Civil commitment petition against Butner, NC prisoner dismissed

 Federal judge discounts sex offender's confessions as fabricated

Sex offenses are upsetting, and their perpetrators creepy. Understandably, it's easy for jurors and even judges to brush aside legal technicalities and burdens of proof in the interest of keeping women and children safe.

But it is disturbing when forensic psychologists collude in this endeavor, disregarding the limits of science by overstating the accuracy of risk assessment instruments, inventing pretextual disorders to justify preventive detention, and even claiming omniscient truth-telling powers regarding ancient, unprosecuted allegations.

In an environment replete with such folie à plusieurs, it was refreshing to read the recent federal decision in the case of Markis Revland, a habitual criminal who faced civil detention after serving time for child pornography possession.

Senior U.S. District Judge Bernard A. Friedman systematically analyzed and rejected the evidence as failing to meet the government’s burden of proof. Not only did the government fail to show that Revland had a serious mental disorder that put him at high risk of molesting children if released, it even failed to prove that the convict had engaged in any hands-on child molestation in the past, the judge ruled.

Child abuse claims imaginary

In addition to his conviction for child pornography, Revland had two prior convictions for indecent exposure. But the most damning evidence against him was his own admissions, made during sex offender treatment at the federal prison in Butner, North Carolina, that he had committed 149 additional incidents of sexual abuse of children of various ages.

However, the keen-minded judge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina wasn’t buying those confessions:

The court finds that all of the 149 incidents reported by respondent … were the product of his imagination, not actual events.

He explained that Revland was desperate to enroll in Butner’s treatment program in order to escape the infamous federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, where he feared for his life after being beaten and raped at knifepoint by fellow prisoners. Once at Butner, he felt compelled to fabricate “a long list of sex offenses,” lest he be deemed uncooperative and returned to Leavenworth.

The offenses that he described in great detail were implausible, in that he was serving a prior, 10-year prison term for cocaine at around the same time that he claimed to be running around molesting children, the judge determined:

The reported incidents were not only too numerous to believe but also recounted – years afterwards – far too precisely, with respondent providing the age of the victim, the time of day … when each offense occurred, and the location where each incident allegedly occurred…. And yet the government offered no evidence to independently verify that any of these incidents occurred or that any of them – even one – ever resulted in investigation or prosecution.

As a group, Butner offenders – most of them incarcerated on child pornography charges -- have confessed to an unusually high number of undetected sex offenses, leading many observers to suspect that the widely publicized numbers are unreliable. Critics say treatment providers at the federal institution pressured prisoners to report as many offenses as possible, lest they be accused of not cooperating.

No bona fide sexual disorder

Likewise, Judge Friedman was unconvinced by the government's claim that Revland suffered from a mental disorder, pedophilia, that would justify civil commitment by making him likely to engage in future child molestation if released.

Friedman conceded that the convict met the criteria for antisocial personality disorder. But he found that such a diagnosis was irrelevant:

The essence of this disorder is that the patient “fail[s] to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest.” Dr. [Jeffrey] Singer testified that the vast majority of prison inmates have this disorder, as they are in prison for breaking the law and failing to conform to social norms. Dr. [Joseph] Plaud testified that there is no documented causal link, in this case or in general, between antisocial personality disorder and sexual dangerousness. The court credits these experts' opinions.

Finally, the judge rejected the claims of two government psychologists that two so-called actuarial instruments, the Static-99R and the MnSOST-R, showed Revland to be at high risk for recidivism.

Judge Friedman said the risk assessments by both Dr. Manuel Gutierrez, a Board of Prisons employee, and contract psychologist Jeffrey Davis were "particularly unreliable in the present case because they both assumed that [Revland] is a pedophile with numerous 'hands-on' victims, whereas the court has rejected both of these premises."

Increasingly, cutting-edge researchers are coming to the consensus that by and large, with a few exceptions at the extreme end of the continuum, sex offenders are not a distinct group worthy of the level of special attention they are getting these days. Rather, they are garden-variety criminals who violate social norms, take what they want, and eventually burn out as they enter middle age.  

The judge's bold language in cutting through the empty psychobabble about mental disorder and risk harkens back to the little boy in the Hans Christian Andersen tale, The Emperor's New Clothes, who was not afraid to declare out loud that the emperor was naked.

Happy New Year’s – and thanks for your support!

Thanks very much to those of you who responded to my request for help, generously donating money and books or signing up for a paid subscription. I really appreciate your kind assistance. For those of you who meant to chip in but didn’t get around to it yet (I know how busy we all get), click HERE to see a list of ways that you can still contribute. (Or, look in the right column of the blog's website.) Please join in today, to help keep this blog thriving in 2012 and beyond.

Happy New Year’s to all of you!

Updates of leading malingering and Miranda rights tests

As we ring in the new year, here are a couple of updates on tests some of you may be using in your forensic practices.

Miranda instruments revised

When it comes to assessing whether a criminal defendant had the capacity to waive his or her Miranda rights prior to giving a statement to police, there is only one game in town -- the Instruments for Assessing Understanding and Appreciation of Miranda Rights by eminent forensic psychologist Tom Grisso and colleagues. Now, that set of tests has been completely revised and given a new name: the Miranda Rights Comprehension Instruments (MRCI). One of the main problems with the old instruments was that their language was more complex than the actual language used by many police warnings, reducing their real-world validity. That problem has been rectified through simpler language in the new edition. Also, the test developers promise better psychometric properties and updated normative data. But it's kind of a tricky situation, because we are being instructed to use the new instruments when assessing juveniles, but to stick with the old ones for assessing adults until new adult norms are published some time in 2013. More on the new instruments is HERE.

Facelift for gold-standard malingering test

In contrast to Miranda rights, there is no shortage of instruments for assessing malingering. But for assessing malingered psychosis, one instrument is widely recognized as the "gold standard." That test is Richard Rogers and colleagues’ Structured Interview of Reported Symptoms (SIRS). It too was recently revised. The revision was in part due to the discovery that the original SIRS failed to adequately distinguish between some people diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder and people who were instructed to deliberately exaggerate symptoms. But critical reception for the revised tool, the SIRS-2, has been less than stellar. Over at the Open Access Journal of Forensic Psychology, forensic psychologist Greg DeClue warns that the SIRS-2 may be vulnerable to admissibility challenges in court. That is due to the publishers' refusal to be transparent by letting independent professionals such as DeClue analyze their data. DeClue challenges the test's developers to submit a comprehensive description of the SIRS-2 validation study for peer-reviewed publication, and to let independent professionals analyze the data without impediment. His interesting critique is HERE.

