Online alert: Ethics and peer review articles

I said I was done blogging about the psychopathy controversy for awhile. But I did want to alert readers to the fact that the International Journal of Forensic Mental Health has opened up its two articles so that you can download them for free for a limited time. Those articles pertain to ethics and the peer-review process. The articles are:

• Threats to Sue, Peer Review, and Potential Implications for Science and Law: A Commentary by Norman Poythress and John P. Petrila

• The Dark Side of Peer Review by Stephen D. Hart

Click on either title to go to the downloadable pdf.

"I'm a criminal and so are you"

We are living in an "age of prohibition," says Scott Henson over at Grits for Breakfast. Texas, he notes, has 11 felonies just involving oysters. Youth are especially criminalized, for everything from copyright piracy to "sexting" to truancy. As laws proliferate, so do the number of violators, bringing us to the point of this guest essay by author and activist Michelle Alexander:

"I'm a criminal and so are you"

Guest essay by Michelle Alexander*

Who am I? How do I identify?

Lately, I've been telling people that I'm a criminal. This shocks most people, since I don't "look like" one. I'm a fairly clean-cut, light-skinned black woman with fancy degrees from Vanderbilt University and Stanford Law School. I'm a law professor and I once clerked for a U.S. Supreme Court Justice -- not the sort of thing you'd expect a criminal to do.

What'd you get convicted of? people ask. Nothing, I say. Well, then why do you say you're a criminal? Because I am a criminal, I say, just like you.

This is where the conversation gets interesting. Most of my acquaintances don't think of themselves as criminals. No matter what their color, age or gender, most of the people in my neighborhood and in my workplace seem to think criminals exist somewhere else -- in ghettos, mainly.

They have an unspoken, but deeply rooted identity as "law-abiding citizens." I ask them, "Haven't you ever committed a crime?" Oddly, people often seem perplexed by this question. What do you mean? they say. I mean, haven't you ever smoked pot, didn't you ever drink underage, don't you sometimes speed on the freeway, haven't you gotten behind the wheel after having a couple of drinks? Haven't you broken the law?

Well, yeah, they say, but I'm not a criminal. Oh, really? What are you, then? As I see it, you're just somebody who hasn't been caught. You're still a criminal, no better than many of those who've been branded felons for life.

Perhaps there should be a box on the census form that says "I'm a criminal." Everyone who has ever committed a crime would be required to check it. If everyone were forced to acknowledge their own criminality, maybe we, as a nation, would second-guess our apparent zeal for denying full citizenship to those branded felons.

In this country, we force millions of people -- who are largely black and brown -- into a permanent second-class status, simply because they once committed a crime. Once labeled a felon, you are ushered into a parallel social universe. You can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education and public benefits -- forms of discrimination that we supposedly left behind.

This kind of stigma, discrimination and social exclusion may befall you for no reason other than you were once caught with drugs.

I doubt Barack Obama thinks of himself as a criminal, though he should. He has admitted to using illegal drugs during his college years -- lots, in fact. What if he thought of himself as a criminal? What if he identified that way? Would it lead him to feel a bit more compassion for those who are branded drug felons for life, unable to find work or housing, and deemed ineligible even for food stamps?

Maybe if Obama thought of himself as a criminal he wouldn't have just endorsed spending even more money on prisons at a time when scarce resources would be much better spent on education or health care, or just about anything else.

I am a criminal. Coming to terms with this aspect of my identity has helped me to see more clearly -- with blinders off -- the ways in which I have been encouraged not to feel any connection to "them," those labeled criminals. I see now that "they" are me, and I am them.

*This essay was first posted at CNN, and is reposted here with the permission of Michelle Alexander. Ms. Alexander is author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New Press, 2010). She is former director of the Racial Justice Project of the ACLU of Northern California and of the Civil Rights Clinic at Stanford Law School. She holds a joint appointment with the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University.

