Epidemic of nomadic sex offenders worsens

New laws not exactly a blueprint for public safety

It's happening all around the country, from Georgia to Florida to Washington. But nowhere is the problem more acute than in California, which has seen an 800 percent increase in the past two years. As Karl Vick of the Washington Post reports:

LOS ANGELES -- Upon release from state custody, Ross Wollschlager began an intensive search for a home, one that abided by the restrictions imposed on convicted sex offenders in California -- and, in various versions, by about 30 other states. Obliged by law to return to Ventura County, the convicted rapist was forbidden to sleep within 2,000 feet of a school or a park.

He ended up in a tent on the dry bed of the Ventura River.

Strict new laws aimed at keeping track of sex offenders after they leave prison appear to be having the opposite effect, encouraging homelessness in a population believed more likely to re-offend if cast into the streets without structure or family support, say prosecutors, police, parole officials and experts on managing sex offenders.

The issue is starkest in California, where the number of sex crime parolees registering as transient has jumped more than 800 percent since Proposition 83 was passed in November 2006. The "Jessica's Law" initiative imposed strict residency rules and called for all offenders to wear Global Positioning System bracelets for the rest of their lives.

Named for a 9-year-old Florida girl raped and murdered by a convicted sex offender, the provision passed by a wide margin that reflected the powerful public emotion that experts and law enforcement officials say in this instance trumped sound policy.

"The public definitely was sold a bill of goods on this one," said Detective Diane Webb, supervisor of the Los Angeles Police Department unit that tracks 5,000 sex offenders in Los Angeles County. "Unfortunately, it bodes well for politicians to support it because the public does have this false sense of security that this is somehow protecting them when it's not."

Locating legal housing for offenders has become so difficult in urban California that when parole officers find an apartment building beyond the exclusion zones, they often pile in as many offenders as the landlord will accept. When neighbors notice, the cluster spurs protests that prompt lawmakers to pass even tighter exclusion zones as Proposition 83 allows.

The informative Post story continues here.

Previous related posts:

• Punishment for homelessness: Life in prison
• Sex offenders must live as trolls
• A bridge as a last resort

Eye-plucking prisoner competent and sane

Andre Thomas plucked out his right eye in 2004. Now, he has plucked out his left.

The Texas death row inmate with a history of mental problems killed his wife and their two children and ripped out their hearts. He then walked into a police station and confessed.

None of that sounds all that sane. Indeed, Thomas has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and suffers from psychotic delusions and a preoccupation with death, religion, and suicide, sources say.

Nonetheless, he was found competent to stand trial, convicted, and sentenced to die for the death of his 13-month-old daughter.

The self-mutilation is unlikely to have any effect on his appeals, but at least they got him transferred to a psychiatric hospital for treatment.

The story is here.

Court strikes down federal civil commitment law

In a big blow to the federal Adam Walsh Act, an appellate court has upheld a challenge to the civil commitment portion of the law.

The opinion by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals affirms a lower court ruling in the case, U.S. v. Comstock, which I blogged about back in September of 2007.

The challenge was brought by the North Carolina Federal Public Defenders on behalf of Graydon Comstock, who received a 37-month prison sentence for receiving pornography via computer. When his term ended two years ago, the government certified him as a "sexually dangerous person" and kept him in civil confinement, where he has remained ever since. The ruling will affect at least three other men also held at the Federal Correctional Institution at Butner, North Carolina.

This was the first appellate court to address the constitutionality of the civil commitment portion of the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006, which has divided trial courts around the nation.

The court held that the civil commitment portion of the law exceeds federal authority:

The Constitution does not empower the federal government to confine a person solely because of asserted 'sexual dangerousness' when the Government need not allege (let alone prove) that this 'dangerousness' violates any federal law….

Consistent with its role in maintaining a penal system, the federal government possesses broad powers over persons during their prison sentences. But these powers are far removed from the indefinite civil commitment of persons after the expiration of their prison terms, based solely on possible future actions that the federal government lacks power to regulate directly.

The federal government, the court wrote, does not have the power to "regulate all sexual violence, including acts which violate no criminal statute."

Congress’s perceived need for the sort of civil commitment statute at issue here does not create constitutional power where none exists. Congress must instead seek alternative, constitutional means of achieving what may well be commendable objectives.

The court noted that if federal authorities have "serious concerns" about a federal prisoner's future dangerousness, they may notify state authorities, "who may use their well-settled police and parens patriae powers to pursue civil commitment under state law." Federal authorities may even financially underwrite such actions, the court said.

At least 20 states have enacted such civil commitment procedures for Sexually Violent Predators over the past two decades.

In upholding the district court's 2007 opinion, the circuit court did not specifically affirm a second reason given by the lower court for striking down the civil commitment portion of the Adam Walsh law. The lower court had held that the legal standard of "clear and convincing" proof was too low, and that due process required that danger be proven "beyond a reasonable doubt" before a person was preemptively detained. By avoiding that issue, the circuit court appears not to disturb laws in some states that require a lower standard of proof.

Further resources:

4th Circuit Opinion, U.S. v. Graydon Earl Comstock Jr.

Federal court strikes down portion of Adam Walsh Act (blog post of Sept. 10, 2007)

"4th Circuit Got it Right in Comstock," analysis by law professor Corey Rayburn Yung

Breakdown in Lone Star death machine?

Drop in Texas executions has folks wondering

Texas is the death penalty capital of the United States, and perhaps the world. So a decline in both executions and new death sentences there has some wondering whether this is the beginning of the end for capital punishment in our prison nation.

"I think we are seeing the leading edge of that national transformation,” said Rob Owen, co-director of the Capital Punishment Clinic at the University of Texas at Austin.

Whoa, Cowboy, says Michael Casillas, chief prosecutor of the appellate division of the Dallas County district attorney's office. Not so fast: "Things are, even in the criminal justice system, kind of cyclical."

Most startling of last year's statistics were those coming out of Harris County (Houston), the epicenter of the death penalty capital. The year before last, that one COUNTY alone had surpassed the annual execution rate for the next-highest STATE (Virginia). But last year, that usually prolific killer did not sentence a single person to die. Not even an illegal immigrant who went to trial for killing a police officer!

