RadioLab explores criminal culpability and the brain

Debate: Moral justice versus risk forecasting

After Kevin had brain surgery for his epilepsy, he developed an uncontrollable urge to download child pornography. If the surgery engendered Klüver-Bucy Syndrome, compromising his ability to control his impulses, should he be less morally culpable than another offender?

Blame is a fascinating episode of RadioLab that explores the debate over free will versus biology as destiny. Nita Farahany, professor of law and philosophy at Duke, is documenting an explosion in the use of brain science in court. But it's a slippery slope: Today, brain scanning technology only enables us to see the most obvious of physical defects, such as tumors. But one day, argues neuroscientist David Eagleman, we will be able to map the brain with sufficient focus to see that all behavior is a function of one perturbation or another.

Eagleman and guest Amy Phenix (of Static-99 fame) both think that instead of focusing on culpability, the criminal justice system should focus on risk of recidivism, as determined by statistical algorithms.

But hosts Jad and Robert express skepticism about this mechanistic approach to justice. They wonder whether a technocratic, risk-focused society is really one we want to live in.

The idea of turning legal decision-making over to a computer program is superficially alluring, promising to take prejudice and emotionality out of the equation. But the notion of scientific objectivity is illusory. Computer algorithms are nowhere near as value-neutral as their proponents claim. Implicit values are involved in choosing which factors to include in a model, humans introduce scoring bias (as I have reported previously in reference to the Static-99 and the PCL-R), and even supposedly neutral factors such as zip codes that are used in crime-forecasting software are coded markers of race and class. 

But that’s just on a technical level. On a more philosophical level, the notion that scores on various risk markers should determine an individual’s fate is not only unfair, punishing the person for acts not committed, but reflects a deeply pessimistic view of humanity. People are not just bundles of unthinking synapses. They are sentient beings, capable of change.

In addition, by placing the onus for future behavior entirely on the individual, the risk-factor-as-destiny approach conveniently removes society’s responsibility for mitigating the environmental causes of crime, and negates any hope of rehabilitation.

As discussed in an illuminating article on the Circles of Support and Accountability (or COSA) movement in Canada, former criminals face a catch-22 situation in which society refuses to reintegrate them, thereby elevating their risk of remaining alienated and ultimately reoffending. Yet when surrounded by friendship and support, former offenders are far less likely to reoffend, studies show.

The hour-long RadioLab episode  concludes with a segment on forgiveness, featuring the unlikely friendship that developed between an octogenarian and the criminal who sexually assaulted and strangled his daughter.

That provides a fitting ending. Because ultimately, as listener Molly G. from Maplewood, New Jersey, comments on the segment’s web page, justice is a moral and ethical construct. It’s not something that can, or should, be decided by scientists.

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The episode is highly recommended. (Click HERE to listen online or download the podcast.)

Militarization: When the extraordinary becomes ordinary

In line with the human rights theme of this year's Blog Action Day (it's exciting to be coordinating with 2,000+ other bloggers from around the world!),* let me share four brief anecdotes. They may seem unrelated but, ultimately, they do connect. I promise.

#1: Cheye Calvo, mayor of the small town of Berwyn Heights, Maryland, was in his bedroom one night, changing clothes for a meeting. His mother-in-law was in the kitchen, cooking a tomato-artichoke sauce. Suddenly, Calvo heard an explosion and the sound of gunfire. Heavily armed men clad in black burst into the house. He saw his mother-in-law lying face-down on the kitchen floor at gunpoint. His two beloved black Labradors lay dead in pools of blood. Clad only his boxer shorts, the mayor was bound and forced to kneel on the floor. This was it, he thought. He was about to be executed, but he knew not why.

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#2: In the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City, an alert neighbor observed a man forcing a woman into her apartment. Police were called. They burst in and found the woman in handcuffs, a man hiding in her closet with rope and two pairs of women's panties in his backpack. Daryl Thomas was a resident of the neighborhood, a husband and a father, and a computer system manager for a Manhattan law firm. When questioned by Senior Detective Harold Hernandez, he was forthcoming. No, this was not his first sexual assault; he had committed seven or eight similar attacks in the neighborhood in recent months. Yes, he was willing to show police the precise locations. The detective had one major problem: He was unaware of any serial rape spree in the 33rd precinct. If the victims had reported the crimes, the Manhattan Special Victims Unit would have notified the precinct of the pattern, so police could be on the lookout for a suspect matching Thomas’s description.

