The social costs of Zero Tolerance in the schools

APA convention preview

I recently came across an article stating that the public schools in New Orleans are now spending $20 million a year on private security at 22 schools. That's almost $1 million per school, up from about $23,000 per school back in the pre-Katrina day.

The social cost of such heightened school security – and in particular the "Zero Tolerance" policies – is the topic of a symposium at this weekend's American Psychological Association conference in San Francisco.

Research by the APA's Zero Tolerance Task Force found that discipline can actually increase bad behavior and school dropout rates. Punitive school policies also funnel racial and ethnic minority children directly from the school system into – you guessed it – the juvenile justice system.

The one-size-fits-all policies of the Zero Tolerance programs do not consider children’s lapses in judgment or developmental immaturity as a normal aspect of development, according to one of the researchers, Cecil Reynolds of Texas A&M University.

The seminar is at 4:00 p.m. on Sunday, August 19. A list of the luminaries at this seminar is available online.

Photo credit: contraceptacon (Creative Commons license)

APA set to condemn torture

Mock executions, sexual and religious humiliation, dog attacks, induced hypothermia, sleep deprivation, and threats to kill family members.

These are among the controversial government practices that psychologists will no longer be allowed to participate in, under a resolution to be unveiled at next weekend's convention of the American Psychological Association, the world’s largest organization of psychologists.

Psychologists are the last medical professionals still willing to assist U.S. government interrogators at Guantanamo and elsewhere. The American Medical Association, The World Medical Association, and the American Psychiatric Association have all declared that their members have no business consulting in individual interrogations at such detention sites.

The issue is causing considerable acrimony within the 148,000-member APA. Many psychologists think the resolution does not go far enough. They will be lobbying at this weekend's conference for an explicit ban on psychologists in the interrogation rooms.

Psychologists' key role in developing brutal interrogation techniques for the CIA and the military has been the topic of several media exposes. Salon magazine, which has provided continuing coverage of this issue, has an excellent overview today.

"Psychologists have been involved one way or another in supporting the CIA in various forms of psychological torture for years," the article quotes Leonard Rubenstein, president of Physicians for Human Rights, as saying. "The issue is coming to a head because there are so many people within the profession who really feel that the whole integrity of the profession is at stake."

The proposed resolution is timely. It comes on the heels of a White House announcement that it may call on psychologists to participate in a revamped interrogation program. On July 20, President Bush signed an executive order resuming "a coercive CIA interrogation program at the agency's 'black sites,' " according to the Salon article. The U.S. Director of National Intelligence says psychological techniques will be part of the program, but that they will be subject to careful medical oversight - oversight provided by none other than psychologists.

The schedule for APA's special mini-convention, "Ethics and Interrogations: Confronting the Challenge," is available online.

The New Yorker magazine, Vanity Fair , and Salon have featured excellent articles on this topic.

Psychologists for an Ethical APA is spearheading protests at this weekend's convention.

Photo credit: burge5000 (Creative Commons license)

Punishment for Homelessness: Life in Prison

I’ve posted several times now about the legal conundrums faced by convicted sex offenders. In this guest column, an attorney highlights the case of Larry Moore Jr. of Georgia, facing life in prison because he could not provide the state with an address.

Guest commentary by Ezekiel Edwards

Should anyone be sentenced to the rest of their lives in prison because they are homeless?

Some people think so.

At least when it comes to the most vilified people in our society -- sex offenders. Sex offenders nationwide are carefully monitored, the public is privy to where they live, and, like many people with criminal records, they are barred from a bevy of employment and housing options.

To be sure, sex offenses should be dealt with seriously, and certain sex offenders require close surveillance. However, some states' concerns over sex offenders has transformed into outright and unacceptable animus, this time in the form of strict new sex offender registry laws.

Take Georgia, for instance, and the case of Larry Moore, Jr., in Augusta. Under state law, Mr. Moore, a sex offender, is prohibited from living within 1,000 feet of a church, school, school bus stop, day care center, church, and swimming pool. That does not leave a lot of places for Mr. Moore to reside. The options are even more limited when considering that almost every shelter in the entire state refuses to accept sex offenders.

Georgia also requires sex offenders to register an address. But given how few places the law allows sex offenders to live, and given that Georgia, like most states, invests far too little resources in helping people released from prison find housing and work, some sex offenders, like some prisoners generally, cannot find housing after prison, or lose their housing, and thus cannot report a legal address.

If it happens once, the result might be some jail time, or additional probation. But if it happens a second time, even if the underlying cause is homelessness, the punishment is life in prison. In other words, the penalty is harsher than if the offender had committed another sex offense.

