Title: Perspectives on Crime and Justice: 2000-2001
Lecture Series
Series: Research Forum
Author: National Institute of Justice
Published: March 2002
Subject: Criminal justice research
86 pages
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U.S. Department of Justice
Office of Justice Programs
National Institute of Justice

Perspectives on Crime and Justice:
2000-2001 Lecture Series

Research Forum
Volume V 

March 2002

National Institute of Justice

-------------------

U.S. Department of Justice
Office of Justice Programs
810 Seventh Street N.W.
Washington, DC 20531

John Ashcroft
Attorney General

Deborah J. Daniels
Assistant Attorney General

Sarah V. Hart
Director, National Institute of Justice

Office of Justice Programs
World Wide Web Site 
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov
 
National Institute of Justice
World Wide Web Site
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij

To find out more information about the National Institute of Justice, please
contact:

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access the NIJ Web site
(http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij).

If you have any questions, call or e-mail NCJRS.

-------------------

National Institute of Justice

Perspectives on Crime and Justice:2000-2001 Lecture Series

Alfred Blumstein

Laurence Steinberg

Carl C. Bell

Margaret A. Berger

March 2002

NCJ 187100

-------------------

National Institute of Justice

Sarah V. Hart
Director

The National Institute of Justice is the research and development branch of
the Department of Justice. NIJ's Perspectives on Crime and Justice Lecture
Series is part of its Professional Conference Series, which supports
exchanges between researchers and practitioners through conferences,
workshops, planning and development meetings, and other support to the
criminal justice field.

The Perspectives series features speakers from a broad cross-section of the
criminal justice field who are invited to speak on topics of interest to them.
The lecture series was developed to foster dialogue among criminal justice
professionals and to promote further research in the field. The Research
Forum publication series, of which this publication is a part, was designed
to share information about the Perspectives series and other
forms with a larger audience.

The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the presenters and
other persons attending the Perspectives lecture forums. As such, they do
not represent the official positions of the U.S. Department of Justice.

The National Institute of Justice is a component of the Office of Justice
Programs, which also includes the Bureau of Justice Assistance, the
Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency
Prevention, and the Office for Victims of Crime.

-------------------

Preface

The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) is the research and development
arm of the U.S. Department of Justice. NIJ's Perspectives on Crime and
Justice Lecture Series is an opportunity for policymakers and researchers
to pause, reflect, and engage in discourse on the best research about crime
and justice issues. Through this series, NIJ continues to present
discussions by some of the Nation's most distinguished scholars
representing criminology and related disciplines. 

In 2001, Alfred Blumstein discussed the perceived drop in our violent
crime rate, which he noted may be the beginning of a continuing decline,
the start of a new increase, or a plateau. Laurence Steinberg discussed
concerns about the way the criminal justice system identifies and treats
adolescent serious offenders. Carl Bell pointed out the varieties and types
of violence and discussed basic strategies for violence prevention.
Margaret Berger's lecture underscored the tremendous and far-reaching
impact of DNA evidence.
 
The lectures in this volume follow a rich tradition of inquiry and
enlightenment on crime and justice issues. They are intended to raise the
level of discourse and promote dialogue and interest in new areas of
research. I hope you enjoy these thoughtful and thought-provoking
discussions. 

Sarah V. Hart
Director 
National Institute of Justice

-------------------

Contents

Preface

Lecture 1: Why Is Crime Falling--Or Is It?
Alfred Blumstein, Ph.D.

Lecture 2: The Juvenile Psychopath: Fads, Fictions, and Facts
Laurence Steinberg, Ph.D.

Lecture 3: Violence Prevention 101: Implications for Policy Development
Carl C. Bell, M.D.

Lecture 4: Raising the Bar: The Impact of DNA Testing on the Field of
Forensics
Margaret A. Berger, J.D.

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Why Is Crime Falling--Or Is It?

Presentation by 
Alfred Blumstein
Professor
H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and 
Management
Carnegie Mellon University

February 14, 2001
Washington, D.C.

The Recent Crime Drop

To those who worry about crime in the United States, the period from
1993 through 1999 was a welcome relief. We witnessed a steady drop in
crime rates to a level lower than we have seen for more than 30 years. My
presentation focuses on violent crime, primarily homicide, because it is so
serious. It also is the most reliable and consistently measured crime and is
highly correlated with many other aspects of crime. Between 1993 and
1999, the U.S. homicide rate dropped by an impressive 40 percent to a
level of 5.7 per 100,000 population, a rate not seen since 1966. This
almost brings the United States into the range of some of the countries in
Western Europe.

Exhibit 1 presents homicide and robbery rates from 1972 through 1999.
These two types of violent crime track each other closely. Both homicide
and robbery declined between 1993 and 1999.

These current favorable trends, however, cannot continue indefinitely. We
should try to identify the factors that contribute to the downward trend
and, as those effects are saturated, determine whether the downward trend
will flatten or, because of other factors, reverse.

Whenever crime rates decrease, there are usually claims of both credit
(e.g., "it's a result of my administration's policy of . . .") and explanation
(e.g., "demographic shift"). Television newscasters always look for a
single explanation and are particularly troubled when more than two
mutually supportive factors come together. I recently co-edited with Joel
Wallman The Crime Drop in America,[1] which addresses the multiple
factors that together contributed to the crime drop, including the waning of
crack markets, the strong economy, efforts to control guns, intensified
policing (particularly in efforts to control guns in the community), and
increased incarceration.

Aggregate Trends

Exhibit 1 shows that from the 1970s to the mid-1990s, the homicide rate
oscillated in the fairly narrow range of 8 to 10 per 100,000 population.
Only recently has this rate declined below 8. The peak in 1980 probably
was a demographic peak because baby boomers reached the high-crime
ages of the late teens and early 20s in the 1970s and moved beyond those
high-crime ages in the 1980s.

There was a trough in 1985, followed by the homicide epidemic in the late
1980s and early 1990s. Then, following a peak in 1991 and a slightly
lower peak in 1993, the homicide rate declined to its lowest point in 1999,
the latest year for which the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
published data in the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR).

Age Differences

This aggregate picture requires various types of disaggregation if we are to
isolate the important factor differences that are masked when looking at
only the aggregate. For demographic factors, arrest information is studied
because only the demographics of those who get arrested are known.
Exhibit 2 is the first step in that disaggregation, where we begin to
examine the homicide arrest rate trends for individual ages in the
traditional peak range of 18 through 24. There was a clear rise among all
ages between 1965 and 1970, followed by a period of reasonable stability
from 1970 through 1985; the flatness of the 18 to 24 peak is reflected in
the fact that the lines for the individual ages are mixed together and cross
one another. That flat period runs through the 1980 peak in the aggregate
rate shown in exhibit 1, again suggesting that the 1980 peak was primarily
a consequence of changing demographic composition rather than changes
within any particular age groups.

Beginning in 1985, we start to see a major divergence across ages, even in
this narrow age range of 18 through 24. By 1993, the 18-year-olds had
more than doubled their rates, and 24-year-olds showed no growth at all.
Those younger than 18 showed a growth pattern similar to that of the
18-year-olds, more than doubling their rates between 1985 and 1993.
These annual growth rates were impressively high, in the range of 10 to 20
percent per year for all ages under 21. After the 1993 peak, we saw a
comparably impressive decline in these ages; by 1999, they were roughly
back to their 1985 levels.

In contrast to this remarkable growth and decline in homicide arrest rates
among the younger ages, the rates for people older than 24 showed no
growth; in fact, their rates have steadily declined since 1975.

These trends are summarized in exhibit 3, which shows two important
lines. The upper line reflects the growth period of 1985 to 1993; the lower
line reflects the decline or recovery period, which was from 1993 to 1999.
Each line depicts for each age the ratio of the age-specific arrest rate for
murder in 1993 (the upper line) and in 1999 (the lower line) to the rates
that prevailed in 1985. Ratio values greater than 1.0 (denoted by the thick
black line) represent an increase in the rates; points below 1.0 represent a
decrease. The upper line portrays the ratio reached in the peak year, 1993,
and the lower line portrays the degree to which the ratio had declined by
1999.

The arrest rate for 15-year-olds in 1993 was triple the rate in 1985. The
growth rate was less for older teens, but it was still more than double the
1985 rate for all those age 20 and younger. In contrast, for those age 30
and older, 1993 rates were actually about 20 percent lower than 1985 rates.

The trend line depicting the 1999:1985 ratio is well below that for 1993,
and the greatest decline occurred among younger people. For the first time
since 1993, young people's rates in 1999 were roughly back to their 1985
levels--about 20 percent below for the 14- to 17-year-olds and about 20
percent above for the 18- to 22-year-olds. To the extent that the 1985 rates,
which are those that prevailed from 1970 through 1985, represent a stable
level that is not easily penetrated, that finding may suggest that the current
approaches-- having finally undone the effects of the 1985 to 1993
rise--may have reached their limits, and we may need to consider different
approaches if we are to move significantly below that level for these
young people. The positive effects of current approaches--including
expanded afterschool programs, conflict resolution, and job skill
training--on young people may have reached their limit, and we may have
to consider other prevention strategies.

The homicide rates for older people have seen a continuing decline since
the mid-1970s. By 1993, rates for people older than 30 had declined about
20 percent from 1985 levels, and by 1999 they had declined another 20
percent to a level that is about 40 to 60 percent of their 1985 level. 

The differing patterns for younger and older groups underscore the
importance of examining each age group's role in explaining the trends in
the aggregate homicide rate since 1985. The aggregate rates shown in
exhibit 1 grew to their 1991 peak solely because the rates of the younger
people were increasing faster than the rates for the older people were
declining. Between 1991 and 1993, the rise for younger people had
generally flattened out (as reflected in the pattern for the 18-year-olds in
exhibit 2), and so the rate of decline seen in the older ages began to
dominate the aggregate rates. Since the rates of both young and old were
decreasing after 1993, the aggregate rate continued to fall.

In sum, the increase in the level of homicide in the United States during
the growth period of the late 1980s and early 1990s was due entirely to the
trends in the younger age groups; homicide rates for those age 25 and
older did not increase. However, the decrease since 1993 is due to both the
recent sharp drop in offending among young people and the continuing
decline in offending among older persons. Even though they commit
homicide at lower rates, the contribution of the older age groups to the
recent decline in the aggregate homicide rate may be appreciable because
of their large numbers. For example, in 1980 and 1985, people older than
30 accounted for about 30 percent of the homicides, but by 1993, their
contribution declined to only 22 percent, partly because of the growth in
the contribution of the younger offenders and partly because older people
were committing fewer homicides. By 1999, their contribution increased
to 24 percent, driven largely by the sharp decline in the rates for younger
offenders after 1993.

Explanations of the homicide decline must differentiate between the
factors that are responsible for the long-term fall in homicide rates among
the older adults and the ones causing the post-1985 rise and the more
recent drop in homicide offending by the younger groups. Those two
explanations are likely to be different.

The Role of Weapons

Young people experienced a major growth in the use of handguns in
homicide after 1985. Exhibit 4 displays the number of homicides--relative
to the number of handgun homicides in 1985, which is set to an index of
100--in each year with three types of weapons: handguns, other guns, and
weapons other than guns. The exhibit focuses on the weaponry used in
homicides by youths between the ages of 18 and 24, using data from the
Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR), compiled by the FBI, of factors
associated with individual homicide events. Before 1985, there was some
oscillation, but no clear trend. But between 1985 and 1993, there was an
increase of more than 130 percent in homicides committed with handguns,
with no marked change in the number of homicides committed with long
guns and about a 50-percent decrease with nonguns. This suggests that
handguns were partly a substitute for nongun weapons (e.g., knives) and
caused more homicides that, if handguns had not been used, may have
been merely assaults. The decline started in 1994 and, by 1997, had
decreased to about only a 50-percent increase over 1985.

Handgun homicides committed by juveniles younger than 18 quadrupled
between 1985 and 1993, with a doubling in the number of long-gun
homicides and about a 20-percent decrease in the number of nongun
homicides. By 1997, the number of handgun homicides had decreased
sharply to about 80 percent below the 1993 rate. There was no such
increase in the number of handgun homicides committed by 25- to
45-year-old adults; that age group displays a downward trend that
accelerates after 1991 and reaches a level about 60 percent of the 1985
level in 1997.

A major change occurred after 1985; young people were acquiring
handguns in alarming numbers. Older people may have had more
handguns during this period, but they appear to have exercised greater
restraint in their use.

It is widely recognized that teenage males are poor dispute resolvers; they
have always fought to settle their disputes. When they fight with fists, the
conflict evolves relatively slowly; the loser will eventually find a way to
withdraw or a third party, observing the incident, has time to intervene.
The dynamics are extremely different when a handgun is present; the
conflict escalates well before anyone can retreat or intervene. Once
handguns become prevalent in a neighborhood, each person who carries
one has an incentive to make a preemptive strike before his adversary
does.
 
Between 1985 and 1993, the weapons involved in settling young people's
disputes changed from fists and knives to handguns--and more recently, to
semiautomatic pistols, which have much greater firepower and lethality.
The growth in lethal weaponry is reflected in the changes in the weapons
used in homicides committed by different race and age groups. Beginning
in 1985, there was a sharp growth in the firearm homicide death rate
among young people (those in their early 20s and younger; youths
[ages18-24], especially juveniles [under 18 years old]; but not among
adults [ages 25-45]) that changed a flat trend to a sharply rising one, with
the rise sharpest for young ages. At the same time, the shift was much
smaller for the number of homicide deaths due to means other than
handguns.

The decline in the number of handgun homicides almost mirrors the rise.
Following the peak in 1993, the rate of decline was steepest for juveniles;
it was less steep for youths. Adults, whose rate displayed no peaking,
nevertheless showed a steady decline of almost 40 percent after 1993.
These data end in 1997, two years before the age-specific homicide arrest
rates reached the 1985 level, and one can speculate that their decline
continued until at least 1999.

The increase in suicide weapons-specific death rates before 1993 was
similar to that of homicide death rates. Following a period of generally flat
rates, the rate of suicide by firearms increased sharply after 1985, but the
rate of suicide by other means did not change. This shift was especially
marked in suicides of black youth and juveniles, whose suicide rate had
previously been markedly lower than that of whites.[2]

These observations suggest that the growth in homicide committed by
young people was more attributable to the weapons they used than to the
emergence of inadequately socialized cohorts of "superpredators," as some
observers claimed during the period that saw such an increase in the
number of homicides. If the cohorts were indeed more vicious, then one
would expect to see a growth in homicides by all forms of weaponry rather
than by only handguns. The findings strongly suggest that teenagers had
disputes as they always had, but that the availability and lethality of
handguns, and later semiautomatic pistols, resulted in an increase in
homicides.

