These 10 Questions Can Mean Life Behind Bars

---

5-4-15 National:

From BuzzFeed

A short checklist called the Static-99 (Latest ver. is Static-99R also discussed) weighs facts about a sex offender’s past in order to predict the likelihood of future crimes. Many legal and scientific experts worry that the way the test is often used — to make high-stakes decisions about an individual’s liberty — is critically flawed.

Hersey Lelaind knew he was in trouble — just not how much trouble. He and a housemate had been on a drive, and Lelaind had been smoking pot. When they returned to their home in Vacaville, California, the sheriff’s department was waiting.

“We pull into the driveway. They draw down guns on us and tell us to get out of the car,” Lelaind said in an interview with BuzzFeed News last May. Both men were living with other parolees in a house that had been targeted for a sweep to check for violations. The cops led Lelaind, handcuffed, through the front door of the house, which had already been searched. They made him give a urine sample.

Lelaind knew he’d test positive for marijuana. But after spending the past few years bouncing in and out of jail, mostly for minor parole violations, he wasn’t afraid of another 30-day stretch. I can do that standing on my head, he thought.

That was in 2006, when Lelaind was 26 years old. He’s been kept under lock and key ever since. His problem wasn’t the drug bust itself. But the bust prompted the authorities to review Lelaind’s checkered past. As a teenager, he had been convicted for sexual abuse against a minor — and had served his time.

Science reporter delves into shadowy realm of civil commitment

---

5-4-2015 California, National:

"Hersey Lelaind knew he was in trouble -- just not how much trouble. He and a housemate had been on a drive, and Lelaind had been smoking pot. When they returned to their home in Vacaville, California, the sheriff’s department was waiting….

"That was in 2006, when Lelaind was 26 years old. He’s been kept under lock and key ever since. His problem wasn’t the drug bust itself. But the bust prompted the authorities to review Lelaind’s checkered past. As a teenager, he had been convicted for sexual abuse against a minor -- and had served his time.

This can happen in any civil commitment state when a person with a sex offense history gets arrested and convicted for a new crime; thats when the eval takes place.

"That fact, along with other aspects of his criminal and life history, were entered into the 'Static-99,'(Static-99R Latest) a little-known but highly influential questionnaire that critics contend is being tragically misused. The test spit out a score that set him on the path to being locked up in a state psychiatric facility. Why? Because he might commit another crime in the future. He doesn’t know if he will ever be released."

So begins an expose on the U.S. civil commitment industry by Peter Aldhous, an award-winning science writer. Writing for Buzzfeed, Aldhous traces the stories of both Hersey Lelaind, an African American man from San Francisco, and Wayne Hicks, a gay man from the Deep South, to illustrate the life-shattering consequences of getting a bad score on a badly flawed actuarial risk instrument.

The dramatically different outcomes for Lelaind and Hicks underscores the hit-or-miss nature of risk assessment, where the difference between freedom and a life behind bars can be something as random as which evaluator is assigned to the case or what risk tool that evaluator chooses to employ.

Static-99: Yet more bumps on a rocky developmental path

---

4-19-15 National:

Last December, psychologist Brian Abbott and I produced a table to illustrate the mercurial nature of the Static-99 risk assessment tool for sex offenders. No sooner had we published our table chronicling the tool's shifting nature over time, than the developers announced yet more changes. Here, we are re-posting our original table, with an update as of January 2015.

The Static-99 is the most widely used instrument for assessing sex offenders’ future risk to the public. Indeed, some state governments and other agencies even mandate its use. But bureaucratic faith may be misplaced. Conventional psychological tests go through a standard process of development, beginning with the generation and refinement of items and proceeding through set stages that include pilot testing and replication, leading finally to peer review and formal publication.

Audit finds low recidivism, critiques reliance on inflated Static-99 risk estimates

---

10-27-2013 Florida:

Dan Montaldi’s words were prophetic.

