Juvenile In Justice: An online gallery

Art professor Richard Ross is traveling the United States and photographing juvenile institutions. The project, Juvenile In Justice, is partially funded by the Guggenheim Foundation and the Annie E. Casey Foundation and will be published next year. The 196 photos in the online gallery are well worth checking out. While you are there, visit his related collection, Architecture of Authority. Stunning stuff.

From the top: Los Angeles, California; Cook County, Illinois; Biloxi, Mississippi

Police psychologist settles confession suit for $1 million

A psychologist who helped police obtain a false confession from 14-year-old Michael Crowe has settled out of court for $1 million. A judge had called the aggressive interrogations of Crowe and two friends "psychologically abusive."

Dr. Lawrence "Deadlift" Blum, a police psychologist, helped police in Escondido, California formulate the "tactical plan" that they used to get Michael to confess to the murder of his 12-year-old sister, according to the Crowe family's lawsuit.

Blum admitted in a pretrial deposition that he told a police detective that 15-year-old Aaron Houser, Michael's friend, was a "Charlie Manson wannabe."

Only through serendipity were the boys' charges dismissed more than a year after their arrests, when DNA evidence proved that a mentally ill transient had committed the murder. That man, Richard Tuite, was ultimately convicted of manslaughter.

Images from the videotape of Michael Crowe's interrogation.

The family's lawsuit against the police is still pending in federal court.

Crowe's confession became the subject of an award-winning Court TV documentary that I show to my graduate students. (Unfortunately, The System: The Interrogation of Michael Crowe is no longer commercially available, as far as I can determine.)

The San Diego Union-Tribune coverage of the settlement is HERE. My prior coverage of the case is HERE. The Tru Crime Library (formerly Court TV) has more background on the case HERE.

Charging youth as adults costly and unjust, study finds

Waiving youth into adult courts for prosecution is unscientific, racially biased, and may increase crime, according to a Maryland study released today by the Just Kids Partnership to End the Automatic Prosecution of Youth as Adults.

The researchers tracked 135 youths who were charged as adults in Baltimore. They found that more than two-thirds were ultimately sent back to the juvenile system or had their cases dismissed outright, but not before spending an average of five months in adult jail. Only 10 percent ended up in adult prison. African American youth were disproportionately likely to be transferred to adult court.

The study comes as Maryland weighs whether or not to spend more than $100 million on a new facility for youth awaiting trial in adult court.

Based on their findings, the researchers recommend reducing the prosecution of youths in adult courts, and instead providing teenagers with more treatment opportunities.

"Youth who go into the adult correction system are significantly more likely to commit further and more violent crime than their peers who are treated as juveniles," they state.

The Just Kids Partnership is a consortium consisting of the Public Justice Center, Community Law in Action and United Parents of Incarcerated Children and Youth.

The full report is available HERE. An executive summary is HERE. Additional background is available at the Just Kids Partnership website.

Paradoxical finding on juvenile sex offender risk

Leading tools cannot distinguish among delinquent boys

New tools designed to predict sex offender recidivism risk among juveniles continue to generate controversy and confusion. Some studies find that they work a bit better than the flip of a coin, and some find that they don't. Now, a new study out of Canada adds a paradoxical twist to the mix.

On two leading instruments, generally delinquent juveniles with a prior sex offense scored higher in risk than juveniles who had committed only sex offenses. And, true to this prediction, about 13 percent of these delinquent boys went on to commit another sex offense during the 6.6-year followup period, compared with just 7 percent of the boys with only sex offenses.

But, while they did moderately well at predicting risk among the non-delinquent juveniles, neither tool could reliably predict which among the delinquent, higher-risk youngsters would go on to reoffend sexually. The two instruments were the Juvenile Sex Offender Assessment Protocol-II (J-SOAP-II) and the Estimate of Risk of Adolescent Sexual Offense Recidivism (ERASOR).

A number of factors contribute to the difficulties in accurately predicting risk, especially among juveniles. These include:

• Adolescent immaturity -- most juvenile offending is time-limited, and will spontaneously cease over time.

• Low base rates -- it is hard to accurately predict events that have a low likelihood of occurring. In the current study, for example, only 9.4 percent of the youths were charged with another sex offense during the followup period.

• Situational and random influences -- A lot of offending, especially among juveniles, is due to situational and environmental factors rather than personality variables, and these are extraordinarily hard to predict. (See this PSYBLOG post for a social psychology experiment demonstrating the underappreciated influence of situational variables.)
  

It all gets back to the larger problem I discussed in last week's report on the British metaanalysis of violence risk prediction tools: Maybe we will never find the Holy Grail. Maybe we've reached the summit of the mountain, and it’s time to step back.

