Iran hostage takes on California prison SHU's

"Free country" throwing thousands in hole for their beliefs

Shane Bauer spent 26 months in Iran's Evin Prison, four of them in solitary, after he and two fellow hikers were apprehended on the Iraqi border in 2009. Seven months after his release, he visited the segregated housing unit (SHU) at the infamous Pelican Bay Prison in his home state of California.

In Iran, his cell was twice as big as those at Pelican Bay. He slept on a mattress, rather than a thin piece of foam. And he wasn’t required to defecate at the front of his cell, in full view of guards. But, most of all, the investigative journalist noticed the lack of windows in the SHU cells:

"Without [the] windows, I wouldn't have had the sound of ravens, the rare breezes, or the drops of rain that I let wash over my face some nights. My world would have been utterly restricted to my concrete box, to watching the miniature ocean waves I made by sloshing water back and forth in a bottle; to marveling at ants; to calculating the mean, median, and mode of the tick marks on the wall; to talking to myself without realizing it. For hours, days, I fixated on the patch of sunlight cast against my wall through those barred and grated windows. When, after five weeks, my knees buckled and I fell to the ground utterly broken, sobbing and rocking to the beat of my heart, it was the patch of sunlight that brought me back. Its slow creeping against the wall reminded me that the world did in fact turn and that time was something other than the stagnant pool my life was draining into."

Bauer's investigative piece in Mother Jones is the most thoroughly documented report I have seen on the politics of long-term solitary confinement in California. The ex-hostage convincingly demonstrates that a tool supposedly created to staunch prison gang violence is being used to torture prisoners who engage in prison activism, hold Afro-centric worldviews, or simply read the wrong books.

As even prison administrators admit, only a small minority of those being held in long-term solitary confinement are classified as gang members; even fewer are gang leaders. Rather, most are so-called "gang associates." It's hard to see how a prisoner serving a lengthy term can avoid all associations with the ubiquitous prison gangs. But the evidence used to toss prisoners into long-term SHU isolation can be very thin, including possession of such written materials as:

• "Black literature" (including The Black People's Prison Survival Guide which, ironically, counsels prisoners to stay away from gang leaders)
• Publications by California Prison Focus, a prison reform group that advocates the abolition of the SHUs
• Bestsellers such as Sun Tzu's The Art of War and Machiavelli's The Prince

(A list of the types of items that can get prisoners thrown into solitary is HERE; a sample list of one prisoner's suspect materials is HERE.)


Most troubling is the lack of due process. Prisoners are not entitled to legal representation at the 20-minute hearings that decide their fate for decades. There is no judicial oversight to prevent trumped-up evidence from being introduced. Indeed, one judge ruled that it is not illegal for prison authorities to fabricate information in order to lock somebody away in solitary.

Click on image  to experience interactive SHU cell as narrated by Bauer

"Other than the inmate, there is only one person present -- the gang investigator -- and he serves as judge, jury, and prosecutor. Much of the evidence -- anything provided by informants -- is confidential and thus impossible to refute. That's what Judge Salavati [in Iran] told us after our prosecutor spun his yarn about our role in a vast American-Israeli conspiracy: There were heaps of evidence, but neither we nor our lawyer were allowed to see it."

In the wake of last year’s hunger strikes, California prison officials claim they are reforming the system. SHU prisoners are now allowed calendars, as well as handballs to use in the small concrete dog runs in which they can exercise, alone, for one hour each day. If they abstain from gang activity for a year, they can now get a deck of cards; three years earns them a chessboard.

But there's a major catch. The Department of Corrections is vastly expanding the list of serious rules violations. Mere possession of articles or pictures depicting "security threat groups" (the new name for gangs) will constitute "serious rule violations on par with stabbing somebody," Bauer reports. And the list of such groups has expanded to 1,500, including everything from Juggalos (followers of the popular hip hop group Insane Clown Posse) to "revolutionary groups” to "Black-Non Specific," a term that, as Bauer notes, suggests that "any group with the word 'black' in its name can be considered disruptive."