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Police prepare to enter Carey apartment

#3: After dental hygienist Miriam Carey attempted to ram a barricade near the White House and was shot to death on Oct. 3, her one-year-old baby in the car, police descended upon her home town of Stamford, Connecticut, armed with helicopters, bomb trucks, Hazardous Materials trucks and machine guns. The 100-odd personnel from the U.S. Secret Service, the FBI and state and local police sealed off the area and evacuated nearby residents before donning Haz-Mat suits with self-contained breathing apparatuses and entering Carey’s apartment. Rather than bombs, guns or Al Qaeda literature, they reportedly found prescriptions for the antipsychotic risperidone and the antidepressant escitalopram, medications consistent with Carey's diagnosis of postpartum depression with psychosis.

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Ohio State University's MRAP

#4: Ohio State University has just obtained a military surplus Mine-Resistant, Ambush-Protected (MRAP) armored personnel carrier. Explaining the acquisition, the campus police chief points out that stadiums are at risk for terrorist attacks, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The MRAP may also be used for crowd control at football games. The vehicle cost about half a million dollars to produce and is designed to withstand "ballistic arms fire, mine fields, IED's, and Nuclear, Biological and Chemical environments." To make its appearance less ominous, its desert tan is being repainted black and its roof-mounted machine gun being removed. The university joins the ranks of cities across America -- from Preston, Idaho to Cullman, Alabama to Boulder, Colorado and Murrieta, California -- that are cashing in on Department of Homeland Security grant money to buy such intimidating vehicles. In Dallas County, Texas, for example, the sheriff’s department plans to use its new MRAP to serve drug warrants. 

So what's the connection?

All four anecdotes relate to an insiduous shift in U.S. policing over the past few decades, toward greater and greater militarization.

The emergence of SWAT

Young people born in the 1980s may find it hard to believe that back in 1970, there was only one SWAT team in the entire United States -- in Los Angeles, California. Today, SWAT teams are a cultural icon. Almost all cities and most small towns have these paramilitary forces. By and large, the role of SWAT teams is far removed from the Hollywood image of hostage rescue or mass shooting intervention. Rather, they are being deployed – tens of thousands of times per year – in drug raids and to serve routine warrants, according to a new book by award-winning in investigative journalist Radley Balko. 

Cheye Calvo, the mayor of Berwyn Heights, Maryland (Anecdote 1), was a victim of one such raid. Mistaken drug raids are far from rare. The judiciary's progressive weakening of checks and balances in regard to warrants and searches has fostered a police culture in which "extraordinary violence" is meted out with impunity. The shooting of dogs "at the slightest provocation," Balko writes, is part of a larger problem of an us-against-them "battlefield mentality" in which many police see the citizenry as the enemy.

Allure of the techno-warrior

"Why serve an arrest warrant to some crack dealer with a .38?" asked one U.S. military officer who trained police SWAT teams in the 1990s. "With full armor, the right shit, and training, you can kick ass and have fun."

As this quote implies, SWAT raids -- conducted hundreds of times per year in cities large and small -- foster a masculine culture of violence and a worship of a "techno-warrior" image of policing. SWAT raids are the ultimate in power, an adrenaline rush that is quickly habit-forming. Recruitment videos that emphasize this culture may, in turn, be changing the type of individual who seeks to become a police officer.

Texas SWAT team terrorizes organic farmers in August

Balko traces the militarization of police to the "drug war" ideology that began under President Nixon and escalated under Ronald Reagan. One specific clause in an omnibus crime bill of 1984, not considered particularly controversial at the time, ultimately produced a seismic shift in American policing. The asset forfeiture law allowed police to seize property, auction it off, and divide up the bounty, just so long as federal agents were even remotely involved in the investigation.

Asset forfeiture created a huge incentive for police to go after people in order to seize their property. Drug enforcement brought in boatloads of cash, much of which was reinvested into more battle gear. Police departments competed with each other for drug revenue, to the neglect of investigating violent crimes such as rape, robbery and murder. So, we end up with situations like the one a few years back in Oakland, California, in which a lack of investigative prioritization allowed a serial rapist on parole to remain free to prey on young African American girls until he finally made the mistake of gunning down four police officers.

Detective work is no fun

Many police officers are appalled by the insidious militarization of police. Betty Taylor, police chief of a small Missouri town, recalled how she became troubled by the economic disparity between the "drug guys," flush with property seizures and endless federal grants, and the struggling sex crimes unit that she had established.