New study on juvenile sex offender treatment

Efficacy claimed, but control group questionable

I previously reviewed forensic psychologist Frank DiCataldo's excellent book on juvenile sex offenders, in which he claims there is very little good research to show that sex offender-specific treatment is useful with adolescents. As DiCataldo points out, most of the studies (and the meta-analyses of studies) purporting to show a treatment effect have serious flaws. One big problem is the lack of control groups. This makes it impossible to know whether juveniles who did well after sex-offender treatment would have done equally well without treatment or with generic treatment not focused on sex offending.

But now, a study out of Canada (where else?!) is being trumpeted as methodologically sound proof that -- drum roll here -- treatment works. The study followed 148 adolescents for up to 20 years, which is a very long time for this type of research. Overall, only 17 of the subjects (about 11.5%) picked up a new sex offense as adults, with another 7 getting a new charge only in adolescence, for a total of 24 recidivists (16%). That's in line with a growing body of data on the very low recidivism rates of juvenile sex offenders, ranging from about 4% to 15%.

When they broke it down by those who underwent their specialized treatment, compared with a comparison group that did not, they found that only 9% (5 out of 58) of the youths who had gone through their program got charged with a new sex offense over the next 20 years, compared with 21% (19 out of 90) of those who had not. That's a significant difference.

But here's the rub. The participants were not randomly assigned to treatment (versus no treatment), which is how it's supposed to be done in psychotherapy treatment outcome research. Otherwise, you never know if there is something about the selection process that affected the results. Not only was assignment to groups not random, but the researchers put the kids who refused to undergo treatment, along with those who dropped out of treatment early, into their so-called "control" group! In fact, these bad boys comprised fully half of the non-treatment group. My guess is that these dropouts and refusers were probably a whole lot more delinquent than the other kids in the first place.

So it's possible that what the research really shows is not that treatment works, but that hardcore delinquents who refuse or drop out of treatment are likely to get into more trouble in their later teens and early 20s. It would be interesting to see if the control group still showed a higher recidivism rate if they removed the dropouts and refusers from the analyses. In fact, I would love to see some qualitative analyses of who those 19 recidivists (out of the total of 90 in the control group) are.

Another potential confounder I noticed was that many of the adolescents in the non-treatment control group were apparently in some different kind of treatment at the time. That treatment is not described, so perhaps this study is more of a between-treatments design, rather than a study of treatment versus no treatment.

Again, as I've discussed previously, part of the "problem" both with accurately predicting which juveniles will reoffend and also with designing treatment programs that work is the very low overall rate of recidivism among juveniles who have sexually offended. As DiCataldo and others have pointed out, if you just predict that no juvenile caught for a sex crime will reoffend, you will be correct in the broad majority of cases.

Flattening trajectory

The study, by psychologist James Worling and his colleagues at the Sexual Abuse: Family Education & Treatment Program (SAFE-T) program in Ontario, did have some other interesting findings. The researchers found that most recidivism -- both sexual and nonsexual -- happens within the first few years. Offending flattens out significantly at about the 10-year mark, when folks hit about the age of 25. This is consistent with the recent study by Lussier and colleagues of sex offender trajectories, as well as the general criminology literature on desistance. Crime, including sex offending, is a young man's game.

The finding that only 11.5% of the participants were charged with subsequent sexual offenses as adults is also in line with other research showing very low recidivism for juveniles. A strength of this study is its long course; it followed kids all the way up to an average age of 31.

The study is: Worling, J.R., Littlejohn, A., & Bookalam, D. (2010). 20-year prospective follow-up study of specialized treatment for adolescents who offended sexually. Behavioral Sciences and the Law, 28, 46-57.