The steady decline in handgun homicide rates after 1993 is consistent with
the decline in youth-perpetrated homicide rates shown in exhibit 2. The
pattern in handgun use is also reflected in exhibit 5, which depicts the time
trend in the rates of arrests for weapon possession at various ages. This
pattern is also similar to the homicide patterns depicted in exhibit 2.
Weapon arrest trends show a distinct peaking in 1993, followed by a clear
decline.

Changes in the rates of weapon arrests result from a combination of
changes in the illegal carrying of weapons and changes in police
aggressiveness in pursuing illegal weapons. Exhibit 5 shows a
considerable growth in weapon possession among young people during the
late 1980s. Police also became more concerned about weapons, especially
in the hands of young people. That combination is reflected in the rise in
weapon arrests, which peaked in 1993. There is no indication of any
diminution in police aggressiveness in pursuing young people with guns
after 1993, so the decline after 1993 is likely due more to a reduction in
the carrying of guns than to a slackening of police efforts to capture the
guns. This reduction in carrying seems to have been an important factor
contributing to the decrease in homicides after 1993.

Thus, we have clear indications from SHR data on weapons used in
homicides and weapon arrests that there was a significant decline in the
use of handguns by young people after 1993. It is difficult to sort out all
the factors that contributed to that. One important contributor was the
aggressive stop-and-frisk tactics used by local police, especially in many
large cities. Community groups in many cities also took an active role in
negotiating truces among gangs and seeking to establish norms that
precluded the carrying of guns.

Important Federal initiatives also are likely to have contributed to the
decline. The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act (P.L. 103-159),
which requires a 5-day waiting period for a background check for any
person who wants to buy a gun from a licensed dealer, became effective in
1994, the first year of the decline. The denial rate under the Brady Act has
been reported at 2.4 percent of those who apply to purchase a gun.[3]
Uncertain is the degree to which these individuals simply accepted the
denials or resorted to one of the many loopholes left open by the Brady
Act: purchasing a gun at a gun show, buying one from a private individual,
hiring a straw purchaser to buy it, stealing it, or using any of the other
means left open to a determined illegal purchaser.

There are also approaches by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and
Firearms (ATF) to identify dealers and individuals disproportionately
involved in the sale or purchase of "crime guns." ATF tries to trace back to
the original dealers guns seized by law enforcement. Such efforts may lead
not only to deterring inappropriate handgun transactions but to making
guns harder to obtain. 

All these efforts have a mutually reinforcing effect. A reduction in the
carrying of handguns, because of either the threat of confiscation or the
difficulty in acquiring them, would lead to a reduced incentive for others
to carry, thereby reducing the likelihood of handgun homicides, especially
among the young people for whom it was so deadly.

The Role of Drug Markets

One important factor that has affected criminality throughout the 1980s
and 1990s has been the problem of drug abuse and drug markets. In a
survey conducted in 1991, 32 percent of prisoners reported using cocaine
or crack regularly and 15 percent used heroin or opiates regularly. At the
time of the offense that led to their imprisonment, 14 percent were using
cocaine or crack. These numbers were appreciably higher than those
reported in a similar survey conducted 5 years earlier.[4] These are much
higher rates than one finds in general population samples (e.g., the
National Institute on Drug Abuse household surveys), which strengthens
the importance of a connection between drug use and crime rates.

Paul Goldstein developed a useful taxonomy of the drug-crime connection
composed of three components other than the sale or possession of the
drugs themselves:

--Pharmacological/psychological consequences. The drug itself causes
criminal activity (most notably, the connection between alcohol and
violence).

--Economic/compulsive crimes. Drug users commit crimes to get money
to support their habit.

--Systemic crime. Crimes are committed as part of the regular means of
doing business in the drug industry (including violence as the accepted
way to solve disputes between competing sellers or as retribution between
a seller and a buyer as a result of reneging on a drug deal).[5]

There is a fourth, more broad connection that should be considered: the
community disorganization caused by the drug industry and its operations,
including the manner by which the norms and behaviors in the drug
industry, which can pervade some communities, influences the behavior of
others who have no direct connection to that industry. For example, the
widespread prevalence of guns among drug sellers can impel others in the
community to arm themselves to similarly defend themselves, to settle
their own disputes even if they do not involve drugs, or to gain respect.

The problem of crack cocaine emerged in the early 1980s and accelerated
significantly in the late 1980s. One indication of this growth lies in the rate
of arrests of adults for drug offenses, which, especially for nonwhites
(primarily blacks) started to increase in the early 1980s and accelerated
appreciably after 1985 with the wide distribution of crack, especially in
low-income urban neighborhoods. The steady growth in drug arrests of
nonwhite adults compared with those of white adults is reflected in exhibit
6, which depicts the ratio of nonwhite-to-white drug arrests for both
juveniles and adults.

The trend for juveniles is strikingly different. Throughout the 1970s, the
arrest rate for nonwhite juveniles was below that of whites (the ratio is less
than 1:1). Starting in 1986, however, their rate grew rapidly, reaching a
rate four times that of whites during 1989-92, then began a steep decline to
about 50 percent above the white juvenile rate in 1999. This pattern shows
that the major recruitment of nonwhite juveniles into the drug markets did
not begin until the distribution of crack became widespread in about 1985.

Exhibit 6 provides important information linking some earlier
observations about the rise in homicides committed by young people and
the role of guns in that rise. Three major increases--more than a
doubling--occurred in the short period between 1985 (the beginning of the
involvement of young people in drug markets) and 1993 (the peak year of
youth violence):

--Rates of homicides committed by youths age 20 and younger, with no
growth for adults 25 and older (exhibit 3).

--The number of homicides those younger than 25 commit with guns, with
no growth in nongun homicides (exhibit 4).

--The quadrupling of the arrest rate of nonwhite juveniles on drug charges
compared with white juveniles (exhibit 6).

One explanation for this dramatic combination of changes involves a
process that is driven by illegal drug markets, which appear to operate in
conjunction with the demand for drugs despite massive efforts during the
past two decades to attack the supply side. In the late 1980s, the illegal
drug trade recruited juveniles because they were willing to work more
cheaply than adults, were less vulnerable to the punishments imposed by
the increasingly punitive adult criminal justice system, and were willing to
take more risks than adults. The rapid growth in the demand for crack
required more sellers--many new users used crack because they could buy
one hit at a time, unlike powder cocaine, which was not sold in small
quantities--and encouraged the market to find its labor supply wherever it
could. Furthermore, recruiting juveniles was the market's means of
replacing the large number of adult drug sellers who were being
incarcerated during the 1980s. The economic plight of young urban black
juveniles, many of whom saw no other comparable route to economic
sustenance at the time, made them particularly responsive to the lure of
employment in the crack markets.

Because crack markets were run as street markets, especially those
operating in inner-city areas, the participants were especially vulnerable to
attack by robbers who targeted their sizable assets, either the drugs or the
money from the sale of drugs. Calling the police for protection was not an
option, so participants in those markets, including recruited juveniles,
were likely to carry guns to protect themselves and solve disputes. Once
these juveniles started carrying guns, other teenagers who were not
involved in the drug markets but went to the same schools or walked the
same streets also were more likely to arm themselves. These teenagers felt
they needed guns for their own protection, but they also may have
believed that weapon possession was a status symbol in the community.
This initiated an escalating arms race: As more guns appeared in the street,
there was an increased incentive for individuals to arm themselves. In light
of the much tighter networking of teenagers than of older people, that
diffusion process could proceed quickly. The emergence of teenage
gangs-- some involved in drug markets--in many cities at about this time
contributed to that diffusion.

In view of the recklessness and bravado that often characterize male
teenagers and their low skill level in settling disputes other than through
the use of physical force, many of the fistfights that would otherwise have
taken place escalated into shootings as a result of the presence of guns.
This escalation in violence can be exacerbated by the problems of
socialization associated with high levels of poverty, high rates of
single-parent households, educational failures, and a widespread sense of
economic hopelessness. Not until they reach their mid-20s do they develop
some prudence, become more cautious even if they are armed, and display
greater restraint.

This hypothesized diffusion process[6] has been tested further with
city-level data on juvenile arrests for drugs and homicides, taking
advantage of the fact that drug markets flourished at different times in
different cities, such as in the mid-1980s in New York and Los Angeles
and later in smaller cities. Daniel Cork[7] has shown the connection
between the rise in handgun homicides and the recruitment of juveniles
into crack markets. Using an epidemic model originally developed for
marketing literature, Cork identified--in individual cities--the time when
juvenile arrests for drugs began to accelerate and the corresponding time
when juvenile homicide arrests increased. He found most typically a 1- to
3-year lag between the two, with homicides following involvement in drug
markets. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that the rise in
juvenile homicides was attributable to the diffusion of guns from young
people recruited into drug markets to their friends and beyond. His
analysis of individual cities also showed that crack markets generally
emerged first in the largest coastal cities, especially in New York and Los
Angeles, and then appeared in Middle America and smaller cities. Thus,
the observed patterns in the rise of homicide committed by young people
with handguns are highly consistent with explanations that assign central
importance to the rise and decline of crack markets in the United States.

The fall-off in the nonwhite/white drug-arrest ratio (exhibit 6) in the 1990s
is a reflection of the changing tastes for crack, especially in urban
neighborhoods. As recognition of its deleterious effects became
widespread, word spread through the streets that crack was an undesirable
drug, and this wisdom had a major effect on diminishing the number of
new users.[8] This contributed to a major reduction in the need for street
sellers. As a result, the nonwhite juvenile sellers, who had been important
participants in those street markets, were no longer needed. Older users
continued to be major crack consumers, but their demand could be served
more readily by individual delivery, thereby diminishing the need for
street markets. All these changes contributed to a decline in street markets,
the recruitment of juveniles, and handgun possession by young people
following the 1993 peak.

One important contributing factor to the decline in violence as crack
demand ebbed has been the strength of the U.S. economy during the past
decade. If there were no legitimate jobs for young people, it is reasonable
to anticipate that they would have found other criminal activity to provide
economic sustenance. But the abundance of job opportunities, including
those not requiring high skill levels, provided legitimate alternatives.
Individuals in legitimate jobs have a strong incentive to conform and avoid
criminal activity. This should indicate the desirability of finding
approaches that bring young people into the legitimate economy through
appropriate training to develop legitimate employment opportunities. 

Incarceration

The United States has gone through a dramatic transformation in its
sentencing policies and practices in the past 25 years. As shown in exhibit
7, the United States maintained an impressively stable incarceration rate
(prisoners per capita) of about 110 per 100,000 population during the
50-year period from the early 1920s to the mid-1970s,[9] when it suddenly
grew exponentially at a rate of about 6 to 7 percent per year. The rate is
currently more than four times the previously stable rate.

Various attempts have been made to correlate the rising incarceration rate
with the crime rate. The most aggressive of those analyses use the period
after 1991--they argue that the crime rate has been steadily decreasing
because the incarceration rate is increasing. But such simplistic attempts to
estimate the incarceration effects on crime are likely to be misleading. For
example, the analysis must also account for the period in the late 1980s
when crime was increasing at the same time the prison population was
growing.

Attributing the decline to incarceration is far more tenable if one focuses
on older offenders, whose homicide rates have declined steadily since the
mid-1970s. This group is the appropriate focus for estimating the
incapacitative effect of incarceration (i.e., crime is reduced because
offenders are removed from the streets). One can appreciate that the
incapacitation effects were an important contributor to the continuing
decline of violent crime rates among older people, especially for those
over 30, who displayed about a 40- to 60-percent drop in homicide rates
between 1985 and 1999 (exhibit 3). This connection is particularly
appropriate because 32 is about the median age of State prisoners.

One of the contributors to the growth in incapacitation is the large number
of drug sellers who have been sentenced to prison in the past two decades.
Exhibit 8 shows the growth in incarceration from 1980 through 1996 by
crime type. The greatest growth--by a factor of more than 10-- was among
drug offenders. Ironically, their incarceration did not have a major impact
on the drug trade because others, particularly younger sellers, replaced
them. But if they would have engaged in violence on the outside, their
incarceration could have contributed to the decline in violent crime rates.
The incapacitation effect, however, is at least partially negated by violence
committed by the replacements. Indeed, because many replacements were
young people, who have a greater propensity for violence, the net effect
may have been an increase in violent crime, undoubtedly a factor that must
be considered when discussing the rise in violence of the late 1980s.

Even if drug offenders' incarceration contributed to the reduction in
homicide, it is not clear whether imprisoning them was an efficient use of
fiscal or prison resources. As the prison population grows, marginal
offenders are likely to have a lower offending frequency (lambda) than
those who were already incarcerated.[10] A sizable but unknown fraction
of drug offenders who are incarcerated (comprising more than 20 percent
of State prisoners and more than 60 percent of Federal prisoners) are
predominantly entrepreneurs rather than generic criminals, and they are
not likely to be violent.

Incarceration effects are far less likely to have been a significant factor in
the more recent decline in violent crime rates among teenagers and youths,
and most likely were limited to older youths, whose risk of incarceration is
greatest. In addition, levels of violence have fallen in the younger age
groups in recent years even as their risk of incarceration has increased. The
decline might have been less steep in the absence of the "get tough on
juveniles" sentencing policies enacted in recent years. But it seems more
likely that the other factors considered in this paper-- the reduction in the
use of guns, changes in the drug markets, and the growing number of
legitimate job opportunities--have had more dominant effects.

In The Crime Drop in America, William Spelman and Richard Rosenfeld
derived estimates of the contribution of incarceration to the crime drop of
the 1990s. Spelman[11] used general elasticity estimates (percentage
reduction of crime resulting from a 1-percent increase in the prison
population) from the literature and estimated that the crime reduction is
associated with steady growth in the prison population. Rosenfeld[12]
used estimates of prisoners' offending frequency (lambda) based on
homicide rates in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods of St. Louis and
Chicago and estimated that prisoners would commit 150 homicides per
100,000 prison population. Both were crude estimates, and they used very
different approaches, but both estimated that incarceration contributed
about 25 percent of the crime drop, leaving 75 percent to other
explanations.

Changing Demographic Composition

Much of the speculation about the recent decline in homicide rates
attributes it to changing demographics. This may be a holdover from the
realization that much of the decline that began in 1980 was attributable to
a demographic shift as the baby-boom generation outgrew the high-crime
ages.[13] Those same demographic effects were not at work in the early
1990s, since demographic effects do not always move in the same
direction.

The decline after 1980 was significantly affected by the shrinking size of
the cohorts in the high-crime ages--late teens and early 20s. In the late
1990s and currently in the United States, those cohort sizes are growing.
Exhibit 9 depicts the age distribution of the U.S. population in 2000. It is
evident that the smallest age cohort under 40 is about 24 (those born in
1976). Each of the youngest cohorts is larger than its predecessor until the
peak at age 9. Thus, if age-specific crime rates are to remain constant for
teenagers, the aggregate crime rate should be increasing as a result of the
larger cohort sizes.