Join the blogger's circle of support

As the year draws to a close, I would like to publicly thank all my loyal readers and subscribers. It’s been gratifying to see subscriptions for this blog grow from a few dozen back in 2007 to today's many hundreds of forensic practitioners, lawyers, educators, criminologists, researchers, authors and policy advocates. It is great to see nearly all of the U.S. states and dozens of nations represented, from Saudi Arabia and Turkey to Scotland and Lithuania.

A snapshot of this morning's blog visitors from around the world

I am especially grateful to the many of you who have lent tangible support through monetary donations, books, and other forms of encouragement. Your generous support has been essential in defraying my costs. Letting me know that the time and energy I devote to blogging is useful in keeping you connected and abreast of developments in the field has also helped me stay motivated.

For those of you who have not yet chipped in, I’ve made it very easy. Here are three ways to join my expanding circle of support, and help keep this blog going:

1. Subscribe. A $3 monthly subscription helps defray my Internet fees and research costs. Just click on the "SUBSCRIBE" button in the upper right column of the blog. Paypal makes it quick and easy. 

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And thanks again to all of you who have given me so much support over the years.

Appellate court upholds exclusion of SPECT evidence

Yerba Buena Island, San Francisco Bay

On May 22, 2002, the body of Juliette Williamson was found washed up on Yerba Buena Island in the San Francisco Bay. Williamson and her long-time partner Bruce Brooks were well-known street performers known as the Chicago Brother and Sister Blues Band. For years, they had lived together in a purple school bus parked under a freeway.

Within days of Williamson's disappearance, Brooks gave three confessions to friends. He provided graphic details of how he bludgeoned her to death with a hammer after a drunken quarrel. He even took one friend to the location where he had tossed her body into the Bay; there, police later recovered blood samples that matched Williamson's DNA.

The couple’s 16-year relationship had always been tumultuous, but it was deteriorating in the weeks before the killing. Brooks had resumed smoking crack cocaine and had openly threatened to kill Williamson if she left him, according to trial testimony.

Bruce Brooks. Photo credit: M. Macer, S.F. Chronicle

By the time he went to trial six years later, Brooks's story had changed. He testified that Williamson attacked him and knocked him "silly." He saw a fluorescent number three in his mind; the next thing he knew he was dropping Williamson's body over the bridge to bury her at sea. He had no recollection of killing her, but figured he must have.

A defense-retained neuropsychologist, Myla Young, testified that Brooks had frontal lobe damage that might cause him to begin a repetitive act like hitting and not stop until worn out. The impairment also made him prone to amnesia, she said.

But the jury wasn't buying. After three days of deliberations, jurors convicted Brooks of second-degree murder. He was sentenced to 15 years to life.

Appeal: Unfair to exclude SPECT evidence

Brooks appealed, citing the trial judge's exclusion of Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT) evidence. He had hoped to introduce the colorful brain scans to convince the jury he had organic brain damage that made it impossible for him to premeditate a murder, or even form a conscious intent to kill. Psychiatrist Daniel Amen was prepared to testify that Brooks' scan, which measures blood flow to certain regions of the brain, looked "very abnormal."

San Francisco trial judge Cindy Lee excluded the SPECT testimony based on concerns about both the method and the messenger.

Daniel Amen promotes his Amen Clinics

Under California's Kelly-Frye standard, for scientific evidence to be admissible in a criminal case, there must be proof that the technique is considered reliable in the scientific community and that the witness is a qualified expert who used correct scientific procedures. The party seeking to introduce the evidence has the burden of proving its admissibility by a preponderance of the evidence.

Regarding the method, the judge ruled that research has not established that SPECT scans can accurately determine cognitive impairment, much less impairment so severe as to preclude the requisite mental states for premeditated murder. While the scans were "pretty glitzy" and "high tech," their colors lacked meaning and had a high potential to confuse the jury, she said.

As to the messenger, the judge had "a 'considerable question' ... as to whether [Amen] is an independent and unbiased expert and truly represents a cross-section of the relevant scientific community," according to a just-issued appellate ruling.

The First District Court of Appeal upheld the trial judge's ruling, endorsing her concerns about both the method and the messenger.

The appellate justices were unable to find any published appellate decision on the issue of whether SPECT evidence is admissible in a criminal trial to support a theory that a defendant's ability to form a specific intent was impaired by organic brain damage. So they conducted their own independent review of the scientific status of SPECT evidence. They were ultimately under-impressed.

[W]e agree with the trial court that defendant failed to establish that SPECT was generally accepted by the scientific community as showing brain injuries that were relevant to the defense theory that he did not form the intent necessary to commit murder. Defendant did not establish a generally accepted correlation between blood flow to a particular part of the brain and any particular behavior…. [A]s the trial court correctly summarized the testimony, "[T]here’s a lack of any testimony that there’s any quantitative percentage of blood flow, specific cognitive functions or other factors that will be impaired or even affected."

Regarding the messenger, the appellate justices said it was within the trial judge's discretion to raise "serious questions about Amen’s qualifications to testify as an expert witness. The court doubted that he could be independent and unbiased in light of his long engagement in significant entrepreneurship activities regarding SPECT via the Amen Clinics and activities as a proponent of the utility of SPECT scan imaging."

Amen's methods questioned

Judge Lee and the appellate panel were not alone in viewing Amen's activities with suspicion.

Amen, a graduate of the now-defunct Oral Roberts University School of Medicine, has said he was "led by God to pursue this work." And the missionary zeal with which he promotes SPECT for everything from depression and anxiety to aggression and drug abuse has raised concerns among other medical professionals.