Special journal issue on adolescent sex offenders

NOTE: It looks like this entire special issue of Behavioral Sciences and the Law is available online. Other interesting articles in the issue include:

Inter-rater reliability of the PCL-R total and factor scores among psychopathic sex offenders: are personality features more prone to disagreement than behavioral features?
John F. Edens, Marcus T. Boccaccini, Darryl W. Johnson

Searching for the developmental origins of sexual violence: examining the co-occurrence of physical aggression and sexual behaviors in early childhood
Patrick Lussier, Jay Healey

Assessing risk of sexually abusive behavior among youth in a child welfare sample
Robert A. Prentky, Nien-Chen Li, Sue Righthand, Ann Schuler, Deborah Cavanaugh, Austin F. Lee

Psychological mechanisms underlying support for juvenile sex offender registry laws: prototypes, moral outrage, and perceived threat
Jessica M. Salerno, Cynthia J. Najdowski, Margaret C. Stevenson, Tisha R. A. Wiley, Bette L. Bottoms, Roberto Vaca Jr., Pamela S. Pimentel

Legal, ethical, and methodological considerations in the Internet-based study of child pornography offenders (p 84-105)
James V. Ray, Eva R. Kimonis, Christine Donoghue

Psychopathy brouhaha: It's a wrap (I hope!)

Today's Scientific American has more on the censorship controversy I've featured here in recent weeks. As regular readers know, the flap centers around allegations that psychopathy researcher Robert Hare tried to silence critics by threatening to sue. The controversial article was finally published this month in the American Psychological Association publication Psychological Assessment, but the fallout continues.

The column by J.R. Minkel, oddly titled "Fear Review," features a rundown, including commentary by prominent scholar Stephen Hart:

People familiar with the matter say the scale's author, Robert Hare of the University of British Columbia, deserves only partial blame for the delay, to be shared with the American Psychological Association (APA), the journal's publisher. But they say Hare's use of legal threats has at best subverted the peer review process that is the crux of modern scientific progress, and could at worst encourage junior researchers in the field of forensic psychology to pursue other lines of research.

"I find this action to be completely inconsistent with the man I had [great] respect and affection for," says Stephen Hart of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, a collaborator and former student of Hare's. "People I speak with automatically think, 'Well, what's in that article that makes him so upset? What's he so afraid of?'

After reading all of the publicly available materials on the controversy, as well as numerous email posts on professional listservs, here's how I boil things down to the essence:

• The Skeem and Cooke article is an important scientific analysis of the theoretical construct of psychopathy, which is increasingly being used as a weapon in court with grave consequences for those it is deployed against.

• Not surprisingly, Robert Hare disagrees with Skeem and Cooke. Specifically, he does not agree with their claim that his Psychopathy Checklist or the underlying psychopathy construct centralizes criminality.

• Hare claims that Skeem and Cooke distorted his work. In a written response, he gives three examples of alleged distortions. Presumably, since he was preparing his response for publication, he picked the best examples he could find to illustrate his complaint. Yet, these are nowhere near as egregious as I had imagined they would be, given his threat to sue.

• Hare accuses two well respected psychology-law leaders, Norm Poythress and John Petrila, of being biased and misinformed. But nothing in his response supports this. Poythress and Petrila, in their article in the International Journal of Forensic Mental Health that set this whole ball in motion, were careful not to take sides in the underlying scientific debate over psychopathy. Rather, they focused on the threat to academic freedom and science posed by threats to sue: "Academic freedom rests on the premise that advances in science can only occur if scholars are permitted to pursue free competition among ideas. This assumes that scholars have the liberty to do their work free from limitations imposed by political or religious pressure or by economic reprisals."

• Hare has claimed elsewhere that his "lawsuit threat was meant only to get the 'attention' of APA, Skeem, and Cooke and force changes to the article." In his essay, he expresses bafflement at the ensuing, lengthy delay in the article's publication. To claim that his threat to sue did not contribute to the lengthy delay is either disingenuous or naïve. Especially in the wake of other controversies, such as the Rind debacle in which the U.S. Congress blasted the APA's publication and peer review process, the Association is undoubtedly very gun-shy and reactive over lawsuit threats.