These age-composition changes are relatively small, with cohort sizes
growing at a rate of about 1 percent per year. Even disaggregating the
composition by race reveals a similar pattern: Both whites and blacks have
their smallest cohort at about age 24 in 2000, but the rate of growth of the
younger black population is about 2 percent per year. These demographic
trends are small compared with the much larger annual swings in the
age-specific crime rates, as much as 10 to 20 percent per year growth in
the 1980s (16 percent per year for 18-year-olds from 1985 to 1991) as well
as decreases in the 1990s (6 percent per year for 18-year-olds from 1991 to
1998).

Some Observations

The sharp rise in violence by young people during the late 1980s and the
correspondingly sharp decline in the 1990s are striking. The increase in the
aggregate homicide rate was due to escalating rates among juveniles and
youths, predominantly (although not exclusively) by and against black
males, particularly in larger cities and exclusively involving handguns. By
1999, the rate of homicide perpetrated by youths finally returned to the
stable rate that prevailed from 1970 through 1985.

Although the causes of the rise in violent crime are reasonably
clear--homicides by young people with handguns, mostly as a result of
diffusion out of drug markets--the factors contributing to the decline are
more complex. Various forces are involved, some more salient in certain
places. They include efforts by local police, communities, and Federal
agencies to separate young people from their guns. Those efforts have
been helped considerably by the waning of crack markets, especially the
diminished participation of young people in those markets. As an
alternative, the robust economy has provided legitimate job opportunities
for them, which has created incentives to avoid illegal activities.

The changes in drug markets also help account for the variation in the
timing of the peaks and declines in rates of violence across cities. Large
coastal cities such as New York and Los Angeles, where crack took hold
earlier and violent crime rates peaked sooner than in other cities, were
expected to--and did--experience a drop in homicide rates sooner than
other cities. The effects of drug markets also directs attention to the
population groups in which the changes in homicide were concentrated:
youth, particularly black youth who did not have more attractive economic
opportunities and became drug sellers at disproportionately high rates in
inner-city crack markets.

For older offenders, the growth in incarceration is an important component
of the explanation, although other considerations seem to be relevant.
These include the widespread availability of domestic violence services,
which seem to have contributed significantly to the reduction in male
victimization in homicide.[14]

One final observation is somewhat provocative. The UCR reports for the
first half of 2000 were released by the FBI in mid-December 2000. They
are strikingly different from the previous 6 years in which annual
decreases in crime rates of 6 to 8 percent were common. The new report
estimates both crime and homicide drops of merely 0.3 percent. This could
be an indication that the decrease in crime, which could not continue
indefinitely, has finally flattened out. A precursor to this estimate occurred
in 1998, when homicides dropped by only 2 percent in the large cities
(populations of 500,000 to 1 million and more than 1 million) when the
national aggregate drop was about 6 to 8 percent. Large cities have led the
rise and decline in crime rates. We cannot be certain whether this
flattening is an indication of one small disruption to a continuing decline,
the start of a next increase, or a plateau from which changes will require
particularly innovative approaches that are quite different from the actions
that have taken us to this point. Regardless, we should take advantage of
the current opportunity to better understand these processes and to pursue
criminal justice and community-based policies to forestall the next
increase as long as possible. As we look to the future, we should be
concerned both about the possibility of a resurgence of active drug
markets and any violence they may bring with them and about a downturn
in the economy and the impact it would have in communities in which
violence is most likely to reignite.

Question-and-Answer Session

Patrick W. Murphy, American Police Association, Alexandria, Virginia:
Remember what the Crime Commission said about the police? How can
you forget--about [being] ineffective, inefficient, fragmented, insular,
unprofessional, and not dedicated to research? Community policing has
brought a small revolution in policing. In a quick-and-dirty survey, the
L.A. Times found that the chiefs of about a dozen major cities that had
experienced significant declines in murder, credited community policing.
Although the debate continues about New York, there are those who say
community policing has had a significant impact there, even if it has not
been given the same credit by city hall or police headquarters. Police have
a long way to go, but I'm encouraged that some kind of a corner has been
turned, with police focusing more on prevention and working more with
the community. Would you comment on that?

A.B.: Policing has been most notable in its development and its openness.
Police chiefs are remarkably astute and policing has been impressive in its
readiness to try new ideas. Community policing makes so much sense at
an abstract level, but when you examine its implementation at the city
level, it is difficult to evaluate just what is going on. Programs vary
enormously. When the COPS program began, community policing became
the byword for whatever police departments wanted to do so they could
take advantage of new sources of funding. 

A 1999 paper coauthored with Allen Beck[15] examined arrests per crime
over time; for all crime categories we looked at, except for drugs--for
which we did not know the number of crimes--the arrest rate per crime
was flat. So, at least it casts some question about the degree to which
innovation in policing has contributed to significant improvements in
solving crimes. The extent that it helps solve a variety of other problems,
the extent that it contributes to much better relations between the police
and more highly mobilized communities, is all to the good. I've been to
visit the Compstat operations in the New York Police Department. Much
has been made of the technology there, but I think it is secondary to the
chiefs and "wise old hands" who put precinct captains on the spot and say,
"What are you doing about all this?" and get them to address the emerging
crime problems with a variety of challenges and ideas. These are the
places where we can see a lot of innovation. 

I think police departments are ready to add operations research units,
groups that will analyze the data that are now streaming in from 911 calls
(which are not easily manipulated), with the data that stream in from other
sources, figuring out improved tactics and improved approaches. I would
hope that funding is available to provide this kind of link between the
police, who are now anxious for interesting sophisticated analysis leading
to better operations, and the resources to do it. 

Joanne Wiggins, U.S. Department of Education, Washington, D.C.: You
talked about murder, you talked about robbery, you talked about drug
arrests; you did not talk about rape, sexual assault, or domestic violence. I
would issue a challenge that when we talk about "crime dropping," it is
not true to say that crime is down unless you can also say that crimes
against women are down. I think we need to be careful how we make these
statements because the realities of women's lives may not be exactly like
the charts you have been showing and research needs to take these
disparities into account.

A.B.: I think that is an important issue. Unfortunately, our data sources, on
rape particularly, are not terribly reliable in the sense that in the
victimization survey, the number or rape victim sample is too low to get
reliable estimates, and in police records there is too much "un-founding"
(i.e., the alleged incident did not occur) going on. The category of reported
rapes is subject to significant shifts in women's willingness to report over
the past couple of decades. One interesting study that came out of the work
of the National Consortium on Violence Research was a dissertation by
Laura Dugan that compared the association of intimate-partner homicide
across cities with the degree of services (e.g., legal services, counseling
services). Dugan found that the more services a city provided for domestic
violence, the more good it did to reduce intimate-partner homicide, but
only of one gender. And the gender that benefited from the reduction was
not women, but men. The interpretation has been that increased victim
services provided alternatives for women who might otherwise have killed
their victimizers. So the major drop in intimate-partner homicide
victimization has been for men. Dugan is revisiting the issue of domestic
violence itself to gain a better understanding of the situation. 

Devon Brown, Office of the Corrections Trustee, Washington, D.C.: I was
delighted recently to learn that your colleague, the esteemed John DiIulio,
has recently "found religion," inasmuch as he has changed his view on the
prediction that so-called "superpredators" would take over our cities.
Could you share with us your view on that?

A.B.: When we saw this rise in juvenile violence, rhetoric started to flow.
The "superpredator" theory argued that we are now seeing a breed of kids
that is far worse in socialization, conceivably in genetics, than previously
seen. A major thrust of everything I said about that rise in violent crime
was that it was not different kids, it was the same kids doing what they had
always done, with more lethal weaponry. The handgun became the major
source of the problem when it got into the hands of irresponsible people.
Violent crime was reduced not because we had changes in socialization
after 1993, but because the nucleating role of the drug markets diminished.
It declined because kids no longer had to carry guns and we saw a general
disarmament. Another reason for disarmament was that the police were
posing larger threats--taking the guns away and imposing other
punishment. As we saw fewer guns in the street, the incentive to carry
them was diminished. So we saw this gradual dropping away. John DiIulio
has acknowledged that "superpredator" was really an inappropriate
characterization. I think the essence of the data I presented today shows
that it wasn't different kids; it was the weapons those kids were carrying.
These factors should stimulate everybody to work to prevent handguns
from getting into the hands of irresponsible people. There are many ways
we can do that without significantly inconveniencing the large number of
responsible people who have every right to have handguns legally. These
include tracing guns, as ATF does to see where those guns are coming
from; identifying dealers who are major sources of guns used in crimes;
and restricting gun purchases to one gun per month to inhibit aggressive
marketers. Federal laws will be necessary to ensure that one State is not
vulnerable to neighboring States that do not enforce gun laws. As long as
we see a clearly interstate commerce in guns, Federal intervention will be
needed to identify the source of the problem and identify minimally
intrusive methods to ensure that guns don't get in the hands of statutorily
defined irresponsible people (youth, felons, and individuals who have been
involuntarily committed to mental institutions). A number of States'
mental health departments, for example, have set up registries of people
who have been committed to mental hospitals who should not have access
to guns. A gun dealer can query that registry to determine whether a
particular customer is prohibited from purchasing a gun. The response
gives no detail on the person's mental illness, but merely provides a yes/no
answer on prohibition.

Stephen Rickman, Executive Office for Weed and Seed, U.S. Department
of Justice, Washington, D.C.: As a consequence of this increase in
incarceration rate over the past 20 years, you have also had an increase in
the number of people who are coming out of prison. And I think there was
a study done over at the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) estimating more
than 500,000 people released. Given the fact that you have had this
diminution in postrelease supervision and services with this population,
how do you factor this into your trends and how it may affect crime in the
future?

A.B.: That's a good question, because it really pulls together a number of
important issues. Number one, we are keeping people incarcerated longer.
We are keeping people longer partly because our sentences are increasing,
partly because of mandatory minimums, and, most important, because of
parole violations (increasingly for technical violations). We are increasing
the probability that these people coming out are coming out well past their
criminal careers--and we must think seriously about criminal careers.
There was a period when NIJ sponsored some very important research on
criminal careers, looking at the duration of a criminal career, how long
people stay active. Research found that the duration of the residual
criminal career goes up through the 20s, is fairly flat through the 30s, and
then falls off in the 40s. So people in their 30s are the ones most likely to
continue--if they are active in their 30s. 

The issue of postrelease management is a complex one. It involves a
mixture of providing services and exercising control by sending the person
back to prison. The trends lately have emphasized the control aspect, often
at the expense of services. Indeed, many States are finding that more of
their admissions are now composed of parole violators than new court
commitments. Service needs are complex, and perhaps the most essential
is drug treatment, which everyone acknowledges is important. In addition,
there has to be help in finding and keeping a job, treating mental illness,
and various other forms of counseling.

The whole notion of parole has became politicized because parole officials
rather than prison officials were the ones who made release decisions: "We
will stop the release decisions by moving to determinant sentences"
without attention to the handholding and the guidance and the counseling
needed and without attention to the rate of reincarceration. Parole officials
took the political heat for being "soft on crime" at the time when everyone
else was being "tough," so they began sending violators back to prison on
the least provocation without dealing with the issue of the optimum policy
for dealing with somebody who now is drug positive. The parole issue
very much needs rethinking. Parole recommitments have been a major
factor in the growing incarceration rate over the past 5 years or so. 

Obviously crime rates are declining. We are not doing a lot more on drug
enforcement because the drug markets have thinned out and have become
more surreptitious. They now look more like powder cocaine
markets--more like pizza delivery rather than street markets.

Ted Gest, University of Pennsylvania, Criminal Justice Journalists (based
in Washington, D.C.): While your presentation related to government
responses to crime, you concentrated almost totally on what you would
call enforcement or incarceration remedies. Could you describe the field of
so-called crime prevention in the past 10 years or so? I think it's fair to say
there has been an increase in programs dealing with juveniles and drug
treatment--certainly not so much as was contemplated in the 1994 crime
law,[16] but a lot of programs. Does the absence of crime prevention from
your comments indicate that either we don't know what any of these
programs contributed or that you think they have had a marginal or
insignificant effect on the phenomenon?

A.B.: I think that's an important question. There is so much I didn't talk
about but I certainly didn't mean to slight prevention. I still think the
efforts that governments, particularly the Federal Government, put into
issues of prevention are quite minimal and the issue is compounded by the
fact that we have so little research, between the Office of Juvenile Justice
and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), National Institute of Justice, and
BJS, to have any accurate assessment of what works best. The programs
we get data on and that have been a major cornerstone of both Federal and
State policies have been in the incarceration area. Prevention efforts are
still strikingly minuscule in comparison to what is needed, particularly the
need to combine those efforts with evaluations targeted at what looks like
the most promising opportunities. OJJDP has been a major leader in, for
example, the longitudinal research in tracking kids through emerging and
eventually terminating criminal careers--and the factors associated with
getting involved in crime--because that fundamental research helps to
identify what kind of interventions are best for whom. 

We went through this horrible period in the late 1970s and early 1980s
when Bob Martinson's "nothing works" theme emerged out of a variety of
evaluation studies that tried to find the "silver bullet" and tested individual
technologies to estimate their effectiveness in reducing recidivism. Any
such treatment cannot be universally applicable. Treatments have to link
the individual offender or potential offender and his or her needs, the
treatment provider and his or her skills in delivering various kinds of
treatment, and the environment in terms of what kinds of crime that person
might be getting involved in. 

We have to experiment with many approaches and evaluate them, but
budgets in the order of tens of millions of dollars are inadequate to deal
with this problem. We continue to be impressively ignorant about the
effects of any of our interventions within the justice system. And cutting
that back would be the height of folly at a time when the establishment is
ready to be open and interested in getting research findings. But we need
much more research and evaluation to track the changes that are going on
in this phenomenon-- because they are changing. 

Clinton G. Turner III, U.S. Capitol Police, Washington, D.C.: My primary
interest is victims of crime, especially those victimized at night. What
about the enhancement of victim/witness support nationwide? At the U.S.
Capitol Police, we are very good at dealing with victims of crime,
primarily crime that occurs around 6:00 p.m. and later. Youths commit a
high percentage of these crimes. If we enhanced victim programs in the
various police departments, I believe we would have even fewer. Is there
anything being done nationwide to enhance the victim-witness programs
in police departments?

A.B.: I believe there are; I just haven't looked very carefully at that. I'm
sure there is someone here who could answer that much more fully than I.
I'm sure there are many here who might want to comment. Pat Murphy, do
you have a sense of the degree to which police departments are developing
victim service programs?