The rationale for this repression that has been repeatedly condemned by international and U.S. human rights groups is the need to reduce gang influence in prisons. However, Bauer explains,there is no evidence that such solitary confinement regimens reduce prison violence. To the conrary, prisons that have reduced or eliminated supermaxes have seen parallel reductions in prison violence.

I highly recommend reading the Mother Jones report, "Solitary in Iran Nearly Broke Me. Then I Went Inside America's Prisons."

My most recent blog post on the Pelican Bay SHU, focusing on an Amnesty report and a class-action lawsuit and containing links to prior related posts, is HERE.

Related: National Law Journal report, The graying of the penitentiary

My Amazon review of the new movie ARGO, about the 1979-1980 Iranian hostage crisis, is HERE; if you find it helpful, please click on "yes" at the bottom.

Amnesty issues scathing report on prolonged solitary confinement

Critique follows lawsuit alleging psychological torture at infamous Pelican Bay  

Tucked away in a remote corner of Northern California is one of the most brutal behavioral experiments of the modern era: Upwards of 500 men housed for more than a decade straight in tiny, windowless, concrete tombs.

Pelican Bay, which opened in 1989, was specifically designed to foster maximum isolation. Prisoners are denied phone calls, contact visits, and recreational or vocational programming. But the designers did not plan for the sensory deprivation to be perpetual; stays in the "SHU" (Segregated Housing Unit) were originally intended to last 18 months or less.

Now, in a scathing report, Amnesty International has lambasted conditions in the SHU as "cruel, inhuman, or degrading" punishment that violates international law on the treatment of prisoners.

California holds more than 3,000 prisoners in SHU's, with more than 1,000 at Pelican Bay. No other U.S. state is believed to have held so many prisoners for such long periods in indefinite isolation, the Amnesty International investigators found.

A spokesman for the prison system responded with the rather outlandish nonsequitur that California has no solitary confinement, because SHU prisoners are able (if they have funds) to buy televisions and watch cable channels, including ESPN.

The Amnesty report follows on the heels of a class-action lawsuit filed by the Center for Constitutional Law on behalf of 10 SHU prisoners who claim that long-term isolation is slowly destroying their bodies and minds, in violation of international standards against torture and inhumane treatment.

The lawsuit, Ruiz v. Brown, alleges that prisoners have no means to escape solitary confinement, other than to become government informants against prison gangs, which would put them and their families at risk.

While the prison system claims these are the "worst of the worst," the men claim they are being held in solitary confinement as punishment for their lack of cooperation with prison administrators, based on very thin evidence of gang affiliation. For several, their housing status alone prevents them from being eligible for parole.

Evidence of their supposed continued gang affiliation, the lawsuit says, includes:

• Saying "hello" to a prisoner from a different gang
• Possessing a drawing of an Aztec tattoo
• Possessing a pamphlet in Swahili, a language spoken by 60 million Africans that is categorized by the Department of Corrections as a "banned language"
• Having a Black Power tattoo
• Having a book about George Jackson (Paul Liberatore's The Road to Hell: the True Story of George Jackson, Stephen Bingham, and the San Quentin Massacre)

Plaintiff Paul Redd, for example, has spent 33 of the past 35 years in solitary confinement, the last dozen at Pelican Bay. He would be eligible for parole if not for his purported status as a "captain" in the Black Guerrilla Family despite no evidence of any gang activity in the past six years. His SHU status is allegedly based on old confidential memoranda stating he had communicated with other BGF members, plus possession of drawings, collages and booklets related to George Jackson and the Black Panthers.

A hunger strike last year, supported by up to 6,600 prisoners at 13 other prisons around the state, led to raised hopes, but so far no meaningful reform.

Psychological effects of long-term isolation

What happens when you lock humans inside a concrete sensory deprivation chamber for a period of decades, denying them all physical connection, human warmth, and even glimpses of nature?

In their lawsuit, prisoners who have spent a mind-boggling one to two decades in solitary confinement describe an inexorable descent into hopelessness and despair, with crippling loneliness and a constant struggle to stave off psychosis. They report pervasive insomnia, anxiety, hallucinations, mood swings, violent nightmares, panic attacks and a profound rage that they attempt to stifle by numbing all feeling. One prisoner described feeling like "walking dead," while another said he hears disembodied voices and feels like he is "silently screaming 24 hours a day."