As the Dallas Morning News reports, a number of factors may be contributing to the decline. These include:

• A big drop in the murder rate
• Better quality legal representation
• A wave of exonerations
• The high costs of capital case prosecution
  
• The availability of life without parole as an option

Or perhaps Harris County is just looking over toward neighboring Dallas County, usually number two in executions, where maverick prosecutor Craig Watkins (whom I featured on this blog last September) has called a halt to all executions pending a thorough review.

In a sign of the times in which Barack Obama could be elected as President, Watkins' crusade has earned him the honorary title of "Texan of the Year" from the Dallas Morning News:

He is actively pursuing a range of reforms that would protect the wrongly accused and appropriately punish the guilty. Not only does he want to clear the innocent, but he also hopes to extend the statute of limitations in DNA cases to ensure that the right person does the time.

He has reinvented his office by creating a conviction integrity unit, an operation that has freed prisoners who were wrongly locked up for murder, robbery and rape. Not content to just notch wins in the courtroom, Mr. Watkins deserves credit for vigilantly pursuing justice – a distinction with an important difference.

Dallas County leads the country in DNA exonerations (19 and counting), and Mr. Watkins has seized upon the attendant acclaim, taking his fight for social justice to statewide and national stages. In his sudden fame, he sees an opportunity to change the way district attorneys do business.

Further resources:

Texas Department of Criminal Justice schedule of executions

Execution statistics

Craig Watkins: Texan of the Year

Is the death penalty a dying breed? (Dallas Morning News)

Hang 'em high county to reverse course (blog post, September 2008)

Prosecutor will not use 9-year-old's confession

The 4-year-old boy making news today for shooting his babysitter harkens back to the 9-year-old Arizona boy who shot his father and another man to death back in November. In both cases, competency will be a central issue. Although the 4-year-old has not been arrested and in any event is highly unlikely to ever be found competent to stand trial, the 9-year-old's case is still undecided.

That earlier case was back in court yet again today, in one in a series of developments of interest to forensic psychologists.

At this latest hearing, prosecutors agreed not to use the boy's videotaped statement to police. The defense had argued that the boy was illegally questioned without an attorney or a family member present; after all, the typical 9-year-old child is unlikely to grasp the implications of the Miranda warnings and intelligently waive his rights.

While in custody after the Nov. 5 killings, the boy also told a Child Protective Services worker that he had decided his thousandth spanking would be his last, according to police reports. Prosecutors agreed to suppress that statement as well. Prosecutors said they reserve the right to use either or both statements if the boy testifies in contradiction to them.

However, whether the unidentified boy will ever face trial is unknown, as the judge has not yet ruled on his competency. A psychologist who examined the boy for the defense opined that he is incompetent to stand trial due to his age and intelligence, and that he is unlikely to become competent within the time allowed by law.

If a judge finds the boy is incompetent and unable to be restored to competency within 240 days, the case could be dropped with prejudice, meaning it could not be refiled. If the boy is found fit to stand trial, he will likely face a bench trial in front of Apache County Superior Court Judge Michael Roca.

He also has been examined by a prosecution expert, but those results haven't yet been disclosed.

The next hearing in the case is scheduled for Jan. 21. I'm sure residents of St. Johns wish it was all over, as the town has been besieged by the media. Now, with the even more sensational case of the 4-year-old, whose babysitter allegedly stepped on his foot, maybe the camera crews will pack up and head for Jackson, Ohio instead.

Related background materials:

Videotape of confession (partial)

St. Johns, Arizona police report (pdf)

New Year’s Briefs – Part I

Signs of the times?

Happy New Year to all of my loyal subscribers and readers. As usual, a lot is going on and I have had little time to blog. But here are a few highlights, with more to follow.

California strikes draconian sex offender sentence

Imagine serving the rest of your life in prison for missing a bureaucratic deadline. That's what happened to Cecilio Gonzalez under California's three-strikes sentencing law, when he was three months late one year on his annual sex offender registration with the police. Registration infractions usually carry a maximum sentence of three years, and the prosecutor had originally offered Gonzalez a two-year term. He ended up with life because he decided to take the case to trial, acting as his own attorney. That's cruel and unusual punishment, a California appellate court ruled, because the punishment was grossly disproportionate to his "entirely passive, harmless and technical violation of the registration law." It is unclear what effect the ruling may have on other 3-strikes cases, given that California's Supreme Court has declined two challenges by men whose third strikes were shoplifting - in one case videotapes and in another case golf clubs. The L.A. Times has the full story.

Spotlight on violent vets

Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who come home and wreak havoc on their communities are a topic of mounting alarm around the United States. In Fort Carson, Colorado, for example, nine combat soldiers have been accused of killing people in the past three years; sexual assault and domestic violence cases are also up sharply. The New York Times has a follow-up story to its initial coverage a year ago, which traced many homicides by combat veterans to war-related trauma and the stress of deployment. As the Times notes, even military leaders are starting to acknowledge that "multiple deployments strain soldiers and families, and can increase the likelihood of problems like excessive drinking, marital strife and post-traumatic stress disorder."

Judges have also noticed the upsurge and in several jurisdictions around the country they are joining with local prosecutors, defense attorneys, and U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs officials to set up special veterans-only courts. The judges say trauma-related stress, brain injuries, and substance abuse are contributing to the rash of crimes. They are hoping the innovative courts can help rehabilitate veterans and avoid convictions that might cost veterans their future military benefits, according to a report in the National Law Journal.

Renewed calls for prison reform

With more than 1 in 100 Americans now behind bars, there are additional signs that some policy makers are getting fed up. Driving the trend may be the current economic downturn. As blog guest writer Eric Lotke pointed out last month, and as more and more people are finally noticing, the money being spent on prisons could be better spent on social programs. As the Virginian-Pilot editorialized:

In prosperous times, state and federal lawmakers wanting to polish their get-tough-on-crime image pass bills putting more people in prison and keeping them longer for offenses such as drunken driving, drug possession and dog fighting. When the economy tanks, those mandatory sentencing laws stay in place, and budget cuts instead dig into drug treatment and job-training programs.

