magazine legal correspondent Dahlia Lithwick. (Click on the NPR logo to the right.)

It will be interesting as case facts emerge to learn what complex algorithm may have produced Fritzl's twisted psyche. According to a sister-in-law, he grew up without a father, and his mother beat him on a near-daily basis. Certainly, that is one type of home environment that can produce a sexual sadist.

Competency to stand trial

Much public confusion exists about the distinction between legal insanity and incompetence to stand trial, and this confusion may be occurring in the Fritzl case as well.

Fritzl's attorney is quoted as saying that his client is "mentally incompetent" and that he will challenge any other decision reached by the psychiatrist who has been appointed by the court. Austrian law allows him to obtain an expert opinion from a psychiatrist of his choice.

While the legal construct of insanity pertains to an accused person's past state of mind, including whether he knew the difference between right and wrong at the time of his crime, competency pertains to the accused's present ability to understand the legal proceedings and assist one's attorney at trial.

As such, incompetency is not a permanent barrier to prosecution. If a person is found incompetent to stand trial, he is treated until he becomes competent, at which time he stands trial. (In the NPR program I link to, above, Dershowitz claims competency is often a permanent barrier to prosecution, but I believe he is wrong about that except in unusual cases in which a defendant cannot be restored to competency due to such things as severe retardation or dementia.)

Sex offending

Austria, like the rest of Western Europe, has not jumped on the imprisonment bandwagon in recent years. Its incarceration rate is 108 per 100,000, more than seven times lower than the United States'. Criminal code reforms in 1974 emphasized the importance of diversion as an alternative to incarceration. And Austrians are so opposed to capital punishment that they stripped California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's name from a soccer stadium in his hometown because he refused to pardon a condemned man.

But as we here in the United States certainly know, extreme cases fuel extreme laws, and the heinousness of Fritzl's deeds may fuel a drive for harsher punishment in Austria, especially of sex offenders.

Indeed, Austria's justice minister is already vowing to spearhead a sweeping review of all sentencing laws and to propose legislation doubling prison sentences for "especially dangerous" predators.

Fueling outrage around the world is the fact that Fritzl had a prior sex offense conviction. Way back in 1967, when he was in his early 30s, he served time for rape. He also had a second conviction for attempted rape and an arrest for indecent exposure, according to reports.

Prosecutors are still deciding how to charge Fritzl so that he faces the maximum possible punishment. The maximum sentence for rape is 15 years, and unlike in the United States time is not added consecutively for multiple charges. He could get a few additional years if convicted of "murder through failure to act" for the death of an infant whom he admits incinerating. But since he is 73 years old, the difference in his sentence is probably moot except on a symbolic level.

Trauma psychology

Perhaps most interesting, and most unsettling, is the psychological effects of their ordeal on Fritzl's victims. These include Elizabeth, the daughter imprisoned for a quarter of a century, the children, and even Fritzl's wife Rosemarie, who claims to have had no inkling of her husband's deeds.

Elisabeth was initially kept tethered on a cable that allowed only limited movement. For about nine years, she and her older two children, 19-year-old Kerstin and 18-year-old Stefan, were kept in a tiny room together, meaning the children would have witnessed their grandfather’s sexual abuse of their mother.

Nineteen-year-old Kerstin remains quite physically ill, so we do not know much about her mental state. Stefan, however, shows signs of severely impoverished physical and psychological development, including trouble talking and moving around in the open after spending his entire life in a small, windowless basement. Younger son Felix, 5, probably has the best chance of recovery. The children reportedly communicate through a combination of speech and animal sounds, including growling and cooing, and become exhausted with the effort of trying to make themselves intelligible to outsiders.

As child psychologist Bruce Perry explains in his new book, The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, trauma and neglect at any age can cause gaps in neurological development that are difficult to reverse. Dr. Perry’s treatment is "neurosequential," meaning he sequentially targets brain regions left undeveloped by trauma. When children's brains are affected in infancy, for example, therapy may start with healing touch or rhythm before moving on to higher brain functions.

Elizabeth's psychological state is difficult to even fathom. Her father reportedly began raping her when she was 11 and continued to do so for a number of years. She bore seven of his children, one of whom died and three of whom were taken away from her to live upstairs. Imprisoned in the tiny cellar from the age of 18, she reportedly looks far older than 42.