"When you think about the collateral effects of a sex crime, of how it can affect an entire family, an entire community, it just didn’t make sense," she told Balko. "The drug users weren't really harming anyone but themselves. Even the dealers, I found much of the time they were just people with little money, just trying to get by." Her opinion solidified when she was recruited onto a SWAT team, and witnessed first-hand the lasting terror that the raids produced in vulnerable children.

"I thought, how can we be the good guys when we come into the house looking like this, screaming and pointing guns at the people they love? ... Good police work has nothing to do with dressing up in black and breaking into houses in the middle of the night…. When you get into that [us-versus-them] mentality, there are no innocent people. There's us and there's the enemy. Children and dogs are always the easiest casualties."

Downgrading crime

The case of Daryl Thomas (Anecdote 2) involved more than neglect of violent crimes. As Detective Hernandez discovered, police brass in his precinct -- and throughout New York City -- were systematically downgrading crimes from serious felonies to minor misdemeanors, in order to improve their CompStat crime statistics. A model that has been adopted throughout the United States as well as in England and Australia, CompStat had the unintended consequence of fostering competition among precincts for lower statistics. Only seven categories of major crime are counted in crime statistics and made publicly available, so police can reduce crime rates by, for example, reclassifying attempted rape as criminal trespass.

The Thomas case was handled quietly, with no media attention. Thomas was convicted and sentenced to 50 years in prison. But Hernandez, frustrated by the constant battles with his own superiors, took an early retirement. "Unfortunately, this is the culture for the young cop coming into the department. He doesn't see the bigger picture," he said. "If it's going to allow him to have a day off, and they won't ride him or harass him, he'll go along with it. And New Yorkers are being victimized, and no one responds to their complaints."

While major crimes were being downgraded to misdemeanors, Manhattan police were also being encouraged to trump up minor cases -- drinking in public or driving without a seatbelt -- in order to bolster their statistics. Police officer Adrian Schoolcraft surreptitiously recorded his superiors giving these directives; with the collusion of a department psychologist, he eventually found himself drummed out of the force on trumped-up psychiatric grounds. (You can hear excerpts from his secret tapes on This American Life.)

Culture of fear

Putting the case of dental hygienist Miriam Carey (Anecdote 3) in historical context illustrates just how much has changed in the past few decades. 

Back in 1976, Chester M. Plummer became the first person shot to death by White House guards. Plummer and Carey were similar in some respects. Both were African American. Both were described as apolitical. And both manifested signs of psychiatric decompensation. With her postpartum psychosis, Carey had apparently incorporated President Obama into a delusional belief system. Plummer, a decorated Army veteran, former high school football star and part-time cabbie, had been examined by a psychiatrist after being arrested for indecent exposure; the doctor thought Plummer's recent divorce had triggered a psychiatric crisis. On July 25, 1976, Plummer scaled a fence while holding a three-foot pipe. He was shot to death after ignoring the guards’ orders to stop.

What happened -- or didn't happen -- next is where the difference in culture emerges. Blogging at The Nation, Rick Perlstein compares the two cases to highlight the extreme overreaction of police today to any threat, however contained.

"There’s terrorism now, they say. But there was terrorism then, nearly every month -- 89 bombings attributed by the FBI to terrorism in 1975, culminating in that awful LaGuardia bomb; and a veritable wave in the winter and spring 1976, much of it around the trial of Patty Hearst: of an FBI office in Berkeley, Standard Oil of California headquarters in San Francisco. Americans didn’t freak out, or shut down, or exhibit symptoms of PTSD. They had a massive outdoor national 200th birthday party."

Writing in The Baffler, Chris Bray makes a similar point in regard to the shutdown of Boston after the explosion at the marathon that killed three people.

Police outside Carey residence in Stamford, CT

In the aftermath of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the 1996 bombing at the Atlanta Olympics, and the paired 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, here’s what didn’t happen: whole cities weren’t locked down, armored personnel carriers with police logos didn’t rumble in, and SWAT teams in combat uniforms and body armor didn’t storm through the suburbs for a loosely ordered set of (ultimately hapless) house-to-house searches. Somehow, though, 2013 was the year it became appropriate to close cities, turning off taxis, buses, and trains and telling residents that the governor was suggesting -- okay, strongly suggesting -- that they not leave their homes until the police said so. One of those familiar moments in which officials ask the public to be on the lookout turned into a remarkable new moment in which officials ask the public to cease to exist in its public form so that the police can have the streets.