The new study, by Gordana Rajlic and Heather M. Gretton of the Youth Forensic Psychiatric Services in Burnaby, British Columbia, is "An Examination of Two Sexual Recidivism Risk Measures in Adolescent Offenders: The Moderating Effect of Offender Type." It was published in the latest issue of Criminal Justice and Behavior and is available for free from Sage Publications for a limited time.

Related blog resources:

• New study on juvenile sex offender treatment: Efficacy claimed, but control group questionable (June 18, 2010)

• The "juvenile sex offender": Myth in the making? Book describes harmful effects of labeling and treatment (Jan. 31, 2010)

• New findings on juvenile sex offending (Jan. 7, 2010)

• Can we tell which juveniles will sexually reoffend? (Dec. 2, 2009)

• Challenge to juvenile sex offender risk prediction: Harsh federal law on shaky scientific ground (Oct. 9, 2008)

Handbook of Violence Risk Assessment

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

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

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

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

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

My Amazon review is HERE.

APA Dispatch II: Whither juvenile forensics?

The U.S. Supreme Court ruling this May in Graham v. Florida, restricting life without parole sentences for juveniles, relied in part upon scientific evidence from developmental psychology and neuroscience. In ruling that juveniles are categorically different from adults, the high court was assisted by amicus briefs from the American Psychological Association and other professional organizations including the American Psychiatric Association and the National Association of Social Workers.

The APA's position, which the Supreme Court also validated in its 2005 ruling in Roper v. Simmons outlawing the death penalty for juveniles, is that juveniles' diminished culpability is based on three basic differences from adults:

1. Immaturity: Juveniles are more impulsive and less likely to reason judiciously about risk
2. Vulnerability: They are more likely to be influenced by peer pressure
3. Changeability: They are still developing, and are more amenable to rehabilitation than adults

At this week's APA convention, the American Psychology-Law Society (Division 41) hosted a cutting-edge track on juvenile justice. The dynamic sessions raised intriguing issues about how the growing acceptance of adolescent immaturity and difference will affect forensic practice in the juvenile justice system.

Bryan Stevenson: "Huge implications" of Graham case

In an eloquent presentation, NYU law professor Bryan A. Stevenson, founder of Alabama's Equal Justice Initiative, expressed optimism that Graham and the twin case of Sullivan v. Florida, in which he was counsel, signal that the tide is turning away from the punitive Superpredator hysteria of the 1980s. He encouraged the APA to continue its public policy advocacy by bringing legal attention to the impacts of trauma, violence, and neglect on youngsters.

Hopefully, the capacity crowd of psychologists will attend to the implications of Stevenson’s other take-home messages: Mass incarceration has radically changed American society, creating a class of "new untouchables." And the victims of this sea change are overwhelmingly poor and minority. Indeed, he asserted, wealth -- not criminal culpability -- largely drives criminal sentencing. In Louisiana, for example, of the juveniles serving life without parole for crimes other than homicide at the time of the Graham decision, 94 percent are African American. Most are incarcerated for rape, with 71 percent of the victims being white.

Tom Grisso: "Forensic examiners beware"

Forensic psychology guru Tom Grisso sounded a more cautionary note about Graham's implications. The high court's adoption of a categorical approach to juveniles is at odds with the discretionary, individualized method at the core of forensic assessment, he pointed out.

Grisso demonstrated his point through a mock cross-examination. On the stand, the mock expert conceded that the research of Laurence Steinberg, Elizabeth Cauffman, and others on adolescent immaturity is now widely accepted in the field, as shown by Supreme Court's rulings in Graham and Roper. Next, Grisso produced a New York Times op-ed co-authored by Steinberg, reiterating Roper's conclusion that psychologists "are unable to distinguish between the young person whose crime reflects transient immaturity and the rare juvenile offender who may deserve the harsh sentence of life without parole." In the script, the expert was left speechless and incapable of defending her individualized opinions about risk.

Grisso said forensic psychologists must be aware of this debate, and think about how to answer such questions in court. The outlook for prediction is not as bleak as the APA's advocacy efforts might suggest, he asserted, as experts do have a reliable basis on which to give probability estimates, especially about more short-term risk.

Good news for juveniles with a sex crime

A panel of juvenile sex offender experts was more upbeat about the implications of the scientific research on adolescent difference. As with general criminality, they said, research has not identified methods to accurately predict which juveniles will reoffend sexually. Indeed, none of the factors that predict sex offender recidivism in adults (multiple victims, male victims, young child victims, personality disorder, sexual deviance, etc.) predict recidivism for juveniles.