Patrick W. Murphy: From what I read in the newsletters and other sources,
more departments are getting into victim services. But, you are so right
about how chintzy we are about research. It's crazy that we are not
spending 10 times as much on research as we are, especially on policing.
Earlier, I was too polite. The basic problem about crime in this country is
that we do not have a national police system, and we do not have
democratic policing in the inner cities where we need it. You know from
your murder rates how much higher the murder rates are in cities with
populations over 100,000 than they are in the rest of the country. Fifty
percent of the murders in the United States are in cities with populations
over 250,000. Within those cities, crime is concentrated in the inner cities,
just as 100 or 150 years ago it was in the ghetto neighborhoods. On one
block in 1870, 365 murders were committed at "Five Corners" in New
York. Both the perpetrators and the victims were "nice people." But we do
not have democratic policing. Democratic policing is self-policing. The
people are supposed to be policing themselves with police assistance.
Well, for 100 years the police have been telling the people that they can
protect them, and the good people don't even know that they are supposed
to be policing themselves with police assistance. Now, that is happening in
some cities, which will lead to more drug treatment and more victim
programs. About 30 percent of the police officers in the country today
have college degrees; this is an encouraging sign, moving toward
professionalization of the major departments. And I think as we see more
of that, we will see more social programs being supported and actively
involved with the urban police. 

Notes

1. Blumstein, A., and J. Wallman, eds., The Crime Drop in America, New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

2. Blumstein, A., and D. Cork, "Linking Gun Availability to Youth Gun
Violence," Law and Contemporary Problems 59 (1) (1996): 5-24.

3. Gifford, L., D.B. Adams, and G. Lauver, Background Checks for
Firearm Transfers, 1999, Bulletin, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of
Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2000, NCJ 180882.

4. Innes, C.A., Drug Use and Crime: State Prison Inmate Survey, 1986,
Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice
Statistics, 1988, NCJ 111940, and Beck, A., et al., Survey of State Prison
Inmates, 1991, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of
Justice Statistics, 1993, NCJ 136949.

5. Goldstein, P., "The Drug/Violence Nexus: A Tripartite Conceptual
Framework," Journal of Drug Issues 15 (1985): 493-506.

6. Blumstein, A., "Youth Violence, Guns, and the Illicit-Drug Market,"
Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 86 (1) (1995): 10-36.

7. Cork, D., "Examining Space-Time Interaction in City-Level Homicide
Data: Crack Markets and the Diffusion of Guns Among Youth," Journal of
Quantitative Criminology 5 (4) (1999): 379-406.

8. Johnson, B., A. Golub, and E. Dunlap. "The Rise and Decline of Hard
Drugs, Drug Markets, and Violence in Inner-city New York," in The
Crime Drop in America, ed. A. Blumstein and J. Wallman, New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2000: 164-206.

9. Blumstein, A., and J. Cohen, "A Theory of the Stability of Punishment,"
Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science 63 (2) (1973):
198- 207.

10. Canela-Cacho, J.A., A. Blumstein, and J. Cohen, "Relationship
Between the Offending Frequency (lambda) of Imprisoned and Free
Offenders," Criminology 35 (1) (1997): 133-175.

11. Spelman, W., "The Limited Importance of Prison Expansion," in The
Crime Drop in America, ed. A. Blumstein and J. Wallman, New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2000: 97-129.

12. Rosenfeld, R., "Patterns in Adult Homicide: 1980-1995," in The Crime
Drop in America, ed. A. Blumstein and J. Wallman, New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2000: 130-163.

13. Blumstein, A., J. Cohen, and H. Miller, "Demographically
Disaggregrated Projections of Prison Populations," Journal of Criminal
Justice 8 (1) (1980): 1-25. See also Blumstein, A., J. Cohen, and H. Miller,
"Crime, Punishment, and Demographics," American Demographics
(October 1980): 32-37.

14. Dugan, L., D. Nagin, and R. Rosenfeld, "Explaining the Decline in
Intimate Partner Homicide: The Effects of Changing Domesticity,
Women's Status, and Domestic Violence Resources," Homicide Studies 13
(1999): 187-214. 
15. Blumstein, A., and A. J. Beck, "Population Growth in U.S. Prisons,
1980-1996," in Prisons, ed. M. Tonry and J. Petersilia, volume 26 of
Crime and Justice, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999: 17-61.

16. Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, P.L.
103-322.

-------------------

The Juvenile Psychopath: Fads, Fictions, and Facts

Presentation by Laurence Steinberg
Distinguished University Professor of Psychology
Temple University
Director, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur
Foundation
Research Network on Adolescent Development and
Juvenile Justice

March 20, 2001
Washington, D.C.

This morning, I'd like to talk about a worrisome practice that I believe is
becoming increasingly common in prosecutions of serious juvenile
offenders: the characterization of the juvenile offender as a "psychopath,"
a "budding psychopath," or an individual with "psychopathic
tendencies."[1] I do not have hard data to validate my suspicion that this
practice has in fact become more common in recent years,[2] but my work
on adolescent development and juvenile justice brings me into regular
contact with prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges, and the frequency
with which I am asked questions about psychopathy and its diagnosis
among juveniles has undoubtedly increased. Whether this reflects a
genuine trend may depend as much on one's definition of psychopathy as
it does on one's definition of what constitutes a trend. As some of you
know, to a social scientist, one case constitutes an anecdote; two cases,
data; three, a pattern; and four, a trend. At least four practitioners have
asked me about this issue in the past year, so we may be talking about a
trend.

Regardless of whether labeling some youngsters as true or incipient
psychopaths affects 4, 40, or 4,000 juveniles a year, there is, nevertheless,
good reason to worry about the practice, and there are many reasons to
sound a note of caution within the juvenile and criminal justice systems
about the potential overuse of psychopathy as a diagnostic label when
applied to juveniles. Juveniles who are branded as psychopaths are more
likely to be viewed as incorrigible, less likely to receive rehabilitative
dispositions, and, if it is an option, more likely to be transferred to the
criminal justice system to be tried as adults and face the possibility of
adult sanctions, including incarceration in adult jails and prisons. We are
not sure if the construct of psychopathy makes sense when applied to
adolescents and children, we are not sure that measures of psychopathy are
stable over the course of adolescence or between adolescence and
adulthood, and we have no data on the predictive utility of the diagnosis
when applied to juveniles. We are not ready--if indeed we ever will be--to
base transfer or other dispositional decisions on diagnoses of psychopathy
among juveniles. 

Understanding Psychopathy

Let me begin with a brief introduction to the construct of psychopathy and
its uses and misuses in clinical and forensic practice.

First, I want to distinguish between two similar words with different
meanings for those who do not have a background in psychology or
psychiatry. "Psychopathology" refers to any sort of psychological disorder
that causes distress either for the individual or for those in the individual's
life. Depression, schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,
alcohol dependency, conduct disorder, and bulimia are all forms of
psychopathology. Most researchers use the term "psychopathology"
loosely to refer to a continuum of problems that range from mild
discomfort to full-blown psychosis. Psychopathology can be ascertained
through the administration of standardized tests or questionnaires or
through some form of diagnostic clinical interview.

"Psychopathy," in contrast, refers to a very specific and distinctive type of
psychopathology. Psychopathy is a type of personality disorder defined
chiefly by a combination of antisocial behavior, callousness, and
emotional detachment. As one set of writers recently noted-- 

Psychopaths are typically charismatic individuals who readily manipulate
others and engage in risky behaviors designed to satisfy their own personal
needs. They are undeterred by pangs of conscience and have little or no
concern for the welfare of others. Their relationships tend to be shallow
and they often meander from one opportunistic setting to another without
much concern for the future.[3]

Although psychopathy is often treated as a unidimensional construct,
current thinking indicates that what we call psychopathy is actually
composed of two related, but independent, components. Factor I reflects a
cluster of affective and interpersonal features best described as callous
emotional detachment (e.g., glibness, egocentricity, superficial charm, and
shallow affect), whereas Factor II represents the chronic unstable and
antisocial lifestyle (e.g., irresponsibility, impulsivity, criminality, and
proneness to boredom) associated with psychopathic individuals. The fact
that psychopathy is defined by two factors--one having to do with
emotional detachment and the other having to do with antisocial
behavior--is very important in understanding why it may or may not be
useful in predicting future dangerousness among juveniles.

As it is presently defined, psychopathy is very similar to what
psychologists call a personality disorder--indeed, although it is not listed
in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual-IV (DSM) as a personality
disorder, it has many characteristics in common with antisocial personality
disorder, and some have argued that psychopathy should be viewed as a
subtype of antisocial personality disorder.[4] Personality disorders are
unlike other forms of psychopathology, which are viewed as potentially
treatable (or at least manageable) conditions. In contrast to such disorders
as depression or conduct disorder, psychopathy is presumed to represent a
pattern of personality and behavior that is deep seated, originating in early
experience and/or biological functioning, relatively stable over time, and
resistant, if not absolutely immutable, to change.

Psychopathy is generally assessed via structured interviews. In studies of
adults, the gold standard from which most other measures derive is the
revised version of the Psychopathy Checklist or PCL, which was
developed by Robert Hare, the North American authority on psychopathy
and its assessment. A slightly revised version of this measure, the PCL
Youth Version, is now available for use with adolescents. The PCL is
based on a series of ratings a trained expert makes on the basis of the
individual's interview responses and information taken from the
respondent's file or official records. The ratings are made on 20 different
dimensions (see exhibit 1). The rater assigns a score of 0, 1, or 2 for each
of these 20 dimensions. The field generally uses a cutoff score of 30 to
designate an individual as a psychopath.

Before turning to questions about the appropriateness of using the
psychopathy diagnosis for making dispositional decisions about juvenile
offenders, a few words are in order about the use of this construct in
making judgments about adults. First, there seems to be little disagreement
about the utility of the construct "psychopath" in describing certain adult
criminals. There is a substantial literature suggesting that criminals who
score high on the PCL can be distinguished from their nonpsychopathic
counterparts in theoretically meaningful ways on other personality
measures and on measures of information processing and decisionmaking.
Studies of neuropsychological functioning suggest that at least some
portion of individuals who score high on the PCL may be "wired" in a way
that could conceivably contribute to their criminality.

Second, there is near consensus that the PCL is a valid and reliable way
with which to measure psychopathy among adults, although several
writers have suggested that there is room for improvement[5] and others
have argued that there are three, not two, underlying factors.[6] Reliability
here refers to agreement between raters who are assessing the same
individual. Estimates of the reliability of PCL scores over time are more
difficult to calculate, because at least some of the score an individual
receives is based on facts that are in the individual's record. Because these
facts do not change, certain elements of the individual's PCL score remain
fixed and therefore artificially inflate estimates of the reliability of the
measure over time. Nonetheless, by conventional social scientific
standards, the PCL is a more than acceptable psychological assessment
tool.

Third, and most important, the PCL is unrivaled in its ability to predict
future antisocial behavior; it is especially good at predicting future
violence. For example, a recent meta-analysis of findings from several
large-scale followup studies reported modest but significant correlations
between scores on the PCL and general recidivism, violent recidivism, and
sexual recidivism.[7] Psychopathic individuals (i.e., those obtaining PCL
scores of 30 or more) were approximately four times as likely to commit a
future violent crime than were nonpsychopathic offenders. Moreover, the
PCL "has been found in many studies to perform as well as (and in some
cases better than) statistically derived actuarial measures designed
specifically to predict future violence."[8] In the MacArthur Violence Risk
Assessment Project, the PCL was the single best predictor of future
violence out of a set of 134 predictors.[9] This does not mean that the PCL
is fantastically accurate in predicting future criminal behavior, only that
the PCL does a better job than other instruments designed for the same
purpose.

Whether this level of accuracy is acceptable for making decisions about an
individual is a more complicated matter, and one that, as experts in risk
assessment like John Monahan[10] have pointed out, is best determined by
legal practitioners, not social scientists. One factor that must weigh
heavily in any decision regarding the use of an imperfect risk assessment
instrument is whether the consequences of a false positive classification--
that is, the classification of an individual as high risk when he in fact is
not--carry unintended harmful effects. If, for example, the outcome of
being classified as a psychopathic individual is long-term incarceration, it
would not be advisable to accept a high false-positive rate. If, on the other
hand, a classification of this sort is used simply to hold an individual for a
few days pending further evaluation, the same false-positive rate may be
acceptable in light of the potential benefits to community safety derived
from identifying the small number of genuinely dangerous individuals. My
concern is that assessments of juvenile psychopathy are not being used to
recommend further evaluation but are instead forming the basis for
definitive dispositional decisionmaking. The fact that assessments of
juvenile psychopathy are being used to make decisions about the transfer
of young offenders into the adult system--decisions that necessarily imply
judgments about the likelihood of individual rehabilitation and that
effectively determine whether any attempt will be made to rehabilitate the
young offender--makes any false-positive problem especially worrisome.

In sum then, at least when speaking about adults, we can say the
following: 

--It makes sense to characterize some criminals as psychopaths. 

--It is possible to do so using the PCL. 

--Knowing whether an individual scores high on the PCL is useful
information to have when trying to predict an individual's risk for future
criminality or violence. 

It is against this backdrop that I want to consider the use of the PCL and
other instruments designed to assess psychopathy to make decisions about
juvenile offenders.

Juvenile Psychopathy Assessment in Historical Perspective

Psychopathy has become in recent years an attractive notion to those
interested in serious juvenile offenders. It is instructive to examine the
current interest in the juvenile psychopath in historical perspective because
there are striking parallels between today's situation and that which existed
in the early decades of the 20th century during the beginning years of the
juvenile justice system. Historian Michael Willrich has written a
marvelous description of what he calls "eugenic jurisprudence" in the early
part of the 20th century,11 and it is fascinating to read this while
pondering the juvenile psychopathy question before us today.

It is the alignment of four factors today, as was the case 80 years ago, that
is driving the contemporary search for the nascent Hannibal Lecter. These
four factors are: (1) a problem; (2) a crisis; (3) a theory; and (4) a
diagnostic tool. 

The Problem

One of the most difficult problems facing practitioners in the juvenile
justice system today is differentiating between serious offenders who are
at risk of reoffending and those who are not. This is an especially
important challenge to those making transfer recommendations, both
because we want to protect the community from individuals who have a
high risk of reoffending (especially if the risk is for violent reoffending)
and because we do not want to expose relatively low-risk young people to
the likely iatrogenic effects of adult sanctions. If it were possible to
differentiate between juveniles who are at high risk of reoffending and
juveniles who are not, we could, in theory, make far better decisions
regarding transfer to the adult system, the decertification of juveniles
charged as adults, and so forth.