That leaves Anecdote 4, about armored personnel carriers, which pretty much speaks for itself.

"We are in the midst of a historic transformation," wrote Eastern Kentucky University professor Peter B. Kraska in 2007 in regard to police militarization. "Attempting to control the crime problem by routinely conducting police special-operations raids on people’s private residences is strong evidence that the U.S. police, and crime-control efforts in general, have moved significantly down the militarization continuum." 

The irony is that this militarization is occurring simultaneously with a great diminution in violent crime in the United States. In particular, despite the public's perception of police work as dangerous, the job of law enforcement is getting safer all the time.

The American Civil Liberties Union is looking into the broader implications of the spread of military culture into domestic policing in the United States. The agency believes that militarization has come at the cost of trampled human rights and a greater risk of violence, according to a report in the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch. The study is due out next year.

That strikes me as a bit too late. Pandora's box has long been opened, and there's no going back.

So, don’t be too surprised if you happen to spy a mine-resistant, ambush-protected, armored personnel carrier rolling down your street in the near future. It's only a matter of time.

Sources and recommended resources:

Radley Balko (2013), Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces 

Peter Kraska (2007), Militarizing the American Criminal Justice System: The Changing Roles of the Armed Forces and the Police

Graham Rayman (June 8, 2010), Village Voice, NYPD Tapes 3: A Detective Comes Forward about Downgraded Sexual Assaults: When even attempted rapes are being downgraded to misdemeanors, is the public safe?

Rick Perlstein (Oct. 3, 2013), Nation, Culture of Fear: Miriam Carey’s Tragedy, and Our Own

Ira Glass, This American Life, “Right to Remain Silent” (well worth a look or, better yet, a listen)

Sarah Stillman (August 12, 2013), New Yorker, Taken: Under civil forfeiture, Americans who haven’t been charged with wrongdoing can be stripped of their cash, cars, and even homes. Is that all we’re losing? 

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*Blog Action Day is an international event in which thousands of bloggers around the world pledge to participate. This year's theme, in coordination with Amnesty International, is human rights. If you want to see a true smorgasbord of human rights topics streaming in live, check out the web page.

Risk screening worthless with juvenile sex offenders, study finds

Boys labeled as 'sexually violent predators' not more dangerous

Juveniles tagged for preventive detention due to their supposedly higher level of sexual violence risk are no more likely to sexually reoffend than adolescents who are not so branded, a new study has found.

Only about 12 percent of youths who were targeted for civil commitment as sexually violent predators (SVP's) but then freed went on to commit a new sex offense. That compares with about 17 percent of youths screened out as lower risk and tracked over the same five-year follow-up period.

Although the two groups had essentially similar rates of sexual and violent reoffending, overall criminal reoffending was almost twice as high among the youths who were NOT petitioned for civil commitment (66 percent versus 35 percent), further calling into question the judgment of the forensic evaluators.

Because of the youths' overall low rates of sexual recidivism, civil detention has no measurable impact on rates of sexual violence by youthful offenders, asserted study author Michael Caldwell, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin and an expert on juvenile sex offending.

The study, just published in the journal Sexual Abuse, is one in a growing corpus pointing to flaws in clinical prediction of risk.

It tracked about 200 juvenile delinquents eligible for civil commitment as Sexually Violent Persons (SVP's). The state where the study was conducted was not specified; at least eight of the 20 U.S. states with SVP laws permit civil detention of juveniles, and all allow commitment of adults based on offenses committed as a juvenile.

As they approached the end of their confinement period, the incarcerated juveniles underwent a two-stage screening process. In the first phase, one of a pool of psychologists at the institution evaluated them to determine whether they had a mental disorder that made them "likely" to commit a future act of sexual violence. Just over one in every four boys was found to meet this criterion, thereby triggering a prosecutorial petition for civil commitment.

After the initial probable cause hearing but before the final civil commitment hearing, an evaluator from a different pool of psychologists conducted a second risk assessment. These  psychologists were also employed by the institution but were independent of the treatment team. Astonishingly, the second set of psychologists disagreed with the first in more than nine out of ten cases, screening out 50 of the remaining 54 youths. (Only four youths were civilly committed, and a judge overturned one of these commitments, so ultimately all but three boys from the initial group of 198 could be tracked in the community to see whether or not they actually reoffended.)