"Why didn’t she try to escape?" some people have asked. We, of course, don't know that she did not try. But if she didn't, based on the limited available facts it seems reasonable to guess that it was due to a combination of fear, learned helplessness, and Fritzl’s diabolical control and terrorization. The initial door to the prison cell was a half-ton of reinforced concrete on steel rails. Fritzl apparently convinced Elisabeth and the children that the concrete door was wired to explode, and that poisonous gas canisters would explode if they tried to escape.

One can only hope that with high-quality treatment and support the family will have some chance of recovery. And that can only begin to happen after the legal case is resolved.

The Scotsman of May 9 has details of Fritzl's in-depth interview on his motives. Wikipedia has additional information and links to background sources.

Fictional confession proves man's undoing

Sensational case mesmerizes Poland

"The perfect crime" is how the Polish media dubbed the unsolved case.

The hog-tied body was found floating in a remote inlet of the Oder River in 2000. Before death, Dariusz Janiszewski was tortured and starved, suggesting he was killed by someone who bore him enmity.

But who would have killed the happily married, good looking, and well liked young advertising executive, an amateur guitarist who enjoyed Led Zeppelin and wore his blond hair long and flowing? Police were unable to locate any suspects, and the case went cold.

Perhaps, as in Edgar Allen Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, the killer could still hear the beating of the dead man's heart. Or maybe his overconfidence did him in. Maybe it was neither guilt nor overconfidence, but simply the temerity of Jacek Wroblewski (dubbed "Jack Sparrow" by his colleagues), the new detective assigned to the cold case.

Sifting through the case file three years later, the detective decided to trace the whereabouts of the dead man's cell phone. He found that a few days after Janiszewski’s death, "ChrisB[7]" had sold the phone on an Internet auction site. ChrisB[7], as it turned out, was Krystian Bala, a postmodernist intellectual featured in the documentary "Young Money" about Poland's nouveau capitalist class.

That link would not have been enough to convict. But Bala had written a creepy novel called "Amok" that contained startling similarities to the killing. The novel’s protagonist, a postmodernist intellectual named Chris, kills his lover and then sells the murder weapon on the Internet.

Detective Wroblewski pored over Bala's sleazy tract for clues until he had it practically memorized, even hiring a psychologist to analyze the author's personality. Further digging unearthed a direct but hidden connection between Bala and his victim: Janiszewski and Bala's wife had a brief extramarital affair some months before the murder.

Was it guilt, revelry, or a desire for attention that drove Bala to write about his crime?

Gisli Gudjonsson, the internationally known confessions expert and forensic psychologist whom I've previously blogged about, says it is rare for people to be able to keep a horrendous crime totally secret. People, even the most depraved, are social animals.

And Bala, by all accounts, was overconfident. Two psychologists who evaluated him after his arrest reported that he had a high IQ, extreme narcissism, and sadistic tendencies. A lethal combination for his victim and a dangerous one for him, too, in that his constant need to demonstrate his superiority led to anonymous boasts to police and the Polish media of his "perfect crime."

Bala's reported psychological makeup is similar to what psychologist Del Paulhus likes to call the "Dark Triad," a combination of narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. Using rather circular reasoning, author Marilee Strong argues in her new book Erased (which I review here) that the triad explains a specific type of cold-blooded, premeditated wife killer, Scott Peterson being the exemplar. (Hans Reiser, currently on trial in Oakland, is potentially another example; I plan to say more about him after the jury verdict.) I say circular, because applying the labels of narcissist, psychopath, and Machiavellian provides little in the way of explanation, nor are these theoretical constructs independent of each other.

Another way to look at these types of killings is to see them as a blending of instrumental and expressive motivations. Instrumental violence is theorized to underlie more rational, goal-oriented killings, such as the murder of a rape or a robbery victim in order to eliminate a witness, or killings that occur during warfare or organized crime disputes. Expressive violence is driven by emotion and is typically impulsive and unplanned.