Just ask Mr. Moore. In 2005, he failed to register as required, spent time in jail awaiting the disposition of his case, and eventually pled guilty. He was released in March 2006, and was left with two places to live that met the law's requirements, both hotels. He registered twice upon his release, registered again in April and June, twice again in July, when the new law took effect. But his job at a fast food restaurant did not pay enough to cover the cost of the hotel, and he was forced to move out.

Homeless, he could not provide the state with an address. Having been convicted of his second violation, Mr. Moore now faces mandatory life in prison under Georgia's law. A lawsuit has been brought by the Southern Center for Human Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union on his behalf.

Some think putting Mr. Moore in jail for the rest of his life is warranted, simply because he is a sex offender. Others argue that it is misleading to say that his life sentence stems from being homeless, as it ignores his original conviction for a sex offense. But no one is ignoring that Mr. Moore is a sex offender -- that is why he is subject to Georgia's cruel and unusual punishment in the first place. But his latest sentence is not for the sex offense, it is for failing to register an address as a sex offender.

Some suggest that sex offenders like Mr. Moore try to use homelessness disingenuously as a defense at trial. First, there are tens of thousands of homeless people in the United States, and included are some sex offenders. Second, under Georgia law, raising the defense of homelessness, even for those who are actually homeless, will always prove futile, as it was for Mr. Moore.

Some have suggested that Mr. Moore should have just found some rural place in Georgia to live. But this ignores the financial and social difficulties involved in moving, particularly for someone who is destitute, and also essentially condones urban cleansing of sex offenders.

Such drastic measures only further undermine sex offenders’ limited residential and employment stability, thereby only increasing the risk of recidivism. Yet unrealistic ostracism is exactly what Georgia and some like-minded folk desire: forcing anyone convicted of a sexual offense to (1) leave the state; (2) languish in prison; or, like in other states, (3) be relegated to the outskirts or underbellies of society. Florida, for instance, authorized five offenders to live under a bridge in Miami after they were unable to find suitable housing that they could afford. In Iowa, offenders have tried complying with the registry law by offering addresses such as "rest area mile marker 149" or "RV in old Kmart parking lot."

It is unconscionable to throw people in jail for the rest of their lives for being homeless and unable to secure an address for sex offender registry purposes. Herding sex offenders under bridges, or into rest areas and parking lots, thereby keeping them outside of the community and yet easily monitored (similar to, say, livestock), is degrading and inhumane.

Making simple residency insurmountable or impractical is not the answer to reducing sexual offenses. Instead, states should implement longer-term, more intelligent, and more humane strategies by paving clear paths to employment, self-sufficiency, and stability and making treatment programs widely available while continuing careful monitoring. If monitoring is difficult because someone is homeless, then the burden should be on the state to provide housing, or to relax the residency restrictions.

This column was originally posted August 14, 2007 at the blog of Drum Major Institute for Public Policy. Reposted with written permission of the author.

Ezekiel R. Edwards is a Criminal Justice Fellow at the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy and a Staff Attorney and Mayer Brown Eyewitness Fellow at The Innocence Project in New York.

When teens commit crimes for others

About 7 percent of Finnish youths have shoplifted for someone else, according to a nationally representative study of 15- and 16-year-olds in that country. Their reasons reflect a combination of altruistic and coercive motives that may be difficult to sort out in the real world.

Motivations for these “crimes by proxy” include being pressured or coerced, helping an older friend who did not want to get caught, being paid, trying to fit in with the group, and proving one’s courage to friends.

These last two motivations fit with much study of juvenile crime committed in groups, including my own research with antigay hate crime perpetrators. “It is obvious that for adolescents, shoplifting for someone else is tightly interlocked with social connections and peer groups,” writes researcher Janne Kivivuori in the current issue of the British Journal of Criminology. “Even purely ‘instrumental’ property crimes, such as shoplifting, are often embedded in a system of coercive and altruistic actions within a social group.”

Questioning the autonomy of these teen shoplifters, Kivivuori links proxy crime to obedience to authority. As demonstrated by Stanley Milgram’s groundbreaking research in the early 1960s, most people will commit proxy crimes when asked to do so by someone in authority.

Proxy crime may factor into more serious and violent offending as well, blurring the lines between offending and victimization, suggests Kivivuori, who is research director of the National Research Institute of Legal Policy in Helsinki, Finland.

Reference: Kivivuori, J. (2007). Crime by proxy: Coercion and altruism in adolescent shoplifting. British Journal of Criminology.

Photo credit: drinksmachine (Creative Commons license)

Medical doctors' unconscious racism affecting patient care

Does lurking racism affect the workings of our major institutions - government, the judiciary, medicine, and education? And how, if it is underground, can we even answer this question with anything more than speculation and opinion?