But this inability to differentiate is not bad news, because what we can say is that the overwhelming majority -- 93 percent -- of juveniles who have committed a sex crime will not reoffend sexually as adults.

An audience member who works in the civil commitment industry expressed incredulity at the cumulative research, saying many of the men in his civil detention facility began their offending careers in their teens.

That may be true, responded researcher Michael Caldwell. But the directionality cannot be reversed. All NBA stars may have played basketball in the ninth grade. But we cannot predict by watching a group of ninth-graders play basketball which, if any, of the players will become basketball superstars.

(A summary of the presentation, "Juvenile Offenders are Ineligible for Civil Commitment as Sexually Violent Predators," is online HERE; it contains a slough of good references. The PowerPoint presentation is HERE.)

Judges launch crusade to save children of color

The most optimistic presentation I attended was a symposium of family court judges who are at the forefront of a movement to reduce the vastly disproportionate representation of minority children in the child welfare system, from which many graduate to juvenile delinquency and adult criminal courts.

The remarkable Hon. Katherine Lucero of San Jose, California said she became active in this movement when she realized she was serving as part of the vast "cradle-to-prison pipeline," processing children who would end up poor, homeless, drug addicted, illiterate, pregnant at a young age, delinquent, and -- ultimately -- incarcerated. When she looked out at her courtroom filled with children of color, her training that justice is blind was cognitively dissonant, making her feel like she was living "in a delusion."

The equally inspiring Hon. Nan Waller of Portland, Oregon said the movement challenges the basic historical tenet of the child welfare system, which promotes removal from families -- so-called "child rescue" -- rather than family strengthening. Most of the mothers who lose their children are suffering from severe trauma that they medicate with drugs. Rather than "cookie-cutter" quick-fixes, including automatic referrals for psychological evaluations and parenting classes, these women need support and help obtaining even basic resources such as housing, transportation, and health care, the judges said.

Assisted by a research and advocacy project of the National Council on Juvenile and Family Court Judges, these and other judges are using a combination of model courts, wraparound services, community interventions, training in implicit race bias at all levels of the system, and other creative methods to reduce the number of children who are placed in foster care. Already, their data show they are having an impact in their respective communities.

Alarming call for preventive detention of children

In the discussion period following their presentation, the judges said they are turning away from ordering psychological reports except when a parent has a genuine, severe mental disorder. They gave two reasons for this. First, psychological evaluations are costly. Second, and more important, the judges do not find it helpful to "slap" pathologizing psychiatric labels on parents. They expressed curiosity as to whether and how we in the field of psychology are working to address the effects of poverty and racism in the populations we serve.

Sadly, the honest answer is that many forensic practitioners and scholars are not adequately addressing the impact of larger social forces -- poverty, race, trauma -- on the people we evaluate, treat, and/or study. Perhaps the sparse attendance at the judges' presentation as compared with other seminars in the forensic juvenile justice track is an indicator of this neglect.

Indeed, at a more well-attended session came a chilling proposal at the polar opposite extreme: To establish a system to preventively detain dangerous juveniles. Raising this "public safety" proposal was attorney Christopher Slobogin, a co-author of the forensic psychology stalwart Psychological Evaluations for the Courts. It will formally air in a book, Juveniles at Risk: A Plea for Preventive Justice, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Slobogin has good intentions, I am sure; he believes such a model will treat juveniles more fairly and help stem the erosion of the separate juvenile justice system.

But the proposal has potentially far-reaching unintended consequences. It myopically ignores what the family court judges and attorney Stevenson are so painfully aware of: The differential treatment of poor and minority children. It is hard to accurately predict juvenile risk, and actuarial risk prediction tools are especially inaccurate when applied to juveniles. This is just the type of nebulous decision-making situation in which implicit (unconscious) biases are most salient, research shows. Forensic psychological evaluations would provide a scientific veneer, masking racial and class biases in deciding who is labeled as dangerous and who is not.

Rather than locking up kids for crimes they have not (yet) committed, we should be working to give young victims of trauma and abuse -- and their families -- the practical resources and tools they need to lead productive lives. Let's hope the field of psychology and public policymakers heed the pleas of the judges and attorneys in the trenches who are fighting to save kids before they get sucked into the "cradle-to-prison pipeline" in the first place.

APA 2010: Exciting forensic programming

I was vacillating about whether to attend the upcoming American Psychological Association convention in San Diego, but browsing through the schedule sold me. The American Psychology-Law Society (Division 41) is sponsoring almost two dozen top-notch sessions featuring timely topics and appearances by many forensic psychology luminaries. Especially timely is the focus on juvenile justice issues. Here's a sampling of the great offerings:

Juvenile justice track

• "Life Without Parole for Juvenile Offenders: Current Legal, Developmental, and Psychological Issues" features Thomas Grisso, Bryan Stevenson, Barry Feld, and Chrisopher Slobogin, dissecting the recent Sullivan and Graham cases and discussing the role of forensic examiners.