Plaintiff Danny Troxell, for example, reports that he does not initiate conversations, is not motivated to do anything, and feels as if he is in a stupor much of the time. He often becomes "blank" or out of touch with his feelings.

These symptoms echo the findings of mental health experts who examined Pelican Bay prisoners as far back as 1995, six years after the prison opened, in connection with an earlier lawsuit (Madrid v Gomez) over the mental health effects of solitary confinement. At that time, Stuart Grassian, MD, an expert on segregation psychosis, found many men were already deteriorating into psychosis, paranoia, suicidality, and other psychological reactions to their unnatural isolation. Craig Haney, meanwhile, found that nearly all of the prisoners he sampled during that period reported symptoms of psychological distress such as intrusive thoughts, oversensitivity to external stimuli, difficulties with attention or memory, profound depression and social withdrawal.

Over time, prisoners can barely recall what it feels like to experience physical contact with another human being. Luis Esquivel, for example, has not shaken another person’s hand in 13 years and fears that he has forgotten the feel of human contact; "he spends a lot of time wondering what it would feel like to shake the hand of another person," according to the class-action lawsuit.

And what about mental health treatment?

"Every two weeks, a psychologist walks past the prisoners' cells, calling out 'good morning,' or 'you okay?' The psychologist walks past eight cells in approximately 30 seconds during these 'rounds.' "

Last year, a Special Rapporteur with the United Nations declared that prolonged solitary confinement constitutes torture, and that even 15 days in solitary confinement violates an individual’s human rights.

In the wake of its investigation, Amnesty is calling for ratcheting down isolation so it is only used as a "last resort" for severely unruly prisoners who endanger others, immediate removal of prisoners who have already spent years in the isolation units, and improving conditions for those who remain by allowing them more exercise and opportunity for human contact and phone calls to their families.

The Amnesty report can be found HERE; the amended petition in Ruiz v. Brown is HERE. An online petition in support of the SHU prisoners' demands is HERE.  The featured artwork is by Gabriel Reyes, one of the plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit. More information on Reyes and his art is HERE.

Related blog posts:

• Supermax: Hell on earth or . . . not as bad as we thought? (Jan. 6, 2011)

• Historic hunger strike by Supermax prisoners continues (July 15, 2011)

• Willie Bosket: Tale of a wasted life (Sept. 23, 2008)

• Why does the United States lock up so many people? (Jan. 29, 2012)

• Claim in 15-year-old girl's stabbing will highlight prison failures (Nov. 9, 2007)

Historic hunger strike by Supermax prisoners continues

Gangs are bad, right? And prison gangs are worse?

Yet, when members of California prison gangs try to retire, California punishes them. They are shipping to a solitary housing unit (SHU) at Pelican Bay, one of the worst prisons in the state. They are locked in isolation cells for months or even years while being forced to undergo lengthy “debriefings” where they must snitch on other prisoners. Many become mentally ill.

The conditions of extreme isolation and deprivation are so severe that they violate the U.S. Constitution and international laws on torture, according to prisoners who on July 1 began a hunger strike in protest.

The prisoners were supported by up to 6,600 prisoners at 13 other prisons around the state. But even with some of the strikers reportedly nearing death this week, prison officials adamantly refuse to sit down at the table and negotiate. In fact, they are putting an evil spin on the strikers by claiming they are being coerced by prison gangs.

The prisoners' demands include an end to long-term solitary confinement, expansion of constructive activities and privileges (such as phone calls and the right to take one photo of themselves per year), and abolition of the prison’s gang debriefing policy.

One of the striking prisoners is Hugo Pinell, an African American organizer who has been imprisoned since 1971 for his role in the San Quentin uprising that led to George Jackson's death. Pinell has been at the Pelican Bay SHU for 20 years.