In 2005, Amen's unconventional treatments had caught the attention of Quackwatch, an international network dedicated to exposing medical "frauds, myths, fads, fallacies, and misconduct." Three years later, Salon ran a piece by neurologist Robert Burton, criticizing PBS for running Amen's "self-produced infomercial" touting his unproven intervention for Alzheimer's disease:

It’s hard to dismiss the religious undertones of Amen’s work…. And yet Amen’s sense of calling hasn't led him to undertake the high-quality clinical investigations that would lend scientific credence to his claims…. Amen states that he has read more than 40,000 SPECT scans and holds himself up as a world expert. But a brief quote from his TV special quickly reveals a very peculiar method of determining what constitutes a normal SPECT scan…. Using Amen’s figures from his TV program, only 3 percent of those he has studied have been interpreted by himself and his staff as being normal. Put another way, 97 percent of patients who attend Amen’s clinic can expect to be told that their SPECT brain scan is abnormal.

But the controversies surrounding neuroimaging in court go far beyond those swirling around Amen and his SPECT scans. Echoing the trial judge's concerns in the Brooks case, the UK Royal Society just this week warned that jurors may be far too impressed with brain images, not recognizing their limited applicability to real-world legal questions.

POSTSCRIPT: On Feb. 29, 2012, the California Supreme Court denied review of the case. 

Study: Lads’ mags sound identical to rapists

As I was driving through America’s Farm Belt on the way to a prison (miles and miles of cows and plowed corn fields as far as the eye could see), it was a bit incongruous to suddenly see --

Photo by Karen Franklin

-- an ADULT SUPERSTORE, perched on the side of the freeway like a giant mousetrap. While sex offenders are chastised for even thinking about pornography, a free-world traveler like me can't escape its dehumanizing specter, whether on the highway or in my hotel room. Novelist Russell Banks was surely on to something when he called sex offenders the canaries in the coal mine, victims of a $10-billion-plus industry that preys on their loneliness and alienation.

With that vision in mind, I was pleased to see that two of my favorite academic scholars are getting a flurry of media attention over their new study finding that most people cannot distinguish between statements about women in British lads' mags and those made by convicted rapists.

In the study, due to be published in the British Journal of Psychology, men identified more with the comments made by rapists than the quotes made in lads' mags. And that's not necessarily a bad thing: On the whole, the statements pulled from Britain's four leading lads' mags (what North Americans would call men's magazines) were actually more denigrating of women than the rape-justifying statements made by rapists.

For example, here are two quotes:

• "There's a certain way you can tell that a girl wants to have sex . . . The way they dress, they flaunt themselves."

• "You do not want to be caught red-handed . . . go and smash her on a park bench. That used to be my trick."

The first quote is pulled from the book, The Rapist Files: Interviews With Convicted Rapists. The second is from a lads' mag. (If you want to test your ability to differentiate rapists from lads' mags, Jezebel has obliged with an online quiz containing 16 of the statements used in the study.)

The study authors worry that lads' magazines (which are not categorized as pornographic because they do not show full nudity) are mainstreaming hedonistic, predatory attitudes toward women.

"The apparent normalising effect of lads' mags runs counter to the work that is done with sex offenders both in prison and the community,” lead researcher Miranda Horvath told the Guardian. “Sex offender programmes challenge the men about their sexist, misogynistic and derogatory beliefs about women and seek to reeducate them. Yet it appears that some similar beliefs have been presented in recent lads' mags, which are normalised and accepted in mainstream society."

Said co-researcher Peter Hegarty in a press release, “We are not killjoys or prudes who think that there should be no sexual information and media for young people. But are teenage boys and young men best prepared for fulfilling love and sex when they normalise views about women that are disturbingly close to those mirrored in the language of sexual offenders?”

He added that young men should be given credible sex education and not have to rely on lads' mags as a source of information as they grow up.

Dr. Horvath of Middlesex University is a pioneering researcher into multiple-perpetrator rape and co-organizer of the London conference on sexual violence at which I gave a keynote this summer. Dr. Hegarty at the University of Surrey has just completed a fascinating research project on Lewis Terman of Stanford University; his book, Poison in the Gift: Alfred Kinsey, Lewis Terman and the Sexual Politics of Smart Men is in press by the University of Chicago Press.

The article is: "Lights on at the end of the party: Are lads' mags mainstreaming dangerous sexism?" by Miranda Horvath, Peter Hegarty, Suzannah Tyler and Sophie Mansfield, in the British Journal of Psychology. Author correspondence may be addressed to Dr. Horvath (HERE).

Hebephilia hopes hidey-hole will help it slip into DSM-5

Jean Broc: The Death of Hyacinthos

Hebephilia, the controversial faux disorder proposed for the upcoming DSM-5, has been repackaged in the hopes that no one will notice its presence. Unfortunately for its survival, two newly published journal articles may make it harder to hide.

The proposed label of "pedohebephilia” has been quietly discarded. Instead, hebephilia – defined as sexual attraction to young pubescents – has been buried in the text of revamped criteria for pedophilia. Presumably hoping it will go unnoticed, the web page authors do not mention the change.

The questionable diagnosis is the brainchild of a Canadian sex offender clinic with inordinate influence on the Sexual Disorders Workgroup of the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-5 revision committee.

It is the last of three quacky sexual paraphilia proposals still standing. Overwhelming opposition derailed paraphilic coercive disorder (which would have turned rape into a mental disorder) and hypersexuality.

These victories notwithstanding, the developers of the DSM-5, due out in 2013, have been remarkably deaf to an ever-increasing roar of concern from allied professions in the United States and internationally. The revision process steamrollers on despite a mushrooming petition by a coalition of psychology organizations, a scathing critique by the British Psychological Society and, most recently, public statements of concern by the 154,000-member American Psychological Association and the 120,000-strong American Counseling Association. 

More costly and ineffective civil detentions

Following on the heels of my historical review of hebephilia in Behavioral Sciences and the Law, the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law has just published two new critiques.

In an article focusing on the legal ramifications, forensic psychologist and attorney John Fabian warns that the primary result of adding this scientifically unproven diagnosis to the DSM-5 will be an increase in civil commitments of sex offenders.

