Forensnips I: So much news, so little time

Much is happening in the news, but I'm too busy to go into depth at the moment. So I’m posting highlights, with links to more in-depth coverage for those of you who are interested. I hope to write a few longer posts on special topics over the coming weeks.

Two topics currently in the spotlight both pertain to commonplace police methods for obtaining arrests and convictions – the use of eyewitnesses and informants.

California considering eyewitness identification reform

At this weekend's American Psychological Association, psychologist Gary Wells received an award for his groundbreaking and influential studies of flawed eyewitness identification procedures.

California's state legislature is tackling the issue head-on. Senate Bill 756, now heading for the Assembly floor for a final vote, would enact statewide eyewitness identification procedures. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed a similar bill last year, so we'll see what he does this time around.

The California legislature is also leading the way toward other reforms to help reduce wrongful convictions:

• Senate Bill 511 would require full electronic recording of interrogations in both juvenile and adult cases.

• Senate Bill 609 would require corroboration of information provided by jailhouse informants.

More research reports and news on this topic is online at:

The Justice Project

Seeing the Forest


Use of informants under scrutiny

Recent Congressional hearings put a spotlight on the widespread, secretive, and largely unregulated police practice of relying on confidential informants to put suspected criminals behind bars. Sparking public awareness and controversy over the longstanding practice were two recent cases: the fatal police shooting of a 92-year-old Atlanta woman in Alabama and a $102 million judgment against the FBI for knowingly using informants to illegally convict four men who then spent decades in prison.

An excellent column by law professor Alexandra Natapoff, author of a forthcoming book about informants, from the Aug. 16 San Francisco Chronicle is available online. Ms. Natapoff's testimony before a U.S. House Judiciary Committee is also available online.

Other coverage of the issue is at:

The blog of journalist Radley Balko

Texan Scott Henson's Grits for Breakfast blog

Drug War Chronicle

... Stay tuned - more news highlights to come.

Reports of sexual assault in prison implicate guards

Countering the common stereotype of prisons, most sexual assaults reported in U.S. prisons and jails last year involved correctional staff assaulting prisoners, according to a newly released report from the Department of Justice.

For 2006, correctional authorities reported more than 6,000 allegations of sexual violence in prisons and jails, the equivalent of about 3 per every 1,000 prisoners. More than half of the allegations involved sexual violence or harassment by correctional staff toward prisoners.

Under the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003, the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the Department of Justice is required to collect annual data on sexual violence in prisons and jails. The Bureau’s press release, with links to the report, is available online.

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

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

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

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

Your jail is also your mental health center

This statement shouldn't be news for any of my regular readers. But you might want to know that it's the topic of an article in the new issue of Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, available online for a fee. The article, "Traumatized Offenders: Don't Look Now, But Your Jail's Also Your Mental Health Center," is co-authored by Philip Kinsler, Ph.D., of Dartmouth Medical School and Anna Saxman, JD, of the Office of the Defender General in Montpelier, Vermont.

Here's the abstract:

There are more than a million prison and jail inmates in the United States who have mental illness. As funding for State Hospitals has decreased, funding for needed community programs has often not kept pace. This has led to a population of homeless mentally ill, many of whom have co-occurring substance use disorders. Society's perhaps unconscious response has been to create 24-hour mental health units within prisons and jails. The authors contend that by doing so, we have 're-criminalized' mental illness. The mentally ill prisoner is most often the victim of extreme family turmoil including physical and/or sexual abuse, parental substance dependence, and parental incarceration. Prisons and jails most often do not provide services for this highly traumatized population or recognize the need for such services. The authors report on problematic aspects of mental health care in prisons, and on several attempts to establish 'trauma-aware' care within the legal system.

The latest news and exposes on incarceration

From Boston Review, an insightful report by Glenn Loury that's the talk of the blogosphere this week:

"Why Are So Many Americans in Prison? Race and the Transformation of Criminal Justice"

From Nation magazine's Aug. 27 (upcoming) issue, an excellent overview of the politics of imprisonment:

How can you tell when a democracy is dead? When concentration camps spring up and everyone shivers in fear? Or is it when concentration camps spring up and no one shivers in fear because everyone knows they're not for "people like us" (in Woody Allen's marvelous phrase) but for the others, the troublemakers, the ones you can tell are guilty merely by the color of their skin, the shape of their nose or their social class?

And from Business Day across the Atlantic in Johannesburg, South Africa, a depressing analysis of that country’s prison system, which closely parallels our own.

Community court set to open in San Francisco

Drug courts. Mental health courts. Juvenile courts.

All are part of a quiet movement of "problem-solving justice" that is sweeping the country, its aim to stop the revolving-door cycle of the criminal justice system.

In the latest development, San Francisco's new "Community Court" is set to start trial operations as early as next month. The court's goal is to consider the problems that led defendants into crime and provide services that can help lead them out. It is modeled on a similar court in downtown New York.

The Community Justice Center will focus on misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies, such as drug crimes, car break-ins, shoplifting, and check kiting. In response to initial opposition from homeless advocates who were concerned that the new court might inadvertently criminalize people just for being poor, the court will not handle public nuisance infractions such as public urination and public drunkenness.

Journalist Bernice Yeung's opinion piece on the new Community Justice Center is available online. Ongoing news coverage is online at the San Francisco Chronicle’s web site.