Dallas bans 6-packs

No, not beer.
Or soda.
Or abs.

Six-pack photo lineups -- perhaps the single largest cause of wrongful convictions.

Frustrated with a string of wrongful convictions, the Dallas police department is now the nation's largest force to use sequential blind photo lineups -- a widely praised technique designed to reduce mistakes made by witnesses trying to identify suspects.

Dallas is not the first department to use the pioneering method. But experts hope that by using it in the county that leads the nation in exonerating wrongly convicted inmates, Dallas will inspire other departments to follow suit.

"If Dallas can do it ... then others are going to rise to the occasion," said Iowa State psychology professor Gary Wells, a national expert on police lineups.

The department switched to sequential blind lineups in April. Before that, Dallas police administered most lineups using the traditional six-pack -- law-enforcement lingo for mounting six photos onto a folder and showing them to a witness or victim at the same time. In sequential blind lineups, mug shots are shown one at a time. Detectives displaying the photos also don't know who the suspect is, which means they can't purposely or accidentally tip off witnesses.

Showing possible suspects all at once tends to make a witness compare the mug shots to one another, Wells said. But if they are shown sequentially, "witnesses have to dig deeper, compare each person to their memory and make more of an absolute decision."

An analysis of 26 recent studies shows that presenting mug shots sequentially instead of simultaneously produces fewer identifications but more accurate ones, Wells said.

Nationally, more than 75 percent of DNA exonerees who have been released since 1989 were sent to prison based on witness misidentification, according to The Innocence Project.

Here is the complete AP story: Dallas police pioneering new photo lineup approach.

Hat tip: Sol Fulero

Upcoming trainings

American Psychology-Law Society

Mark your calendars for the upcoming AP-LS conference, to be held March 18-20, 2010 in Vancouver, BC. The deadline for conference submissions is October 5. Information about the conference is available at the conference website. Proposals for posters, papers, and symposium can be submitted HERE.

Risk for Sexual Violence Protocol (RSVP)

On October 22, Stephen Hart is going to be down in Portland, Oregon, giving an all-day training on his newly developed instrument, the RSVP (which replaces the Sexual Violence Risk-20 instrument). Dr. Hart is well worth catching. A member of the Mental Health, Law, and Policy Institute at Simon Fraser University in Canada, he is an internationally renowned researcher, forensic psychologist and past president of the American Psychology-Law Society. More information on the training is at the website of Northwest Forensic Institute.

Ayres exposer wins award

The prosecution of prominent psychiatrist William Ayres for child molesting, which I blogged about most recently HERE, owes in large part to the tireless efforts of author and reporter Victoria Balfour. Now, Ms. Balfour's investigation has won her an Award for Excellence in the Media for meritorious public service from the Institute of Violence, Abuse, and Trauma and the Leadership Council on Child Abuse & Interpersonal Violence.

In its award letter, the Council commended Balfour for performing "a valuable service to society by using the power of the media as a catalyst for pursuing justice."

Balfour will be honored at the 14th International Conference on Family Violence, Abuse and Trauma on September 25 in San Diego, California.

Meantime, word is out that the San Mateo County (California) District Attorney's Office has decided to retry Ayres after extensive talks with jurors who deadlocked in favor of conviction on most counts.

Ayres, 77, is a former president of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry who treated hundreds of delinquent boys sent to him by the county's juvenile justice system. He was charged with molesting six of these former patients under the guise of giving them medical exams.

More on Balfour and the Ayres case is available at the William Ayres Watch blog.

Criminalizing our nightmares, destroying civilization

We all know what an unmitigated disaster the Drug Wars have been. Here at Ground Zero (California), prison guards live large while public schools crash and burn. (We used to have among the best schools in the United States; now we are at the bottom.) Membership in the guards' union has soared from 2,600 to 45,000, while correctional salaries rose from $15,000 to -- in some cases -- $100,000 a year or more. (Laura Sullivan at NPR has an informative piece on Folsom Prison as an exemplar of this process. Folsom used to rehabilitate its prisoners; now it's a "merry-go-round" with no escape.)

Have we learned from the failed Drug Wars? Nope. Instead, we are on the cusp of a new and massive criminalization effort, this time targeting the bogeyman sex offender.

So predicts Corey Rayburn Yung, prolific scholar at John Marshall Law School in Chicago, in a new article, "The Emerging Criminal War on Sex Offenders." Yung reviews the history of "criminal wars," mainly the War on Drugs, to identify three essential features:

• Marshaling of resources
• Myth creation
• Exception making

He predicts that the changes being wrought by the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act ("AWA") of 2006 may bring "repercussions as substantial as the drug war has had on American criminal justice and society."