Bala's motive was jealous rage, but his cunning and intelligence enabled him to harness his rage in order to plot and execute a more chilling murder. (Check out the recent San Francisco killing of Leonard Hoskins for what could turn out to be a similar blending of instrumental and expressive violence.)

But even more essential to these types of killings than cold-blooded cunning is a chilling level of entitlement. These types of killers, mainly relatively privileged white men, seem to believe that they have the unalienable right to permanently dispose of others who become inconvenient to them. One of the few nonwhite wife killers in Strong's book, for example, is a star football player; as catalogued in recent books on sexual violence in competitive sports, these cultural icons take entitlement to a whole higher plane.

What proved Bala's undoing was his arrogant horn tooting. Amok, described as "a pulp-fiction orgy of bestiality, pornographic Oedipal complexes and indiscriminate sexual violence," went on to become a star witness against him at his trial last year. Simultaneously, the book surged from obscurity to bestseller status as the Polish public lapped up every detail in the most sensational trial in the nation's history.

Although Bala was convicted of murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison, his conviction has been overturned and a retrial is expected to get underway soon.

For a lengthy essay on the Bala case, see David Grann's "Letter from Poland" in the New Yorker. News coverage is here and here; literary commentary is here. BBC has an interesting article here on cases of voluntary confession. Photo credit: valobstruction's "SUV parked in a loading zone" (Creative Commons license).

Meanwhile, shocking revelations by Canadian pathologist

Let's turn now from the Masters to a case of expert witness malfeasance that's been sending shockwaves through the criminal justice system up in Canada. Back in November, I blogged a couple of times about forensic pathologist Charles Smith, whose decades of expert testimony for the government compounded the misery of grieving parents by sending many to prison for the accidental deaths of their children.

This week, Dr. Smith took the stand in the ongoing judicial inquiry and made a couple of shocking revelations:

1. Biased for prosecution

Most shockingly, he admitted that, far from being the neutral scientist he portrayed himself to be, he actually was biased in favor of the prosecutors who hired him.

"I honestly believed it was my role to support the Crown attorney. I was there to make a case look good," he admitted in his first day of testimony before an ongoing judicial inquiry into what went wrong in the cases.

2. "Ignorant"

Second, he admitted that he was "profoundly ignorant" of the criminal justice system. In stating this, he apologized for the "mistakes" he made during some two decades of performing child autopsies in cases of suspicious death.

3. Trained others experts

Despite now admitting to bias and ignorance, back in the day Dr. Smith lectured other doctors on how to be an expert witness in court. In court today, he was shown a speech he delivered entitled, "See You in Court: The Invitation You Can't Refuse," in which he cautioned doctors never to be an advocate for one side or the other. How's that for hypocrisy.

Among those whose lives were torn apart by Smith’s "mistakes" are several mothers who spent years in jail until the cases against them fell apart, and a man who was finally exonerated after spending more than a decade in prison for the death of his niece.

One commonality among many of the cases was the socioeconomic status of the accused, who included racial minorities, aboriginals, and single mothers. Although the adversarial system is premised on an equal fight between the accused and the government, economically disadvantages defendants do not have the wherewithal to obtain their own experts to challenge the government's experts. This is especially dangerous when the expert – as in Smith’s case - appears neutral, well qualified, and scientific.

These multiple emerging scandals - which include the Colorado case of Tim Masters, the British case of Sir Roy Meadows (who falsely accusing dozens of mothers of so-called "Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy") and the Mississippi case of forensic odontologist Michael West - are driving home the fact that experts are not infallible and should not be accepted without skepticism.

More on the Smith hearings, including video coverage, is at the Toronto Star and the Charles Smith Blog. My prior posts on the case are here and here. My blog post on forensic odontologist Michael West (a bite-mark expert) is here.

Japanese may record police interrogations

A series of highly publicized wrongful conviction cases in the Western world has led to vigorous debate over coercive police tactics and whether all interrogations should be recorded. Now, with its own recent revelations of coerced confessions, the Japanese criminal justice system is confronting the same issues.

The debate in Japan centers around next year's introduction of a lay-judge system, in which citizens will begin serving in juror-like capacities for the first time. The new system will require police to present to these non-professionals what suspects said during police questioning.