Fabian outlines the inconsistent federal case interpretations of hebephilia, including the only federal court of appeals ruling, by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First District in the case of Todd Carta (the case I led off with in my review):

The court in Carta focused on the offender's behavior as causing him distress, impairment, and dysfunction in his life. However, the question of whether hebephilia is a type of paraphilia NOS, depends on whether it is considered deviant and abnormal to have a sexual attraction and to engage in subsequent sexual behaviors toward pubescent adolescents and postpubescent minors. To this date, neither the case law nor clinical research on sex offenders has clearly supported classifying hebephilia as an abnormal pathology.

As we can see through this psycholegal analysis, both clinicians and the courts disagree as to whether hebephilia is a pathological sexual deviance disorder. Given the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court recently denied certiorari in hearing McGee, Michael L. v. Bartow, Dir., WI Resource Center, addressing whether a rape paraphilia NOS, nonconsent, meets the constitutional threshold for legal mental abnormality for civil commitment, it is unlikely that the Court will hear such a case addressing hebephilia. More likely, the DSM-5 will provide guidance for clinicians, attorneys, and judges who evaluate and litigate this issue in civil commitment proceedings.

Focus on clinical impairment

In a commentary on Fabian's article, sex offender researchers Robert Prentky and Howard Barbaree try to take a middle road in the contentious debate. At the outset, they acknowledge the questionable nature of diagnosing a condition that is hard-wired in heterosexual men:

Brooke Shields was only 12 years old when she played a child prostitute in Pretty Baby, three years before she modeled Calvin Klein jeans, asking, "Want to know what gets between me and my Calvin's? Nothing." Klein's young teenage models were so provocative that the Justice Department investigated whether the ads violated federal child pornography and child exploitation laws. Penelope Cruz was only 13 years old when she played a child prostitute in the French soap opera Série Rose. Jodie Foster was 14 years old when she played a child prostitute in Taxi Driver. The model Maddison Gabriel, the official "face" of Australia's Gold Coast Fashion Week in 2007, was only 12 years old. Highly sexualized young girls would not be used in advertising, in movies, and on catwalks unless a great many adult males were paying close attention. It appears that heterosexual human males are hard wired to respond sexually to young females with secondary sexual characteristics.

But, they continue, men with an "exclusive sexual preference for young teenagers" (if such men can be found) may indeed be sufficiently impaired so as to meet the mental disorder requirement of "clinically significant deficits in social and interpersonal skills."

This was the approach taken by the appellate court in upholding the civil commitment of Todd Carta, and it is a tactic being used by government experts in sexually violent predator civil commitment proceedings. In a circular rationale, once the pseudo-diagnosis of “Paraphilia Not Otherwise Specified-Hebephilia” is assigned, clinically significant impairment can be inferred from the mere fact of an arrest and criminal prosecution.

To their credit, Prentky and Barbaree do admit that the research base for hebephilia is insufficient at the present time:

The bright line in the sand should be the clinical and empirical integrity of the proposed diagnosis…. Examined in isolation, there does not appear to be adequate empirical evidence that sexual arousal in response to young adolescents constitutes a paraphilia…. Clearly, this is an area that warrants further research.

Let's just hope the DSM-5 gods tune in to the controversy in time to pull the plug on yet another half-baked idea that will only bring further embarrassment to the profession.

Both articles are freely available online:

• John Fabian: Diagnosing and Litigating Hebephilia in Sexually Violent Predator Civil Commitment Proceedings

• Robert Prentky and Howard Barbaree: Commentary: Hebephilia—A Would-be Paraphilia Caught in the Twilight Zone Between Prepubescence and Adulthood

The DSM-5 petition, spearheaded by the Society for Humanistic Psychology, is HERE.

"Invasion of the Hebephile Hunters," my oldie but goodie from 2007 (before all this hoopla got started), is HERE.

New critique of APA’s detainee interrogation policies

Interrogation of Canadian citizen Omar Khadr, age 15, at Guantanamo

Prominent psychology ethicist Ken Pope, a former chair of the American Psychological Association's Ethics Committee who resigned from the APA in 2008, has authored a new article critiquing the APA's controversial policies on detainee interrogations.

Pope said his purpose is to "highlight key APA policies, procedures, and public statements that seem in urgent need of rethinking and to suggest some questions that may be useful in a serious assessment."

He questions the ethical legitimacy of standing behind policies and practices that can cause harm to individuals -- such as detainees -- based on the stated desire to do "the most good for the most people."

Pope provides a history of the APA’s controversial 2002 decision to reject the so-called "Nuremberg Ethic" by permitting psychologists to forego ethical responsibilities when they conflict with government authority (Ethics Code Section 1.02).

Psychologists came under intense criticism from human rights proponents in the wake of 9/11 for their critical role in detainee interrogations. Unlike organized psychiatry and other medical professions, the American Psychological Association promoted its role in detainee interrogations as contributing to national security in a time of crisis.

"APA promoted support for its interrogation policies in its press releases, its journals, its web site, its Internet lists, its conventions, the APA Monitor on Psychology, and other venues," Pope noted. For example, it "submitted a statement on psychology and interrogations to the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence explaining that 'psychologists have important contributions to make in eliciting information that can be used to prevent violence and protect our nation's security'; that 'conducting an interrogation is inherently a psychological endeavor'; and that 'psychology is central to this process.' "

Accordingly, psychologists under contract with the CIA were given a green light to design aggressive interrogation techniques to break down detainees, while other psychologists on the outside assured the public that techniques such as waterboarding were safe and would not cause lasting mental harm.

The article, "Are the American Psychological Association's Detainee Interrogation Policies Ethical and Effective? Key Claims, Documents, and Results," is slated for publication in the journal Zeitschrift fur Psychologie / Journal of Psychology, the oldest psychology journal in Europe and the second oldest in the world.

Pope's critique is timely. For one thing, the policies authored by the APA's controversial Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS Task Force) remain in place. Additionally, the issues he raises have broader implications for current ethical practice of psychologists in other custodial settings, such as prisons, jails, and mental hospitals.

Pope has made the article available at his website (HERE), which also has many other useful resources on ethics and interrogations.

First joint psychology-law program with disability focus

New York Law School and John Jay College of Criminal Justice have announced a new joint degree program in forensic psychology and law that will launch in Fall 2012 and focus on disability law.