The problem facing legal practitioners in the early 20th century was much
the same: how to draw meaningful distinctions among offenders who had
committed similar offenses. As Harvard Law School professor Roscoe
Pound noted early in the 20th century, "Criminals must be classified as
well as crimes."[12] In 1909, the first court-affiliated psychiatric clinic
was founded in Chicago, attached to the Nation's first juvenile court, and
designed to "assist judges in devising a disposition or 'treatment'
appropriate for each offender and to conduct policy-shaping clinical
research into the 'root causes' of crime."[13] Coincidentally, and ironically
in light of today's discussion, the clinic was named the Psychopathic
Institute; a sister clinic, the Psychopathic Laboratory, served the municipal
court. As the chief justice of the municipal court explained-- 

[T]he idea [of the Psychopathic Laboratory] marks a turning point from
the traditional policy of society of treating the delinquents as a single large
class   without consideration of the various individual characteristics
which distinguish them, and are now seen to divide them into a number of
sharply differentiated classes, each with its separate proclivities,
potentialities, and prognostic characteristics.[14]

The Crisis

Each problem noted above was made more pressing by either a crisis or
the public's perception of one. Today's sense of urgency over the need to
determine which offenders are genuine psychopaths has its origins in the
now infamously wrong prediction about the coming wave of
superpredators made by prognosticators like John DiIulio.[15] DiIulio has
now softened his views on the inevitability of an epidemic of juvenile
violence, but the legacy of the superpredator lives on today in the label of
the psychopath.

If DiIulio had a counterpart in the early days of the juvenile court, it may
well have been Harry Olson, the chief justice of Chicago's municipal
court. Olson's speeches about the growing "menace of the
feeble-minded"--a term that was used to refer not only to the mentally
retarded, but to individuals characterized by any number of mental
deficiencies--sparked the same sort of panic and ill-informed changes in
policy and practice as DiIulio's incendiary op-eds about superpredators[16]
would do some 75 years later. Indeed, as Willrich points out, "by the
mid-teens, the discourse about 'the menace of the feeble-minded' had
spilled over from the welfare circles and professional journals into popular
culture"17 in much the same way that the inside-the-Beltway musings of
DiIulio and other conservative pundits eventually found their way into
Time magazine and onto the evening news.

There are parallels in practice between then and now as well. Just as
today's prosecutors propose to use the diagnosis of psychopathy as
grounds for the transfer of juveniles into the adult system, their forefathers
advocated using feeblemindedness as grounds for commitment. In neither
time period do practitioners pay much attention to the problem of false
positives.

The Theory

Although warnings about the wave of superpredators in the 1990s and the
epidemic of feeblemindedness in the 1920s were based more on rhetoric
than reality, more on politics than precise evidence, the translation of
rhetoric into policy and practice necessitated two other ingredients: a
salable theory about the origins of the condition and an available
diagnostic test to distinguish those who had the condition from those who
did not. 

Interestingly enough, during both eras the theoretical perspective that
carried the most weight emphasized the organic bases of criminal
behavior. During the early part of the 20th century, the work of the
neurologist William James Hickson, whom Judge Olson recruited to direct
the municipal court's Psychopathic Laboratory, was especially influential,
at least in Chicago, and as juvenile justice practice went in Chicago at the
turn of the century, so it went in the Nation. Hickson, who had studied in
Europe with Emil Kraepelin and Eugen Bleuler, two of the most
influential thinkers in the history of psychiatry, and in the United States
with Herbert Goddard, who popularized the use of the Binet-Simon
intelligence test in this country, created "a fascinating synthesis of organic
psychiatry and eugenic criminology."[18] Hickson believed that the
central cause of criminality was not low intelligence (the conventional
definition of feeblemindedness and at the time one of the presumed causes
of criminal behavior) but an "affective defect" characterized by apathy,
lack of remorse, and impulsivity, not unlike notions of "moral insanity"
that had been popularized during the mid-19th century,[19] and
remarkably similar to the callous emotional detachment that defines one of
the core components of psychopathy as it is assessed by the PCL. Hickson
believed that this affective defect was inherited in the form of "dementia
praecox," a catchall diagnosis for serious mental disorder popularized by
Kraepelin. Hickson also believed that it was possible to pinpoint the
anatomical site of the defect: the lower brain.

Although little is written today about the genetic basis of psychopathy,
there is no shortage of references in current writing about antisocial
behavior, or about psychopathy in particular, to the possible organic bases
for the disorder. The notion that a subset of chronic offenders is
biologically different from other offenders is central to the dominant
theories of the development of antisocial behavior today, such as that put
forth by Terrie Moffitt,[20] whose widely cited model of juvenile
offending distinguishes adolescent-onset criminality (which presumably is
environmental in origin) from life course-persistent criminality (which, in
addition to its earlier onset and later offset, is presumed to have a strong
biological basis). The notion is also prominent in the works of leading
writers on the subject of psychopathy, including Joseph Newman,[21] Paul
Frick,[22] Adrian Raine,[23] and, of course, Robert Hare.[24]
Psychopathy has been attributed in recent years to low serotonin levels,
low autonomic reactivity, unusual patterns of physiological arousal, and
prefrontal cortical dysfunction. It has become increasingly common at
professional meetings to see "pictures" of criminal brains; whether this is
genuinely informative or simply high-tech phrenology remains a matter of
some controversy.

What's important, though, is that at both the beginning and the end of the
20th century, a theory or set of theories suggested that there exists a
subpopulation of serious offenders whose criminality is caused by an
affective defect, based in an organic brain deficit, and deserving of special
treatment within the justice system. In each historical period, the scientific
legitimacy of the theory provided a foundation on which a change in
practice and, by extension, policy was fashioned.

The Diagnostic Tool

The confluence of a problem, a crisis, and a theory about serious offenders
might influence debate, but to influence day-to-day practice it is necessary
to not only lead practitioners to the water but provide them with the cup
from which to drink it. Nothing succeeds in this task so well as a test.
Indeed, as Thomas Grisso, a member of our MacArthur Network and
expert on the forensic assessment of juveniles, has argued, we typically
think of practice as being driven by policy, but in many instances, the
reverse is true. As new assessment tools become widespread, changes in
practice made possible by the introduction of new measures or assessment
instruments often lead over time to changes in policy.

In the 1920s, the search to identify criminals with the affective defect of
dementia praecox was greatly facilitated by the availability of the
Binet-Simon intelligence test, whose use had become increasingly
widespread in the years following World War I. One would not think an
IQ test would be very helpful in the search for affectively defective
individuals, but in this case, necessity was the mother of misuse. Hickson,
eager to please the judge who had appointed him (a judge who firmly
believed that the menace of feeblemindedness was epidemic), to build his
own reputation as a theorist and diagnostician, and to promote the
Psychopathic Laboratory, began using the Binet, which had been designed
solely to measure certain aspects of intelligence for purposes of identifying
children who needed special educational programs, as a means of
identifying individuals with the affective defect presumed to underlie
intractable criminality. On the basis of individuals' scores on one subtest
of the Binet--a visual memory test-- Hickson and his colleagues made
diagnoses and recommendations to judges that were used to justify the
incarceration of certain offenders. These psychiatric workups were
especially important in cases involving juveniles and females because it
was in these cases that the courts were most interested in assessing the
amenability of the offender to rehabilitative intervention, which was
precisely what Hickson believed he could assess.[25]

All of the elements that led to interest in the diagnosis of dementia praecox
among juvenile offenders in the early decades of the 20th century- -the
problem of prediction, the perceived crisis of epidemic feeblemindedness
among inner-city youth, and the theory of organically based criminality--
were present in a more contemporary form at the end of the 20th century.
And just as the existence of a diagnostic tool (in the 1920s, the
Binet-Simon test of intelligence) concretized these elements into a practice
that influenced legal decisionmaking early in the 20th century, the
growing and, in some senses, well-founded popularity of the PCL as a
diagnostic instrument in assessments of adults more recently has made the
use of versions of the PCL (or adaptations of it designed for the
assessment of juveniles) all but inevitable in the evaluation of juvenile
offenders. Whether the use of these youth-friendly PCL instruments--now,
there's an oxymoron if there ever was one--for purposes of making transfer
decisions today is as problematic as was the use of the Binet-Simon
intelligence test for making commitment decisions 80 years ago is the
topic I turn to next.

The Utility of Juvenile Psychopathy Assessment

Using a measure based on a well-validated and reliable instrument
designed to assess psychopathy among adult offenders to perform a
similar task among juveniles is not the same sort of problem as using a test
of visual memory to diagnose intractable criminality. I am not suggesting
that researchers and practitioners who are using currently available
measures of psychopathy with juvenile populations are committing the
same sort of egregious mistakes that Hickson was making by using the
Binet to make diagnoses of affective defect. 

However, the translation of an instrument from one appropriate for use
with one age group to one appropriate for use with another is far from
worry free. The fact that a problem, a perceived crisis, and a theory about
juvenile offending encourage us to grab onto an available diagnostic
instrument should not make us ignore some very real dangers in doing so.
Until certain fundamental questions about the use of the PCL and
instruments derived from it are answered through systematic scientific
research, practitioners should not be using such measures in forensic
practice. Nonetheless, there is evidence that practitioners are using
PCL-derived instruments for making transfer, sentencing, and
decertification decisions, despite the cautions (some of them transparently
half-hearted) raised by some of the researchers who are heavily invested in
the use of these measures. 

In my view, there are three questions that we must answer before
encouraging courts to consider assessments of juvenile psychopathy in
making sentencing, transfer, and decertification decisions:

1. Do measures of psychopathy mean the same thing when used in
adolescent populations as they do when used in adult populations? This is
the question of construct validity.

2. Are scores on measures of psychopathy derived during adolescence
correlated with scores on measures of psychopathy derived during
adulthood? This is the question of stability.

3. Do scores on measures of psychopathy derived during adolescence
predict antisocial behavior and violence during adulthood? This is the
question of predictive utility.

Research by Elizabeth Cauffman and Jennifer Skeem is about to be
launched to examine these questions. When or until this work is
completed, if the answer to any of these questions is "We don't know," the
use of psychopathy assessments to make important decisions about
juvenile offenders is premature. If the answer to any of these questions is
"No," the use of psychopathy assessments to make important decisions
about juvenile offenders is bad--perhaps even unethical--practice. 

To look at these questions of construct validity, stability, and predictive
utility more closely, first consider the conceptualization and measurement
of psychopathy among adults. As noted earlier, the construct of
psychopathy is predicated on the notion that psychopathic individuals have
a deep-seated, unchanging pattern of personality and behavior that has its
roots in early experience and/or biology. The pattern is characterized by
two broad factors: callous, emotional detachment, which includes such
traits as grandiosity, manipulativeness, shallow affect, and failure to accept
responsibility for one's own actions; and an unstable antisocial lifestyle,
which includes such traits as impulsivity, irresponsibility, delinquency,
and proneness to boredom. Callous, antisocial individuals are presumed to
be at higher risk for continued antisocial behavior and violence.

Construct Validity

Let me begin with the question of construct validity. Do the indicators of
psychopathy when assessed in adolescence mean the same thing as they do
when assessed in adulthood? A different way of asking this is to ask
whether the correlates of psychopathy are the same during different
developmental periods. 

We know that it is not always the case that traits assessed at one point in
development have the same meaning as they do at a different point in
development. Consider, for example, an individual who refuses to
cooperate with other people. During early childhood, this may indicate
healthy independence; during adulthood, this may indicate selfishness or
antisocial behavior. Or consider this: Imagine that we separate a mother
from her child for 10 minutes and then we reunite them. Clinging behavior
in a young child indicates a strong and healthy attachment, which is
correlated with a variety of measures of positive functioning; the same
clinging behavior in an older child may indicate insecurity and would
likely be correlated with indicators of emotional and behavioral problems.

One worry I have about the assessment of psychopathy among adolescents
is that many behaviors we associate with normal adolescent development
are the same behaviors we associate with psychopathy in adults. To be
sure, some of the items used to judge psychopathy likely apply to younger
as well as older offenders. These include pathological lying,
manipulativeness, shallow affect, and poor anger control. For the most
part, I think that these constructs mean similar things when observed in an
adolescent as they do when observed in an adult. (The appropriateness of
these items in assessments of preadolescent children, where they may in
fact be problematic, is not addressed here.) 

But many items that are central to the definition of psychopathy among
adults may erroneously be viewed as indicators of psychopathy in an
adolescent population and confused with normative adolescent
development. These items include grandiosity, proneness to boredom, lack
of remorse or guilt, impersonal sexual behavior, goallessness, impulsivity,
irresponsibility, failure to accept responsibility for one's actions, and
unstable interpersonal relationships. I say this both as the parent of a
nonpsychopathic 16-year-old and the coinvestigator of a longitudinal
study that tracks serious juvenile offenders over time. Because my son
does not permit me to discuss our personal life in public (owing to the fact
that he is glib, grandiose, egocentric, and impulsive), I will comment only
on our experiences in the research.
 
The MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Adolescent
Development and Juvenile Justice, which I direct, is conducting a number
of studies aimed at understanding the ways in which information about
normal and atypical adolescent development can improve the quality of
decisionmaking concerning young offenders in the juvenile and criminal
justice systems. Among these projects is a large-scale study of adolescents'
competence to stand trial, a comparison of the impact of juvenile versus
adult sanctions on serious offenders, several studies of the ways in which
adults judge adolescents' criminal culpability and blameworthiness,
research on legal socialization (how young people acquire attitudes about
the law), and a longitudinal study of "pathways to desistance." (More
information about the Network and its projects is available on our Web
site, www.mac-adoldev-juvjustice.org.)

In our study of pathways to desistance, we are tracking 1,200 juvenile
felons in Philadelphia and Phoenix to understand how they are affected by
their experiences in the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Among the
measures of individual functioning we use in this study is the Youth
Version of the Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-YV), which is considered the
state of the art in the assessment of psychopathy among adolescents. At
our site in Philadelphia, we struggle often over how to interpret the
behavior of the 14- to 17-year-olds in our sample in light of the items that
compose the PCL-YV. Does a 14-year-old who blames his friends for
dragging him into a robbery qualify for a rating of failing to accept
responsibility for his actions, or is he accurately describing a heightened
susceptibility to peer pressure that is characteristic of teenagers at this age?
Is a 15-year-old who does not know what he wants to do with his life
goalless, or is this indicative of an individual in the midst of an adolescent
identity crisis? Is a 16-year-old who has a new girlfriend every other week
someone who has unstable interpersonal relationships, or is he merely
trying to figure out who he is and what he wants in a romantic partner? Is a
17-year-old who believes that he can drive while high grandiose or
suffering from adolescent egocentrism?