Where there's a will, there’s a way.

Psychological scientists have developed a tool called the Implicit Association Test that scientifically measures unconscious racism. That is, it can tell whether you have racial biases that you are not aware of. The test is being used to empirically assess for the presence of individual-level racism in societal institutions.

In the field of medicine, for example, we know that African Americans have higher infant mortality rates and death rates from cervical cancer, heart disease, and stroke than white patients. But are these differences due to outright racism on the part of doctors, or to other factors such as socioeconomic status or lack of health insurance?

While such macro-level factors are undoubtedly significant, a group of Harvard University psychology researchers have used the Implicit Association Test to prove that unconscious racial bias affects how doctors treat heart attack victims.

The study, reported in the current (September) issue of the Journal of General Internal Medicine, involved giving a hypothetical vignette to doctors about a patient suspected of having had a heart attack. In some cases, the patient was described a white; in others, he was described as black. In all other ways, the patient was the same. Doctors who scored high in unconscious racism on the Implicit Association Test tended to withhold aggressive treatment from the black patients.

The current issue of the journal also reports on another study – this one involving real patients - suggesting that similar racial factors play into doctors' decisions about whether to refer women for osteoporosis screening after a hip fracture.

These and other, recent studies suggest that the empirical study of individual-level racism is hitting its stride. Indeed, I posted recently about similar studies of automatic racial processes in the forensic realm, and how subtle racial bias on the part of police, probation officers, and others affects rates of arrest, prosecution, and incarceration.

Since unconscious bias is by definition outside of conscious awareness, and since racism is not as popular as it used to be, no one wants to admit to harboring it. Thus, it is difficult to confront without the empirical evidence of its existence.

Unfortunately, such study has barely touched the mental health field. Although we know that psychiatric diagnosis and treatment vary tremendously by race, for everything from schizophrenia to childhood Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, the empirical study remains to be done on why this is so. Until we can identify the precise mechanisms, disparities will remain, affecting the quality of care and in some cases life or death itself.


You can take the Implicit Association Test online.

Reference: Green AR, Carney DR, Pallin DJ, Ngo LH, Raymond KL, Iezzoni LI, & Banaji MR. (2007). Implicit Bias among Physicians and its Prediction of Thrombolysis Decisions for Black and White Patients. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 22, 1231-1238.

Photo credit: Vanity Press (Creative Commons license)

Can government predict crimes before they occur?

U.S. to ratchet up surveillance with "Project Hostile Intent"

Did you know that when you go to the airport, a "behavior detection officer" might be scanning your face for hostile micro-aggressions?

You ain't seen nothing yet.

The Department of Homeland Security is set to launch Project Hostile Intent (PHI), which will use computers to scan the 400 million travelers who enter the U.S. each year for physical signs of hostile intent.

The Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency hopes to install sensors that will monitor people's pulse, perspiration rate, gait, breathing, eye movements, and other physiological signs through video and audio surveillance and by bouncing lasers or microwaves off your skin.

The full story, "Can you catch a killer before they commit a crime?" will appear in the Aug. 11 issue of New Scientist. Here’s the ominous lead-in:

"IMAGINE the scene. You arrive at New York's JFK airport, tired after a long flight, and trudge into line at passport control. As you wait, a battery of lasers, cameras, eye trackers and microphones begin secretly compiling a dossier of information about your body. The computer that is processing the data from these hidden sensors is not searching for explosives, knives, guns or contraband. Instead, it is working on a much tougher problem: whether you are thinking about committing a terrorist act, either imminently, or at sometime during your stay in the US. If the computer decides that might be your intention, you will be led off for interview with security officers."

Last night, I went to see the Bourne Supremacy, which featured the type of all-knowing, all-seeing state surveillance that is a staple of science fiction books and movies. (One of my favorite such films was 1997's Gattaca.) Watching Bourne (which I enjoyed despite its flaws), I thought the sophistication of the surveillance technology seemed a bit far-fetched. But now, I’m not so sure.

After all, New York City is poised to implement "ring of steel," a Homeland Security-funded system of interconnected license plate readers, surveillance cameras, a coordination center and roadblocks that can swing into action at a moment's notice. If the system works, I’m sure it will be coming soon to a city near you.

If "Traveling while Black" (or Arab) is perilous now, it will be a lot more difficult, and traumatic, once security forces are empowered to use subjective factors like pulse rate and gait as indicators of nefarious intent.

Photo credit: gruntzooki (bird surveillance cameras at Oakland airport), Creative Commons license. Also see Flickr's Panopticon network, dedicated to photographing surveillance cameras.