Senator Jim Webb of Virginia is getting quite a bit of ink in his vigorous calls for prison reform, and editorials are urging other members of Congress to "show the same courage and rally to the cause."

Perhaps with Barack Obama in the White House, the time will be ripe to reverse course. As we forensic psychologists know, this would be good news for the mentally ill, who make up a large proportion of the millions of Americans behind bars. Indeed, a new study coming out of Texas shows that mentally ill prisoners are not only more likely than others to go to prison, but they are far more likely to recidivate. This "revolving-door" phenomenon owes to a lack of community treatment options, massive downsizing of state hospitals, and a legal system that virtually ignores psychiatric issues. As a result, "many people with serious mental illness move continuously between crisis hospitalization, homelessness, and the criminal justice system," noted the authors of the study, published in this month's American Journal of Psychiatry. The study, "Psychiatric Disorders and Repeat Incarcerations: The Revolving Prison Door," is available upon request from lead researcher Jacques Baillargeon of the Department of Preventive Medicine and Community Health at the University of Texas.

Will “revolutionary” Diana Screen end pedophile menace?

Vatican enlisting psychologists to perform miracles

The new movie Doubt paints the issue of pedophilic priests in shades of gray. Is the priest (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) really a pedophile? Or is the head nun (Meryl Streep) just after him because, with his friendly manner and long fingernails, he fits her stereotype? Most provocative of all is the ostracized boy's mother (Viola Davis), who cares more about the priest's kindness to her son than about whether the relationship is sexual.

The movie is set in the 1960s, two decades before the pedophilia scandals sprang into the limelight to tarnish the reputation of the Catholic Church. Revelations of sexual misconduct by priests resulted in staggering financial losses - an estimated $2 billion in civil damages paid by the U.S. Catholic Church alone.

Anxious to mend its reputation and plug the money drain, the Vatican just announced a new fix: Candidates for the priesthood will undergo psychological screening to determine their suitability for the job.

What makes a candidate unsuitable, according to the Vatican? "Uncertain sexual identity," "deep-seated homosexual tendencies," and "grave immaturity" are among the factors. Painting a pseudoscientific veneer on the campaign, the Vatican said "expert" psychologists will screen select candidates on a case-by-case basis.

Mental health professionals, already flush with domain expansion into the emergent sex offender industry, are rushing into this new and potentially lucrative niche.

Leading the charge is Gene Abel, the psychiatrist who invented the controversial Abel Screen, which measures sexual proclivities based on how long men look at visual images of different types of models. Abel is promoting a new "pass/fail" test called the Diana Screen as a "breakthrough in technology" that can accurately identify men who have molested children.

"Who should use it?" asks the tool's website. "Any organization where there are professionals or volunteers who work with children," including churches, youth groups, schools, hospitals, foster care homes, and amusement parks.

In an appeal that combines sex panic emotionalism with a promise of revenue, Abel asks professionals to step forward and "make a difference" by becoming Diana Screen administrators: "You don't just add to your business opportunity, you take a stand against molestation and you help others to also take a stand."

Who can resist an appeal like that?

A quick web search found several psychologists already offering to do Diana Screens for employers. One bragged of having a "Certificate of Achievement" from Abel "in recognition of [his] knowledge about this important technology."

Child molesters are a heterogeneous bunch, with no unitary psychological "profile." So, before rushing to sign on, I decided to read the published literature on the Diana Screen to find out how it works, and whether it is reliable and valid.

Searching "Diana Screen" in an academic database, I did not get any hits. An Internet search was slightly more productive. I found several presentations by Abel. He presented the Diana Screen to the Society for Sex Therapy and Research; the Assessment, Treatment and Safe Management of Sexually Abusing Children, Adolescents, and Adults conference, and the California Coalition on Sexual Offending (CCOSO).

At these conferences, Abel reported on research he conducted with 100-plus applicants for priesthood training jobs. Unfortunately, the research does not appear to have been peer-reviewed or published, as required for admissibility in court under the Daubert standard.

Searching further, I found some strategically placed advertising; searches with the keywords "child molestation" cause Diana Screen ads to pop up on some news sites. The Screen was also a featured exhibitor at this year's conference of the Chartered Property Casualty Underwriters Society, which offers "cutting-edge tools" for "risk management professionals."

More humorously, in the blogosphere I bumped into a group of sex offenders discussing how easy it is to beat the test (and its precursor, the Abel). All you have to do, wrote one man, is ignore the instructions to rate your sexual arousal level to each slide, and instead respond at "a regular timing interval," which is what is really being measured. [PS: The link to their conversation went dead after this post was published.]

"You'll laugh when you find out just how easily the test can be beaten! The entire thing rides on the theory that no one will know what it's really testing."

Another agreed: "It's so seriously EASY to play the test like a harp."

These sex offenders would likely quarrel with the Screen developers' claim that it can identify "over 50 percent of actual child sexual abusers."

But my own question about the 50 percent success rate was, How can they know they are identifying half of all pedophiles? And, perhaps more importantly from an ethical point of view, what is the rate of false positives, or people whom the test wrongly identify as child molesters?

Hoping to learn more, I contact the company directly and asked for any published research. In due time, I received a packet of materials - glossy brochures and fliers, a sample report, graphs, and more promises that the Screen will help "bring an end to child molestation." No references to published research, though.

The materials did include a handout on the aforementioned (unpublished?) study of candidates for religious ordination. Of the 135 applicants screened, 18 (or about 13 percent) failed the test. Of those, 7 "were found to be true sexual risks to children" (based on followup inquiry and polygraph testing), while 2 "were found to have mental health problems" and 9 "required a closer look, but were found to have little or no risk."

Stated another way, that's a false positive rate of at least 50 percent. Even if it is just a screening test, psychologists should be cautious in administering a test with such a high false-positive rate and no published, peer-reviewed data on its reliability or validity.