Even Cleckley, whose groundbreaking description of the psychopathic
personality formed the basis for the PCL worried about this: 

Confused manifestations of revolt or self-expression are, as everyone
knows, more likely to produce unacceptable behavior during childhood
and adolescence than in adult life. Sometimes persistent traits and
tendencies of this sort and inadequate emotional responses indicate the
picture of the psychopath early in his career. Sometimes, however, the
child or the adolescent will for a while behave in a way that would seem
scarcely possible to anyone but the true psychopath and later change,
becoming a normal and useful member of society. Such cases put a serious
responsibility on the psychiatrist.[26]

In the same way that Moffitt[27] argues that we cannot distinguish
between adolescence-limited offenders and life-course persistent offenders
by observing them only during adolescence, because their observable
behavior may be identical, I wonder whether we can distinguish between
psychopathic and nonpsychopathic teenagers on the basis of their scores
on the PCL. The problem is that some items on the PCL describe
characteristics that, while potentially indicative of problems among adults,
may indicate normative development (or at least development within the
normative range) among adolescents--transitory characteristics that
disappear in most individuals by young adulthood. However, by
definition, psychopathy is not something that individuals grow out of.
Which brings me to the issue of stability.

Stability

Assertions about the presence of psychopathy among the young are
necessarily based on the presumption that scores on measures of
psychopathy are stable over time. To my knowledge, we do not really
know if this is true among adults, but the fact that we do not have data at
all on the stability of PCL scores among juvenile offenders over time is
particularly problematic, since adolescence is inherently a time of change.
I should note that the DSM does not permit the diagnosis of antisocial
personality disorder, the closest diagnosis in the psychiatric lexicon to
psychopathy, among individuals under the age of 18. It is not clear why
the diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder among adolescents is
problematic but the diagnosis of psychopathy is not.

Furthermore, it is not simply that psychopathy is presumed to be stable
over time; it is also presumed to be resistant to change. Unfortunately, the
stability of traits over time is generally studied under constant contextual
conditions. Assertions that aggression or impulsivity or antisocial behavior
are stable traits are generally derived from longitudinal studies that do not
consider whether the individual's social environment remained unchanged
during the same time period. For obvious reasons, indicators of stability
under constant conditions may not provide accurate estimates of stability
under changing conditions. Therefore, saying something is stable under
natural conditions (i.e., if nothing else changes) is not the same as saying it
is immutable. To research this, we need more than studies that simply
measure psychopathy at two points in time. Before we use assessments of
adolescent psychopathy to draw inferences about the amenability of young
offenders to rehabilitation, we need experiments that assign putative
juvenile psychopaths to treatment and attempt to change them. We have
some evidence that this is difficult to do in adults, but no evidence either
way in adolescents.

Predictive Utility

My final worry concerns the predictive utility of the PCL in juvenile
populations. The question is whether scores on the PCL that are derived
during adolescence are predictive of antisocial or violent behavior in
adulthood. At first glance, this appears to be the easiest of the three
questions to answer, because it requires only that we assess psychopathy
during adolescence and antisocial or violent behavior during adulthood
and see if the first predicts the second. Indeed, at least one team of
researchers has done this, and the results indicate that adolescents' scores
on the PCL are predictive of the number of times they are convicted for
violent offenses before age 21.[28] It is not quite so simple, however, to
judge the predictive utility of the psychopathy assessments.

The reason for this difficulty inheres in the two-factor structure of the
PCL. (Factor I refers to the emotional and interpersonal aspects of
psychopathy and Factor II refers to the antisocial aspects of psychopathy.)
We know from a vast literature on antisocial behavior that the single best
predictor of future antisocial behavior is past antisocial behavior and that
the single best predictor of future violence is past violence. At issue here,
then, is whether psychopathy in adolescence per se is an especially good
predictor of future antisocial or violent behavior. Demonstrating that
individuals who have offended in the past are at greater risk of offending
in the future is not exactly the stuff that Nobel Prizes are made of. To the
extent that the predictive utility of the PCL or any other measure of
psychopathy inheres solely in the well-established link between past and
future antisocial behavior, we might as well just assess past antisocial
behavior and forget about trying to distinguish between psychopathic and
nonpsychopathic individuals. And if this is the case, high scores on the
PCL tell us nothing about individual amenability, which is the sort of
inference that is being drawn from the PCL. Another way of thinking
about this is to ask whether there is any "value added" to be gained by
assessing the elements of psychopathy that are not indicators of current or
prior antisocial behavior, such as those items that make up the factor
defined by callous, emotional detachment.

Unfortunately, extant research does not provide a clear-cut answer to this
question. Although the connections between current psychopathy and later
offending are real, the links are due largely to the predictive significance
of the antisocial factor, which demonstrates what we know all too well:
that earlier offending is predictive of later offending. In samples of adults,
the links between the non-antisocial variables--grandiosity, glibness,
shallow affect, and so on--and subsequent offending are statistically
significant but very modest in size.[29] Before we can recommend the use
of psychopathy assessments in dispositional decisionmaking regarding
juveniles--especially in dispositional decisionmaking that is based on
assumptions about amenability--we need more research that looks
specifically within the adolescent population at the predictive utility of
those elements of psychopathy that are not themselves indicators of
current antisocial behavior. Questions about the stability and predictive
utility of the PCL and related measures can be answered with
well-designed longitudinal studies. Although we do not have such research
yet and, although such studies are time-consuming and expensive to
conduct, they are clearly within the realm of scientific possibility. 

In closing, I want to return to what I think is the most difficult of the three
questions I raised: whether high scores on the PCL during adolescence
indicate genuine psychopathy or something that is less worrisome.

Many years ago, Anna Freud, the pre-eminent psychoanalytic theorist
interested in adolescence, wrote what now is considered to be a classic
article, "Adolescence as a Developmental Disturbance."[30] Although few
experts in adolescent development continue to hold the view that we
should see the period as one of temporary insanity, at least some of what
Freud implied in this article is worth heeding. Many behaviors that
adolescents engage in are behaviors that, if demonstrated by an adult,
would indeed be indicative of psychopathology, if not necessarily
psychopathy. Psychopathy is, by definition, not something that individuals
grow out of. Adolescence, by definition, is. It is important that we do not
confuse one with the other.

Question-and-Answer Session

Jenni Gainsborough, Senior Policy Analyst, The Sentencing Project,
Washington, D.C.: I actually have three quick questions about the way the
PCL is being used. First of all, is the PCL being widely used to decide
whether juveniles should be transferred into the adult system? Second, you
talked about a youth version of it; does the youth version take into account
the specific characteristics of adolescence that are problematic? And third,
we know that a lot of the fear about "superpredators" was racially based,
and also we know that an extraordinarily high percentage of juveniles
being transferred into the adult system are African-Americans; do these
tools look at racial differences in any way?

L.S.: Yes, no, and no. First, the PCL is being very widely used in Canada
now. Robert Hare and his associates are Canadian and the popularity of
the instrument has always been greater north of the border. It is becoming
more widely used in the United States. No one has any data on this; but I
receive calls regularly from public defenders asking if, in fact, this is a
valid test. As to the second question, the attributes characteristic of normal
adolescent development are identical to the youth version of the PCL
(exhibit 1). The translation of the adult version to the youth version simply
substituted words like "relationships" for "marriage" or minimized the
importance of "work" and substituted "long-term goals." It is virtually the
same instrument. 

The third question on race is a very important one. Some studies suggest
that the instrument performs differently among African-American and
white offenders in adult samples. That is to say that it is somewhat less
useful in studies of African-Americans than in studies of white offenders.
We do not know the answer to this question for the juvenile version. It has
not been studied to my knowledge.

Devon Brown, Deputy Trustee, Office of the Corrections Trustee of the
District of Columbia, Washington, D.C.: The PCL is being used here in
this country. In fact, just north of our border at the Patuxent Institution, its
use is widespread. But my comment has to do with Robert Hare. The
strength of his instrument, when applied to adults, is also its weakness
when used with juveniles. Hare argues that sociopathy is due to a
developmental lag. In both his manual and his research findings, he bases
that instrument on this theory--that the characteristics (as you point out)
are typical of adolescent behavior. It's just that they are demonstrated
within an adult population. So in terms of your presentation, you need to
be aware of that.

L.S.: Thank you. Then I find it very curious that Hare is one of the
coauthors of the youth version of the Psychopathy Checklist and is one of
the team that is marketing it as a measure that can be used with juveniles.
Either he has changed his theory or he is doing something that is
inconsistent with what he has written. 

Lisa Greenman, Staff Attorney, Mental Health Division, Public Defender
Service, Washington, D.C.: I wanted to ask you to comment on two things
that you have mentioned during your talk. One has to do with the
extraordinary nature of the marketing of these instruments. And actually
the last question reminds me that in addition to the youth version there is
now a Hare P-Scan version. I would like to hear more about the very
aggressive marketing. My other question has to do with the significance of
a very high false positive rate in the use of the PCL-R with adults, which
is where it makes its strongest showing. I know some of your colleagues
like Ed Mulvey have described it as the strongest in a field of weaklings. I
wondered if you could expand on this subject. My first exposure to the
construct of psychopathy and the use of the PCL-R for predicting future
violence was in death penalty cases, where prosecutors were arguing that
high PCL scores should be used by a jury to sentence an individual to
death rather than to life without parole. In that context, I learned that the
false positive rate (among people who were high scorers on the PCL) was,
in many studies, shown to be less effective than a coin toss in predicting
future violence. In some studies it was slightly more than 50 percent
effective. But the false positive rate was right around 50 percent and
sometimes even greater. I would like you to comment on the rate of false
positives and how it affects your recommendations on how much courts
should rely on this instrument in a forensic context. 

L.S.: First, there are, in fact, other measures being marketed for use in
identifying juvenile psychopaths, some of which their creators market as
usable with people as young as 10. These are sometimes questionnaire
versions of a lengthy clinical interview administered to the respondent
either directly or through parents or teachers. I think that if you look into
this, you would find that the individuals who are developing these
measures give--as I noted in my talk--a kind of half-hearted caution that
these measures should be used for research purposes only but, at the same
time, urge practitioners to "send your check to this company and we will
gladly send you the measure." What happens next is that the measures find
their way into the hands of practitioners who may or may not read the fine
print that this is a research tool and not a proven clinical instrument. They
then use it to make a diagnosis; they present it in court to a judge who
doesn't know, and perhaps shouldn't be expected to know, the difference
between a research instrument that is still in development and a diagnostic
tool that has clinical validity. I think that if the people who were
developing these instruments were in the room they would argue that there
is a caution on the cover of their instrument that states it is a research tool.
But nevertheless, by selling it to other individuals they are leaving open a
very, very wide door for prosecutors and other legal practitioners to walk
through. 

As to the problem of false positives, as I mentioned before, it depends on
what you do when somebody scores positively. Any instrument that
measures anything, even forecasting the weather, will have false positives
associated with it. If the danger of a wrong forecast is that you carry your
umbrella to work when you didn't need to, then that false positive is not
especially problematic. If the danger of a false positive in the PCL
assessment is that we are going to want to further assess this individual
because we think he might be psychopathic, then I can live with a 50
percent false positive rate. If the danger of a false positive assessment is
that the person gets a capital sentence, then I can't live with a 50 percent
false positive rate. So, I think you can't separate questions about whether
the false positive rate is high or low without asking what the consequences
of a false positive assessment will be. I have argued the same point about
the increasing use of Mosaic and other kinds of profiling programs to
identify at-risk kids in schools because these assessments also have
tremendously high false positive rates. The issue really is, what are we
going to do with a kid who is rated at risk for violence? If the consequence
of that assessment is suspension from school, that false positive rate is not
acceptable. If the consequence is to talk to this kid a little more and learn a
little more about him, then I can live with a false positive rate. So I think
that the answer is: Yes, the PCL is the strongest measure in a field of
"weaklings"--we are very bad at predicting violent behavior. But people
need and want to make predictions and this is the best tool currently out
there.

Robert Stephenson, Director, Division of Workplace Programs, Center for
Substance Abuse Prevention, U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services, Washington, D.C.: You had not identified substance use or abuse
as any one specific measure in your discussion. Could you briefly discuss
the relationship of substance use or abuse in the PCL and pyschopathy,
both in a youth version and an adult perspective? And are there any
specific drugs or patterns of use that might be more predictive than others?

L.S.: Drug use, in and of itself, is not an item that is used to predict
psychopathy. There is an item on the list, you may recall, for juvenile
delinquency (and in the adult version for past criminality) and drug use,
particularly criminal drug use. I am not aware of any research that
suggests that either drug use in general or the use of specific drugs is
indicative of psychopathy. We do know, of course, that individuals who
use and abuse drugs and alcohol are more likely to be involved in a range
of antisocial activities. But to my knowledge it does not make them at
heightened risk for psychopathy. 

Joanne Wiggins, Program Analyst, Planning and Evaluation Service, U.S.
Department of Education, Washington, D.C.: You mentioned racial
differences in the use of the instrument. Can you say something about
differences between males and females?

L.S.: There are very, very few females who score high on the PCL. It's not
a completely male disorder, but it is not very often found among females
and, to my knowledge, I don't know any studies that would allow us to
really make a statement about its differential utility in males and females.

I was asked to comment on what judges ought to rely on if they can't rely
on this assessment tool. I think that individualized assessments of serious
juvenile offenders--assessments done by skilled, developmentally sensitive
forensic and clinical evaluators--can be very useful in helping judges
formulate appropriate dispositions or sentences for juvenile offenders. But
there is a danger when we begin to rely on standardized instruments that
may become widely used in practice by individuals who don't have a great
deal of training and who simply will turn over a score to a judge and say,
"This person scored a 32; therefore, he is a psychopath." I certainly believe
that psychology and psychiatry should play a role in helping courts
formulate sentencing and dispositional decisions; I just worry that handing
out a test and using people's scores on a test that has unproven validity in
this population is not wise practice.

Denise M. Juliano-Bult, Chief, Systems Research Program, Services
Research and Clinical Epidemiology Branch, National Institute of Mental
Health, Washington, D.C.: Could you say anything briefly about inroads
to effective treatment for adolescents who do score high on the PCL?

L.S.: I don't think we know anything about it. You know there have been
literally a handful of studies of kids who scored high on the PCL. To my
knowledge, there has never been a study done that has looked at
interventions designed for kids with high PCL scores to see how that
affects their behavior. My point, today, is not to provide definitive answers
about this, but to raise cautions and questions about a practice that is just
beginning to burgeon, but one that I think we need to be thoughtful about.

Barbara T. Roberts, Senior Policy Analyst, Office of National Drug
Control Policy, Washington, D.C.: You mentioned cautioning people
against looking at a score and making certain cursory diagnostic
determinations. What ethical responsibilities do you think should be
imposed on people who may be in the field and still purport to make such
recommendations? How do you propose to curb that? 