Evaluators typically did not rely on actuarial risk scales to reach their opinions, Caldwell noted, and their methods remained something of a mystery. Youths were more likely to be tagged for civil detention at the first stage if they were white, had multiple male victims, and had engaged in multiple instances of sexual misconduct in custody, Caldwell found.

However, no matter what method they used or which factors they considered, the psychologists likely would have had little success in predicting which youths would reoffend. Even "the most carefully developed and thoroughly studied" methods for predicting juvenile recidivism have shown very limited accuracy, Caldwell pointed out. This is mainly due to a combination of youths' rapid social maturation and their very low base rates of recidivism; it is quite hard to successfully predict a rare event.

Indeed, a recent meta-analysis revealed that none of the six most well-known and best-researched instruments for appraising risk among juvenile sex offenders showed consistently accurate results. Studies that did find significant predictive validity for an instrument were typically conducted by that instrument's authors rather than independent researchers, raising questions about their objectivity.

"Juveniles are still developing their personality, cognitions, and moral judgment, processes that reflect considerable plasticity," noted lead author Inge Hempel, a psychology graduate student in the Netherlands, and her colleagues. "There are still many possible developmental pathways, and no one knows what causes persistent sexual offending."

Caldwell agrees with Hempel and her colleagues that experts' inability to accurately predict which juveniles will commit future sex crimes calls into question the ethics of civil commitment.

"From the perspective of public policy, these results raise questions about whether SVP commitment laws, as written, should apply to juveniles adjudicated for sexual offenses," he wrote. "If SVP laws could be reliably applied to high risk juvenile offenders, the benefit of preventing a lifetime of potential victims makes for a compelling case. However, the task of identifying the small subgroup of juveniles adjudicated for sexual offenses who are likely to persist in sexual violence into adulthood is at least extremely difficult, and may be technically infeasible."

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The articles are:

Michael Caldwell: Accuracy of Sexually Violent Person Assessments of Juveniles Adjudicated for Sexual Offenses, Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment. Request it from the author HERE.

Inge Hempel, Nicole Buck, Maaike Cima and Hjalmar van Marle: Review of Risk Assessment Instruments for Juvenile Sex Offenders: What is Next? International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology. Request it from the first author HERE.

Newtown, CT: Latest massacre brings more hand-wringing

Our nation's collective inertia surrounding mass killings is perhaps best illustrated in a YouTube clip splicing together speeches by Presidents Obama, Bush (II) and Clinton. Lots of hand-wringing and calls for prayer. Little in the way of concrete strategies.

Not that there is any simple fix. The causes are complex and additive: Easy access to super-lethal weapons, inadequate treatment resources for the mentally ill, and -- perhaps most of all -- a culture that glorifies violence.

Children in Karachi, Pakistan commiserate over shared pain

We are, after all, the world's leading imperial power. We aren't surprised at the spectacles of violence in Imperial Rome. Yet are we that different? We exert global control largely through military might, and celebrate violence in the service of a righteous cause. Where is the outrage over our country's slaughter of at least 176 children (almost 10 times the number killed in Newtown) by unmanned drone strikes in Pakistan over the past seven years? Those children are considered expendable, "collateral damage" in pursuit of a legitimate, larger goal. As rabble-rousing filmmaker and author Michael Moore Tweeted, "A county that officially sanctions horrific violence is surprised when a 20-year-old joins in?" Yet, amazingly, children on the other side of the world, in Karachi, Pakistan, held a candlelight vigil in solidarity with the children of Sandy Hook.

Untreated mental illness

As shown in a Mother Jones interactive map of 65 mass murders since 1962, a majority of the killers were mentally ill, and displayed signs of such before their rampages. High-quality, affordable, dependable and stable treatment, in which the clinician forges a real human connection with the patient, can save lives. And the great thing is, prevention does not necessitate prediction. We don't need to be able to do the impossible, and pinpoint which depressed, psychotic, manic, alienated or socially withdrawn man (yes, the shooters are overwhelmingly male) might have become the next Adam Lanza. Or the next suicide, an act twice as prevalent as homicide. Yet, high-quality treatment is scarce, and getting scarcer. Instead, jails and prisons are primary sites for the impersonal medication maintenance that passes for treatment these days.

Misplaced emphasis?

