9-6-2010 Washington:
The state Supreme Court’s message Thursday to state lawmakers might as well have been: Try again.
In a 5-4 decision, the high court ruled that legislative efforts to retake the reins of the state’s sexually violent predator law went too far.
That law – which allows the state to involuntarily commit the state’s worst sex offenders after they serve their prison sentences – requires predators vying for release to show that they have “so changed” as to no longer pose a threat to the community.
In 2004, one particularly notorious offender – Andre Brigham Young, a six-time rapist who fought the state’s civil commitment law all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and lost – argued that he had “so changed” merely by aging.
The Court of Appeals sided with Young, ordering a new commitment trial based on little else than a demographic study of sex offenders leaving Canadian prisons that included seven persons over the age of 60.
The Legislature responded in 2005, unanimously amending the law in an attempt to restore its pre-2004 meaning.
Lawmakers said that before a predator gets a shot at release, he should present evidence of more than advancing age or other demographic factor. The 2005 amendments called for a predator to show proof of a physiological change rendering him unable to commit a sexually violent act or a treatment-induced change in his mental condition.
On Thursday, five state Supreme Court justices declared those amendments an unconstitutional violation of due process, finding them too narrow.
The court’s ruling stemmed from a Pierce County case brought by David McCuistion, a convicted rapist with a history of sex crimes dating back to 1980. McCuistion had requested a trial to consider his release based solely on the word of an out-of-state expert who essentially argued that it would be impossible for anyone to prove an offender has a mental defect that makes him a risk to reoffend.
Justice Susan Owens, writing for the minority, said that in backing McCuistion’s request, the majority itself had gone too far. The court’s decision will greatly expand the ability of predators to argue for their release – even when there is no evidence of a change, demographic or otherwise.
“Under the standard that McCuistion advocates, any expert anywhere could force a new release trial for every (sexually violent predator) every single year by declaring that the defendant never met the commitment definition in the first place,” Owens said.
She predicted that the the costs and administrative burdens that could result from the majority’s holding would be “unacceptably high.”
Owens also cautioned that the court has eliminated a big incentive for offenders to undergo treatment – one of the ways they have won release hearings in the past.
The Legislature should look to repair the damage done – and restore the balance of the state’s civil commitment law – when it reconvenes next year. ..Source.. By Kim Bradford
Showing posts with label Civil Commit - . Assessment Tools. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Civil Commit - . Assessment Tools. Show all posts
September 6, 2010
Court ruling undermines sexual predator law
April 21, 2010
New study: Do popular actuarials work?
4-21-2010 National:
From In The News by Karen Franklin:
Newer instruments outperform Static-99 and RRASOR
If you evaluate sex offenders, you may be overwhelmed by the dizzying array of actuarial risk assessment instruments vying for your vote: Static-99, RM 2000, RRASOR, Static-2002, SORAG, MnSOST-R. The list of weird-looking acronyms grows ever longer, and the validity studies more complex.
For help figuring out which instruments do what, and how well, I recommend a study by two Canadians, Jan Looman and Jeffrey Abracen, just published in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence. The study compared the ability of four leading instruments to predict recidivism among a sample of 419 high-risk Canadian sex offenders. Overall, about 15% of the released offenders were convicted of a new sex offense when the follow-up time period was held at a constant of seven years.
Among the interesting findings:
•When rapists and child molesters were examined separately, none of the instruments were able to predict sexual recidivism (defined as a new conviction) for child molesters.
•The RRASOR (Rapid Risk Assessment for Sex Offense Recidivism) bombed completely as a predictive tool. The Static-99, a descendant of the RRASOR and the most widely used actuarial for assessing sex offender risk, did not do much better. As the authors note, since their sample was similar to U.S. offenders subject to civil commitment as Sexually Violent Predators (SVPs), the lack of predictive validity of these instruments raises concerns about their use in SVP proceedings.
•Two newer instruments -- the Static-2002 and the Risk Matrix 2000, developed in England -- did somewhat better. Especially interesting is how the Static-2002 performed. Overall, only two of the instrument's five subscales predicted sexual recidivism. Not surprisingly, these were Age at Release and Persistence of Sexual Offending. This is rather common sensical, in that sex offending declines dramatically with age, and a high score on the Persistence scale indicates an entrenched pattern of sex offending, with an early onset, a high rate, and multiple convictions. When rapists and child molesters were separated out, instead of being lumped together as generic “sex offenders” as they often are, only the Deviant Sexual Interests scale predicted sexual recidivism for the child molesters.
•Finally, age matters. It really does. The few who continue to deny this obvious fact are just being stubborn. Similar to other studies, only about 2% of offenders over 50 reoffended (one child molester and one rapist, in this case), compared with 20% of those ages 25 to 35.