The bottom line:

After analyzing all sides of the issue, I find that the Skeem and Cooke article is an important and timely contribution to the field, and that threats to sue over such publications set a dangerous precedent. As Poythress and Petrila point out in their commentary, potential negative effects of defamation threats against scientific researchers include -- among other things -- that:

1. researchers avoid critical research out of fear of lawsuits,
2. academics avoid volunteering as peer reviewers, and
3. journal editors self-censor on controversial topics

Censorship -- or even the appearance of censorship -- is especially dangerous when it involves critique of a construct that may be used in a partisan manner in the forensic arena.

Hare is entitled to express his opinion, but nothing in his public response changes these bottom lines. Rather, as Jennifer Skeem notes in today's Scientific American piece, all of this peripheral controversy distracts from the scientific critique of psychopathy, including her critique that was silenced for three years before finally seeing the light of day.

I sure hope this is my last blog post for a while on this topic!

PRIVATE NOTE TO TODAY'S "ANONYMOUS" BLOG COMMENTER:
I regret that I had to reject your comment about the pecuniary angle from publication.
While I found it quite interesting, I had no easy way to substantiate its accuracy.

GENERAL NOTE TO COMMENTERS:
I encourage comments, but it's nice to know who is talking;
please consider signing your name (or at least a pseudonym).

My prior coverage includes:

• Psychopath guru blocks critical article: Will case affect credibility of PCL-R test in court? (May 30, 2010)
• More coverage of psychopathy censorship controversy (June 1, 2010)
• Psychopathy controversy goes primetime (June 10, 2010)
• New York Times covers psychopathy debacle ( June 12, 2010)

"Killing and culpability" sentences handed down

You readers who completed the "Killing and Culpability" exercise a while back may be interested in the sentences that were handed down:

"Avenging a Wrong"

Remember Aaron Vargas? He was the man who went to the home of the older man whom he said had molested him as a child, shot the man once in the chest, and then waited half an hour to be sure he died. The Northern California community of Fort Bragg had rallied around Vargas, and he was expecting a lenient sentence after his guilty plea to manslaughter.

The judge said no dice; the fact that the victim was a child molester was largely irrelevant. "To grant probation in this case would put a stamp of approval on the defendant's actions, which I cannot do," he told a courtroom packed with Vargas supporters. "The use of violence to correct a wrong only encourages more violence."

The sentence: 9 years in the state pen.

"Street Brawl"

The other case featured in the exercise was that of Andrew Hoeft-Edenfield, age 20, who stabbed a University of California at Berkeley fraternity man to death during a drunken street brawl. A jury had rejected his plea of self defense, and convicted him of second-degree murder. Although he cried and pleaded for leniency, the judge noted that he fled from the scene after the stabbing, discarded his knife and hid out at a friend's house.

The sentence: 16 years of hard time.

Reactions, readers? Were either of the sentences surprising? Were they just?

The "Killing and Culpability Exercise" is HERE

New York Times covers psychopathy debacle

I had no idea when I broke the news of this censorship controversy that it would generate so much mainstream attention. First Science ran with it, and today it's made the New York Times; I am told other major U.S. and international news outlets have made inquiries. I hope this affair will serve as a dramatic lesson to others who might think about making legal threats when someone criticizes their work. The move certainly backfired against psychopathy guru Robert Hare.

Certain theories have weightier real-world implications than others. When a capital case defendant is labeled a "psychopath" in court, it can literally mean the difference between life and death. Similarly, the pejorative label has serious consequences for someone facing lifelong civil detention as a sexual predator. Thus, critical analysis of the reliability and validity of the underlying theory is essential. Researchers whose work lends itself to partisan forensic application should expect scrutiny.