• Judicial Panel on Reducing Racial and Ethnic Disproportionality, hosted by forensic psychology scholar Richard Wiener, features three juvenile court judges and an attorney from the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges

• "Juvenile Offenders Are Ineligible for Civil Commitment As Sexual Predators," looks to be a great presentation on a topic I have blogged about recently, that of predicting sex offender recidivism among kids; moderated by Richard Wollert, the panel includes Michael Caldwell telling us "Why Evaluators Can't Identify Sexual Recidivists When They Assess Juveniles."

• "The Construct of Empathy in the Treatment of Adolescents in the Juvenile Justice System," moderated by Lois Condie of Harvard Medical School, will include a presentation by forensic psychologist and professor Frank DiCataldo, whose outstanding book The Perversion of Youth I reviewed here.

Other Div. 41 hot picks

• "Forensic Assessment": Scholars Daniel Murrie, Richard Rogers, and others will discuss the reliability of forensic evaluations in sanity evaluations, misassumptions regarding Miranda waivers, evaluating the competence of violence risk assessors, and other timely forensic assessment issues.

• "Mental Health Courts -- The MacArthur Research" features stalwarts John Monahan, Hank Steadman, and others.

• "Long-Term Solitary Confinement's Impact on Psychological Well-Being -- The Colorado Study" looks to be an especially powerful panel including presentations by Stuart Grassian, an early scholar of segregation psychosis, AP-LS fellow Joel Dvoskin, and Jamie Fellner, an attorney with Human Rights Watch, talking about "Supermax Confinement and the Mind."

• "Juror Decision Making": Margaret Bull Kovera and other scholars will present recent empirical findings in jury research.

• "Social Cognition in Court -- Understanding Laypersons' Interrogation Schemas and Prototypes" features false confession scholars Saul Kassin, Solomon M. Fulero, and others.

Early registration ends Wednesday (after which the price goes up), so register now if you plan to attend. Now that you know which panels I am attending, I hope to see many of y'all down in sunny San Diego in just a couple of months.

Oodles of free criminology articles

Sage journals wants you … and they are offering a wide array of taste treats from more than a dozen different journals, in the hopes of luring you in. Just click on any of the below links to download the free article(s) of your choice:

Journal: Youth Justice
Criminalizing Sociability through Anti-social Behaviour Legislation: Dispersal Powers, Young People and the Police

Journal: Sex Abuse
Psychological Profiles of Internet Sexual Offenders: Comparisons With Contact Sexual Offenders

Journal: Police Quarterly
The Effect of Higher Education on Police Behavior

Journal: European Journal of Criminology
Girls, gangs and violence: Assessing the evidence

Journal: Punishment Society
The relevance of inmate race/ethnicity versus population composition for understanding prison rule violations

Journal: Homicide Studies
A Multidimensional Analysis of Criminal Specialization Among Single-Victim and Serial Homicide Offenders

Journal: Feminist Criminology

• Long-Term Patterns of Offending in Women
• Understanding Identity Theft: Offenders' Accounts of Their Lives and Crimes
• Genocide: The Criminal Law between Truth and Justice

Journal: Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice
Internet Development, Censorship, and Cyber Crimes in China

Journal: Trauma Violence and Abuse
Understanding Human Trafficking in the United States

Journal: Criminal Justice and Behavior
Violent Video Games and Aggression: Causal Relationship or Byproduct of Family Violence and Intrinsic Violence Motivation?

Journal: Crime Delinquency
Opportunities, Rational Choice, and Self-Control: On the Interaction of Person and Situation in a General Theory of Crime

Journal: Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice
Youthful Suicide and Social Support: Exploring the Social Dynamics of Suicide-Related Behavior and Attitudes Within a National Sample of US Adolescents

Thanks to Jarrod Steffan, a forensic and clinical psychologist in Wichita, Kansas who specializes in criminal forensic psychology, for sharing this special offer with us.

New study on juvenile sex offender treatment

Efficacy claimed, but control group questionable

I previously reviewed forensic psychologist Frank DiCataldo's excellent book on juvenile sex offenders, in which he claims there is very little good research to show that sex offender-specific treatment is useful with adolescents. As DiCataldo points out, most of the studies (and the meta-analyses of studies) purporting to show a treatment effect have serious flaws. One big problem is the lack of control groups. This makes it impossible to know whether juveniles who did well after sex-offender treatment would have done equally well without treatment or with generic treatment not focused on sex offending.