This is at least the third in a series of protests by U.S. prisoners in recent months. Last December, thousands of prisoners in Georgia used mobile phones to organize what has been called the largest prison labor strike in U.S. history, in at least six prisons across the state. Prisoners on death row in Ohio then went on a hunger strike and won some changes in their conditions, according to a lengthy report by Al Jazeera. 

Al Jazeera has more background on the strike (HERE). To get involved by contacting state officials or taking other supportive action, visit the blog of Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity.

Related blog post:

• Supermax: Hell on earth ... or not so bad

Supermax: Hell on earth or . . . not as bad as we thought?

I thought everyone knew that being locked up alone in a tiny cell -- sometimes for years at a stretch -- is bad for one's psyche.

But I was wrong. Based on a one-year project with the Colorado Department of Corrections, a group of researchers says there is a dearth of evidence to support the popular notion that solitary confinement exacerbates psychiatric symptoms among mentally ill prisoners. Although the prisoners they studied did manifest problems, these were preexisting and so could not be attributed to the effects of administrative segregation confinement, the researchers contend.

I was dubious when I heard the researchers present their study, "One-Year Longitudinal Study of the Psychological Effects of Administrative Segregation," at the APA's annual convention last year. Having worked in a Segregated Housing Unit ("SHU") for mentally ill prisoners, I saw with my own eyes the rapid and profound mental deterioration of mentally ill prisoners assigned to the SHU.

Even prisoners who had no preexisting mental disorders fell apart when subjected to prolonged isolation. I will never forget one youngster, a first-timer incarcerated for violating probation in a minor stolen property case, who was sent to the SHU for protection after he reported being raped by his cellmate. They ended up taking him out on a stretcher following a serious suicide attempt. The last time I saw him, when I visited him on the medical ward of a maximum-security prison, he was completely changed from the happy-go-lucky kid I had known.

But he started out healthy. Maybe, contrary to popular wisdom, the mentally ill -- at least those in Colorado -- have more robust psyches than everyone else. Or maybe they are asocial or masochistic. Anyway, I'm just telling you my own personal anecdotes. That's not science.

Study under fire

The report just came out, and already it is generating a lot of heat from those who fear it will be used to legitimize continued warehousing of mentally ill prisoners in SHU's. The ACLU has issued a statement pointing out that the Colorado findings contradict a sizeable body of research, not to mention common sense.

Two leading experts on prison conditions, psychiatrists Terry Kupers and Stuart Grassian, are publicly assailing the study as fatally flawed. They criticize the researchers for not conducting interviews with the prisoners who were the subjects of the year-long study.

"The methodology of the study is so deeply flawed that I would consider the conclusions almost entirely erroneous," said Kupers, author of Prison Madness: The Mental Health Crisis Behind Bars. "And far from finding 'no harm,' there were many episodes of psychosis and suicidal behavior during the course of the study -- the researchers merely minimize the emotional pain and suffering because they judge the prisoners to have been already damaged before they arrived at supermax."

Grassian, the former Harvard professor who coined the term segregation psychosis and who has done research with hundreds of prisoners in solitary confinement, said he notified the researchers of several severe methodological flaws, including a failure to analyze contradictory data, but the flaws were not addressed.

Grassian said the prison's own records document almost two incidents of suicidal or self-destructive behavior for every three prisoners in solitary confinement (63%), compared with less than one incident for every ten prisoners (9%) in the general population.

Since the supermax craze took off in the early 1990s, almost every U.S. state has signed on to the dubious concept, and an estimated 25,000 American prisoners are now locked 24/7 in these tiny, antiseptic cubicles. Although SHU housing was originally intended for relatively short terms of confinement, nowadays prisoners may remain in these constantly lit and electronically surveilled sensory deprivation holes for years -- or even decades. A federal court recently agreed to hear a challenge brought by a man named Tommy Silverstein who has spent a whopping 27 years in solitary confinement.

If they had just talked with the prisoners …

While the Colorado correctional researchers were busy tabulating survey data instead of talking with the prisoners themselves about their subjective experiences, a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley took the exact opposite approach, and -- not surprisingly -- came to diametrically opposed conclusions.