Back-to-back slaughters at the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, the shopping mall in Portland, Oregon and now Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut -- among others -- give an impression of an alarming rise in mass shootings in the United States. Surprisingly, that perception may be inaccurate.

Tracking murders in which four or more people were killed in one incident, criminologist James Alan Fox found that the numbers rise and fall from year to year, but without trending in any direction. On average, there are about 20 mass murders per year in the United States, bringing the deaths of about 100 people, according to an interview in the San Francisco Chronicle. The deadliest in U.S. history, by the way, was way back in 1927, when a 55-year-old school board treasurer in Michigan set off dynamite that killed 38 elementary school children and six adults.That paled in comparison to Anders Breivik's 2011 bombing and shooting attacks in Norway, which killed 77 people, most of them teenagers.

Another prominent criminologist, Jack Levin, agrees with Fox that the focus on mass murder is misplaced, especially vis-à-vis the gun control debate. The broad majority of the 8,000+ people killed by guns in the U.S. each year die singly, often at the hands of family members or due to interpersonal disputes or drug-related conflicts. One-off incidents notwithstanding, schools remain far safer statistically than homes, streets or roadways.

Blaming "the media"

If the attention is being misfocused, that brings us to the role of "the media" in mass violence. It is certainly plausible that the media frenzy surrounding each new outbreak contributes to copycat crimes. If you are angry and alienated, why not go out in a blaze of glory rather than with a silent whimper. Teach society a lesson; be remembered.

Yet I cringe when I hear blame heaped at the feet of "the media." As a former daily newspaper journalist I can attest to the fact that "the media" as a monolithic, all-powerful entity is a fiction. Sure, over-the-top TV news crews (who hardly merit the title of journalist) mercilessly badger victims' families in the interest of titillating viewers. But despite increasingly narrow ownership of the major news outlets by a handful of enormous conglomerates, newspapers, magazines, and even blogs still feature plenty of thoughtful analyses and investigative reports. And although these narratives have some influence in shaping public perceptions, they ultimately reflect more than construct the larger realities in which they are embedded. "They," in other words, are us.

The half-life of vigorous public discourse seems to be roughly a month. Then, another event generates headlines, and we're spastically chasing that thread. Until another tragedy strikes, and the spiral starts over. All the while, there is so much noise (to use Nate Silver's terminology) that the signal can be hard to detect. As Ohio public defender Jeff Gamso muses,

People will speak of evil. They will talk about gun control and how this proves we need more -- or less -- of it. They will talk about security, as if wrapping ourselves in plastic will keep us all safe when all it will really do is suffocate us.... If you would hate, hate the fact that we are reactive, always trying desperately to prevent what happened yesterday. And doing it badly. 

Perhaps this time will be different. Perhaps this latest in a string of rampages represents a tipping point. But I kind of doubt it. It's far easier to propose arming school teachers than to directly challenge the culturally embedded fermentation of entitlement and alienation that kindles rageful violence that gives no quarter.

Further resources:

My NPR commentary after the Aurora massacre can be heard online or by downloading the MP3 podcast HERE.

For you Twitter folks, I've Tweeted a series of media analyses on Sandy Hook that I found particularly insightful. You can find them at my Twitter site or in the Twitter feed in the right-hand column of my blog's home page.

My blog posts after previous mass shootings include:

• Aurora massacre: To speak or not to speak? (July 22, 2012)
• Arizona rampage: Analyzing the analyzers (Jan. 23, 2011)
• Virginia Tech: Can school shootings be prevented? (April 19, 2007)

And here, finally, is an oldie but goodie on the futility of trying to predict rare events:

Systems failure or black swan? New frame needed to stop memorial crime control frenzy (Oct. 19, 2010)

Prisoner "reentry": Paradigm shift or empty rhetoric?

  Vindictive "imagined public" a barricade to real reintegration   

For many who have broken the law, the real punishment begins not when they are processed into prison, but when they are finally ejected from their concertina-enclosed cages into a vengeful society that won't allow them to redeem themselves, branding them as forever bad.

Despite the stacked deck, some former prisoners do manage to find a sense of hope and turn their lives around. Such desistance is especially likely when society welcomes prisoners and restores their status as full citizens. Indeed, a study by Florida's Parole Commission found that prisoners whose civil rights were restored were far less likely to reoffend than those who remained unable to vote, hold public office, sit on juries, or obtain certain state licenses.