More fundamentally, this type of testing raises philosophical issues about how far society should go in the name of protecting children, especially when most victimization is done not by teachers or amusement park workers but by family members. Who, for example, should be screened? As a colleague commented, it is one thing to screen airline pilots for alcohol abuse, but if priests, teachers, hospital employees, and even carnival workers will be screened, where will we draw the line? How much personal information are employers entitled to know? And what recourse will there be for those who are denied employment or lose their jobs based on their innermost thoughts, their sexual identity, an incident in their distant pasts, or - worst of all - erroneous test results?

The most pernicious problem with false positives is, how can one really know? As the movie Doubt suggests, proving innocence is difficult, and those who claim to be protecting children may have more complicated motives.

* * * * *

JULY 2015 POSTSCRIPT: The Atlantic has just published an interesting article on the controversies swirling around Abel Assessment by Maurice Chammah, a staff writer at The Marshall Project.

Criminal profiling strikes out again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New journal issue loaded with hot topics

The current (December) issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law has a slew of interesting articles on sex offender civil commitment, forensic brain imaging, religion and the death penalty, forensic assessment of problematic Internet use, psychotherapy with prisoners, competency case law, school shooter motivations, and other timely topics. Highlights include:

Use of DSM Paraphilia Diagnoses in Sexually Violent Predator Commitment Cases
This is the long-awaited article by DSM-III editors Michael B. First and Robert L. Halon, addressing diagnostic controversies in SVP civil commitment cases.

It is accompanied by two commentaries:

• In Muddy Diagnostic Waters in the SVP Courtroom, forensic psychologist Robert Prentky and colleagues essentially agree with First and Halon’s critique. They state that misuse of the DSM in SVP cases is a serious form of "pretextuality."

• In Inventing Diagnosis for Civil Commitment of Rapists, forensic psychologist and attorney Thomas K. Zander traces the history and ethics implications of using DSM diagnoses that lack reliability or validity in order to civilly confine rapists.

Next comes a similar point-counterpoint series of three articles on functional brain imaging in court:

• Functional MRI Lie Detection: Too Good to be True? by Joseph R. Simpson

• Commentary: Functional MRI Lie Detection by James R. Merikangas

• Commentary: The Future of Forensic Functional Brain Imaging by Daniel D. Langleben and Frank M. Dattilio

The full Table of Contents, with links to full-text pdf files, is here.

Good building, bad building

Guest essay by Eric Lotke*

China has opened a new subway system every year for the past six years. The U.S. has opened 45 new prisons and jails. Who's setting up to lead in the 21st century?

"Expanding prisons mean more jobs," explained the Fayetteville Observer over the summer.

The rural North Carolina community was celebrating the $19 million expansion of a $90 million prison that opened in 2003 and immediately filled to capacity. Such growth is a boon for rural, economically distressed counties. "Prison jobs bring added payroll, boost housing markets and draw new retail customers to poor parts of the state," observed the Observer.

The good news is that public investment can work. The bad news is that better choices must be made. We need to distinguish between prisons for crime control and prisons as a jobs program, between building for the future and building for the past.

• "We're always looking for ways to bring jobs to Wilkes County," said state senator Jim Whitehead of Georgia, when funding fell into place for a new pre-release center.

• "This is the biggest thing to happen to Stewart County since I've been here," said the chair of the county board when the private, for-profit Corrections Corporation of America opened a new 1,524 person detention center. "Everything's been leaving rather than coming in the 10 years I've been here. The biggest thing this will do is provide jobs for the county and the area."

• "Push state to build prison here," editorialized the Altoona Mirror in central Pennsylvania, three weeks before the election. "What would the area do to obtain 600 well-paying jobs in what could be termed a recession-proof industry? It's not a rhetorical question. Those jobs could happen. But it's important that our local and state leaders don't drop the ball."

President-elect Barack Obama is planning a massive new public works program. He wants to employ 2.5 million people rebuilding our roads and schools and bridges. That’s great. It's more than great. We need the projects, we need the jobs, and the proposal is on the order of magnitude of the problem.

Part of the program could be a reconsideration of the role prisons play in our rural economy. That role seems to have taken on a life of its own.

"When folks here heard the governor wanted to close the 137-year-old Pontiac Correctional Center, sucking hundreds of jobs from the area, they mobilized in a way that only small towns can. They held rallies and a parade. Streets were lined with blue-and-white 'Save Our Prison' signs and residents were outfitted in T-shirts to match." The local ABC news affiliate described it as "a struggle for their economic lives," as the state considered closing the town's second-largest employer to help fill a $700 million hole in the state budget.

States are truly struggling. Forty-one states have already reported budget problems for the current or upcoming fiscal year, and it's likely to get worse. States are starting to cut benefits and services ranging from health care to public schools and early childhood education.
But one budget item is never questioned: prisons.

Even as states spend nearly $50 billion on prisons every year and counties spend over $20 billion on jails, we build additional locked capacity. Even with U.S. incarceration rates at seven times historical and international norms, we build. Even as crime continues on its 15-year descent to levels not seen in 40 years, we find money to build even more.

The sacrifices we make to build these prisons are astonishing. Between 1987 and 2007, state spending on prisons increased by 40 percent (as a percent of the general fund). State spending on higher education decreased by 30 percent. We are financing our prisons by cutting our colleges.

We continue to build even though prisons are often disappointing for economic development. The best jobs go to people from out of town, and dollars spent on prisons have little "multiplier" effect. They don't generate future additional dollars of economic activity, as do dollars spent on transportation, schools and so forth. Every dollar invested in highway construction generates $2.50 of gross domestic product in the short term. Raising teacher wages by 10 percent is associated with a 5 percent decrease in drop-out rates. But still we shortchange our schools and other rural enterprise, and build new prisons.

The solution is to recognize that prisons have an economic logic of their own. The Pentagon budget is understood as a combination of military necessity and commercial interests. We need to understand the appeal prisons offer to struggling rural communities in the same way.

The challenge is to break the link between prison as industry and prison as crime control. The challenge is to show a way out for governors and legislators who want to reduce the burden of the corrections budget but genuinely cannot because of the immediate and legitimate trouble it causes to their constituencies.