But now, a study out of Canada (where else?!) is being trumpeted as methodologically sound proof that -- drum roll here -- treatment works. The study followed 148 adolescents for up to 20 years, which is a very long time for this type of research. Overall, only 17 of the subjects (about 11.5%) picked up a new sex offense as adults, with another 7 getting a new charge only in adolescence, for a total of 24 recidivists (16%). That's in line with a growing body of data on the very low recidivism rates of juvenile sex offenders, ranging from about 4% to 15%.

When they broke it down by those who underwent their specialized treatment, compared with a comparison group that did not, they found that only 9% (5 out of 58) of the youths who had gone through their program got charged with a new sex offense over the next 20 years, compared with 21% (19 out of 90) of those who had not. That's a significant difference.

But here's the rub. The participants were not randomly assigned to treatment (versus no treatment), which is how it's supposed to be done in psychotherapy treatment outcome research. Otherwise, you never know if there is something about the selection process that affected the results. Not only was assignment to groups not random, but the researchers put the kids who refused to undergo treatment, along with those who dropped out of treatment early, into their so-called "control" group! In fact, these bad boys comprised fully half of the non-treatment group. My guess is that these dropouts and refusers were probably a whole lot more delinquent than the other kids in the first place.

So it's possible that what the research really shows is not that treatment works, but that hardcore delinquents who refuse or drop out of treatment are likely to get into more trouble in their later teens and early 20s. It would be interesting to see if the control group still showed a higher recidivism rate if they removed the dropouts and refusers from the analyses. In fact, I would love to see some qualitative analyses of who those 19 recidivists (out of the total of 90 in the control group) are.

Another potential confounder I noticed was that many of the adolescents in the non-treatment control group were apparently in some different kind of treatment at the time. That treatment is not described, so perhaps this study is more of a between-treatments design, rather than a study of treatment versus no treatment.

Again, as I've discussed previously, part of the "problem" both with accurately predicting which juveniles will reoffend and also with designing treatment programs that work is the very low overall rate of recidivism among juveniles who have sexually offended. As DiCataldo and others have pointed out, if you just predict that no juvenile caught for a sex crime will reoffend, you will be correct in the broad majority of cases.

Flattening trajectory

The study, by psychologist James Worling and his colleagues at the Sexual Abuse: Family Education & Treatment Program (SAFE-T) program in Ontario, did have some other interesting findings. The researchers found that most recidivism -- both sexual and nonsexual -- happens within the first few years. Offending flattens out significantly at about the 10-year mark, when folks hit about the age of 25. This is consistent with the recent study by Lussier and colleagues of sex offender trajectories, as well as the general criminology literature on desistance. Crime, including sex offending, is a young man's game.

The finding that only 11.5% of the participants were charged with subsequent sexual offenses as adults is also in line with other research showing very low recidivism for juveniles. A strength of this study is its long course; it followed kids all the way up to an average age of 31.

The study is: Worling, J.R., Littlejohn, A., & Bookalam, D. (2010). 20-year prospective follow-up study of specialized treatment for adolescents who offended sexually. Behavioral Sciences and the Law, 28, 46-57.

Special journal issue on adolescent sex offenders

NOTE: It looks like this entire special issue of Behavioral Sciences and the Law is available online. Other interesting articles in the issue include:

Inter-rater reliability of the PCL-R total and factor scores among psychopathic sex offenders: are personality features more prone to disagreement than behavioral features?
John F. Edens, Marcus T. Boccaccini, Darryl W. Johnson

Searching for the developmental origins of sexual violence: examining the co-occurrence of physical aggression and sexual behaviors in early childhood
Patrick Lussier, Jay Healey

Assessing risk of sexually abusive behavior among youth in a child welfare sample
Robert A. Prentky, Nien-Chen Li, Sue Righthand, Ann Schuler, Deborah Cavanaugh, Austin F. Lee

Psychological mechanisms underlying support for juvenile sex offender registry laws: prototypes, moral outrage, and perceived threat
Jessica M. Salerno, Cynthia J. Najdowski, Margaret C. Stevenson, Tisha R. A. Wiley, Bette L. Bottoms, Roberto Vaca Jr., Pamela S. Pimentel

Legal, ethical, and methodological considerations in the Internet-based study of child pornography offenders (p 84-105)
James V. Ray, Eva R. Kimonis, Christine Donoghue

California may expand juvenile competency law

In the landmark case of Milton Dusky, the U.S. Supreme Court held that in order to be criminally prosecuted a defendant must have a factual and rational understanding of the proceedings and a basic ability to consult with his or her attorney.