L.S.: Well, I guess for starters, I don't think it's wise to be distributing--in
fact selling-- unvalidated instruments. Assessing psychopathy in juveniles
may or may not turn out to be useful. I am not saying here today that I am
certain it is not useful; I am saying we simply don't know. We need the
kind of longitudinal research that I discussed earlier to look at how this
tracks over time, to look at what it predicts, to look at how stable it is,
before we move from research into practice. The fact that it is being used
in practice now indicates to me that the individuals who developed these
measures are not being appropriately cautious.

Notes

1. I am grateful to Elizabeth Cauffman, Thomas Grisso, Daniel Seagrave,
and Jennifer Skeem for graciously making available to me prepublication
drafts of manuscripts on closely related topics. I draw heavily on their
insightful analyses here. Thanks as well to Elizabeth Cauffman, John
Monahan, and Jennifer Skeem for their comments on an earlier draft of
this paper.

2. Edens, J., J. Skeem, K. Cruise, and E. Cauffman, "The Assessment of
Juvenile Psychopathy and Its Association With Violence: A Critical
Review," Behavioral Sciences & the Law 18 (2000).

3. Poythress, N., J. Skeem, S. Lilienfeld, and J. Edens, "Personality
Features and Antisocial Behavior," unpublished NIMH grant proposal,
2000.  

4. Ibid.

5. Harris, G.T., T.A. Skilling, and M.E. Rice, "The Construct of
Psychopathy. Crime and Justice: An Annual Review of Research,"
unpublished manuscript, 2000.

 6. Cooke, D.J., and C. Michie, "Refining the Construct of Psychopathy:
Towards a Hierarchical Model," Psychological Assessment 13(2) (2001).

7. Hemphill, J.F., R.D. Hare, and S. Wong, "Psychopathy and Recidivism:
A Review," Legal and Criminological Psychology 3 (1998): 139-170.

8. Edens, et al., 2000. See note 2.

9. Steadman, H., E. Silver, J. Monahan, P. Appelbaum, P. Robbins, E.
Mulvey, T. Grisso, L. Roth, and S. Banks, "A Classification Tree
Approach to the Development of Actuarial Violence Risk Assessment
Tools," Law and Human Behavior 24 (2000): 83-100.

10. Monahan, J., The Clinical Prediction of Violent Behavior,
Washington, DC: National Institute of Mental Health, 1981.

11. Willrich, M., "The Two Percent Solution: Eugenic Jurisprudence and
the Socialization of American Law, 1900-1930," Law and History Review
16 (1998): 63-111.

12. Ibid, 82.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid, 82.

15. Bennett, W., J. DiIulio, and J. Walters, Body Count, New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1996.

16. DiIulio, J., "The Coming of the Super-predators," Weekly Standard
(November 27, 1995): 23.

17. Willrich, 90. See note 11.

18. Willrich, 89. See note 11.

19. Maughs, S., "A Concept of Psychopathy and Psychopathic Personality:
Its Evolution and Historical Development: Part I," Journal of Criminal
Psychopathology 2(2) (1941a): 329-356; Maughs, S., "A Concept of
Psychopathy and Psychopathic Personality: Its Evolution and Historical
Development: Part II," Journal of Criminal Psychopathology 2(3) (1941b):
465-499.

20. Moffitt, T. E., "Adolescence-limited and Life-course-persistent
Antisocial Behavior: A Developmental Taxonomy," Psychological
Review 100 (1993): 674-701.

21. Newman, J., "Psychopathic Behavior: An Information Processing
Perspective," In D. J. Cooke, A. E. Forth, and R. D. Hare, eds,
Psychopathy: Theory, Research, and Implications for Society, Dordrecht,
The Netherlands: Kluwer (1998): 1-11.

22. Frick, P., Conduct Disorders and Severe Antisocial Behavior, New
York: Plenum, 1998.

23. Raine, A., and J.H. Liu, "Biological Predispositions to Violence and
Their Implications for Biosocial Treatment and Prevention," Psychology,
Crime and Law 4 (1998): 107-125.

24. Hare, R. D., "Performance of Psychopaths on Cognitive Tasks Related
to Frontal Lobe Functions," Journal of Abnormal Psychology 93 (1984):
133-140. 

25. Willrich.

26. Cleckley, H., The Mask of Sanity (5th edition), St Louis: Mosby,
1976. 

27. Moffitt, T.E. See note 20.

28. Forth, A., and H. Burke, "Psychopathy in Adolescence: Assessment,
Violence and Developmental Precursors," In D. Cooke, et al., eds,
Psychopathy: Theory, Research and Implications for Society, Boston:
Kluwer Academic (1998): 205-229.

29. Skeem, J., and E. Mulvey, "Psychopathy and Community Violence
Among Civil Psychiatric Patients: Results From the MacArthur Violence
Risk Assessment Study," unpublished manuscript, Law and Psychiatry
Program, University of Pittsburgh, 2001.

30. Freud, A., "Adolescence as a Developmental Disturbance," Writings 7
(1969): 39-47.Kluwer: 1- 11.

-------------------

Violence Prevention 101: Implications for Policy Development

Presentation by
Carl C. Bell 
President/C.E.O. 
Community Mental Health Council, Inc. 
Director of Public and Community Psychiatry 
Professor of Psychiatry and Public Health 
University of Illinois 

April 20, 2001
Washington, D.C.

Violence Prevention 101: Implications for Policy
Development

Violence prevention rests on some basic principles that support systemic
changes in health behavior. The discussion focuses on two basic premises
of violence prevention that can inform public policy. The presentation
begins with a broad look at violence within a variety of social sectors and
age ranges. It then narrows the discussion to an examination of the school
age population, which reflects how early implementation of violence
prevention principles among these age groups can have a dramatic effect
not only on violence reduction, but also in very real terms on individual
outcomes.

The first premise of violence prevention, often overlooked by practitioners
when they design violence prevention programs across age and
ethnic/racial groups, is that there are different types of violence (see
"Types of Violence"), and each type requires different prevention,
intervention, and followup strategies.[1]

A second premise, similarly neglected, is that different racial/ethnic
groups experience different types of violence at different rates, and each
calls for different prevention strategies. The following comparisons
exemplify these different rates. Most murder cases involve a victim and
offender of the same race or ethnicity. Among groups, homicide rates for
African-Americans are 6 times and Latino rates are 2.3 times the Native
American, Asian-American, and white rates of homicide. Other crime
categories also reflect differences. The difference in violence rates
between African-Americans and whites reflects the vast differences in
poverty and social infrastruture between these two groups.[2] 

In other violence comparisons among groups, interpersonal altercation and
domestic homicide are major forms of violence in the African-American
community. But because battered women now can rely on support from
women's shelters to escape their batterers, the rate of homicide of
African-American men by African-American women no longer exceeds
that of African-American women by African-American men.[3]

Gang-related violence is prevalent in the Latino community. Street
violence is also common among Latinos: gun violence predominates, but
knifings also are common.[4] Compared with other groups, however,
Latino men are less likely to perpetrate domestic homicide. Interpersonal
altercation is also common in the Native American community. Forty
percent of Native American murder victims are killed by non-Native
American offenders, and in 33 percent of the cases, the offender was
white.[5] 

Suicide is a major form of violence in the white community. Whites
represent most of the offenders motivated by anger or revenge, and in
domestic- or romantic-related mass murders in which the offender also
kills himself.[6] In anger/revenge mass murders in which specific persons
were targeted, 66.5 percent of the perpetrators were white and 66.7 percent
of these perpetrators attempted suicide. In anger/revenge mass murders in
which a specific place was targeted, 76.5 percent of the perpetrators were
white and 38.9 percent of perpetrators attempted suicide. In similar mass
murders with diffuse targets, 80 percent of perpetrators were white and 30
percent of perpetrators attempted suicide. In domestic/romantic-related
mass murder, 57.1 percent of the perpetrators were white and 28.6 percent
attempted suicide. 

Research shows that among adolescents, suicide is extremely rare for
those who lack a major mental disorder.[7] Research has also shown that
mass media coverage of suicide may trigger copycat behavior in
vulnerable adolescents who have major mental disorders.[8] 

In summary, if we are serious about effecting policy decisions concerned
with violence prevention and systemic changes surrounding public health,
two premises must be taken into account when designing violence
prevention programs: 1) There are different types of violence, and 2)
violence rates and prevention vary by ethnic groups. Once we have
addressed these fundamental premises, we must cast a sufficiently wide
net that incorporates certain principles that are not always closely linked to
violence prevention.

Violence Prevention Principles 

The basic principles of violence prevention as I see them are-- 

--Rebuilding the village. 

--Providing access to health care. 

--Improving bonding, attachment, and connectedness dynamics.

--Improving self-esteem. 

--Increasing social skills. 

--Reestablishing the adult protective shield. 

--Minimizing the residual effects of trauma. 

These principles are interdependent and are key guiding principles for
effecting large, systemic changes in health behavior.[9]

Rebuilding the Village

Social disorganization theories of deviance suggest that poverty, lack of
job opportunities, single-head households, isolation from neighbors, and
weakened community networks and institutions lead to reduced informal
and formal social control,[10] which, in turn, promotes violence. Research
demonstrates that communities need protective factors, such as an
infrastructure and social fabric, to deliver effective public health
interventions. Unfortunately, communities have varying levels of these
protective factors.[11] In communities where they are lacking, a facilitator
might be needed to help create community partnerships.[12] For example,
evidence indicates that school-based interventions that shift how high-risk
children are managed--by increasing parental involvement in school and
collaboration with school personnel--can reduce risk, particularly for
in-school violence.[13] Another violence prevention strategy for child and
adolescent populations might be to pair schools with community-based
secular and faith-based organizations to develop activities to reduce
violent and disruptive behavior by and against youths in the schools and
surrounding communities. By emphasizing a shared vision among
cooperating groups, a facilitator can encourage a mission-driven
philosophy that transcends the goals of individual agencies in favor of a
more overarching vision. This can be accomplished by emphasizing the
interdependency among diverse elements in a community, encouraging
affiliation among these elements, promoting development of "systems"
thinking, and providing leadership to community organizations--religious,
business, social service, health, educational, civic, and social--to enable
them to synergize their efforts to promote healthy development of youth. 

Several examples of the "rebuilding the village" concept are occurring in
Chicago. One of these is the Community Mental Health
Council/University of Illinois/Juvenile Court Juvenile Delinquent
Assessment Program, which provides forensic assessments of youths in
juvenile court. It will also provide the foundation for collaboration among
three African-American and three Latino community-based organizations
so that needed services will be available to youths and their families upon
release from court custody. Over a 3-year period, a coalition composed of
the Chicago Crime Commission, the University of Illinois, the Chicago
Police Department, Chicago Public Schools, the Community Mental
Health Council, the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services,
Allstate Insurance Company, and community leaders led to development
of the Chicago Crime Commission Community Youth Program.
Additionally, there are plans for a behavior disorders clinic at the
University of Illinois that will share a child psychiatrist with the
Community Mental Health Council and address clinical needs of children
identified by the previous collaboration. Through collaborations to assess
the nature and size of the violence problem, these institutions are better
able to facilitate "rebuild the village" efforts. These initial
accomplishments convinced involved organizations that to effect positive
change, they needed to work together to maximize their pooled resources.

Providing Access to Health Care

The second principle involves raising awareness among healthcare
professionals of factors that affect individual health, particularly their
mental health. A better understanding of the many factors affecting health
can improve diagnoses, reduce gaps in delivery of services, and make
management of treatment strategies more appropriate. The following
examples underscore the value of more comprehensive medical screening
for determining the causal links between health and behavior. Research
supports, for example, the hypothesis that neuropsychiatric disorders
among adolescents and children may predispose individuals to violence;
specifically, neurophysiological brain impairments acquired since birth,
i.e., not genetic biology, can lead to difficulty in bonding/attachment, poor
social skills, and lack of impulse control. Environmental factors may also
create physiologic responses that influence behavior. Research, for
example, indicates that children with high levels of exposure to lead may
be predisposed to violence.[14]

Among male juvenile delinquents, at least one-third have an impairing
mental disorder, aside from conduct disorder, that has not been adequately
treated. Many of these children are also substance abusers. Two of the
more common mental disorders for this group--ADHD and depression--are
treatable. Children with conduct disorders--with and without
accompanying ADHD--also can be adequately treated with
medication.[15] As seen by these examples, timely and proper diagnosis
and treatment programs are critical to improve overall health and
individual outcomes in a variety of areas such as school.

Juvenile offenders may also be at high risk for exposure to multiple types
of trauma as a result, for example, of family and peer relationships and
prone, therefore, to the development of post-traumatic stress disorder
(PTSD). One study found the prevalence rate of such disorders among
juvenile offenders to be 24 percent.[16] 

Virtually all suicide studies reveal that suicide victims in Western societies
suffer from depression, psychosis, or substance abuse,[17] but determining
who among depressed individuals may be in danger of suicide is
extremely difficult and challenges prevention strategies. Evidence in
Sweden, however, shows that the development of new medications has
created safer treatment of depression. Advancements in medications have
encouraged many individuals diagnosed with depression who had
formerly avoided treatment to seek help. As a result, treatment for
depression has inadvertently, but significantly, decreased the suicide rate
among the general population in that country.[18]

Across age groups, as neuropsychiatry becomes more sophisticated,
psychiatric diagnosis and treatment of some causes of violent behaviors
will become more specific. Without the infrastructure to provide these
more sophisticated services, however, communities with the greatest need
for violence prevention programs will be the last to receive appropriate
health care that could prevent some of the antecedents of violent behavior. 

Improving Bonding, Attachment, and Connectedness Dynamics

Low levels of parental warmth, acceptance, and affection; low levels of
family cohesion; and high levels of family conflict and hostility have been
associated with delinquent and violent behavior among juveniles.[19] By
paying attention to the attributes of the family--its beliefs and values,
emotional warmth, support, and organization-- communication strategies
can be developed within the family to strengthen it.[20] Providing early
intervention programs for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers and their
parents can teach both parents and their children the skills to enhance their
sense of personal mastery and encourages strong intra-family attachments.
Such attachments have been shown to reduce the risk of serious antisocial
behavior and violence.[21] Helping parents bond with their infants may
seem a far cry from violence prevention, but enabling infants to grow up
with basic trust and security provides the groundwork for future stable
relationships that may be necessary to prevent violence or intervene in
violence.[22]

The Chicago public schools' Cradle to Classroom program is one example
of a successful bonding and attachment strategy. In Chicago, 26 percent of
white, 31 percent of Hispanic, and 34 percent of African-American
females reported pregnancy as a reason for dropping out of school.
Chicago's public school leadership decided to support rather than ostracize
teens who had children. By creating a collaborative initiative with the
Chicago Department of Public Health, six hospitals, and other agencies for
pregnant and parenting teens, the school system developed a system to
train teens in essential parenting skills and teach them how to access
community resources. Cradles to Classroom also provides counseling to
new mothers about domestic violence and provides guidance to teens
regarding access to prenatal, nutritional, medical, social, and child care
services. The program has had a significant impact on the dropout rate of
participating teens. 