New York Law School already offers 13 courses on mental disability law, while John Jay already offers an M.A. in forensic psychology. But this will be the first program of its kind, according to New York Law School professor Michael Perlin, who is also the director of he law school's Mental Disability Law Program.

"I'm very excited about the joint program because it highlights the interdisciplinary nature of what we are trying to do through our mental disability law program," Perlin told the National Law Journal. "We created courses specifically to appeal to both lawyers and mental health professionals. This program helps create a synergy that ensures, as best we can, that graduates will have a deep understanding of the other discipline."

"Our graduates will be well-trained lawyers for people with mental disabilities issues and have the potential to become legal advocates, work on public policy or become law professors in this unique niche," said James Wulach, the director of the M.A. Program in Forensic Mental Health Counseling at John Jay College.

Students must apply and be accepted to both schools separately and will finish with a Master of Arts in forensic psychology from John Jay and a Juris Doctor from New York Law School. Perlin expects an initial enrollment of about 25 students.

The National Law Journal story is HERE.

Good tidings: Violence at all-time low

How does this sound for entertainment: Your date asks you out to the theater to watch a live cat slowly lowered into a fire and burned to death, howling with pain as it is singed, roasted, and finally carbonized?

If that isn't your idea of a good time, don't hop into the next time machine heading back to medieval Europe.

In 16th-century Paris, throngs –- including kings and queens -- flocked to watch such gruesome spectacles, shrieking with laughter as cats and other animals were tortured to death on stage.

"The Catherine Wheel"

Torture and violence were woven into the fabric of life, from the sexualized sadism of London, where elaborately designed and decorated torture devices were the pinnacle of artistic creativity, to the widespread practice of hacking off the nose of anyone who disrespected you (the source of the strange idiom, "to cut off your nose to spite your face").

In contrast, whether we know it or not, we are now enjoying the most peaceful period in all of human history. Indeed, the precipitous decline in violence of all types may be “the most significant and least appreciated development in the history of our species,” argues Steven Pinker, a renowned professor of psychology at Harvard University, in an epic tome, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.

"The Judas Cradle"

Given the tenor of the daily news headlines, Pinker knows his claim sounds far-fetched. But in 800 pages of research and analysis, augmented by hundreds of charts and tables, he convincingly establishes that violence is indeed heading in one direction: down.

The decline is drastic across-the-board, in both state-sanctioned and individual violence: International wars, civil wars, terrorism (an obsession far out of proportion to its prevalence), slavery, sexual violence, child abuse, infanticide....

Click HERE to read my full Amazon review of this recommended text. If you appreciate the review, please click on "yes."

Breivik insanity finding showcases Norway’s progressive system

Sensible and efficient are words that come to mind in reviewing the Norwegian government's handling of mass killer Anders Behring Breivik's legal case.

The court appointed two psychiatrists who worked collaboratively to evaluate Breivik,who admits killing 77 people and injuring 151 others in a mass shooting spree in July.

The psychiatrists spent 36 hours interviewing Breivik on 13 separate occasions before finding him insane at the time of the crimes. Breivik was psychotic and inhabited a ''delusional universe,'' they wrote in their 243-page report.

Although many have expressed surprise, there's not the kind of political grandstanding one might expect with such a politically charged case in the United States or some other Western countries. Even prosecutors are not voicing any objection to the insanity finding.

''Anders Behring Breivik during a long period of time has developed the mental disorder of paranoid schizophrenia, which has changed him and made him into the person he is today,'' prosecutor Svein Holden announced at a press conference.

Inga Bejer Engh, speaking for government prosecutors, also said she was ''comfortable'' with the finding.

An expert panel from the Norwegian Board of Forensic Medicine is expected to approve the finding. If so, Breivik will likely be detained indefinitely in a psychiatric hospital and will not stand trial.

Rehabilitation a central goal

Norway’s criminal justice system stands in stark contrast to the more punitive systems in many other countries. Rehabilitation, rather than just punishment for punishment's sake, is its central goal.

Even if Breivik had been found sane and convicted at trial, his maximum prison sentence would have been 21 years, or at most 30 years if he had been found guilty of crimes against humanity.

For example, a male nurse found guilty of murdering 22 of his elderly patients was released in 2004 after serving just 12 years in prison.

"A lot of resources are put into this. The idea is for people to be able to leave prison and lead a life free from crime,” criminology professor Hedda Giertsen of the University of Oslo told the BBC. "There is help to find accommodation, help with personal finances, education -- nearly half of Norway's prison population is offered some sort of course or education."

Statistics indicate this policy works: Reconviction rates in Norway are about 20 percent, far lower than in other European countries or the United States.

And just think about all of the money Norway will save by avoiding the public spectacle of a lengthy and high-profile trial featuring dueling psychiatric experts. 

Rationality: Don't you love it?

MnSOST-3: Promising new actuarial for sex offenders to debut

Note: See below postscript for a link to the MnSOST-3 instrument and manual, now available online.

Regular readers know that I've criticized our field's overreliance on imprecise and atheoretical screening instruments to predict whether or not an individual will behave violently in the future.

As Patrick Lussier and Garth Davies of Simon Fraser University point out in the current issue of Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, the actuarialist approach of searching for external variables that distinguish individuals "is somewhat at odds with the rationale of risk assessment, which is intended to assess the risk of an individual but also takes into account any changes in the level of risk over time for a specific individual."

In their new longitudinal study, Lussier and Davies identified heterogeneous trajectories in sexual and violent offending over time. They suggest that by turning "a blind eye" to criminological research on the developmental course of offending, the actuarialists have produced measures that are a misfit for many if not most individuals, overestimating risk in some cases and underestimating it in others.

While I agree philosophically with their critique, we have to be realistic.

Legislatures and courts love the so-called actuarials, which rate an individual's risk based on the presence of various preselected risk factors. They're quick and easy to administer. And they offer an illusion of scientific certitude that legitimizes current laws and criminal justice practices.