Some U.S. states have limited this due process protection to defendants who suffer from a mental illness or a developmental disability. This excludes children, who may lack rational understanding due to their natural immaturity. In the 2006 Washington state case of Swenson-Tucker, for example, an appellate court held that an 8-year-old boy was competent to stand trial despite severe deficits stemming from his age and immaturity.

In Florida, by contrast, juveniles have a statutory right to competence, and both age and developmental immaturity can be considered in deciding competence. (Florida Code, Section 985.223.)

If California Assemblyman Felipe Fuentes has his way, the Golden State will follow the Sunshine State and move into the forefront of juvenile justice trends. Assembly Bill 2212 would formalize the requirements for juvenile competency proceedings in the state, and specifically mandate consideration of developmental immaturity.

The proposed law (excerpted below) follows on the heels of a 2007 appellate case (see my blog post HERE) allowing immaturity as the basis of incompetency for an 11-year-old Sacramento boy accused of breaking into an elementary school and stealing candy bars. Two psychologists had evaluated Dante H. (2007 Cal. App. LEXIS 704) and concluded that he was not fit to stand trial.

AB 2212, as amended, Fuentes. Minors: mental competency.
The bill would require, upon declaration of a doubt as to the minor's competency, the court to order that the question of the minor's competence be determined in a hearing, as specified. The bill would require the court to appoint an expert in the field of juvenile adjudicative competency to evaluate whether the minor suffers from a mental disorder, developmental disability, or developmental immaturity and, if so, whether the condition impairs the minor's competency. The bill would require the Judicial Council to develop and adopt rules to implement these requirements. The bill would require that, if the minor is found to be incompetent by a preponderance of the evidence, all proceedings remain suspended to determine whether there is a substantial probability that the minor will attain that capacity in the foreseeable future or the court no longer retains jurisdiction. The period of time during which these proceedings would be suspended would not exceed 6 months.

A vote by the California Assembly's Public Safety Committee is scheduled for today.

Although the definition of developmental immaturity remains vague (see below text by Ivan Kruh and Thomas Grisso for an excellent discussion), most forensic psychologists who evaluate juveniles already consider their age and maturity, and this proposed law is a much-needed step toward requiring such practice.

Recommended resources:

• Evaluation of Juveniles’ Competence to Stand Trial by Ivan Kruh and Thomas Grisso (Best Practices in Forensic Mental Health Assessment series)
• Juvenile Competency Statutes: A Model for State Legislation by Kellie Johnson, Indiana Law Journal
• MacArthur Foundation's Juvenile Competence Study

Teen sexting resources

"Sexting" is a hot topic these days, especially in the wake of this month's U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in Miller v. Mitchell that it is unconstitutional to prosecute teens for child pornography solely based on their cell phone photos. The highly publicized Pennsylvania case illustrated the unintended consequences of current sex offender hysteria. The district attorney's office in Wyoming County had threatened to prosecute a teenage girl on felony child pornography charges unless she underwent mandatory reeducation. An appellate court barred the prosecutor from retaliating against young Ms. Doe for invoking her constitutional right not to attend the education program.

Related resources:

• An excellent overview by Tamar Lewin of the New York Times, "Rethinking Sex Offender Laws for Youth Texting"

• A TV news video of forensic psychology students speaking about teen sexting at a state government hearing in Connecticut

• The website of the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet, containing a wealth of information and resources on the widely hyped teen sexting phenomenon
  

Police interrogations: AP-LS issues landmark white paper

Boy's "psychological torture" points to need for reform

In 1998, the Crowe family in Escondido, California awakened to their worst nightmare. Twelve-year-old Stephanie was lying in a pool of blood on her bedroom floor, dead from multiple stab wounds. Police quickly zeroed in on a suspect -- Stephanie's 14-year-old brother Michael. After a series of grueling interrogations, Michael ultimately admitted he may have killed his sister. He and two friends were arrested for murder.

Only through serendipity were the boys' charges dismissed more than a year later, when DNA evidence proved that a mentally ill transient had committed the murder. That man, Richard Tuite, was ultimately convicted of manslaughter.

Now, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has reinstituted the families' civil rights case against the police, dismissed by a federal judge several years ago. Writing for the three-judge panel, Justice Sidney R. Thomas described the shocking nature of the interrogations:

One need only read the transcripts of the boys' interrogations, or watch the videotapes, to understand how thoroughly the defendants' conduct in this case "shocks the conscience." Michael and Aaron [Houser] -- 14 and 15 years old, respectively -- were isolated and subjected to hours and hours of interrogation during which they were cajoled, threatened, lied to, and relentlessly pressured by teams of police officers. "Psychological torture" is not an inapt description.

