Scott Ritter: A Tipping Point Toward Chaos

[Jackpine Radical]

50. I have no opinion about Ritter's actions, but i do know something about

the justice system as it relates to sex offenders. Note this--"a condition of his parole was admitting his offenses." In other words, if he actually were innocent, the only way to get parole was to admit to offenses he did not commit.

This is not a new thing. In one rather interesting case I reviewed a few years ago, the offender was in sex offender treatment, still locked up for many rears after he had served out the original term of his sentence. One thing I discovered in his records is that, early in his treatment, he was getting "good" polygraph results concerning his disclosure of victims, but over time, as his treatment progressed, his polygraph results got worse & worse, so the staff kept pushing him for more victim disclosures, but even as he was disclosing more victims, his polygraph readings stayed in the Deceptive range. He disclosed over 40 victims. The polygraph started going "bad" when he moved beyond confessing to his original 3 victims.

An informed look at the data from the federal sex offender program at Butner, NC suggests that this is a pretty common event, that offenders are pushed to confess to many more victims than they actually had. Here are some relevant comments from a review by my colleague Dr. Richard Wollert of the situation at Butner:

My colleagues and I criticized the Butner Studies because they included the types of flaws listed in Table 2. One very troubling feature was that the welfare of Hernandez’ “subjects” was dependent on their standing in his program. From interviewing or counseling CPOs who had been at Butner we learned they were fearful of program termination. If this happened they would be moved to the general prisoner population, where they would be harassed as sex offenders. Another problem was that Hernandez could define a sex offense anyway he wanted. He could, for example, count a dating relationship between a college freshman and a high school junior as an offense. It was also impossible to verify the accuracy of reports because CPOs were told not to identify victims and consent forms promised confidentiality. Still another problem that several Butner patients revealed to us was that staff members expected them to disclose new offenses on an ongoing basis. One former patient, for example, spontaneously wrote a letter to me (C.S., personal communication, September 6, 2010) stating that “when I got into the SOTP program I was instructed to count all incidents of sexual contact regardless of my age or the age of my ‘victim’”. Another was required to complete three PHQs within the span of a year. Finally, Butner patients were also expected to pass the full disclosure polygraph that Bourke and Hernandez (2009) described in the “Measures” section of their paper (p. 186). This holds significant implications for a study based on self-report data because a technique that is widely used to pass this exam entails “overestimating the number of possible victims” (Abrams, 1991, p. 259).
We also described how these circumstances interacted with one another to artifactually produce Hernandez’ results. This explanation relied heavily on the fact that subjects in psychological experiments will act the way a researcher wants them to act if they know what the researcher hopes to find. Aspects of the research situation that tip subjects off to these hopes are referred to as “demand characteristics” (Orne, 1962; Fillenbaum, 1966). In the Butner research, it was a simple matter for offenders in treatment to figure out what Hernandez wanted from them. This “demand” was reinforced by polygraph examinations and repeated PHQ administrations accompanied by an awareness that those who were terminated would be placed in the general population. Overdisclosure was also encouraged by the adoption of data collection procedures that made it impossible to verify the accuracy of disclosures.