Keramet Reiter's series of in-depth interviews with former SHU prisoners in California, far and away the world's leader with about 3,330 SHU prisoners, was part of her research into the rise of supermaximum confinement in America.

The settings that the men chose was telling in and of itself: After years in tiny, concrete-filled boxes, almost all asked to meet her either outdoors of close to a window.

Reiter told UC reporter Cathy Cockrell that she was moved by the former prisoners' tragic accounts of the effects of sensory deprivation.

"People spoke of having no clocks, daylight, or seasons to mark the passage of time; growing pale from lack of sunlight; and being amazed at the sight of a single bird, insect, or even the moon, after months or years of virtually no exposure to the natural world."

But, hey, maybe if they had been mentally ill to start with, they wouldn't have minded ad-seg so much. Just a serene vacation, away from the hubbub and stress of general population housing.

Not a vacation I would ever want to take but, hey, that's just me.

Further readings:

• Keramet Reiter: Parole, snitch or die: California’s supermax prisons and prisoners, 1987-2007, July 7, 2010

• Atul Gawande, New Yorker magazine: Hellhole: The United States holds tens of thousands of inmates in long-term solitary confinement. Is this torture? March 30, 2009

• National Public Radio series: "Life in Solitary Confinement"

• Solitary Watch: On Bradley Manning, Solitary Confinement, and Selective Outrage, by Jean Casella and James Ridgeway, Jan. 2, 2011

Drawings: (1) Prisoner sketch by Herman Wallace, Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola; (2) prisoner sketch, Pelican Bay, California; (3) prisoner sketch, Tommy Silverstein, ADX federal supermax, Florence, Colorado; (4) prisoner sketch, Pelican Bay, California; (5) my (comparatively crude) sketch of a suicidal prisoner whom I observed chained to the floor of a bare concrete "protective" cell.

My Psychology Today post, at my blog Witness, is HERE. For more frequent posts by me on this and other topics, subscribe to my Twitter feed, HERE.

APA Dispatch I: Science and public policy

I had intended to limit my dispatches from the American Psychological Association convention in San Diego to forensic highlights. But I would be remiss if I didn't touch on the big news from psychological science and public policy. Anyway, it's all related to forensics.

Conference theme: Ending marriage discrimination

A public policy highlight of the convention was its theme of opposing marriage laws that discriminate against gay men and lesbians. Walking into the futuristic convention hall, one was greeted by a life-sized hologram of the APA's CEO, Norman B. Anderson, speaking of the scientific advocacy role in this area of the APA, which at 152,000 members is the world's largest psychological organization and devotes a good share of its $115 million annual budget to advocacy. Kiosks gave attendees a chance to don large lapel pins supporting marriage equality, or send a message to their legislator calling for an end to the federal ban on same-sex marriage.

The theme, planned months ago, could not have been more timely, especially given the conference's location. Just as the convention got underway yesterday, Judge Vaughan Walker lifted the stay on gay marriages in California following his earlier ruling that marriage discrimination was unconstitutional. Many of the key expert witnesses who presented scientific evidence at that trial were featured speakers at the convention: Gregory Herek of UC Davis on sexual orientation and stigma (introduced by APA President Carol Goodheart), Anne Peplau of UCLA on same-sex relationships, and Charlotte Patterson of the University of Virginia summarizing the empirical research regarding the emotional health of children raised in lesbian and gay families.

The APA leadership seems delighted to be on the correct side of history this time, especially after the lengthy debacle over psychologists' role in the torture of detainees at Guantanamo.

Memory: How the brain reconstructs reality

Meanwhile, memory research was on the cutting edge of the psychological science presented at the convention. I had the great fortune to hear preeminent scholar Daniel Schacter present some of the very latest findings.

We already know that retrieving a memory is nothing like opening a file on your computer. In calling up a memory, the brain -- specifically the hippocampus -- grabs a bunch of bits and pieces stored here and there around the brain, and reintegrates them to suit the current situational demand. This is adaptive. It allows us to use our accumulated experience to respond flexibly to an ever-changing environment. But it comes at a cost of errors and distortions, which Schacter has summarized beautifully in The Seven Sins of Memory (which all forensic practitioners should read).