"Psychological torture" and "brutal and inhumane" were descriptions given by a juror in the real killer's criminal trial after he viewed the videotaped interrogations. (I show the heartwrenching video, which is no longer available commercially, in my forensic courses.) Dr. Richard Leo, an expert in coerced confessions and author of Police Interrogation and American Justice (read my review HERE), echoed the juror's sentiments, describing Michael's interrogation as "the most psychologically brutal interrogation and tortured confession that I have ever observed." So did Dr. Calvin Colarusso, Director of Child Psychiatry Residence Training Program at the University of California, San Diego, who evaluated Michael and described the interrogation as "the most extreme form of emotional child abuse that I have ever observed in my nearly 40 years of observing and working with children and adolescents."

The appellate victory will allow the families' federal civil rights case to move forward to a jury trial or a settlement. In an interesting angle, the justices also reinstated the claim against a psychologist whom police consulted during the interrogation. The plaintiffs allege that Dr. Lawrence "Deadlift" Blum, a police psychologist, conspired with Escondido police, helping them formulate a "tactical plan" that they followed in their interrogation. Blum admitted in a deposition that he told a police detective that 15-year-old Aaron Houser, Michael's friend, was a "Charlie Manson wannabe."

The ruling coincides with publication of a landmark article sponsored by the American Psychology-Law Society (AP-LS) on the scientific status of coerced interrogations and false confessions. The article, written by leading scholars Saul M. Kassin, Steven A. Drizin, Thomas Grisso, Gisli H. Gudjonsson, Richard A. Leo, and Allison D. Redlich and published in this month's Law & Human Behavior after an extensive process of vetting and review, is only the second such paper authorized by AP-LS in its 42-year history. The first was a 1998 white paper on eyewitness identification. As William C. Thompson, criminology and law professor at the University of California at Irvine, notes in the introduction to the special issue:

That paper (Wells, Small, Penrod, Malpass, Fulero, & Brimacombe, 1998) proved extremely influential in subsequent policy debates about line-ups and other eyewitness identification procedures. By providing an intellectual framework for analysis of systemic factors that affect eyewitness accuracy, and by distilling specific policy recommendations from a broad array of research, it set the agenda for policy discussion and channeled those discussions in productive directions. The paper was the foundation for a subsequent National Institute of Justice policy paper. Many of its recommendations, such as procedures for composing line-ups and instructing witnesses, are beginning to be implemented nationwide.

The AP-LS hopes the current review article will have a similar effect on the field. After methodically reviewing the state of the science, the authors make a number of critical recommendations for reform aimed at reducing the number of false and/or coerced confessions. These include:

• Mandatory electronic recording of interrogations, with the camera angle focused equally on the suspects and detectives
• Limits on the duration of interrogations
• Limits on the presentation of false information and evidence
• Special protections for vulnerable suspects, including juveniles and those with cognitive and/or psychiatric impairments
• Scrutiny of "minimization" tactics, in which police pursue "themes" that minimize suspects' perceived moral, psychological, and/or legal culpability
  

Michael Crowe's exoneration came about as a result of what author Edwin Borchard described in a 1932 tome on wrongful convictions as "sheer good luck." The scholars who collaborated on this white paper hope that their recommendations will reduce the role of such serendipity, by giving police, prosecutors, judges, and juries the scientific information necessary to reduce egregious injustices like the one in Escondido 12 years ago.

Images: (1) Michael Crowe's interrogation, (2) Richard Tuite, the real killer, (3) Michael Crowe with his sisters; Stephanie is on the left.

Hat tip: Adam Alban

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

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

Book describes harmful effects of labeling and treatment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, here's a modest idea:

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

* * * * *

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

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

Related Amazon book reviews:

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

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

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

• Rape and the Culture of the Courtroom
  

• Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness

Photo credit: SOL Research

New findings on juvenile sex offending

Sexually Violent Predator laws have so colored our perceptions that we often ignore a more typical type of sex offender -- the kid next-door. Indeed, of known sex offenders against children, more than a third are other juveniles, according to a new study commissioned by the Justice Department.

Most of these young offenders are not pedophiles or sexual deviants. Rather, they are sexual experimenters, date rapists, and boys who commit sexual assaults as part of a group. Risk of sexual acting out increases sharply as boys enter puberty, and plateaus at age 14, according to the study. The overwhelming majority of youths apprehended for sexual misconduct -- an estimated 85-95 percent -- have no further arrests for sex offenses.

This suggests that new federal rules placing juveniles on public sex offender registries are counterproductive, as the broad majority of youthful sex offenders will mature out of offending and should not be stigmatized for life. Rather, says study co-author David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center, early sex education is a key to preventing youthful sexual misconduct.