HERE'S HOW: As our new federal leaders develop plans for stimulus and infrastructure investment, they should self-consciously direct resources to break the link between prisons and the dependent rural economies. They should create a grant program to help states transition from prison economies to more productive uses.

People are ready for this kind of change. Way back in 1999, when there were half a million fewer people in American prisons and jails, John DiIulio, one of the main movers behind the prison explosion, said we had reached a point of diminishing returns. But we can’t change course; the transition costs are too high:

• Drug treatment and prevention programs are cheaper in the long run, but they cost money up front to start.

• Cost savings to some are job losses to others. Especially when the programs go to scale and entire prisons are shut down or construction projects avoided. What should people do in the interim?

That's where federal assistance can come in. Part of the infrastructure/investment/stimulus money can be directed to cover transitional costs out of the prison economy. A few billion dollars of federal money in the short term can help states break the prison hammerlock, and free them to redirect tens of billions of state dollars to other purposes – from schools to roads to hospitals.

That's the proposal: A federal grant program that helps states manage transitional costs in the short run. Much like the federal VOI/TIS Justice Department grant program helped build prisons in the 1990s, a transition grant program can help to unbuild them in the 2000s (perhaps best administered by the Commerce Department). Let the laboratories of democracy experiment over techniques, but the federal government can help ease the transition.

It's a modest investment for the federal government that can yield substantial dividends quickly. But it needs to be consciously identified as a goal. Left alone the prison autopilot will continue to rise.

*This well-researched essay (check out some of the many embedded links for more) is reprinted from the Campaign for America's Future with the written permission of the author. Eric Lotke, an attorney, is Research Director at the Campaign for America's Future. Previously he served as Policy Director at the Justice Policy Institute, and was a Soros Foundation Senior Justice Fellow. He has authored path-breaking research on the criminal justice system, including patterns of juvenile homicide, the demographics of incarceration, and the political and financial consequences of the U.S. Census Bureau counting people in prison where they are confined rather than their original homes. More on his impressive background and good works is here.

New book explodes myth that innocent do not confess

Innocent people do not confess. Especially to rape and murder.

That is the belief of most people, including jurors, judges, attorneys, and even the very police detectives who induce false confessions. The Norfolk Four case is the perfect vehicle to challenge our misguided faith. And Tom Wells and Richard Leo are the ideal storytellers: Wells followed the case for seven years; Leo is a leading expert on the social psychology of police interrogation. The book is meticulously researched, through primary source documents and dozens of interviews.

The Wrong Guys: Murder, False Confessions, and the Norfolk Four reads like a Stephen King novel but provides a step-by-step deconstruction of the bizarre case of the Norfolk Four, explaining the individual, situational, and systemic factors that converge in a typical false confession case.

More on the Norfolk Four case is online here; the publisher's web page is here. My longer review is forthcoming from California Lawyer magazine.

Cyberbullying verdict raises legal questions

Running neck-and-neck in the Bad Behavior Gone Wild category are the shoppers who trampled a poor Wal-Mart worker to death in Long Island and the Missouri woman who bullied a 13-year-old until the depressed girl hanged herself.

But while everyone is outraged by both cases, last week's criminal conviction in the cyberbullying case has troubling implications about the criminalization of the Internet.

A federal jury convicted Lori Drew of three misdemeanor counts of computer fraud for misrepresenting herself as a teenage boy on the popular MySpace social networking site. Jurors apparently agreed with prosecutors that creating a phone profile constituted "unauthorized access" to MySpace, under a federal law that previously was used only to prosecute hackers.

Analyzing the verdict's implications is Brian Stelter of the New York Times:

While the Internet's anonymity was used in this case as a cloak to bully Megan, other users say they have perfectly good reasons to construct false identities online, if only to help protect against the theft of personal information, for example. "It will be interesting to see if issues of safety and security will eventually trump the hallmark ideology of free, largely anonymous or pseudonymous participation in cyberspace," said Sameer Hinduja, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at Florida Atlantic University. Andrew M. Grossman, senior legal policy analyst for the Heritage Foundation, said the possibility of being prosecuted for online misrepresentation, while remote, should worry users nonetheless. "If this verdict stands," Mr. Grossman said, "it means that every site on the Internet gets to define the criminal law. That's a radical change. What used to be small-stakes contracts become high-stakes criminal prohibitions."

Danah Boyd of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society expressed perhaps the broadest perspective:

"There are lots of kids hurting badly online,” she said. "And guess what? They’re hurting badly offline, too. Because it's more visible online, people are blaming technology rather than trying to solve the underlying problems of the kids that are hurting."

The full story is here.

Move over, Guantanamo - here comes Wisconsin

Lifetime detention for misconduct at age 14?

When he was 14 years old, Daniel Arends made a big mistake. He sexually assaulted an autistic boy. He was adjudicated as a delinquent.

Then, he made some other mistakes. His juvenile detention was extended several times for sexual contact with other boys.

When he turned 17, he learned just how much trouble he was in. He became the first juvenile that the state of Wisconsin sought to detain indefinitely under its "Sexually Violent Person" civil commitment law. He was committed to the Sand Ridge Secure Treatment Center in 2005, and he has remained there ever since. He is now 22.

Technically, there is a way for Daniel to get out of this potentially lifelong incarceration. All he must do is show that he has changed so that he no longer meets the legal criteria of being "more likely than not to commit a future act of sexual violence."

The Catch-22 is, how can one prove something like that from behind bars?

One potential method is through expert evidence. A psychologist, Dr. Sheila J. Fields, evaluated him, administered a series of tests, and wrote a favorable report stating that in her opinion he had indeed changed. He had successfully progressed in the treatment program and his score on the Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R) was now lower. She noted that his last incident of criminal sexual activity occurred when he was 14, and there had been no reports of inappropriate sexual behavior since October 2003.

In her report, Dr. Fields also discussed some of the problems I have been blogging about lately, such as the difficulty of accurately predicting adult sexual recidivism from juvenile misconduct, and reliability problems with Daniel's diagnosis, Antisocial Personality Disorder.