In his talk, Schacter illustrated with the case of "John Doe 2," the composite creation of a faulty memory who was the subject of a massive FBI manhunt after the Oklahoma City bombing. As it turned out, John Doe 2 (despite lingering conspiracy theories to the controversy) was most probably an Army private who had nothing whatsoever to do with McVeigh; he happened to have been at the auto body shop where McVeigh rented his van, but a full day later.

The advent of neuroimaging technology has enabled this memory research to advance at a rapid pace. (The hippocampus even has its own journal now, named after itself!) In their most recent work, Schacter and his colleagues are localizing the precise hippocampal sites that activate when various tasks are being performed. Distinct patterns of hippocampal activity are visible on fMRI when someone is storing initial memories, retrieving those memories, and imagining future possibilities.

Intriguingly, it turns out that the brain tasks involved in remembering are not so different from those involved in imagining the future, or imagining a fictional version of the past, for that matter. Which makes sense: Like recalling real events, imagining fictional scenarios first requires us to think about our past experiences, and then tweak them (consciously or unconsciously).

Australian study: Sharing distorts eyewitness memory

The fact that the very act of retrieving a memory causes it to be distorted (also the topic of a rather dry convention presentation by researcher Joseph LeDoux, author of The Emotional Brain) explains a new finding by forensic psychology lecturer Helen Paterson of the University of Sydney in Australia. She found that sharing memories leads to contamination that cannot be reversed through providing corrective information.

Paterson's team showed participants one of two different versions of a video of a crime. After discussing the crime with each other, most participants reported seeing specific details that were not in the version they had watched. The researchers believe that discussions among co-witnesses are more likely to damage accurate recall for a crime than are other avenues of distorted information such as reading a news account or being asked leading questions by investigators.

Like the broader memory research of Schacter and others, Paterson's study, published in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology, has direct implications for witness reliability. Once a memory is distorted, the inaccuracies remain even when witnesses are told that the new information is wrong, as witnesses " find it difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between genuine memories and false memories of an event," Paterson said.

The forensic implications of this line of memory research are rather mind-boggling, when you stop and think about it. Not only do we need to be extremely cautious about putting too much weight on someone's memory for an event but, as the accumulating research shows, we must be skeptical even if multiple people agree on the "facts."

Coming up in Part II: Whither juvenile forensics

Correctional ethics: New guidelines; licensing complaints

New correctional psychology standards published

As most of you know, the largest mental health institutions in the Land of the Free are not hospitals, but penal institutions: Riker's Island in New York, Cook County Jail in Chicago, and the Los Angeles County Jail. The USA incarcerates the largest proportion of its population of any country on the planet, and at least 15 percent of those 2 million or more people have serious mental illnesses. Unfortunately, many correctional systems lack resources to meet the constitutionally mandated needs of mentally ill individuals in their custody.

For you folks in correctional psychology, Criminal Justice and Behavior has just published a special issue containing the newly revised standards for psychologists working in jails, prisons, and other correctional facilities and agencies. This is only the second revision of the standards since their initial publication by the International Association for Forensic and Correctional Psychology (IACFP) in 1980. They are the result of more than a year's effort by a revision committee chaired by Richard Althouse, Ph.D., president of the IACFP.

Guantanamo psychologists face ethics charges

The timing of these new guidelines is serendipitous. Earlier this week, the San Francisco-based Center for Justice and Accountability and Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic filed state licensing board complaints against two former Guantanamo psychologists. The aim of the complaints, filed in New York and Ohio, is to force investigations into the psychologists’ roles in the torture of prisoners.

The Ohio complaint alleges that Larry C. James, now dean of Wright State University's School of Professional Psychology, headed a special unit called the Behavioral Science Consultation Team, known as "Biscuit," that advised the military on how to break down prisoners and participated in the controversial interrogations at Guantánamo. The New York complaint is against psychologist John Leso, Dr. James's predecessor on the special team.