This process of criminal desistance is the topic of a new film out of Scotland. The Road from Crime -- a 48-minute film that can be viewed by clicking on the image below -- is narrated by Allan Weaver, a Scottish ex-offender turned probation officer and author of the book So You Think You Know Me? The script was co-written by my friend Shadd Maruna of the Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Queen's University Belfast, who wrote the groundbreaking book, Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Rebuild Their Lives.

Study: Reentry doesn’t equal reintegration

The film strikes an optimistic note, citing increasing government interest in alternatives to incarceration in these lean economic times. But a new study out of Colorado is less sanguine, at least as far as the USA is concerned. Even as policy makers give lip service to facilitating prisoners' successful "reentry" into the community, they cling to a risk reduction model that hamstrings true reintegration, the researchers found.

The researchers tracked the work of a Colorado state commission tasked with recommending changes in sentencing policies aimed at reducing sentencing costs while increasing efficacy. Analyzing the commission's discourse, study co-authors Sara Steen, Traci Lacock and Shelby McKinzey of the University of Colorado discovered that a powerful "imagined public" held these public servants hostage, forcing them to look over their shoulders and censor their humanistic impulses lest they be perceived as soft on crime.

The public of the commissioners' imaginations is a vengeful one, which promotes "victims’ rights" as antithetical to the rights of offenders. In this "zero-sum" wordlview (as David Garland labeled it in The Culture of Control), "concerns about offenders translate into attacks on victims and vice versa, so that actors have to forge an allegiance with one group or the other."

"This narrative implies that the real reentry problem is that this population is reentering society at all (if it were not for the expense, the reentry problem could be solved by keeping people who commit crimes in prison forever). The moral undertone to this narrative is one of anger and disgust toward (or, more mildly, frustration with) a group of dangerous people who need to be watched. [Former prisoners] are not people we want to help -- in part because they are, in some sense, beyond help…. [It] is clear that there is some interest in improving offenders' lives, but the main story driving the recidivism reduction narrative is that we (nonoffenders) should invest in reentry to make ourselves safer."

Indeed, risk-driven discourse has so become so naturalized that it takes a very active effort to step back and realize that it is only one of several possible ways of thinking about citizens who have committed crimes. Indeed, Shadd Maruna and Thomas LeBel (in an article available online) identified two dominant recidivism-reduction narratives:

• The CONTROL NARRATIVE views ex-prisoners as dangerous creatures who require close supervision at all times.

• The SUPPORT NARRATIVE regards ex-convicts as bundles of deficits with “needs” that must be attended to.

Although these narratives are superficially dissimilar, in essence they are fundamentally alike in that both dehumanize and problematize former offenders. Indeed, the so-called "risk/needs" paradigm so popular in forensic psychology circles arose squarely from the recidivism reduction discourse that overarches both the control and support narratives. As the researchers discovered in the Colorado case, much more time and energy is put into risk assessment than in providing the external resources necessary for change; “no matter how precisely one can measure an individual’s needs, without resources to attend to those needs the measurement is in some sense meaningless.”

Source: Steen et al (2012)

Imagined public: More vitriolic than actual public opinion?

The irony is that, in their hearts, many public officials and practitioners would like to do more for paroling prisoners, but are paralyzed by fear of a public that in reality may be less vengeful than they imagine. As Steen and her colleagues note:

"Commissioners routinely raised the specter of public discomfort with their recommendations, and they always assumed that the public was punitive and would oppose reforms that benefited offenders in any significant way. While the commissioners themselves had complex views of crime and punishment, they  almost universally assumed a deeply simplistic view on the part of the public, a view based on retribution  to the exclusion of all other considerations. Despite its mandate to continually draw on evidence to support its conclusions, the Commission completely ignored (or was unaware of) recent social scientific evidence of a shift in public opinion about crime and punishment."

They cited a 2002 poll conducted for the Open Society Institute in which the majority of those surveyed believed that the primary goals of the criminal justice system should be rehabilitation and crime prevention.

In other words, public officials may be generalizing about the public's attitudes based on a skewed perception created by handful of vocal -- and often rabid -- constituents. Because of this, public policy remains firmly entrenched in an irrational, hysterical loop tape from which escape is nigh impossible. As the Colorado researchers conclude:

"Many academics equate reentry with rehabilitation, and assume that the popularity of the reentry concept has resulted in discourse and policy that are friendly toward offenders, decreasing the distance between 'us' and 'them'. Our analysis suggests that reentry has not significantly changed the discourse, and we show how practitioners and policy-makers have molded the reentry concept to fit comfortably within the existing punitive discourse by focusing on recidivism reduction rather than reintegration…. In the end, we rather pessimistically conclude that the high hopes of many that reentry could fundamentally change the nature of punishment discourse in the 21st century is to date misplaced."

