New findings on juvenile sex offending

Sexually Violent Predator laws have so colored our perceptions that we often ignore a more typical type of sex offender -- the kid next-door. Indeed, of known sex offenders against children, more than a third are other juveniles, according to a new study commissioned by the Justice Department.

Most of these young offenders are not pedophiles or sexual deviants. Rather, they are sexual experimenters, date rapists, and boys who commit sexual assaults as part of a group. Risk of sexual acting out increases sharply as boys enter puberty, and plateaus at age 14, according to the study. The overwhelming majority of youths apprehended for sexual misconduct -- an estimated 85-95 percent -- have no further arrests for sex offenses.

This suggests that new federal rules placing juveniles on public sex offender registries are counterproductive, as the broad majority of youthful sex offenders will mature out of offending and should not be stigmatized for life. Rather, says study co-author David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center, early sex education is a key to preventing youthful sexual misconduct.

Even as U.S. states get set to implement the registration and reporting requirements of the Adam Walsh Protection and Safety Act this year, under penalty of losing grants if they do not comply, a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee is receiving testimony about problems with the registry.

"There are some very compelling cases that ... don't rise to the threshold of a predator and shouldn't be on the register," Republican Representative Tonya Schuitmaker of Michigan, a member of the committee, told the Michigan Herald-Palladium. "Unfortunately, they get lumped in with the predators."

The newspaper cited as an example the case of a 17-year-old boy who perfectly illustrates the juvenile study findings:

Since committing his offenses between the ages of 12-14, he has not had any further problems. He successfully completed probation and 200 hours of public service work and he excels in school, where he plays several sports. Yet, when he turns 18 his name will be placed on a registry that will stigmatize him until his 40s.

Gloria Gillespie, a sex offender therapist, told the newspaper that the boy's offenses were exploratory, and he is not a predator at risk of committing new offenses.

"Juvenile murderers get off at 21 and they're not on any list," she said. "What's the purpose of this?"

The juvenile study is available here; USA Today coverage is here. An excellent Herald-Palladium (Michigan) article on sex offender registries is here. Graphics credit: Adreson (Creative Commons license)

ON A RELATED NOTE: For a judicial analysis of the punitive and stigmatizing impact of the federal reporting law (SORNA), see the Maine Supreme Court opinion in Maine v. Letalien. Eric S. Letalien was 19 years old when he was convicted of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl. He was sentenced to prison and placed on a public registry for 15 years. Later, the law was amended, requiring him to register for life. He appealed, citing the negative impact on his ability to maintain employment and fulfill his roles as a husband and a father. In last month's decision, Maine's Supreme Court overturned the lifetime registration requirement in cases like Letalien's as unconstitutional on ex post facto grounds.

2009: Bad year for death penalty

The writing is on the wall: Death sentences are at an all-time low, more states are abolishing capital punishment altogether, and -- in what is being called a "tectonic shift" -- the American Law Institute announced it will wash its hands of the enterprise.

Adam Liptak, the New York Times' astute legal analyst, says that of all of last year's developments, the American Law Institute action is the most critical. The influential institute, comprised of 4,000 judges, lawyers and law professors, created the modern framework for the death penalty in its 1962 Model Penal Code. Its vote to abandon its capital punishment structure followed a study finding that the system was plagued with systemic problems, including racial disparities, risks of executing innocent people, and exorbitant costs.

A campaign to have the institute take a formal stance against the death penalty failed, Liptak said in yesterday's column. Instead, the institute voted to disavow the structure it had created "in light of the current intractable institutional and structural obstacles to ensuring a minimally adequate system for administering capital punishment."

Meanwhile, New Mexico last year joined 14 other states that have abolished the death penalty in favor of the option of life without the possibility of parole. And although the number of executions was up nationwide from the previous year (from 37 to 52), fewer new death sentences were imposed than in any year since the United States reinstated capital punishment in 1976.

That may reflect not only dwindling popular support for capital punishment, but also the high costs during these tough economic times. The ever-rational state of California, which bucked the national trend despite an especially acute economic crisis, is spending an estimated $137 million per year on the death enterprise not including an estimated $400 million for a new facility to house its 690 death row prisoners, Time magazine reported.

Summing up the current pendulum shift, Time noted: "Urgently important to fewer and fewer people, yet less and less compelling to the country at large, the death penalty keeps sputtering along, dwindling as the years go by."

Graphics credit: Finishing-school (Creative Commons license)
Double hat tips: Tim D. and Gretchen W.

Best wishes for the holidays

If you have noticed a dearth of posts lately, it is because I am taking a holiday break. Until my return, I would like to wish all of you -- and especially my loyal subscribers -- a wonderful holiday season and a new year of peace and happiness.

Karen Franklin, Ph.D.

The high court and "selective empathy"

In a previous blog post, I briefly referenced the U.S. Supreme Court's recent opinion in Porter v. McCullum. The high court unanimously reversed a death verdict because the defense attorney failed to present mitigating evidence at the penalty phase of the trial.

George Porter Jr. was convicted of shooting his former girlfriend and her new lover to death. The potentially mitigating evidence that the jury didn't get to hear included military heroism during the Korean War, post-war adjustment problems, childhood victimization, a brain abnormality, inadequate schooling, and limited literacy.