So, until a more theoretically informed, person-oriented approach gains traction, we should at minimum insist on more accurate actuarials, and better acknowledgment of their limitations. That was the goal, for instance, of the Multisample Age-Stratified Table of Sexual Recidivism Rates (MATS-1), a collaborative project by researchers in the United States, New Zealand, and Australia to more accurately incorporate advancing age into predictions of risk for sex offenders.

With that more modest goal in mind, I am cautiously optimistic about a newly developed actuarial tool for assessing recidivism among sex offenders, the MnSOST-3.

A better actuarial?

Before you recoil in shock based on the name alone, let me reassure you that it's a completely different tool from the old Minnesota Sex Offender Screening Tool (the MnSOST or MnSOST-R). Only three of the new instrument's items are the same, and even those are measured differently, so I don't even know why they kept the tainted name. As many of you know, the original MnSOST (pronounced MIN-sauced) oversampled high-risk offenders and so produced artificially inflated estimates of risk. Also, research on its development was never published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Based on an article by developers Grant Duwe and Pamela Freske accepted for publication in the journal Sexual Abuse, the new and improved MnSOST-3 appears to have several advantages over existing actuarial instruments for assessing sex offender recidivism.

The developers took advantage of advances in statistical modeling, using a predictive logistic regression model that enables a more nuanced measurement of the effects of continuous predictors such as age and number of prior offenses. Risk is adjusted based on whether an offender will be under any kind of supervision in the community, something other actuarials do not consider. Scoring is done on an Excel spreadsheet, which should reduce data entry errors.

A major strength of the MnSOST-3 is that it was developed on a contemporary sample that included 2,315 sex offenders released from Minnesota prisons between 2003 and 2006. Given the plummeting rates of sexual offending in the Western world over the past couple of decades, this is imperative in order not to overestimate risk.

The developers report that the MnSOST-3 is well calibrated with actual recidivism rates for all but the highest-risk offenders, for whom it overestimates risk. In other words, the predicted probabilities of recidivism match up pretty closely with the actual rates of reoffending except for the very highest-risk offenders. Overall, about four percent of the released offenders were reconvicted of a new sex crime within four years, a base rate that is consistent with other recent research findings. 

Moose Lake sex offender facility, Minnesota

The authors frankly acknowledge the problem that this low base rate poses for accurate identification of recidivists. While offenders who scored in the top 10 percent on the MnSOST-3 were more likely than lower-scoring men to reoffend (their rate of reconviction was 22 percent), if you predicted that any given individual in this top bracket would reoffend, you would be wrong four times out of five.

The optimism-corrected accuracy of the MnSOST-3 for the contemporary sample, as measured by the Area Under the Curve (AUC) statistic, was .796. This means that there is about an 80% chance that a randomly selected recidivist will have a higher score on the instrument than a randomly selected non-recidivist -- although this applies only to the sample from which the instrument was developed and is not generalizable to other samples.

Although we must wait to see whether this moderate accuracy will generalize to sex offender populations outside of Minnesota, the MnSOST-3 may be about as good as it gets. After a decades-long search for the Holy Grail of risk prediction, consensus is building that the obstacles are insurmountable. Low base rates of recidivism, along with fluid and unpredictable environmental contexts, place a firm ceiling on predictive accuracy.

Which gets us back to the point made by Lussier and Davies: Consistent with a large body of criminological theory, we need to recognize the criminal career as a process with a beginning, a middle and an end. In other words, it's time to start looking at the individual offender and understanding his specific offense trajectory, rather than just continuing to amass collections of external variables to measure him against.

Oh, in case you were wondering how well the old MnSOST-R did at predicting which men in the contemporary Minnesota sample would reoffend, it had an AUC of .55. That's about as good as a coin flip.

So, if nothing else, the MnSOST-3 should seal the death warrant of its worn-out ancestors. Given their inaccurate and bloated estimates of risk, that will be a very good thing.

The articles are:

Lussier, Patrick and Davies, Garth (2011) A Person-Oriented Perspective on Sexual Offenders, Offending Trajectories, and Risk of Recidivism: A New Challenge for Policymakers, Risk Assessors, and Actuarial Prediction? Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 17 (4), 530–561. (To request a copy from the author, click HERE.)

Duwe, Grant and Freske, Pamela (In Press), Using Logistic Regression Modeling to Predict Sex Offense Recidivism: The Minnesota Sex Offender Screening Tool-3 (Mnsost-3), Sexual Abuse. (To request a copy from the author, click HERE.)

POSTSCRIPT: The MnSOST-3 is now being used by the Minnesota Department of Corrections; thus, the instrument and the scoring manual are available online -- HERE. 

Related blog posts:

• MnSOST-R actuarial instrument critiqued (July 3, 2008)
• SVP industry sneak peek: Problems in Actuaryland (Oct. 4, 2009)
• Study: Actuarials fail to predict sexually violent recidivism (March 5, 2010)
• Delusional campaign for a world without risk (April 3, 2010)
• New study: Do popular actuarials work? Newer instruments outperform Static-99 and RRASOR (April 20, 2010)
• Groundbreaking study of sex offender life courses: Challenge to actuarials: 4 distinct trajectories ID'd (June 4, 2010)
• Metaanalysis debunks psychopathy-violence link (Sept. 3, 2010)
• Age tables improve sex offender risk estimates (Dec. 1, 2010)

Thanksgiving roundup

Brandon McInerney

Gay panic defendant gets 21 years

The gay panic case of Brandon McInerney that we’ve been tracking here since 2008 is finally over. The defendant, who was 14 when he shot and killed classmate Larry King, agreed to a 21-year prison term after a jury deadlocked in his murder trial two months ago.

"The missing militant" pleads no contest

Ronald Bridgeforth

Ronald Bridgeforth, the man I blogged about a couple of weeks ago who spent 43 years underground before deciding to turn himself in, pleaded no contest yesterday to a 1968 charge of assault on a police officer. His sentencing is set for February. For those of you who are interested in his fascinating life, I recommend a profile (HERE) by Laura Rena Murray in Tuesday's San Francisco Chronicle. As Bridgeforth put it, "Not being in jail is not the same as being free."