Here's what Benedict Carey, health beat reporter at the New York Times, had to say:

Academic disputes usually flare out in the safety of obscure journals, raising no more than a few tempers, if not voices. But a paper published this week by the American Psychological Association has managed to raise questions of censorship, academic fraud, fair play and criminal sentencing -- and all them well before the report ever became public.

The paper is a critique of a rating scale that is widely used in criminal courts to determine whether a person is a psychopath and likely to commit acts of violence. It was accepted for publication in a psychological journal in 2007, but the inventor of the rating scale saw a draft and threatened a lawsuit if it was published, setting in motion a stultifying series of reviews, revisions and legal correspondence.

"This has been a really, really troubling process from the beginning," said Scott O. Lilienfeld, a psychologist at Emory University and a collaborator with one of the paper's authors. "It has people wondering, 'Do I have to worry every time I publish a paper that criticizes someone that I’ll get slapped with a lawsuit?' " The delay in publication, he said, "sets a very dangerous precedent" and censors scientific discourse….

Dr. Hare's clinical scale, called the Psychopathy Checklist, Revised, is one of the few, if not the only, psychological measures in forensic science with any scientific backing…. Dr. Skeem and Dr. Cooke warned in their paper that the checklist was increasingly being mistaken for a complete definition of psychopathy -- a broader personality construct that includes deceitfulness, impulsivity and recklessness, though not always aggression or illegal acts. The authors contended that Dr. Hare's checklist warps that concept by making criminal behavior a more central component than it really is…. {NOTE: The New York Times later issued a correction of the above portion that is in red; clearly, it's wrong to call the PCL "one of the few, if not the only," forensic psychology measures with any scientific backing!}

"When we first wrote the paper," [Jennifer Skeem] said, "we saw it simply as a call to the field to recognize we were going down a path where we were equating an abstract concept with a checklist, and it was preventing us from looking at the concept more closely."

Carey's full article is HERE. I will be sure to keep readers posted on any further developments.

POSTSCRIPT

This evening, readers alerted me that Robert Hare has posted a lengthy response giving his side of the controversy. His essay, "On Fairness in Academic Debate: A Commentary on Poythress and Petrila (2010) and Related Matters," claims that Poythress and Petrila's critical opinion piece in the International Journal of Forensic Mental Health (see my May 30 blog post) was biased and one-sided. He presents a timeline of the events surrounding the lengthy delay in publishing the underlying psychopathy article by Skeem and Cooke in Psychological Assessment, and gives specific examples of their allegedly egregious misrepresentations of his work. He comments:

… Poythress and Petrila and Hart failed to give an impartial and complete account of the situation. Their actions resulted in publication and circulation of a seriously biased account of events, and a commentary in the June 11 issue of Science, which noted that there are several sides to every issue…. I have no arguments with their thoughtful and commendable views about the nature of scientific debate and peer review, and about the potential fallout from threats of litigation…. I would welcome a formal investigation of the entire matter by an appropriately impartial body. I also would be willing to engage in open debate with the parties involved…. Contrary to the characterizations of others, I made extensive efforts to use the academic system in this case, but [the Skeem and Cooke] article went beyond the boundary of fair academic debate and criticism. The nature of the issue and the authors' refusal to correct their egregious statements gave me no reasonable alternative….

Would I do it again, given similar circumstances? Perhaps not, for like a whistle-blower the focus soon turns to the person who made the complaint and not on the issues and events that led to the complaint. Further, many in the scientific community believe that there are no grounds for litigation concerning academic works, no matter what the circumstances. I’ve learned from this experience that not all academics and scientists play by the accepted rules of science, and that legal redress for those claiming injustice is frowned upon by many as rocking the academic/scientific boat, however leaky it may be; a professional Catch-22 that serves to deny academics the legal rights enjoyed by the rest of the population.

His full statement is HERE. Again, I encourage readers interested in this subject to read Skeem and Cooke's Psychological Assessment article, rebuttal, and surrebuttal and form your own opinions.