Speaking to Salon magazine last year, the former director of Florida's civil commitment program for sex offenders called innovative rehabilitation programs "fragile flowers." The backlash from one bad deed that makes the news can bring an otherwise successful enterprise crashing down.

Montaldi was referring to a community reintegration program in Arizona that was derailed by the escape of a single prisoner in 2010.

But he could have been talking about Florida where, just a year after his Salon interview, the highly publicized rape and murder of an 8-year-old girl is sending shock waves through the treatment community. Cherish Perrywinkle was abducted from a Walmart, raped and murdered, allegedly by a registered sex offender who had twice been evaluated and found not to meet criteria for commitment as a sexually violent predator (SVP).

Montaldi resigned amidst a witch hunt climate generated by the killing and a simultaneous investigative series in the Sun Sentinel headlined "Sex Predators Unleashed." His sin was daring to mention the moral dilemma of locking up people because they might commit a crime in the future, when recidivism rates are very low. Republican lawmakers called his statements supportive of "monsters" and made their "skin crawl."

Montaldi's comments were contained in an email to colleagues in the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, in response to the alarmist newspaper series. He observed that, as a group, sex offenders were "statistically unlikely to reoffend." In other words, Cherish Perrywinkle’s murder was a statistical anomaly (also known as a black swan, or something that is so rare that it is impossible to predict or prevent). He went on to say that in a free society, the civil rights of even "society's most feared and despised members" are an important moral concern. A subscriber to the private listserv apparently leaked the email to the news media.

The Sun Sentinel series had also criticized the decline in the proportion of paroled offenders who were recommended for civil commitment under Montaldi's directorship. "Florida's referral rate is the lowest of 17 states with comparable sex-offender programs and at least three times lower than that of such large states as California, New York and Illinois," the Sun Sentinel reported.

Audit finds very low recidivism rates

In the wake of the Sun Sentinel investigation, the Florida agency that oversees the Sexually Violent Predator Program has released a comprehensive review of the accuracy of the civil commitment selection process. Since Florida enacted its Sexually Violent Predator (SVP) state in 1999, more than 40,000 paroling sex offenders have been reviewed for possible commitment. A private corporation, GEO Care, LLC, runs the state’s 720-bed civil detention facility in Arcadia for the state's Department of Children and Families.

Three independent auditors -- well known psychologists Chris Carr, Anita Schlank and Karen C. Parker -- reviewed data from both a 2011 state analysis and an internal recidivism study conducted by the SVP program. They also reviewed data on 31,626 referrals obtained by the Sun Sentinel newspaper for its Aug. 18 expose.

All of the data converged upon an inescapable conclusion: Current assessment procedures are systematically overestimating the risk that a paroling offender will commit another sex offense. ..Continued at In the News.. by Karen Franklin

---

How Impressed Are Jurors with Risk Measures?

---

8-15-2013 National:

Scores from risk measures are a primary focus for scholars and forensic evaluators who attempt to estimate sex–offender recidivism risk. But do they matter to the jurors who make decisions about sex offenders in civil commitment trials?

The authors of a recent paper published in Psychology, Public Policy, and Law surveyed jurors at the end of 26 sexually violent predator trials to examine the relation between risk-measure scores reported at trial and jurors' beliefs about the likelihood that the respondent would commit a new sexual offense if released.

Jurors' perceptions of respondents' recidivism risk were not associated with respondents' scores on the Static-99 (R. K. Hanson & K. E. Thornton, 2000), Minnesota Sex Offender Screening Tool-Revised (D. L. Epperson, J. D. Kaul, S. J. Huot, D. Hesselton, W. Alexander, & R. Goldman, 1998), or Hare's Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (R. D. Hare, 2003).

Jurors viewed respondents as less likely to reoffend and were more skeptical about the ability of experts to predict recidivism when an expert testified on behalf of the respondent. Findings highlight the incongruence between recidivism research, which identifies risk-measure scores as the strongest known predictors of sexual recidivism, and jury decision making. ..Source.. by Providentia

---