Of course, this is just one study. Other studies comparing the accuracy of instruments for assessing sex offender risk have come to various and contradictory conclusions. For example, contrast the present findings with those of the Austrian study that I blogged about last month, testing German versions of the RRASOR, Static-99, SORAG, and SVR-20. The publisher of the International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology has just made that study available for free, by the way. Keeping up with this burgeoning literature is a full-time job, unfortunately necessary for practice in this area.
November 20, 2007
Evaluating and Improving Risk Assessment Schemes for Sexual Recidivism: A Long-Term Follow-Up of Convicted Sexual Offenders
March 2007 217618
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Risk assessment plays a central role in the management of sexual offenders in the criminal justice system, impacting every level of decision-making. The specification of which offenders should be included in state registration or community notification, the distribution of treatment opportunities in prison, the determination of parole eligibility, the allocation of resources in monitoring and supervising offenders in the community, and the ultimate decision to remove the most serious offenders from the community through civil commitment all involve critical choices involving risk. The serious consequences to potential victims, to those offenders who no longer pose a threat to the community, but are denied their civil liberties, and to critical community funds that may be squandered as the result of inaccurate decisions all demand the guidance of the most accurate actuarial algorithms available. Because decisions must be made—even doing nothing constitutes a decision—to choose not to employ the most accurate decision-making algorithms is to choose to pay the costly price of a suboptimal decision.
The aim of the present study was to evaluate and to improve the decision-making algorithms that have been generated to assess risk in sexual offenders. More specifically, it was the task of this research project to evaluate the extant actuarials in a sample of sexual offenders on whom long-term follow up were available. We assessed the comparative accuracy of the major risk instruments over time and over subsamples, explored their underlying factor structure, examined the accuracy of a new assessment protocol (SRA Need Assessment; Thornton, 2002), and explored the potential for generating improved predictive instruments.
In a prior study we (Knight, 1999; Prentky, Knight, & Lee, 1997) had followed 599 offenders who had been referred to the Massachusetts Treatment Center (MTC) for evaluation between 1959 and 1984. Of these 266 (Bridgewater Treatment [BT] sample) had been committed to MTC as “sexually dangerous” and subsequently released, and 333 (Bridgewater Observation [BO] sample) had been determined not to be sexually dangerous and returned to finish their sentences. Of the 333 BO offenders 200 constituted a matched sample (on age at evaluation, marital status, and number of prior crimes) and 200 were randomly sampled from the entire sample BO population evaluated. There was an overlap of 67 offenders selected by both the random and matched process. For all these offenders we had accessed and integrated four outcome record sources, including the Massachusetts Board of Probation records, the Massachusetts Parole Board records, the Massachusetts Treatment Center Authorized Absence Program records, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) records.
In the present study we accessed the archival clinical files for these offenders and coded these records both on modern empirically-derived, mechanical actuarials that have been developed since 1997 for predicting sexual recidivism, including the RRASOR (Hanson, 1997), the Static-99 (Hanson & Thornton, 2000), the Static-2002 (Hanson & Thornton, 2003), the SORAG (Quinsey, Harris, Rice, & Cormier, 1998), the MnSOST-R (Epperson, Kaul, Huot, Hesselton, Alexander, & Goldman, 1998), and the Risk Matrix 2000 (Thornton et al., 2003), on two structured clinical guidelines, the SVR-20 (Boer, Hart, Kropp, & Webster, 1997) and the A-SOAP-II (Prentky & Righthand, 2003), and on a new experimental measure, the SRA Needs Assessment (Thornton, 2002). Offenders were also categorized in the Massachusetts Treatment Center Rapist (MTC:R3) and Child Molester (MTC:CM3) typologies and diagnosed according the DSM-IV Antisocial Personality Disorder and Conduct Disorder criteria. All codings and judgments were carried out without any access to or knowledge about the follow-up status of the offenders.
The final report addressed six basic questions. We summarize the findings for each using this framework: ..more.. by Raymond A. Knight, Ph.D. ; David Thornton, Ph.D.
November 12, 2007
Sex offenders and the law: Too dangerous to be released?
11-11-2007 Virginia:
They are considered the worst of Virginia's sexual predators, a community of 61 men deemed so dangerous that even after completing their prison sentences, they remain locked up.
A towering, razor-lined fence keeps them in a complex called the Virginia Center for Behavioral Rehabilitation. Although the facility is classified as a mental institution, it has the look of an isolated prison.
In theory, the state hopes to rehabilitate these career child abusers and rapists so that they can be trusted back on the streets.