From Australia: Prolonged detention and mental health

An investigative journalism program in Australia has aired a remarkable documentary on the psychiatric effects of lengthy detention of asylum seekers. ABC’s Four Corners obtained rare footage of conditions in facilities that are typically kept out of sight and out of mind. The show portrays rampant self-mutilation, suicide and psychotic decompensation among Australia's 4,000 incarcerated asylum seekers. "I have only seen darkness in life and a dark future ahead," explains a young Iranian man who has just tried to hang himself after the third rejection of his immigration petition. In a secretly filmed interview, a psychiatric nurse states that suicide attempts and grotesque self-mutilations are daily occurrences, with as many as 30 detainees at a time on one-to-one suicide watch at her facility alone. Psychiatric staff are shown responding to the overwhelming despair by overprescribing sedating medications. Dr. Suresh Sundram of the Mental Health Research Institute describes the detention sites as factories for producing mental illness, especially for detainees who are held for lengthy periods and those who have undergone torture and other traumas before fleeing their homelands. Click below to watch the 45-minute video, which is relevant not only in Australia but other countries around the world with similar immigration issues.

Juveniles: Lifelong benefits of multisystemic therapy 

In a study that's getting a bit of buzz around the Web, a researcher has found that Multisystemic Therapy's positive effects on juvenile delinquents extend for decades. An average of 22 years later, youths who were randomly selected for MST treatment had significantly fewer arrests and family problems than those who got traditional individual therapy. MST, developed by study co-author Charles Borduin of the University of Missouri, has become one of the most widely used evidence-based treatments in the world. It owes its success to the fact that it involves the offender's entire family and community, whereas traditional therapy targets only the offender without modifying his problematic environment. The new study is published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. The Abstract is HERE; a press release summarizing the findings is HERE.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Photo (c) Karen Franklin 2011

And finally, if you're reading this in the comfort of your warm and cozy home or office, you can be thankful you're not at the bottom of the 99 percent, living in a plywood shack being torn down just in time for the rainy season. That's the plight of the folks in one of the many homeless encampments near where I walk.

I wish all of you readers and subscribers a nice holiday. 

Psychology rife with inaccurate research findings

The case of a Dutch psychologist who fabricated experiments out of whole cloth for at least a decade is shining a spotlight on systemic flaws in the reporting of psychological research.

Diederik Stapel, a well-known and widely published psychologist in the Netherlands, routinely falsified data and made up entire experiments, according to an investigative committee.

But according to Benedict Carey of the New York Times, the scandal is just one in a string of embarrassments in "a field that critics and statisticians say badly needs to overhaul how it treats research results":

In recent years, psychologists have reported a raft of findings on race biases, brain imaging and even extrasensory perception that have not stood up to scrutiny…. 

Dr. Stapel was able to operate for so long, the committee said, in large measure because he was “lord of the data,” the only person who saw the experimental evidence that had been gathered (or fabricated). This is a widespread problem in psychology, said Jelte M. Wicherts, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam. In a recent survey, two-thirds of Dutch research psychologists said they did not make their raw data available for other researchers to see. "This is in violation of ethical rules established in the field," Dr. Wicherts said.

In a survey of more than 2,000 American psychologists scheduled to be published this year, Leslie John of Harvard Business School and two colleagues found that 70 percent had acknowledged, anonymously, to cutting some corners in reporting data. About a third said they had reported an unexpected finding as predicted from the start, and about 1 percent admitted to falsifying data.

Also common is a self-serving statistical sloppiness. In an analysis published this year, Dr. Wicherts and Marjan Bakker, also at the University of Amsterdam, searched a random sample of 281 psychology papers for statistical errors. They found that about half of the papers in high-end journals contained some statistical error, and that about 15 percent of all papers had at least one error that changed a reported finding -- almost always in opposition to the authors' hypothesis….

Forensic implications

While inaccurate and even fabricated findings make the field of psychology look silly, they take on potentially far more serious ramifications in forensic contexts, where the stakes can include six-figure payouts or extreme deprivations of liberty.

For example, claims based on fMRI brain-scan studies are increasingly being allowed into court in both criminal and civil contexts. Yet, a 2009 analysis found that about half of such studies published in prominent scientific journals were so "seriously defective" that they amounted to voodoo science that "should not be believed."

Similarly, researcher Jay Singh and colleagues have found that meta-analyses purporting to show the efficacy of instruments used to predict who will be violent in the future are plagued with problems, including failure to adequately describe study search procedures, failure to check for overlapping samples or publication bias, failure to investigate the confound of sample heterogeneity, and use of a problematic statistical technique, the Area Under the Curve (AUC), to measure predictive accuracy.

Particularly troubling to me is a brand-new study finding that researchers' willingness to share their data is directly correlated with the strength of the evidence and the quality of reporting of statistical results. (The analysis is available online from the journal PloS ONE.)

I have heard about several researchers in the field of sex offender risk assessment who stubbornly resist efforts by other researchers to obtain their data for reanalysis. As noted by Dr. Wicherts, the University of Amsterdam psychologist, this is a violation of ethics rules. Most importantly, it makes it impossible for us to be confident about the reliability and validity of these researchers' claims. Despite this, potentially unreliable instruments -- some of them not even published -- are routinely introduced in court to establish future dangerousness.

Critics say the widespread problems in the field argue strongly for mandatory reforms, including the establishment of policies requiring that researchers archive their data to make it available for inspection and analysis by others. This reform is important for the credibility of psychology in general, but absolutely essential in forensic psychology.

Related blog posts:

• Beware "voodoo" brain science (March 10, 2009)
• Violence risk meta-meta: Instrument choice does matter (June 19, 2011)

Hat tips: Ken Pope and Jane

New article of related interest:

False-positive psychology: undisclosed flexibility in data collection and analysis allows presenting anything as significant

Psychological Science (November 2011)
Joseph Simmons, Leif Nelson, and Uri Simonsohn (click on any of the authors' names to request a copy)

From the abstract: This article show[s] that despite empirical psychologists' nominal endorsement of a low rate of false-positive findings (≤ .05), flexibility in data collection, analysis, and reporting dramatically increases actual false-positive rates. In many cases, a researcher is more likely to falsely find evidence that an effect exists than to correctly find evidence that it does not. We present computer simulations and a pair of actual experiments that demonstrate how unacceptably easy it is to accumulate (and report) statistically significant evidence for a false hypothesis.