Based on this favorable report, Daniel petitioned the court for a hearing on whether he still meets the civil commitment criteria. The government of Wisconsin, however, opposed the hearing, arguing Daniel was not entitled to it unless he could actually "prove" in his petition that his condition "had changed."

The local court agreed, and denied Daniel the right to even be heard in court. Shades of Guantanamo, right?

Daniel appealed, and the Wisconsin Appellate Court agreed with him. The standard for getting a hearing, the appellate court ruled, is whether the person has presented facts in his petition from which a judge or a jury “may” conclude that he has changed. In other words, he is not required to prove that he actually has changed just to get an evidentiary hearing.

The case will go back to the lower court for an evidentiary hearing. That does not mean Daniel will be released, though. For that, we'll have to stay tuned.

The Nov. 19 appellate ruling in State v. Arends (2008AP52) is online here. News coverage in the Journal Sentinel of Milwaukee is here.

Hat tip: Steve Erickson

Treating therapist as police interrogator

For all you psychologists, here's a quick ethics vignette:

You live and work in a small town, population 13,000. Like many psychologists, you have a diverse practice. You treat patients at a local mental health clinic. You serve on professional boards. You work part-time as a consultant to the local sheriff's department.

One day, the sheriff asks you to come down and help with some interrogations in a cold case of sexual assault and murder. Among the suspects being questioned are Deb and Ada, two young women you treated in your private practice.

What do you do?

If you are Wayne R. Price, Ph.D. of Beatrice, Nebraska, you see no problem in interrogating the young women despite having been their therapist:

"What I find, I find. It makes no difference to me," Price testified at a pretrial hearing. "When I have an emotional involvement or vested interest and can't do it objectively, I will say so."

Price's role in helping elicit confessions from two of his former patients is in the spotlight now, almost two decades later, because of new DNA evidence pointing to a different killer. The so-called Beatrice Six case has set a record for the number of people exonerated by DNA evidence in a single case.

The five suspects who confessed fit the pattern of false confession cases: Suggestible young people with psychiatric or cognitive problems who used alcohol or drugs, were easily confused, and were worn down by aggressive questioning.

False confessions like this are not nearly as unusual as many people still think. According to the Innocence Project, they have been found in about one-fourth of DNA exonerations.

What is unusual in the Beatrice Six case is the psychologist's role. A psychologist playing the dual roles of trusted therapist and criminal interrogator "would have had a powerful place of trust and persuasion over suspects," the Omaha World-Herald cites confession experts as stating.

The Six did not become formal suspects until four years after the 1985 murder of Helen Wilson. The ball got rolling when a hard-partying 23-year-old named Tom Winslow was in jail for an unrelated crime, the beating of a motel clerk during a robbery. Police approached him with an offer he couldn't refuse: "Help us solve our murder case, and we'll get you out of jail on bond."

Winslow claims police called him a liar and threatened him with the electric chair if he did not confess. He said police fed him information and "suggested he was blocking out memories of a horrific crime due to the cloud of alcohol or drug abuse," according to reporter Paul Hammel, who has followed the case for the World-Herald.

Earlier this month, authorities announced that the DNA found at the crime scene matched an Oklahoma City man, Bruce Smith, who had since died. In light of that evidence, the state is seeking pardons for the Beatrice Six.

Joseph White, a 26-year-old drifter from Alabama, was the only one of the Six who refused to confess. A jury deliberated for only a few hours before convicting him anyway, largely on the testimony of co-defendants who received reduced charges in exchange.

One of White's attorney's, Toney Redman, recalled arguing in court that those testifying were "so weak-minded" that their stories could not be trusted.

"I'm fully convinced now that the police, if they wanted to, could get any borderline personality person, who has alcohol and drug issues, and scare them to death and get them to confess to anything," he told the World-Herald.

Two of the three who testified against White - Ada JoAnn Taylor and Deb Shelden - were former patients of Dr. Price. Their accounts reportedly changed over time, partly after Dr. Price encouraged them to recollect more details.

Taylor, diagnosed by Price with a personality disorder, initially said she couldn't recall much because she had memory problems. After police insisted she was at the scene of the murder, she eventually changed her story. She also told investigators she communicated telepathically with a friend and had five former lives and an imaginary twin. She took a plea deal and was paroled in November.

Shelden, the other former patient of Price's, initially told interrogators she didn't recall the details of the assault on her grand-aunt until months later, when she began having nightmares. She said Dr. Price helped her to remember the details. Shelden was paroled after serving 10 years in prison.

Although Dr. Price - now executive director of Blue Valley Behavioral Health in Beatrice - doesn't see a problem with his dual roles in the Beatrice Six case, many other psychologists might.

Beneficence and Nonmaleficence is the very first principle of the American Psychological Association's Ethics Code, advising us to to "benefit those with whom [we] work and take care to do no harm." Another principle, Justice, cautions psychologists to "exercise reasonable judgment and take precautions" to avoid participating in unjust practices. A third principle, Respect for People's Rights and Dignity, discusses the duty to safeguard people's confidentiality and self-determination, especially when their "vulnerabilities [might] impair autonomous decision making."

The dangers of multiple relationships are specifically addressed in Section 3.05 of the Ethics Code. Psychologists are forbidden from engaging in dual relationships that "risk exploitation or harm to the person with whom the professional relationship exists."

The Forensic Psychology Specialty Guidelines, published two years after Dr. Price's involvement in the Beatrice Six interrogations, also caution against engaging in dual relationships that might cause harm: "Forensic psychologists recognize potential conflicts of interest in dual relationships with parties to a legal proceeding, and they seek to minimize their effects. Forensic psychologists avoid providing professional services to parties in a legal proceeding with whom they have personal or professional relationships that are inconsistent with the anticipated relationship."

It's hard to see how providing someone with confidential psychological therapy would not be inconsistent with later becoming that person's police interrogator.

If you have other thoughts on the ethical contours of this case, I encourage you to comment.

Omaha World-Herald coverage of the Beatrice Six case is here, here, and here.