Resources:

For more information about The Road from Crime and the wider desistance project visit the Discovering Desistance Blog. An evidence summary on desistance, How and why people stop offending, is also available online. The film was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and George Mason University.  In addition to Shadd Maruna, project members include Fergus McNeill of the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research at the University of Glasgow, Stephen Farrall of the University of Sheffield and Claire Lightowler of the Institute for Research and Innovation in Social Services.

The featured article is: Unsettling the discourse of punishment? Competing narratives of reentry and the possibilities for change by Sara Steen, Traci Lacock and Shelby McKinzey Punishment and Society 2012 14: 29 DOI: 10.1177/1462474511424681. Click HERE to request a copy from the first author.

Related blog posts: 

• Systems failure or black swan? New frame needed to stop "Memorial Crime Control" frenzy

• Book highlights prisoner reentry obstacles: Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration

• Brooklyn, NY prisoner reentry program: Prosecutors push alternatives to crime 

On providing invited testimony in a legislative hearing

Reflections of a forensic psychologist

Floyd L. Jennings, JD, PhD, a clinical psychologist and attorney with a long-time clinical practice, currently works in county government to address the problems of the chronically mentally ill in the criminal justice system. In this capacity, he testified this week before a state legislative committee. Here, he reflects on that experience:

As special resource counsel to the Mental Health Division of the Harris County Public Defender (Houston, Texas), I was asked to provide testimony to the Texas House Subcommittee on Criminal Jurisprudence -- and did so on 29 February 2012.

For those having a history of legislative contact, serving as a witness in a hearing may be not at all discomforting. But to one for whom it was a new experience it was quite different.

First, the charge of the committee was to address whether alternative sentencing for mentally ill persons would be desirable. I argued simply that no changes in sentencing were needed -- because it would be difficult to craft, impossible to implement as it would trade on definitions of applicability, and moreover, courts already have the option of considering a defendant's state of mind as either mitigating or exculpating. 

On the other hand, diversion strategies for the lower-level misdemeanor offender could have enormous cost benefits and not compromise public safety. As well, pre-trial jail psychiatric services could be provided at modest direct cost through the use of physician extenders, and provide just that opportunity for stabilization necessary to enable rapid disposition of the matter, shortening any period of confinement. Finally, I argued that opportunities for post-disposition placement tiered to the acuity of the person would dramatically reduce recidivism.

Second, the affective dimensions of proffering testimony are profound -- the setting is elegant and the committee is seated above the witness much like justices in a supreme court. Witnesses are presented with questions for which there are often no easy answers, but to which some response must be made. My case was no exception.

Third, I learned that the lucidity of the argument may have little consequence. I was upbraided for failing to provide the legislature with specific means of cost savings through transfer of mental health services to the "private sector", although there is no private sector entity with the duty to provide mental health services to the chronically mentally ill on a statewide basis. And even if existing, no private sector entity has the resources to provide such. The tone of questions made it plain that legislators would prefer to have government provide all the goods and services that governments rightly provide, but at no cost, or with private sector funding.

Fourth, the venue of a public hearing is no occasion for stirring rhetoric or confrontation. I felt I should have reminded the committee that the present moment is not the occasion for abandonment of those functions which are uniquely governmental -- the care of the weakest members of society who are ill equipped to care for themselves. But in retrospect, and having viewed the videotape of the proceeding, it was far the better to have remained on task, and narrowly focused upon the committee's charge.

Finally, the message for psychologists, and mental health providers in general, is multifold: Involvement in the legislative process is to venture into unfamiliar and discomforting territory. However, social change is rarely achieved in a sterile environment, or one involving only warm and supportive exchanges. Moreover, to call upon governmental entities to fulfill their statutory duty as well as higher moral purpose, it to expose oneself to a certain amount of discord. In short, it goes with the territory. 

Would I do it again? 

I hope so, because in the course of the day I realized there were many I knew personally who were also participating in the process and there is also something rewarding about believing that perhaps you touched even one person having decision-making power to effectuate change.

The video of Dr. Jennings’ testimony is online HERE (beginning at 1:44:50).