But to date, no one has been freed.
The men are confined indefinitely under Virginia's four-year-old civil commitment program, which allows chronic sexual predators to be institutionalized after serving their prison sentences.
Eighteen other states have similar regiments and the U.S. Supreme Court has declared them constitutional - if it can be proved that the molesters are likely to repeat their crimes, and if they are receiving psychological counseling to learn how to control their deviancies.
There is no convincing evidence that therapy changes chronic molesters, particularly pedophiles. Across the nation, only about 5 percent of the 2,700 sex offenders civilly committed since 1990 have been released.
By June, Virginia officials are expecting the population at the Petersburg institution to almost double to 113 sex offenders. The high cost of their therapy will require taxpayers to shell out at least $123,000 a year for each sexual predator - about six times the cost of keeping an inmate in prison.
The program is outgrowing its Petersburg home, once a training center for the mentally retarded. The state plans to close the facility early next year and move operations to a $63 million institution being built in Nottoway County near Burkeville solely to house sexual predators.
It will hold as many as 300 molesters. Legislators say it could be filled in three years.
Some mental health experts and civil libertarians say the facility is little more than a new form of prison to keep sex offenders locked up for life.
"It's a violation of due process," said Kent Willis, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Virginia chapter. "Once you've served your sentence, you should be released.
"We don't incarcerate people on the fear they'll commit future crimes.... Our concern is that this system becomes a railroad for the state to keep people in prison for as long as it wants."
Several offenders being held in Petersburg are upset that they're still confined.
"I don't feel that it's fair at all that I am being confined after I have already paid a debt to the society that I owed them for the heinous crime that I am fully responsible for committing," James D. Lewis Jr. of Norfolk wrote in a letter this summer to The Virginian-Pilot. "I feel that I am being forced to pay interest on the debt."
Lewis, now 40, was convicted of molesting children well known to him in 1983 and 1988. After serving prison terms, his probation was revoked in 1996 for "making contact with children." He suffers from depression and "psychotic symptoms," according to a psychological assessment conducted prior to his civil commitment.
Supporters of civil commitment offer no consolation to Lewis and his fellow offenders at the center.
"I'd have to assume the chances are slim and none that anyone will leave the program in Virginia," said state Sen. Kenneth Stolle, R-Virginia Beach, vice chairman of the state crime commission.
Since the Virginia program's inception, about 2 percent of sex offenders have been sent to civil commitment after serving their prison time.
"These are the worst of the worst," Stolle said. "From that perspective, I think the risk of releasing them outweighs the concerns about their civil liberties. I don't have a lot of sympathy for them."
The General Assembly passed legislation setting up the program in 1999 but did not authorize the money to finance it until 2003, when lawmakers were goaded into action by the pending prison release of Richard Ausley, a notorious pedophile.
In 1973, Ausley kidnapped 13-year-old Martin Andrews of Portsmouth, raped and beat the youth in the woods for a week, and left him to die chained in a buried box. Andrews was discovered, alive, by hunters.
Thirty years later, Andrews successfully lobbied the state legislature to spend $2.7 million to start the Petersburg center and keep Ausley confined. Ausley, however, was killed in 2004 by his cellmate before he was to be released from prison.
Andrews remains convinced the program is worth the expense.
"These guys can't control themselves," he said in a recent interview. "When you look at what it would cost to track them down again, convict them and execute those who would go on to murder - not to mention helping all their new victims - the cost of the program seems pretty small."
Figuring that prison is a cheaper alternative, the General Assembly last year mandated 25-year minimum sentences for most sex crimes against children younger than 13. Pedophiles convicted a second time of a sex crime face mandatory life sentences.
Toward the end of their sentences, all Virginia sex offenders are evaluated on an actuarial table for their risk of molesting again. The table, called the Static 99, is widely used across the nation and takes into account factors about each felon's record, including the number of convictions for sexual crimes, the sex of the victims, and the offender 's relationship to each victim.
An inmate is considered a candidate for civil confinement if he or she scores 4 or higher on a 12-point scale. A score of 4 means a person who has been released has a 26 percent chance of being arrested for a sexual crime within five years, a 31 percent chance within 10 years, and a 36 percent chance within 15 years.
The next step for civil confinement candidates is a psychiatric examination and a review by a seven-member panel of corrections officials, mental health experts and a lawyer for the state. A recommendation is forwarded to Virginia's attorney general, who then decides whether to pursue a civil commitment case in the Circuit Court where the inmate was last convicted of a sexual offense.
The men who have been sent to the center, mostly pedophiles, have long histories of predatory sexual crimes. They range in age from 23 to 70, and served an average of almost 10 years in prison before being civilly committed. Many blame their crimes on their victims.