The ratchet effect

By now, we really should know better than to allow this further destruction of our civil society. Even the Economist of London, hardly a bastion of liberal politics, is lambasting the laws. The August 6 issue includes both a leader and a more in-depth article explaining why America’s sex laws are "unjust and ineffective." As the subhead puts it:

"An ever harsher approach is doing more harm than good, but it is being copied around the world"

As with the Drug Wars, the laws are driven by the "ratchet effect":

"Individual American politicians have great latitude to propose new laws. Stricter curbs on paedophiles win votes. And to sound severe, such curbs must be stronger than the laws in place, which in turn were proposed by politicians who wished to appear tough themselves. Few politicians dare to vote against such laws, because if they do, the attack ads practically write themselves.

"In all, 674,000 Americans are on sex-offender registries -- more than the population of Vermont, North Dakota or Wyoming…. [A]t least five states require registration for people who visit prostitutes, 29 require it for consensual sex between young teenagers and 32 require it for indecent exposure. Some prosecutors are now stretching the definition of 'distributing child pornography' to include teens who text half-naked photos of themselves to their friends.

"How dangerous are the people on the registries? A state review of one sample in Georgia found that two-thirds of them posed little risk. For example, Janet Allison was found guilty of being 'party to the crime of child molestation' because she let her 15-year-old daughter have sex with a boyfriend. The young couple later married. But Ms Allison will spend the rest of her life publicly branded as a sex offender."

Yung too discusses some of these unintended consequences, including the harm to innocent parties. Other examples can be found daily in the popular press. For example, today's Raleigh (North Carolina) News and Observer reports on the travesty of convicted sex offenders being denied the right to worship, and one church choosing to move its children's programs off-site to protect a sex offending parishioner.

As I've reported before, the sexual predator hysteria is creating a widespread phobia of men in contact with children. Columnist Jeanne Phillips (Dear Abby), for example, is fueling panic about the dangers of public men's rooms. As San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll sardonically responded:

"When did the idea get out that men's rooms were a secret hotbed of molestation? I mean, there are some men's rooms -- including, apparently, one in the Minneapolis airport -- where consensual homosexual activity between adults has been known to happen. But that's not at all the same thing as child molesting; that's just a form of speed dating. Men's rooms, may I say, are boring. Ain't nothing going on in them. Molestation typically happens in other places, usually in a private home. And statistically it's no more common than it was 30 years ago. As I've said before, if you're looking for the people most likely to molest your child, look at the members of your own family, because that's how it usually happens. People don't want to admit that, so they invent phantom pedophiles in the nation's men's rooms."

But above and beyond all of these unintended consequences, I predict that years from now we will look back and realize not just what we already know -- that we destroyed many lives unnecessarily, bankrupted our schools and other public institutions, and curtailed civil liberties on a massive scale -- but, more fundamentally, we actually created the creature we feared.

Creating the bogeyman: "Mike"

Let's take "Mike." An average, red-blooded 19-year-old American, he dated a cute 16-year-old girl. Like thousands of other young men, he was arrested, and forced to register as a "sex offender" for life. No matter that his behavior was not deviant. Three years is a standard age gap between young men and women for dating in our culture, as it has been forever. I happened to see the obituary of an 89-year-old man who before his demise had celebrated his 70th wedding anniversary. His wife was 86. Do the math. If he had been born 70 years later, he'd be a sex offender for life. Unable to live freely, work, or even attend church, he probably wouldn't have led such a successful life. After all, as social psychologists can tell you, the environment is at least as important to behavior as any psychological characteristics. Probably far more so.

Back to Mike. As I said, there's nothing wrong with Mike. But no matter. Like everyone else, he must undergo mandatory "treatment" for "statutory perpetrators" (yes, that's what treatment providers are calling guys like Mike).

The treatment of choice is cognitive-behavioral therapy. Its mantra, as Dany Lacombe of Simon Fraser University in Canada found in an ethnographic study of one prison-based treatment program, is:

"Once a sex offender, always a sex offender."

"Sex offending is like diabetes," a program therapist tells the assembled sex offenders. "It will not go away. You cannot be cured. We don't use the C word here. But can you be managed? Yes. Treatment is all about managing your risks to re-offend."

Despite little empirical support for this approach, Mike will be trained to understand his "cycle" of offending and develop a relapse prevention plan that focuses on controlling "deviant sexual fantasies." He will have to generate a log of sexual fantasies. If he denies deviant fantasies, or doesn't see the connection between his fantasies and his offending, he will be accused of not cooperating. He will learn to create deviant fantasies "to keep the therapists at bay."