APA revises ethics standards

In the wake of the Guantanamo abuses, the American Psychological Association has revised its Ethics Standards to clarify that compliance with the law is no excuse for unethical behavior.

Specifically, language has been added to Standards 1.02 and 1.03 ("Conflicts Between Ethics and Law, Regulations, or Other Governing Legal Authority" and "Conflicts Between Ethics and Organizational Demands") stating that the standards may "under no circumstances … be used to justify or defend violating human rights." In addition, a clause allowing psychologists to behave unethically in order to "adhere to the requirements of the law, regulations, or other governing legal authority" has been struck out.

Related resources:

• The new correctional standards are available HERE for free for a limited time.
• Mother Jones and Democracy Now have in-depth coverage of the Guantanamo complaints, with links to additional background materials.
• The Ohio complaint against psychologist Larry James is HERE. Local coverage of that case, in the Dayton Daily News, is HERE.

Guantanamo psychologist takes the Fifth

Court case may fuel debate at annual APA Convention

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forensic psychology angles in the Josef Fritzl case

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

Insanity defense

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Competency to stand trial

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

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

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

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

Sex offending

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

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

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

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

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

Trauma psychology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Video: Never-released Abu Ghraib photos

As an expert witness on behalf of a guard at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, psychologist Philip Zimbardo of Stanford prison experiment fame was privy to many photographs taken by the abusive guards. Today, Wired magazine published a short video by Zimbardo that includes previously unreleased photos. The video is explicit, gruesome and troubling, so "viewer discretion is advised." Wired has an accompanying article with additional resources. Also see Zimbardo's book, The Lucifer Effect (look for my online review on the book's Amazon.com page.)

News roundup

Scot freed after 20 years

This story hasn't been getting much press in the United States, but it's been a topic of interest in Europe. Kenneth Richey of Scotland has spent 20 years on death row in Ohio, exhausting round after round of appeals for a crime he insists he didn't do. Finally, a plea bargain has been reached in which he will plead no contest to involuntary manslaughter and be home in time for Christmas.

Europeans had been outraged at the conditions of Richey's confinement, which are ho-hum here in the prison nation. Said one Scottish official who visited Richey:

"The reality of somebody who is kept locked up in a cell for 23 hours a day for 19 years is quite mind-blowing. It is a dreadful, inhumane and dehumanising system. If one man is off it, then remember there are hundreds [sic!] of people in America still enduring that dreadful situation."

The London Times has more.

Children electroshocked (roll over, Stanley Milgram)

A prankster has outdone experimental researcher Stanley Milgram by a long shot, telephoning a school for the severely disturbed and easily convincing school officials to shock pupils up to 77 times each!

The prank is highlighting the fact that the Massachusetts school, Judge Rotenberg Educational Center, routinely administers electroshock as punishment. The school is the only one in the United States that does so; the device's inhumanity is concealed by the clinical-sounding name of graduated electronic decelerator.

ABC News has the story here.

Tasers face growing opposition

U.N. Committee calls it "torture"

In the wake of the deaths of six people in just one week and a videotaped incident at an airport in Canada in which a man died after being tased, calls for the restriction or ban of shock-inducing tasers are becoming increasingly urgent.

On Friday, the controversy grew when a United Nations Committee Against Torture called taser use a form of torture. The comment was embedded in a larger report on the committee’s activities, and focused on the use of tasers in Portugal.

Although public criticism focuses on taser use by police, much more out of sight the weapons are widely used as weapons of control in U.S. prisons and juvenile detention facilities. Such widespread tasering of prisoners is documented in the BBC documentary, "Torture: America's Brutal Prisons."

A CBS news report is online here. An Amnesty International report on taser use is here.

Congressional journal highlights APA torture debate

The struggle over the role of psychologists in military interrogations is reaching the halls of Congress. Today's issue of Congressional Quarterly features an article by Shawn Zeller, entitled "Torture Issue Ties Up Psychologists Association":

You'd think that psychologists, of all people, would know torture when they see it. But the leaders of the American Psychological Association, the profession's governing body, have been trying for more than two years to quell a faction of vocal dissidents who say the group tacitly condones U.S. military and intelligence use of coercive tactics.