For most of them, the likelihood that they would commit more sexual crimes if released is so high that their risk assessment is not fully measured. Any higher than a score of 6 on the Static 99 test and a person's risk of recidivism is no longer measured. A 6 means a released offender has a 39 percent chance of being arrested for a sexual crime within five years, a 45 percent chance within 10 years and a 52 percent chance within 15 years.
The average score of the men at the center is 6.4, according to a Virginian-Pilot review of their psychological assessments.
The review also found:
About 80 percent of the men are guilty of sexually assaulting children who are 13 or younger - in several cases, as young as 2.
All but eight of the men are guilty of at least two separate sexual crimes.
Slightly more than half of the men have at least three convictions.
Among them is Aubrey W. Layne, 40, of Norfolk. At 14, he was hospitalized at the Norfolk Psychiatric Center for molesting a 4-year-old girl. At 20, he was found guilty of fondling a 6-year-old girl. At 29, he forcibly sodomized an 8-year-old Norfolk girl. At 33, he took indecent liberties with an 11-year-old Norfolk boy.
There's Thomas W. Lambert, 52, of Norfolk. At 7, he was committed to Eastern State Hospital after pulling down a girl's pants. At 17, he forced four teenage girls to strip at knife point in the back of a Norfolk sandwich shop. At 20, he was convicted of raping two Norfolk women. At 34, he was sent back to prison for molesting a woman in a Richmond coin laundry.
One of Lambert's rape victims, who asked not to be identified, said recently that she has not emotionally recovered from the attack 32 years ago.
Lambert entered her home on the ruse of needing help repairing his bicycle and forced the woman and her 25-year-old pregnant daughter to disrobe.
"I'm always afraid," the woman said. "I don't go anywhere after dark."
Of Lambert, she said: "I was afraid when I heard they put him in an institution that would declare him fine after a couple of years and let him out. I don't want to see that man ever released."
Behind the center's tall fences, Lambert and the other men bunk in a one-story brick bungalow and live under tight restrictions. Administrators bar the media from entering the facility. Telephone access to the offenders is tightly controlled.
Although the center looks like a penitentiary, it must operate as a rehabilitation institution to legally detain the offenders - who are officially called residents, not inmates - after they have completed their prison sentences. The distinctions often seem blurry.
While prisons are run by the Department of Corrections, the center is controlled by the Department of Mental Health, Mental Retardation and Substance Abuse Services.
In their letters, the offenders describe tensions between the security force at the center and its therapists. They complain about high prices at the canteen, bad food and frequent turnover of therapists.
"It is a maximum-security prison disguised as a so-called treatment center," wrote James Jenkins, a resident of the center and former Accomack County electrician with a history of molesting girls.
The offenders say there is no job training or a chance to earn money at the center.
Those conditions will change when the Nottoway County facility opens, said Mario Dennis, the facility's chief psychologist.
Dennis, who specializes in treating sexual deviancies, said offenders have "a much better lifestyle" in civil commitment than in prison. When not in therapy, residents are allowed to roam the yards and common areas. They are not required to wear uniforms, and they have a library with books and appropriate videos. They are allowed to stay up later at night than they could in prison and rise later in the morning.
"There's more freedom here, and more responsibility," Dennis said.
Security at the center is headed by Charles Bise, a former state corrections official who declined several requests for an interview.
The guards, including many who previously worked in prisons, do not carry weapons, said Adam Austin, spokesman for the center.
Dennis said the residents are divided into three groups: mentally retarded; child molesters; and violent and aggressive offenders. They all spend at least 10 hours a week in group therapy, are given homework assignments, and must attend community living meetings with their peers.
"The treatment is not warm and fuzzy," Dennis said. "It's not designed to make the residents feel better. It's designed to have them realize how destructive their behavior has been and learn how to identify the high-risk situations that caused them to offend in the past.
"We never speak in terms of cure; we speak in terms of risk management," Dennis said. "For many of them, deviant sexual desires will continue to exist."
Residents are required to disclose all of their sex crimes - not just the ones that resulted in criminal convictions. Those with hopes of freedom must pass periodic lie detector tests to prove they have been candid.
Some offenders refuse to open up, saying confessions could subject them to new prison sentences because Virginia does not have a statute of limitations on many sexual crimes. Dennis said their fear is misguided because residents are not asked to give the actual names of victims or provide incriminating details about the incidents.
Another device routinely used is the penile plethysmograph, which measures the change in the circumference of the penis while an offender is shown pictures of children, women or men. Some clinicians argue the test can be foiled if subjects avert their eyes from the pictures.