Backlash against penal excess hits New Zealand this weekend

When I was in Australia over the summer, giving a keynote at their national forensic psychology conference, I got the distinct impression that Aussie practitioners were a wee bit savvier about criminal justice excesses than the average American.

Now comes evidence that neighboring New Zealanders are equally astute: A joint conference this weekend of Australian and New Zealanders is entitled: Crime and Punishment: The Rising Punitiveness.


The Wellington conference, co-hosted by the Australian and New Zealand Association of Psychiatry, Psychology and Law and the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, features intriguing keynotes on:

• Law and psychiatry, from cooperation to contamination (my favorite title in a great lineup) -- Law and Ethics Professor Nigel Eastman, St George’s University of London

• New Zealand's three strikes legislation: Sound policy or penal excess -- Law Professor Warren Brookbanks, Auckland University Law School

• Off with their heads…said the Queen (runner-up for best title) -- Forensic Psychiatry Professor Emeritus Paul Mullen, Monash University

• While it may not be criminalisation, it is criminal: The plight of people with mental illnesses in the criminal justice system -- Forensic Psychology Professor James Ogloff, Monash University and Director of the Centre for Forensic Behavioural Science and Director of Psychological Services at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Mental Health

• Contrasts in punishment: An examination of Anglophone excess and Nordic exceptionalism (one I would especially like to hear) -- Criminology Professor John Pratt, Institute of Criminology, Victoria University

• Reconceptualizing psychopathy to promote effective intervention -- Psychology and Social Behavior Professor Jennifer Skeem, Centers for Psychology and Law and Evidence-based Corrections at the University of California

• Politics and punitiveness – Limiting the rush to punish -- Kim Workman, retired public servant with the New Zealand Department of Maori Affairs and Ministry of Health

 If you happen to be in or near Wellington this weekend, check it out. I am excited to see this growing backlash against penal excesses, and I sure wish I could be there!

Predicting behavior: The case of the missing militant

There is an oft-repeated axiom in our field that the most reliable predictor of future behavior is what a person has done in the past.

But is this axiom valid?

Let's take the example of Ronald Stanley Bridgeforth, featured on America's Most Wanted.

Forty-three years ago, while being detained on suspicion of trying to buy merchandise with a stolen credit card, the 24-year-old Black militant pulled out a revolver and shot at police. He jumped bail and, three years later, became a suspect in the killing of a police sergeant during an armed invasion of a police station in San Francisco.

Would this information lead you to predict that he was likely to engage in more violence in the future?

If so, you would be wrong.

Bridgeforth vanished from the radar screen, and eventually police figured he might have died. But the former community activist was far from dead. After fleeing to Africa, he moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, married, and raised two sons. Under the assumed name of Cole Jordan, he worked as a janitor, earned a bachelor’s degree from Wayne State University and a master's degree in counseling from Eastern Michigan University, became a licensed professional counselor, and eventually worked his way up to the rank of a full-time faculty member at Washtenaw Community College.

Bridgeforth with attorney Paul Harris (L) and wife Diane (R)

Last week, Bridgeforth finally turned himself in. Authorities were not closing in, but he had a troubled conscience. He plans to plead guilty in the assault case, in which he faces a maximum of five years in prison. Prosecutors announced they will not prosecute him in the infamous murder of Sgt. John Young at San Francisco's Ingleside Station on Aug. 29, 1971. That case unraveled two years ago in part due to allegations (aired in a documentary, Legacy of Torture) that police used torture with electric shock, cattle prods, beatings, sensory deprivation and asphyxiation to obtain confessions from three of the nine suspects.

One might argue that Bridgeforth is an exception to the rule. Only, he's not. Time and again, we hear about a long-time fugitive who lived a quiet life, surrounded by friends and co-workers who had no clue about his or her violent past.

David Gonzales, William Walter Asher III, Katherine Ann Power, Claude Daniel Marks and Donna Jean Willmott, to name just a few.

These cases are testament to the weak validity of the axiom that past behavior is a good predictor of the future. There are several flaws with the theory, among them:

• The base rate: Most serious crimes have a low base rate of recidivism. That makes us most likely to be correct if we predict that the behavior will NOT reoccur. For example, because of the base rate of rearrest for murder, we would be wrong in the broad majority of cases if we predicted that someone who has killed once will most likely kill again. The same is true for sexual offending. In one recent study, 95 out of 100 people arrested on sex charges had no prior sex crimes; an inordinate focus on the five percent lends an illusion of a higher base rate of reoffending than the evidence warrants.

• Desistance: A second major problem with static predictions is that people change. In fact, even hard-core criminals almost universally desist from crime as they age. This holds true across all eras and cultures. As scholars Shadd Maruna and Laub and Sampson have shown, crime is mainly a young man's game. As they age, offenders settle down and become less impulsive. Or, they simply burn out.

• Environmental context: The axiom of past as prelude also ignores the circumstances that contribute to offending. Criminologists have long known about the critical importance of context. For example, peer influence is critical to crime by adolescents and young adults, who have the highest rates of offending. Lifestyle circumstances that can -- and often do -- change over time influence other types of crimes as well, such as robberies and drug offenses. For Bridgeforth and others of the 1960s-1970s era, the context was a militant revolutionary movement that swept up many idealistic young people.

• Unproven allegations: The Bridgeforth case also highlights the problem of relying on allegations of past misconduct that may not be reliable. Bridgeforth has denied the charge that he was the getaway car driver in the San Francisco police killing, and now prosecutors have chosen not to prosecute him.   

Ultimately, the past-as-prelude axiom may hold better for some behaviors than others. Perhaps it is more reliable when predicting scripted or compulsive acts that a person engages in with high frequency over a lengthy period of time. However, it is less reliable when applied to context-influenced behaviors with low base rates of reoccurrence.

And never should we ignore the influence of aging. Bridgeforth is not the same man at 67 as he was at 24. Think back to your own adolescence or early adulthood; are you the same person now as you were then?

The viewpoint that past is prelude is fundamentally pessimistic, leaving little room to acknowledge that human beings are highly adaptive, and often capable of learning from mistakes and changing our lives.