As Lacombe quoted one 18-year-old, in the article in the British Journal of Criminology:

"They want to hear that I always have fantasies and that I have more bad ones than good ones. But I don't have bad ones that often. I make up the bad ones. I make them really bad because they won’t leave me alone."

Through the treatment process, Mike and others will learn to think of themselves as "beings at risk of reoffending at any moment." Indeed, if treatment is successful, Mike will become a virtual "confessional machine," "expected all his life to narrate his darkest fantasies to criminal justice officers and significant others who are enlisted to help him control his risk."

The iatrogenic process

As you probably know, iatrogenesis refers to the situation in which treatment creates or exacerbates an illness or adverse condition. In the context of sex offender treatment and management, here's how the process works:

1. Saturate popular culture with hypersexual advertising and degrading, misogynistic pornography.
2. When men succumb to the allure and experimentally transgress, label them as lifelong "sex offenders."
3. Through mandatory "treatment," reprogram them into dark and dangerous deviants, "a species entirely consumed by sex."
4. Finally, restrict their freedoms so severely that few if any prosocial life courses remain open.

Through exercises of moral regulation, then, the government, law enforcement, media, and therapists collude to transform sex offenders into a strange and different "other," no longer recognizable in their ordinariness.

While this makes Mike more closely match the public's conception of the bogeyman sex offender, is this helpful in the long run, either to him or to society more broadly? By brainwashing thousands of men to think of themselves as nothing more than perpetual sexual deviants, might we not be producing the very risk we have imagined and then sought to ameliorate?

Related articles by Corey Rayburn Yung:

The Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act and the Commerce Clause, Federal Sentencing Reporter, Vol. 21, No. 2, 2008

Banishment By a Thousand Laws: Residency Restrictions on Sex Offenders, Washington University Law Review, Vol. 85, p. 101, 2007

Photo credit: "Bogeyman" by faedrake (Creative Commons license)

New prison research

Beyond Supermax: The Mississippi experience

Having worked in a prison segregation housing unit, I can tell you that such housing units wreak havoc on the fragile psyches of mentally ill prisoners. In a new article, prison authority Terry Kupers (author of Prison Madness) and a group of 13 colleagues explore what happened when Mississippi was forced through class-action litigation to remove mentally ill prisoners from Parchman's "Unit 32" and to provide them with treatment. The result? Not surprisingly, the prison saw "large reductions in rates of misconduct, violence, and use of force."

The abstract of Beyond Supermax Administrative Segregation: Mississippi's Experience: Rethinking Prison Classification and Creating Alternative Mental Health Programs is available at Criminal Justice and Behavior's "online first" site.

Researching prisoner rape

As you may imagine, getting accurate information on the prevalence and features of sexual assault in prison is a difficult task. Among the many challenges are "working cooperatively with state agencies while maintaining independence, gaining access to prisons and prisoners, securing necessary institutional approvals, and collecting generalizable data on a highly sensitive topic." The federal Prison Rape elimination act (PRea) of 2003 increases opportunities for research, however, and a group of scholars tells us how it is done. Lead author Valerie Jenness of UC Irvine is a noted authority on hate crimes. In this article in Criminal Justice Policy Review, Accomplishing the Difficult but Not Impossible: Collecting Self-Report Data on Inmate-on-Inmate Sexual Assault in Prison, she and co-authors describe their research procedures, in the hopes of reversing the recent decline of in-prison research by encouraging other researchers to sally forth.

Additional resources:

• Online resources on sexual victimization in prison

• U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics special report on prison rape

Norfolk sailors receive partial pardons

Remember the case of the Norfolk 4, which I've blogged about before? That's the 1997 rape-murder case that has become an exemplar of wrongful convictions, the topic of a book by confession scholar Richard Leo and an upcoming screenplay by bestselling author John Grisham.

Yesterday, Virginia Governor Tim Kaine issued partial pardons to three of the four sailors, paving the way for their imminent releases. The fourth sailor was released in 2005. In his statement, the governor noted that the men's confessions contradicted forensic evidence, that no physical evidence linked the men to the crime scene, and that another man had confessed and asserted that he acted alone. That man's DNA matched evidence found at the scene.

The case was highly unusual in that even a group of former FBI agents was lobbying for the pardon.

But guess what? The pardons are only "partial" rather than full vindications. That means the men's convictions will stand, and they will be required to register as sex offenders. And all of you readers know what that means: Even though most intelligent people know they were innocent, they will have a hard time finding anywhere to live, and very few employers will have the courage to hire them.

The New York Times has the story.

Related blog resources:

• My book review of The Wrong Guys (Dec. 8, 2008)
• Another fascinating disputed confession case (Sept. 24, 2007)