Prediction of dangerousness, length of treatment, and psychological damage.

As many of you might realize from my writing that I have a real problem with the pseudoscience of psychiatry and psychology. Especially when it comes to constitutional values and allowing the government to control the thinking of the populace through the questionable methods of mind control, which is in fact, what behavior modification programs are. It’s one thing if someone goes into these programs of their own free will, because they want to make changes. It’s another thing for the government to force them into them. This is especially true when the programs have numerous side effects including posttraumatic stress disorder.

In Robert Wolfe’s article Sex Offender Treatment; A Legal Extortion Business. He points out the dangers both mentally and constitutional ly of forcing people into treatment programs that they don’t need or don’t want.

According to the US Supreme court in Vitck vs Jones 100 S.Ct 125, While a conviction and sentence extinguish an individual’s right to freedom from confinement for the term of the sentence, they do not authorize the state to classify him as mentally ill and subject him to involuntary psychiatric treatment without affording additional due process protections. The Doctrine of unconstitutional-conditions is a rule of constitutional law that bars a government from imposing a condition on the grant of a benefit requiring the waiver of a constitutional right. The government cannot condition a person’s receipt of a governmental benefit on the waiver of a constitutional ly protected right.
It also refers to the rule that government cannot force a defendant to choose between two constitutional ly protected rights.

In Ohlinger vs Watson 652 F2d 775, it was brought out that people “have a constitutional right to such individual treatment as will give each of them a realistic opportunity to be cured or to improve his mental condition” and “rehabilitative rational is not only desirable, but it is constitutional ly required” plus “adequate and effective treatment is constitutional ly required” if inmates are being forced into treatment programs through coercion by threat of loss of their good time, or privileges afforded to other inmates than it is quite obvious that the prisons officials are attempting to change the thinking patterns through forced treatment in violation of these constitutional standards and this issue was addressed by the United States Supreme Court in Stanley v. Georgia, 89 S. Ct. 1243, 1248 ” Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government power to control men’s minds“. It is interesting that behavior modification programs use the same principles as are used in brainwashing and mind control something that the American people are adamantly against.

Make no mistake, having the government force you into any type of treatment program. Especially when it is too alter your thinking patterns would be totally frowned upon by our founding fathers. It would be no different than being forced into a religious group and told that you had to follow their believes or be imprisoned.

In my article, Static 99 developers attempting to deflect criticism of their program admit the obvious.
I again tried to point out the flaws in the believe that pseudoscience has some type of accurate information that could be relied upon and the fallacies of using that information to deny constitutional rights to a group of people as well as the possible reasons why psychiatrists and psychologists continue using the rationalization and justification to the lies they’re spreading to justify their position.

In my article “Ever have your fortune told” I tried to point out the scientific flaws in attempting to project what an individual will do, based on a strict set of rules. Every true scientists and physicists out there understands that the Chaos theory comes into play when you have so many variables to consider such as those that come into play in an individual’s life. But people in the pseudoscience area act as if they have all the answers, which makes them appear to be nothing more than snake oil salesman or witch doctors.

http://forensicpsychologist.blogspot.com/2015/04/static-99-yet-more-bumps-on-rocky.html
And now another article has come out showing that the development of the The Static-99 risk assessment tool and how although legislators and the judiciary department have been using it for the decisions rather a person should be placed in civil commitment or evaluating the dangerousness to provide the different levels for the sex offender registry that in fact the whole time since its inception in 1998. It has been in a constant state of flux, and it earlier versions have been proven to be so inaccurate as to open up the entire use of it as any type of determining factor to so many constitutional lawsuits that the states can ill afford to lose.

From a scientific point of view, nothing should be put into practice until it has actually proven repeatability , but the users of the pseudoscience of psychology and psychiatry. Do not follow the scientific method, but rather they allow their theory’s to be tested on unsuspecting patients . Over and over again causing mental and emotional damage to not only their patients but to the family members of those patients who have to live with the patients who have to live with the damage done by the treatment providers. We have set guidelines for medicines to be tested again and again until the results come back positive . And if they are not positive they do not make it to the store shelves and even if they do make it to the store shelves. They have to list all the side effects that may be damaging. This is not true in the pseudoscience of psychiatry and psychology. The final statement in the article “Static 99: Yet more bumps on the rocky developmental Path”

says volumes about how the usage of this unproven, risk assessment that has had major changes to it almost every year since its beginning usage in the late1990s, may be responsible for untold damages to individuals and their family members.
“It is unknown how many sex offenders were civilly committed in part due to reliance on the now-obsolete data.”

the auditors also recommended re-examining the practice of mandating lengthy treatment that can lead to demoralization and, in some cases, iatrogenic (or harmful) effects.

http://forensicpsychologist.blogspot.com/2012/02/treatment-and-risk-among-most-dangerous.html
Study questions need for lengthy treatment of detainees

Our neighbors to the north are far more sensible, as it turns out. At the Regional Treatment Centre (RTC) in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, civil commitment is nonexistent, and the highest-risk sex offenders may be released after an average of just seven months of treatment.”

Comparing high-risk Canadian sex offenders with similarly dangerous offenders civilly committed in the U.S. state of Florida, the researchers found the two populations to be virtually identical.”

The low recidivism rates in Canada after only brief treatment suggests that the interminable treatment regimens at U.S. civil commitment sites, which typically last for years and years, are “more cultural than practical,” reflecting the U.S. propensity for severe punishment, according to the study’s authors, … One downside of such interminable treatment is that offenders may become institutionalized, with negative affects on their personalities,”

Stay tuned. As more solid research begins to overtake the hype, these and other political skirmishes are likely to become more common in financially desperate states. Eventually, I predict the entire civil commitment enterprise will hit the scrap pile as did the old sexual psychopath laws of the 1950s, but not before 20 U.S. states and the federal government squander many, many more millions of public dollars.

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