Even as U.S. states get set to implement the registration and reporting requirements of the Adam Walsh Protection and Safety Act this year, under penalty of losing grants if they do not comply, a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee is receiving testimony about problems with the registry.

"There are some very compelling cases that ... don't rise to the threshold of a predator and shouldn't be on the register," Republican Representative Tonya Schuitmaker of Michigan, a member of the committee, told the Michigan Herald-Palladium. "Unfortunately, they get lumped in with the predators."

The newspaper cited as an example the case of a 17-year-old boy who perfectly illustrates the juvenile study findings:

Since committing his offenses between the ages of 12-14, he has not had any further problems. He successfully completed probation and 200 hours of public service work and he excels in school, where he plays several sports. Yet, when he turns 18 his name will be placed on a registry that will stigmatize him until his 40s.

Gloria Gillespie, a sex offender therapist, told the newspaper that the boy's offenses were exploratory, and he is not a predator at risk of committing new offenses.

"Juvenile murderers get off at 21 and they're not on any list," she said. "What's the purpose of this?"

The juvenile study is available here; USA Today coverage is here. An excellent Herald-Palladium (Michigan) article on sex offender registries is here. Graphics credit: Adreson (Creative Commons license)

ON A RELATED NOTE: For a judicial analysis of the punitive and stigmatizing impact of the federal reporting law (SORNA), see the Maine Supreme Court opinion in Maine v. Letalien. Eric S. Letalien was 19 years old when he was convicted of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl. He was sentenced to prison and placed on a public registry for 15 years. Later, the law was amended, requiring him to register for life. He appealed, citing the negative impact on his ability to maintain employment and fulfill his roles as a husband and a father. In last month's decision, Maine's Supreme Court overturned the lifetime registration requirement in cases like Letalien's as unconstitutional on ex post facto grounds.

Can we tell which juveniles will sexually reoffend?

Juvenile recidivism is a hot topic in the sex offender field these days. It would be great if we could figure out which young sex offenders are at high risk to offend again. After all, the federal SORNA law mandates that certain juvenile sex offenders be listed on public registries and report to law enforcement every 90 days for a full quarter-century.

But predicting which adolescents are at risk to sexually reoffend as adults is no easy task. Perhaps the biggest impediment is the low base rate: The large majority of underage males who commit a sex crime will not be charged for another sex crime as an adult. So, any prediction that a juvenile will sexually reoffend is likely to be wrong -- what we in the field call a "false positive."

Although several new instruments have popped up with the express goal of increasing the accuracy of juvenile sex offender risk prediction, none has the established reliability or validity to be ready for prime time, according to a new article in Behavioral Sciences and the Law.

"At this time, research does not support the use of any of the specialized risk assessment instruments for the task of predicting sexual recidivism in adolescents…. Unfortunately, legislatures enacting laws regarding civil detainment and registration of adolescent sexual offenders have not been dissuaded by studies demonstrating an inability to accurately predict which adolescents are most at risk for subsequent sex offenses."

Scientifically proven instruments or not, we will still be called upon to conduct such evaluations. And if we refuse, the article's authors point out, courts will just rely upon flawed data or the recommendations of prosecutors.

With that in mind, Michael Vitacco, associate director of research at the Mendota Mental Health Institute in Wisconsin, and his colleagues provide a set of recommendations for forensic psychologists who conduct risk assessments of juvenile sex offenders. These include:

• First and foremost, remember the low base rates and the consequently high risk of false positives, with devastatingly dire consequences to young people's futures.

• Understand adolescent sexual development, including hormonal issues and the brain's structural maturation. Adolescent sexual behavior is fluid, and any risk prediction should be very short-term.

• Be familiar with the literature on treatment efficacy with youth (such as that conducted by Michael Caldwell, Elizabeth Cauffman, and others). Much more so than adults, even the most serious adolescent offenders are amenable to high quality, empirically validated treatments.

• Give proper weight to a youth's social context, including peers, family, community, and school factors. These are enormously influential in youth behavior.

The entire issue of Behavioral Sciences & the Law is focused on adolescent sex offending. The abstract of the article, Assessing risk in adolescent sex offenders: Recommendations for clinical practice, by Vitacco, M.J., Caldwell, M., Ryba, N.L., Malesky, A., & Kurus, S.J. (2009), is online. 

Readers may also be interested in an appellate ruling of first impression on the retroactivity of the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA) as applied to former juvenile offenders. In the aptly titled case of US v. Juvenile Male, No. 07-30290, the 9th Circuit ruled that the new federal law is unconstitutional as applied to juveniles who committed their crimes before the law was enacted.