The latest blow-up came last month at the association's annual meeting in San Francisco. The dissidents, calling themselves Psychologists for an Ethical APA, pushed for a moratorium on psychologist participation in military interrogations. The association's governing council eventually rebuffed that crusade, winning adoption instead of a new policy barring psychologists from participating in more than 20 kinds of torture techniques - including "mock executions, water-boarding or any other form of simulated drowning or suffocation, sexual humiliation, rape," or "cultural or religious humiliation."

But the dissident psychologists aren't satisfied, by a long shot. They're angry that the association "avoided saying outright that all aversive interrogation techniques are prohibited," says Steven Reisner, a leader of the disaffected group who's a New York University psychoanalyst. What's more, he says, the APA's vote means psychologists may still participate in aversive methods as long as they aren't employed in a formal interrogation - effectively condoning controlled use of methods such as sleep deprivation, which other groups have condemned as torture. It's the dissidents' belief that the APA is striving to protect the professional standing of members who work for the Pentagon or CIA - and to keep the association's own relationship with those agencies in good repair.

Reisner's group is fighting on two fronts. It's asking APA members to withhold their dues until the association produces a more forceful denunciation of torture and aversive interrogation techniques. And Reisner says he and his colleagues also plan to lobby state psychological associations to adopt stricter rules. They have also provided information about the APA’s internal debate on the issue to the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The article continues at Congressional Quarterly's web site.

Breaking news: Psychology-torture protest rally in S.F.

Breaking news on the issue of psychologists and torture is available online:

At PsychCentral, the article "Psychologists Continue to Debate Torture Policies" provides a detailed roster of the speakers at this afternoon’s protest rally outside the American Psychological Association convention in San Francisco.

Democracy Now, which has been covering this controversy for some time now, features an audio (mp3) interview with two psychologists advocating for a ban on psychologists’ participation in interrogations. The two are Steven Reisner of NYU Medical School and a faculty advisor at the International Trauma Studies Program at Columbia University, and Stephen Soldz of the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis (who also blogs about this controversy).

APA set to condemn torture

Mock executions, sexual and religious humiliation, dog attacks, induced hypothermia, sleep deprivation, and threats to kill family members.

These are among the controversial government practices that psychologists will no longer be allowed to participate in, under a resolution to be unveiled at next weekend's convention of the American Psychological Association, the world’s largest organization of psychologists.

Psychologists are the last medical professionals still willing to assist U.S. government interrogators at Guantanamo and elsewhere. The American Medical Association, The World Medical Association, and the American Psychiatric Association have all declared that their members have no business consulting in individual interrogations at such detention sites.

The issue is causing considerable acrimony within the 148,000-member APA. Many psychologists think the resolution does not go far enough. They will be lobbying at this weekend's conference for an explicit ban on psychologists in the interrogation rooms.

Psychologists' key role in developing brutal interrogation techniques for the CIA and the military has been the topic of several media exposes. Salon magazine, which has provided continuing coverage of this issue, has an excellent overview today.

"Psychologists have been involved one way or another in supporting the CIA in various forms of psychological torture for years," the article quotes Leonard Rubenstein, president of Physicians for Human Rights, as saying. "The issue is coming to a head because there are so many people within the profession who really feel that the whole integrity of the profession is at stake."

The proposed resolution is timely. It comes on the heels of a White House announcement that it may call on psychologists to participate in a revamped interrogation program. On July 20, President Bush signed an executive order resuming "a coercive CIA interrogation program at the agency's 'black sites,' " according to the Salon article. The U.S. Director of National Intelligence says psychological techniques will be part of the program, but that they will be subject to careful medical oversight - oversight provided by none other than psychologists.

The schedule for APA's special mini-convention, "Ethics and Interrogations: Confronting the Challenge," is available online.

The New Yorker magazine, Vanity Fair , and Salon have featured excellent articles on this topic.

Psychologists for an Ethical APA is spearheading protests at this weekend's convention.

Photo credit: burge5000 (Creative Commons license)

Psychologists and Torture

By Larry Wright, the Detroit News