The decision was widely hailed by death penalty opponents and veterans' groups. But Linda Greenhouse, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who covered the Supreme Court for the New York Times for 30 years and now teaches at Yale Law School, says the decision raises an important question about equity:

Is selective empathy better than no empathy at all?

Greenhouse was struck by "the sympathy that all nine justices displayed for a man who, in the fullness of his adulthood and after promising a friend that she would soon be reading about him in the newspaper, stole another friend’s gun and shot two people to death in cold blood."

She contrasted this with the court's unanimous opinion just last month in another case alleging inadequate representation and failure to adequately pursue mitigation themes in a death case. That case involved Robert Van Hook, also a military veteran, who robbed and murdered a man he picked up in a gay bar. In a decision that "sent chills down the spine of death-penalty opponents," the high court overturned an appellate reprieve, paving the way for Van Hook's execution.

Comments Greenhouse:

Setting the Porter and the Van Hook cases side by side, what strikes me is how similarly horrific the two men's childhoods were -- indeed, how common such childhoods were among the hundreds of death-row inmates whose appeals I have read over the years and, I have to assume, among the 3,300 people on death row today. It is fanciful to suppose that each of these defendants had lawyers who made the effort to dig up the details and offer these sorry life stories to the jurors who would weigh their fate.

I don't make that observation to excuse the crimes of those on death row, but only to underscore the anomaly of the mercy the court bestowed this week on one of that number. Am I glad that a hapless 77-year-old man won't be put to death by the State of Florida? Yes, I am. Am I concerned about a Supreme Court that dispenses empathy so selectively? Also yes.

The full essay, well worth your perusal, is online HERE.

APA announces postponement of DSM-V

Today, shortly after the New Scientist article and editorial hit the Internet, the American Psychiatric Association issued a press release announcing that the publication of the DSM-V will be delayed by at least a year. The "anticipated release date" was moved back from mid-2012 to May 2013. The timing is rather prophetic on the part of reporter Peter Aldhous, who concluded his New Scientist article by predicting:

The final version of DSM-V is scheduled to be published in 2012, but given the level of controversy and the need to test whether psychiatrists can reliably use the proposed diagnoses, that date seems certain to slip.

The full release from the American Psychiatric Association is HERE.

New Scientist expose of psychiatry’s "civil war"

Proposed diagnoses of hebephilia and paraphilias NOS critiqued

On Saturday, the world's leading science and technology news weekly is publishing a scathing expose of the political and financial shenanigans underlying the DSM-V revision process. Accompanying the report in the New Scientist is an editorial calling for a halt to the print version of the American Psychiatric Association's money-making diagnostic bible:

The final wording of the new manual will have worldwide significance. DSM is considered the bible of psychiatry, and if the APA broadens the diagnostic criteria for conditions such as schizophrenia and depression, millions more people could be placed on powerful drugs, some of which have serious side effects. Similarly, newly defined mental illnesses that deem certain individuals a danger to society could be used to justify locking these people up for life.

Given such high stakes, we should all be worried by the controversy. Proponents of some of the changes are being accused of running ahead of the science, and there are warnings that the APA is risking "disastrous unintended consequences" if it goes ahead with plans to publish DSM-V, as the new manual will be known, in 2012.

"Psychiatry’s civil war" is the title of the hard-hitting expose by award-winning science writer Peter Aldhous, San Francisco bureau chief for New Scientist magazine.

As Aldhous reports, professional disputes over the form and content of the upcoming edition "are getting ugly." He notes that respected Duke University scholar Jane Costello has resigned from the work group on childhood and adolescence disorders, citing a lack of scientific rigor across the whole DSM revision. "I felt that there was not enough empirical work being achieved or planned," she says.

In a sidebar, Aldhous shines a spotlight on controversial proposals of pivotal importance to forensic psychology, including the pseudoscientific diagnosis of "hebephilia" that I have previously blogged about:

You may have never heard of "hebephilia", but this obscure diagnosis has huge significance in the courts. If it becomes accepted it could lead to hundreds of sex offenders who have served their jail time being locked up indefinitely - on grounds that some say are spurious.

The proposed diagnosis has been condemned by critics as dangerously blurring the boundary between paedophilia and normal male attraction to teenage girls -- which isn't necessarily acted upon. Karen Franklin, a forensic psychologist in El Cerrito, California, argues that the diagnosis makes a disease out of preferences that have been shaped through human evolution. "People didn't used to live so long and mating started earlier," she says.

The work group is also considering whether some men are specifically turned on by rape -- a proposed condition termed paraphilic coercive disorder. Again, the evidence is based largely on measurements of penile blood flow in response to sexual images and stories, and the validity of the condition is hotly contested.

The rows over hebephilia and paraphilic coercive disorder aren't academic, because 20 US states have passed laws that allow sex offenders who have served their sentences to be detained indefinitely in a secure hospital if they are deemed "sexual predators." This can only be done if the offenders have a psychiatric disorder that increases their risk of reoffending -- which few do, according to DSM-IV.

Franklin says that if hebephilia and paraphilic coercive disorder make it into DSM-V, they will be seized upon to consign men to a lifetime of incarceration.

In a call to put the brakes on this speeding train, the New Scientist's accompanying editorial points out that this would hurt the coffers of the American Psychiatric Association, which has earned more than $40 million since 2000 from DSM sales. But, the editorial concludes, "it's hard to see who else stands to gain from the current exercise -- and if the critics' dire predictions come to pass, patients will be the biggest losers."