The Virginia Supreme Court ruled earlier this month that test results from using the device cannot be admitted in court without evidence to back up the machine's accuracy. In 2002, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the plethysmograph lacks "scientific validity" and is prone to false positives.
Anti depressant drugs, which dampen sexual desires, often are dispensed to residents. Many states, including Virginia, are experimenting with voluntary use of antiandrogens, which block the effects of sex hormones such as testosterone and are used to treat advanced prost ate cancer. The use of antiandrogens has been questioned, however, because they cause weight gain, osteoporosis and breast development.
Drug therapies also raise another concern, While they may produce results when a sex offender is confined, there is no assurance that the molester will continue to take the medications after being released.
A proposal to allow violent sex offenders to avoid civil commitment by volunteering to be surgically castrated has been floating around the General Assembly for two years. It died in committee in 2006 and earlier this year was tabled for additional study.
Even castration, however, does not shield the worst pedophiles from being institutionalized. Jenkins, the former electrician from Accomack County, castrated himself in a jail shower with a shoestring and a razor blade as his civil commitment trial approached in 2004. He still was sent to the behavioral rehabilitation center.
"He feels because he castrated himself, he's not a risk," said Pamela Sargent, a senior assistant attorney general who heads a staff of six lawyers that handle civil commitment cases for the state. "But the fact is, it's very easy to get replacement testosterone in the form of drugs."
Does any therapy really help sex offenders?
Experts disagree. The only reliable deterrent is aging. Few sex offenses are committed by people older than 70.
Dozens of studies in recent decades have compared the recidivism rate of convicted molesters who received psychological counseling and those who did not. A number of reports concluded there were no differences between the two groups, although most found that those who received therapy were slightly less likely to commit new sexual crimes.
R. Karl Hanson, inventor of Static 99 and a senior research officer for Canada's Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, said the general conclusion of studies is that about 12 percent of molesters who received treatment were arrested for committing new sex crimes, compared with 17 percent who never received counseling.
But even those figures are misleading, Hanson said, because most sex crimes are not reported and do not result in arrests.
Sargent, the senior assistant attorney general, said those who are forced into civil commitment are already career offenders who are not likely to take to therapy.
"They've spent their lifetimes developing their habits, and it's not easy to change them," she said.
Some psychologists say therapy in civil commitment is compromised if promising residents are never released.
"Release is an actual element of therapy," said Ted Shaw, a forensic psychologist in Gainesville, Fla., who has treated sex offenders since 1982. "If there's no hope for release, you can't have effective therapy."
Several residents of the center, in letters written to The Virginian-Pilot this summer, were pessimistic that they will ever be released.
"There is a palpable sense of hopelessness," wrote Nilo R. Figueroa, 52, who three times has been convicted for sexual battery of boys and a girl whose families were well-known to him. "... I share the dread of the center evolving into a state-sponsored banishment instead of a facility for behavior modification and preparation for societal re-entry."
Although Dennis acknowledged that many of the men may never be released, he said others have made "substantial progress" and one or two may be nearing a point where he might recommend release if their movement was monitored by GPS.
"The goal is, have they learned to manage their risk so they can be safely maintained and employed," Dennis said.
The residents receive annual evaluations assessing their progress in therapy. Once a year for their first five years in the program, they are entitled to a Circuit Court hearing to seek their release. After that, they are offered a hearing every two years.
In late August, Orlando L. Butler had his day in Chesapeake Circuit Court before retired Judge Norman Olitsky. Butler, 47, has been convicted 16 times for an assortment of non sexual offenses such as cocaine possession, drunken driving, concealed weapons possession and robbery. In 2000, he was found guilty of fondling the 9-year-old son of a friend.
Butler entered from a court cell wearing a blue jail uniform. He asked to be released with GPS monitoring.
Dennis testified that Butler, while progressing in therapy, has declined to submit to polygraph tests and was not ready for release.
"Mr. Butler has acknowledged in group therapy that he may have as many as 10 victims," Dennis said. "He has not divulged any details about those individuals and it is difficult to create a therapy plan for him without full disclosure."
After hearing from Dennis and others, Olitsky found "overwhelming evidence that Mr. Butler should remain committed because he does remain a sexually violent predator."
Dennis, on cross-examination, acknowledged he has never recommended anyone for release during the four-year history of Virginia's civil commitment program.
"So it's worse than prison," said Sharon Mason, Butler's attorney, during the hearing.
"There is no light at the end of the tunnel. It all depends on opinion. It's like being placed in limbo for a lifetime." ..more.. by Warren Fiske, (804) 697-1565, warren.fiske@pilotonline.com
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