A classic article on dual roles in forensic psychology is: Greenberg, S.A. & Shuman, D.W. (1997). Irreconcilable Conflict Between Therapeutic & Forensic Roles. Professional Psychology: Research & Practice, 28, 50-57.

Spitzer update on DSM-V transparency

The latest on the controversy

Robert Spitzer, MD, chair of the DSM-III and DSM-III-R workgroups, has issued an update on efforts to reduce the secrecy surrounding the American Psychiatric Association's DSM-V revision process:

"As those of you who have followed this issue know, APA leadership has been resistant to improving the transparency of the revision process. At the outset, all DSM-V Task Force and Workgroup members were required to sign a confidentiality agreement that prohibited them from discussing anything about the DSM-V revision process.... Requests to APA leadership to see minutes of Task Force and Workgroup meetings were refused on the grounds that releasing minutes would compromise the revision process by inhibiting free discussions among Workgroup members. It also was argued that making minutes of meetings and conference calls would jeopardize APA's intellectual property rights. How this would happen has never been explained....

"Pressure on APA leadership to increase transparency culminated in the drafting of an Action Paper by some members of the APA Assembly. The paper called for the posting of the minutes to the DSM-V workgroup and task force meetings on the DSM-V web site....

"Although clearly a move in the right direction, I believe that these reports fall far short of providing the requisite transparency. The Workgroup reports are quite variable in terms of the amount of detail they provide regarding possible directions for change in the DSM-V....

"Full transparency of the process will only be satisfied by posting the minutes of all DSM-V conference calls and meetings so that the process of the deliberations is evident to all . Anything less is an invitation to critics of psychiatric diagnosis to raise questions about the scientific credibility of DSM-V. That is exactly what Christopher Lane, a harsh critic of the DSMs, did in an Op-Ed piece for the LA Times.

"One of the oft-repeated DSM-V talking points is that the process is 'open and transparent.' To be truly transparent, the nuts and bolts of the DSM-V process needs to be open for outside scrutiny. When it comes to the crucial issue of transparency, even the appearance of impropriety must be avoided. Rather than appearing open and transparent, current APA policy continues to give the appearance that APA has something to hide about how it is developing DSM-V. It remains likely that unwanted media attention will fall on the DSM process until full transparency is achieved."

The only Task Force report posted so far is here. Progress reports from the individual workgroups are posted here.

My readers will be especially interested in the report from the Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders workgroup, which will make recommendations for the highly controversial Paraphilias section of the DSM. The brief report is very vague and really doesn't say much. Rumor has it that the workgroup may be considering adding a new diagnosis for nonsadistic rapists, a highly controversial proposal that was rejected the last time around but would help government experts at civil commitment proceedings. With the continuing secrecy surrounding the process there is no way to know for sure what the workgroup is up to; we'll just have to stay tuned.

Robert Spitzer can be reached via email at Spitzer8@verizon.net.

Blogging jurors

Blogs take on a direction of their own. I have written far more about the DSM-V and sex offender issues than I ever thought I would when I started this blog 19 months ago. There's just a lot to say on those fronts.

Similarly, when jury consultant and trial lawyer Anne Reed started her excellent jury blog, Deliberations, she did not envision how many posts she would write about jurors who blog. But she has. And when she is quoted, interviewed, or asked to speak, social networking is the number one topic of interest.

I have a long list of topics that I never get around to, and blogging jurors is one that keeps going to the back burner. Since I haven't gotten around to writing about it yet, I've decided to point my readers to Anne Reed and let her tell you all about this interesting topic that trial lawyers in particular need to pay more attention to:

So here come two more online jurors this week, frightening lawyers everywhere. There's the Facebook juror in England who put a poll on Facebook to help her decide guilt or innocence. And there's the blogging juror here who knows she can't write about the case, but thinks that "doesn't mean I can't give people a a glimpse of the people I am dealing with," and so gives a great sketch of each person in the courtroom. ("The lead defense lawyer. When he is trying to make a point when questioning a witness he beats his hand on the jury box. "So you *wham* are telling me *wham* that blah blah blah blah blah BLAH! *WHAM*" ) The Facebook juror was dismissed; the word-sketch artist is still sitting, as far as we know.

Reed's advice to attorneys?

This is going to happen to you. It's going to happen to you. It's going to happen to you.

Four things to add to your trial task list:

1. Ask. Ask jurors in voir dire whether they write on line and if so where. If you get a "yes" to that question, you have several tools: (1) the judge can strongly impress on that particular witness that she is to write nothing about the trial, not even character sketches; (2) the lawyers can keep an eye on the juror's site during the trial; and (3) if there's time, you can jump on the juror's site before the jury is chosen to see if it contains anything of concern.

2. Look. Simply running searches by jurors' names -- before the jury is seated if possible, after if not -- you can find non-anonymous blogs, of which there are many.

3. Watch. Even if you've asked and looked, you can still have jurors writing about your trial that you didn't know about, on anonymous sites they did not disclose. If you have enough people, assign someone to set up standing searches to try to catch these, using terms the juror might choose -- the location of the court, and the type of case it is. It also makes sense to check on-line comments to news stories about the case, where you have the staffing to do it.

4. Relax. It's possible that none of these techniques will find the Facebook juror or the sketch artist on your trial. Does that mean we're in a frightening new world with intolerable new rules? I don't think so. Remember that in the old days, both jurors probably would have had talked about the case in the same way, but in conversations with their friends, not on line -- and you wouldn't have found out about those either. If anything, it's easier, not harder, to find chatty jurors than it was when they simply talked.

Click here to see her full post, with links to an entire series on blogging jurors and to her very practical Trial Lawyer's Guide To Social Networking Sites, which does the work for you inquisitive types by linking to all of the major (and many of the minor) social networking sites.

I hope all of you have a nice Thanksgiving holiday!

Photo credit: VintFalken (Creative Commons license)

More on the DSM-V controversy

"The new mental disorders?"

Inspired by last week's op-ed in the L.A. Times, Atlanta Journal-Constitution staff writer Richard Halickshas has a new piece questioning some of the strange new diagnoses being proposed for the DSM-V:

Sex addiction. Internet addiction. Compulsive buying disorder. All of these and more could become officially recognized mental disorders in the next few years. The American Psychiatric Association is creating the fifth edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, or DSM-V, which defines mental disorders and adds new ones with each edition.

