Surprise! Court ‘experts’ color their ‘analyses’ based on what the people are paying them want to hear. Parole and Probation and treatment providers have changed the way they do business since the 1980’s. Originally the idea behind Parole and Probation was to help somebody re-integrate into society, now it’s all about trying to find ways to put them back behind bars. Now with all the new laws and the new types of treatment, treatment providers no longer trying to help their clients build better lives, instead the treatment providers are working hand in hand with Parole and Probation to get that job done of re-incarcerating people. As the article below illustrates, treatment providers that work hand in hand with law enforcement are automatically bias against the the clients that they are supposed to be helping return to society.
“There’s an array of harsh legal weapons targeted at individuals who are convicted of certain sex offenses. Lengthy prison terms are commonplace but twenty states and the federal government go even farther with “civil commitment.” After prison time is done and freedom near, some find themselves, instead, locked indefinitely in facilities that may as well be prisons, not for what they did but for what the government’s treatment professionals say they might do—those predictions have serious consequences but their accuracy is not unlike that of fortune tellers. Civil commitment is a constitutional and human rights quagmire, as one can easily glean from recent court decisions.
What about the professionals who helped create and operate these gulags, what are their responsibilities, what is their culpability? David Prescott was an expert witness in a federal court challenge to Missouri’s civil commitment program for sex offenders. Have a look at his remarkable essay.” -Bill Dobbs
Adversarial allegiance: Frontier of forensic psychology research — Excerpts:
“A colleague recently commented on how favorably impressed he was about the open-mindedness of two other forensic examiners, who had had the courage to change their opinions in the face of new evidence. The two had initially recommended that a man be civilly committed as a sexually violent predator, but changed their minds three years later .”
“My colleague’s admiration was short-lived. It evaporated when he realized that the experts’ change of heart had come only after they switched teams: Initially retained by the government, they were now in the employ of the defense”
“At what point do professionals in these settings openly acknowledge to them/ourselves that we are participating in systems that are openly unconstitutional and therefore unlawful according to the standards of much of the Western world? Even beyond American law, consider the case of Shawn Sullivan, who fled the US and was on Interpol’s most-wanted list. One of the UK’s highest courts denied a U.S. extradition request on the basis that Minnesota’s program to commit sex offenders indefinitely to treatment violates European human rights law. Lord Justice Alan Moses said returning Sullivan for trial with the possibility of later being placed in the sex offender system would be a “flagrant denial of his rights” under European law.”
“With that in mind, professionals might also want to ask at what point we are violating basic human rights when we render “treatment” that no one can ever complete.”
to read the rest of the article go to http://forensicpsychologist.blogspot.com/2015/09/adversarial-allegiance-frontier-of.html
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