The Supreme Court, the Japan Federation of Bar Associations, the Justice Ministry and the Supreme Public Prosecutors Office have set up a panel to discuss filming interrogations, with the bar federation demanding the introduction of cameras.

The full story is in today’s Daily Yomiuri online.

Crime fears hijack science, make people sick

Crime calls forth so many emotions. Fascination. Horror. Anxiety. But probably most of all, fear.

Fear is a powerful emotion. In deft hands, it can drive public policy and create laws that engender more fear and more laws, in an escalating spiral.

In part due to this spiral, the crime-fighting industry has grown staggeringly. It's big business around the world. And that, of course, leads to - what else? - more fear of crime. The cult of crime dominates not only government, the news media and the entertainment industries but, increasingly, the fields of science and technology.

Indeed, one could argue that science and technology are being hijacked away from other, more productive ventures by the relentless focus on crime. Let's go to England for a couple examples of this.

"SmartWater" is a perfect example.

SmartWater a high-tech crime-fighting solution prominent in the UK. A special sprinkler sprays intruders with an invisible fluid containing a unique code connecting the crook to that specific location. At present, 15,000 homes and 117 schools in the town of Doncaster are armed with SmartWater. Think about the scientific resources that went into developing this tool.

Here's a fun fact: Three out of four criminals surveyed said they wouldn't break into a building if they saw the SmartWater logo on display.

I'm not kidding. This is from an actual study, done by a criminology researcher at the University of Leicester in England. How’s that for free advertising?

Microchip implants?

More controversial than SmartWater is the British plan to reduce prison overcrowding and keep track of sex offenders by injecting microchip tracking devices like those used on dogs, cats and cattle into the arms of offenders. One company plans deeper implants that could administer electroshock, broadcast messages, or even serve as microphones to transmit conversations.

Now, think about how society might benefit if -- instead of being diverted to high-tech crime-busting tools like these -- all of this money and scientific expertise was rechanneled to, say, innovative ways of combating heart disease.

Why heart disease?

Well, all roads leading back to Rome, it turns out that fear of crime may actually cause heart disease.

That's the finding from a study published last week in the Archives of General Psychiatry. The researchers found that people who worried most about terrorism in the wake of 9/11 were way more likely than the rest of us to develop cardiovascular illness.

No matter that their chance of dying at the hands of international terrorists is about the same as the risk of being struck by an asteroid or, heaven forbid, drowning in a toilet.

Click here to watch a video of the lead researcher in the terrorism study, Alison Holman of the University of California at Irvine, discussing the findings. John Tierney, a science writer for the New York Times, has more to say here about how the "terrorism industry" distorts risks. More links on fear of terrorism are here.

Photo credit: IZ, "Industry of Fear" (Creative Commons license)

News roundup

Eastern nations importing Western justice practices

I've seen several accounts lately of Asian countries importing Western criminal justice practices. In China, which has a continental (or inquisitorial) model like that used in most of Europe, the Canadian Bar Association is collaborating with Chinese lawyers to advance the adversarial practices used in Canada and the United States. The Lawyers Weekly of Canada has that story. Meanwhile, in Japan, courts are gearing up to implement what for the West is an old standard – jury duty. In preparation for the January 2009 launch date, a former New York Legal Aid attorney is training Japanese defense lawyers in how to address ordinary citizens in court. That story is one of a series of special reports on "Toyko Justice" at New York City's NY1 news service.

New DOJ report: Sexual victimization of prisoners

The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics has released findings from a national survey of more than 23,000 prisoners at 146 state and federal institutions. Overall, about 4.5% of prisoners report sexual victimization, more than half committed by staff. The special report, required under the Prison Rape Elimination Act, is available online, as is a summary press release.

$10 million law & neuroscience project

How should the courts respond to new brain-scanning techniques that have potentially far-reaching legal implications?

A $10 million, 3-year grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is bringing scholars together to help answer this question by integrating neuroscience developments into the U.S. legal system.

The project will begin by synthesizing existing research and identifying gaps. Then, studies and conferences will be funded to fill those gaps. One end goal is an educational primer for judges, differentiating evidence-based techniques from those that lack scientific validity and should not be admitted in court.

More information is available at the project's website.