Christopher Lane, author of the book "Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became an Illness," complained last week that the new DSM, due out in 2011, is being put together in secret, a charge that DSM's editors denied.

In "Wrangling Over Psychiatry’s Bible," published in the Los Angeles Times, Lane also warned that the creation of new disorders where none currently exists may be "little more than a pretext for prescribing profitable drugs."

Here's a look at selected new ailments under consideration by the committees of experts writing DSM-V.

Sex addiction

Real, says Dr. Patrick Carnes, a leading researcher in the field. It's a "compulsive behavior that completely dominates the addict's life. Sex becomes the organizing principle of addicts' lives."

Not real, says Seattle therapist Roger Libby. Slate.com quotes Libby: "You cannot be addicted to yourself. You have to have a substance external to yourself like alcohol or drugs to be addicted."

Caffeine withdrawal disorder

Real, say Johns Hopkins University researchers. Withdrawing from the world's most-used drug causes headache, fatigue, irritability, depression, difficulty concentrating, even flulike symptoms.

Not real? Few seem to argue against this. It's in DSM-IV as a trial diagnosis and is up for official diagnosis designation in DSM-V.

Parental Alienation Syndrome

Real, says paskids.com: [PAS] "arises primarily in the context of child-custody disputes. Its primary manifestation is the child’s campaign of denigration against a parent, a campaign that has no justification."

Not real, says the National Organization for Women: "Parental alienation really is a dangerous and cleverly marketed legal strategy that has caused much harm to victims of abuse, especially women and children during and post-divorce."

Internet addiction

Real, says Dr. Jerald Block, writing in the American Journal of Psychiatry: "Internet addiction appears to be a common disorder that merits inclusion in DSM-V… . [It] consists of at least three subtypes: excessive gaming, sexual preoccupations and email/text messaging."

Not real, argues thelastpsychiatrist.com. "Internet addiction belongs in DSM-V… . And then let's rename the DSM The Book of Fantastikal Magickal Pixies and incorporate it into the Monster Manual."

As you see in the above coverage, the APA denies the charge by Lane and others, including none other than DSM-III Task Force Chairman Robert Spitzer, that the DSM-V revision process is occurring in secrecy.

But, as Spitzer points out in a letter to Psychiatric News, the secrecy is spelled out quite clearly in the contract that all DSM-V task force members must sign:

"I will not, during the term of this appointment or after, divulge, furnish, or make accessible to anyone or use in any way... any Confidential Information. I understand that 'Confidential Information' includes all Work Product, unpublished manuscripts and drafts and other pre-publication materials, group discussions, internal correspondence, information about the development process and any other written or unwritten information, in any form, that emanates from or relates to my work with the APA task force or work group."

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution article is online here. Spitzer's letter about the secrecy is here. My previous post on the DSM makeover controversy is here.

Locking the courthouse doors

I recently blogged about how the current economic crisis is affecting public defender services, creating a potentially unconstitutional situation in which indigent clients cannot get adequate legal help.

Now, at least one county is proposing to curtail essential court services in order to balance the budget.

That is also unconstitutional, says the presiding judge.

The judge of the King County (Seattle), Washington court, the state's largest court, is taking the unusual step of going public. In an opinion piece in the Seattle Times, he reminds the public of the county's duty to adequately fund not only the courts but also the prosecutor and the public defender -- "There is only so much that can be cut before the administration of justice is undermined."

Presiding Judge Bruce Hilyer also pointed out the penny-wise, pound-foolish nature of the wild budget slashing occurring these days.

For example, Seattle's Drug Court is a nationally recognized model that brings in $3.7 million biannually from the state. That money will be forfeited if the Drug Court shuts down. Taxpayers will also lose in the long run if more drug offenders are incarcerated rather than rehabilitated.

In responding to the county proposal to close the court for 10 working days next year, Judge Hilyer delivers a basic civics lesson:

A core principle of our system of government is three branches, each with authority independent of the other. The legislative branch sets policy, the executive branch implements it and the independent judiciary protects the rule of law and the rights of the individual against the other powers of the state…. The drafters of our state constitution foresaw the risk that one branch of government might force closure on another branch. To prevent this, our constitution provides that the superior court "shall always be open, except on nonjudicial days," which are weekends and holidays. …. Apart from weekends and holidays, the courts may be closed only in physical emergencies like snowstorms, floods or earthquakes….

King County faces some very hard choices. But no matter what they are, we cannot afford to suspend our citizens' access to justice by closing our courts.

The full article, "King County Superior Court cannot be closed," is online here.

"The sausage-making of psychiatric care"

"The less you know about how mental health is defined, the better. Or perhaps it's the other way around."

In case you missed English professor Christopher Lane's excellent opinion piece in the L.A. Times last week, the Minneapolis Star Tribune ran it this Sunday. As the American Psychiatric Association gears up for DSM-V, we all need to keep it real when it comes to psychiatric diagnosis. Let's hope this media spotlight will encourage the APA to increase the transparency of the process and make sure only legitimate diagnoses get added to the manual.

The Star Tribune op-ed is online here.

Don’t blame me - AT&T did it!

(Or, my variation on the TODDI defense*)

Loyal subscribers may have noticed an absence of blog posts this week. It's true that I have been busy, but the dearth is partly the fault of AT&T, which shut me down earlier this week.

When I called to find out why my Internet service (and, more urgently, my incoming business telephone line!) was dead, they sent me on a wild goose chase to purchase new equipment.

It took dozens of phone calls, hours of time "on hold," and a two-day wait before they finally sent out a repair person. As it turns out, a technician working on a central terminal up the street had accidentally snipped off my line and spliced me into someone else's.

Accidents happen. And when I complained about the lengthy delay, the good folks at AT&T did compensate me -- to the tune of $16.79.

Sorry 'bout that, folks.

* The TODDI Defense -- The Other Dude Did It -- was one of the most common defenses I heard when I worked as a criminal investigator.