Findings from a longitudinal study on adolescent health have underscored
the importance to youths of being connected to family and
community.[23] This study noted that parent connectedness; parent/school
expectations; school variables; and an individual's history of victimization,
witnessing violence, weapon carrying, and perceived risk of untimely
death are all related to such harmful behaviors as violence, drug use, and
suicide. Forms of family connectedness, including extended family
relationships, may be viewed as viable protective factors that mediate
against various types of risk-taking behaviors. 

Improving Self-Esteem

In his work with elementary and middle school students, Bean[24] notes
that self-esteem is related to the following four domains:  

--A sense of power related to feeling competent to make decisions and
solve problems. 

--A sense of uniqueness that comes from acknowledging and respecting
the qualities and characteristics about oneself that are special and different. 

--A sense of role models that individuals can use to make sense of the
world.

--A sense of belonging that derives from being connected to people,
places, or things.

By providing youths with opportunities to identify, embrace, and actualize
these four factors, their self-esteem will increase, minimizing the hurt that
is so frequently at the basis of violence.   The Chicago public schools have
tried to create opportunities to build children's self-esteem by focusing on
these four areas. Currently, to graduate from high school in Chicago, a
teen must perform 40 hours of service learning. Such experiences help to
transform learned helplessness into competence, thus increasing a youth's
sense of power. The Chicago public schools are also improving the
academic performance of all students by holding students, teachers,
administrators, and schools accountable through learning outcome
standards and staff development. By developing lesson plans consistent
with the standards and establishing a rigorous high school core curriculum,
junior and senior high school academies, advisories (systems in which
youth receive career advice), and the school system can enhance students'
sense of power. In Chicago, the international baccalaureate program has
been extended to 13 high schools and the Chicago public schools have
established 6 regional high schools with academic entrance criteria, as
well as collaborated with area colleges and universities to provide college
courses for motivated and able students. Clearly, such activities increase
students' sense of mastery. In addition, the school system is providing
individualized learning strategies and tutoring services for students with
academic difficulty, as well as establishing smaller class sizes and
specialized curricula for retained students and transition centers for
retained students of high school age.

The Chicago public school system is also providing youths with
opportunities to explore their unique talents. Chicago is attempting to
acknowledge and respect the qualities and characteristics of youths by
making available an array of enrichment activities for students to be
involved in. Accordingly, the system is strengthening its academic, trade,
military, mentoring, and sports opportunities for youths. 

By constructing a school curriculum that emphasizes information and
practice on how youths may avoid or prevent violence, Chicago is
exposing youths to positive models that will allow them to develop
prosocial values. The Chicago public schools Character Education pre-K
to 12th-grade curriculum provides educational strategies for strengthening
and supporting positive character development and teaches students
conflict resolution skills. The objectives of this initiative are to reduce
racial, ethnic, and religious intolerance through education and to provide
youths with models on how to communicate, solve problems, plan,
develop leadership skills, manage resources, and remove barriers to
success. Being involved in constructive activities helps youths develop
social skills and self-esteem and helps to reduce their engagement in risky
behaviors.[25] Finally, helping youths develop a sense of connectedness
provides opportunities that encourage attachment to valued people, places,
and activities. 

Increasing Social Skills

Many successful family interventions developed to prevent violence have
combined parent behavioral training techniques with other interventions
based on family systems theory.[26] This type of training, which teaches
parents how to use positive parenting skills and avoid harsh discipline, has
been shown to reduce violence. Educating parents about the importance of
supervising and monitoring their children, becoming more involved in
their children's lives, and increasing their knowledge of their children's
activities and whereabouts can also reduce the possibility of violence.  

Providing youths with opportunities to serve their community, resolve
disputes peacefully, and develop leadership skills that will enable them to
promote healthy alternatives to violence will decrease tendencies to resort
to violence in a variety of circumstances.[27] The Chicago public schools'
Peer Leaders program teaches elementary and high school students peer
mediation, conflict resolution, and anger management skills; 125
elementary schools, 65 high schools, and approximately 2,700 students
participated in this program in 1997-98. Chicago's Young Negotiators
program has been instituted in 25 schools. Approximately 500 students
participated in the program in 1998-99. The Peer Mediation program uses
peers to teach students how to manage conflict and disagreements
effectively without resorting to violence and other forms of aggressive and
antisocial behavior. Today, 20 Chicago high schools are participating in
this rapidly spreading program. 

The Chicago public school system also initiated the School Climate Team,
which assists in the development of safety plans that schools include in
their improvement plans. Such programs cooperate with school crisis
intervention teams, interfaith/school social support partnerships, and
school and community relations staff to assist in school crises. The Boys'
Town Educational Model provides a social/life skills curriculum training
model that provides intervention strategies to school personnel. Four
elementary and two high schools participate in this demonstration project.
Chicago's Behavior Management Training program trains teachers and
support staff in techniques to help students modify their disruptive and
aggressive behavior and acquire self-control and socially proactive
behavior. Staff in 412 elementary and 67 high schools have received
training. Teachers who need to improve their behavior management skills
when dealing with violent and hostile behavior are offered proactive
support from specialists through the school system's Behavior Intervention
teachers' program. These specialists also assist school personnel in
developing individual behavior management plans for students.[28] 

Training and programs such as the ones discussed here have done much to
curtail the incidence of aggressive behavior and violence for youths, their
families, schools, and communities.

Reestablishing the Adult Protective Shield

Research demonstrates the need and value for positive adult role models
and involvement in the lives of youths. Many studies link adolescent
participation in delinquent and violent behavior with lack of parental
monitoring--represented at its extreme by neglect and conflict-ridden or
poor discipline.[29] By increasing the predictability of parenting and the
level of parental monitoring of children, and by decreasing negative
parenting methods, violent tendencies among children can be averted.

In a similar manner, if schools strictly enforce disciplinary rules and
provide a safety net of educational opportunities for youths who have been
expelled or have violated probation or have committed first-time,
nonviolent serious offenses, the result can be decreased violence. The
Chicago public schools have instituted a zero-tolerance policy for violence
and have a uniform discipline code in place that establishes consequences
for student misconduct. Students found to possess illegal drugs, firearms,
or other dangerous weapons receive immediate consequences, including
expulsion and referral to an alternative school. Chicago public schools'
Alternative Safe Schools program has 6 alternative school sites available
for 300 students who have been expelled from school or referred for
chronically disruptive behavior. Smaller class sizes and support services
are provided for each student through individual learning plans within the
program. SMART (Saturday Morning Alternative Reach out and Teach)
mandates that first-time drug or alcohol offenders take a curriculum that
focuses on character education, leadership development, conflict
resolution training, gang prevention and detachment, and substance abuse
counseling. SMART program students must meet on eight consecutive
Saturdays, two with their parents. Each student is provided with a mentor
and is expected to perform 20 hours of community service. Students who
do not successfully complete the program are referred for expulsion.
Chicago's Jump-Start program operates in collaboration with the Cook
County Probation Department, which gives intensive support to youths
under the jurisdiction of the agency. The program provides youths who
have had significant educational problems with extensive instruction in
social skills and back-to-school transitional support. After completing this
8-week program, youths attend either an alternative or a regular school.

In addition to the sense of security provided through the zero-tolerance
and SMART programs, the implementation of new safety and security
programs further maximizes school safety. More than 600 professional
security personnel are currently assigned to Chicago public schools.
Monthly training is provided by the Chicago Police Department and the
Office of Specialized Services to teach security personnel to work
proactively with students and the school community. Training includes
such topics as cultural awareness, diversity and sensitivity, case
management, positive intervention techniques, de-escalating aggressive
behavior, referral procedures and resources, and communication skills.
Security personnel assist schools in the development of individualized
school security programs. Chicago public schools' Operation S.A.F.E.
(Schools Are For Education) program allows the schools to work in
conjunction with the Chicago Police Department to provide two-person
teams of uniformed police officers who work 8-hour shifts at each high
school. Additional mobile tactical units patrol the vicinity immediately
surrounding high schools and are able to respond quickly to any
emergency calls. 

Parent patrols also have been developed to ensure that students have safe
passage to school. Existing in more than 375 schools, parent patrols
monitor the streets before and after school. Parents are trained in safety
and security measures and participate in workshops on safety, violence,
and conflict resolution. Enhanced training and expansion of security
personnel and the provision of rapid-response teams and after-school
security patrols provide a sense of safety among students by helping to
reduce burglaries, vandalism, and theft after school hours. Metal detectors
and surveillance cameras in every middle and high school increase a sense
of safety and lessen the likelihood that students will bring weapons to
school for their own security. Metal detectors have been installed in all of
the system's high schools and in many elementary schools, recovering
numerous weapons that might otherwise have gone undetected. Such
technology has created an awareness among students and the community
that weapons and illegal contraband will not be tolerated. Additionally, 90
percent of all Chicago high schools have security cameras or surveillance
systems that monitor hallways, stairwells, remote areas, and the perimeter
of the campuses and have significantly reduced vandalism.[30] 

These combined factors--increased adult involvement and supervision,
uniform and enforced rules regarding behavior, and technical security and
surveillance systems--have done much to increase students' sense of
personal safety and individual responsibility in helping to maintain safer
schools and communities.

Minimizing the Residual Effects of Trauma

Well supported in the literature on violence and victimization is an
understanding of the link between violent behavior and feelings of hurt
and anger. Behind all anger is hurt and the fear of being hurt again. Thus, a
major strategy for preventing violence involves helping service providers
identify trauma in children.[31] Sensitivity to signs of trauma is essential
to crisis intervention to reduce traumatic stress and its subtle long-term
effects. Chicago public schools' crisis intervention efforts, for example,
provide pupil support teams and partnerships with the religious
community to supplement local school intervention services for
traumatized children, supplementing services through community-based
social service and health agencies. Research shows that it is important to
provide prevention, intervention, and followup counseling to reduce the
possibility and impact of violent acts. Schools, therefore, frequently have
counseling, nursing, psychological, and social services. Chicago schools
have at least one counselor, supported by a team that includes a nurse,
psychologist, and social worker, who assists students having difficulty in
school or at home. Individual and small-group counseling are also a part of
the school-pupil support services program. When a student's needs are
beyond the school's resources, the student is referred to other programs or
agencies. Safe From the Start, a new program initiated by the city of
Chicago, facilitates the collaboration of the Chicago Police, the
Metropolitan Family Services' Domestic Violence Program, the
Community Mental Health Council Psychiatric Emergency Room/Crisis
Intervention Program, and the Community Mental Health Council
Children's and Adolescents' Outpatient Services in an effort to provide the
full range of needed services to children exposed to violence.[32] 

A major strategy for minimizing the effects of trauma is to turn a student's
learned helplessness into learned helpfulness. The Chicago public schools
require community service of students to foster their sense of involvement
by experiencing firsthand the benefit they provide to their community. The
Service Learning Program is a required component of the high school
curriculum. Students must provide a minimum of 40 hours in service
learning through such activities as tutoring, working with elders, and
participating in community beautification projects. An important aspect of
the program is having the students demonstrate their learning through
individual presentations, papers, and portfolios.

In conclusion, public policy should be based on a solid understanding of
the types of violence occurring across groups and age ranges and on the
very fundamental principles surrounding health behavior and violence
prevention. Acknowledging the varying types of violence, extending
successful programs--particularly for school age children--and ensuring
the provision of a full range of health and mental health services will do
much to reduce the incidence of violent behavior and increase positive
health behaviors.

Question-and-Answer Session

Jamie D. Hueston, Principal Psychology Consultant, Office of Clinical,
Preventive Services, and Behavioral Health, Indian Health Service, U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services, Washington, D.C.: I really
appreciate what you have to say. I'm new with the Federal Government,
and this is a cause I think is important, particularly in our American Indian
and Alaska Native communities. Much of what I heard you speak about
today is applicable to large cities, which have many high schools and
colleges and other community service areas that can collaborate. Can you
talk a bit about programs in rural America or share your general thoughts
about rural America, especially American Indian reservations?

C.B.: That's always a hard one because there are even fewer resources in
rural communities. In fact, the Violence Against Women Toolkit
(http://toolkit.ncjrs.org) contains information for rural locations, including
a section about Native Americans. One feasible thing for rural
communities would be to go to institutions that deliver juvenile justice
services (because there are now screening tools available) and screen for
children who are mentally ill. When those children leave the system, case
managers should arrange followup treatment, whether it be individual,
family, or multisystemic therapy. Aftercare services exist, though they
may be difficult to find in rural settings. 

In rural communities in Illinois we are trying to develop followup care.
We find that a lot of kids in rural juvenile justice systems are just as sick
as those in urban areas, but they're not connected to any health care. That's
the first place I would start. 

There is also much discussion about telemedicine. One of the problems,
however, is that in a place like Springfield, where the telephone
technology may be outdated, telemedicine is just not possible. So there are
concerns about the capability of rural infrastructure. But I think if we were
able to develop the infrastructure and get telemedicine in place, we'd have
a better opportunity to deliver mental health services to children in rural
areas. This would help a great deal and that's where I would focus. 

Bonnie Naradzay, Senior Policy Analyst, U.S. Department of Labor,
Washington, D.C.: It seems to me that from the perspective of policy, a
move that would help is to offer financial incentives to entice educated
specialists to rural areas. I know the AmeriCorps program offers
incentives, but I'm wondering whether somebody could recommend
additional financial incentives, such as paying for schooling, if people do
go to reservations. You would be bringing real health professionals there
instead of relying on telemedicine. 

C.B.: The National Health Service Corps has a program that works in that
way. The program offers to pay your way through school if you go to an
underserved area. And that's been useful. These programs need to be
strengthened rather than weakened. There were some factions recently that
actually considered weakening the program, which, to me, is just bizarre. 

Offering incentives is an excellent suggestion. Another factor is adopting
much of what we are teaching. There is a huge gap between what works
and what is being done in the field. We have to shift focus in what we are
teaching people. Although there are some practitioners in rural America,
they often are doing such individual interventions as psychotherapy on an
8-year-old child who doesn't control the circumstances in his life. Instead,
they may need to do family therapy to improve some of the parenting and
support systems for these children. 

I think you are right. Incentive programs help rural areas. We've got to
figure out how to do this and, again, I would commend Dr. Satcher's report
from the youth conference he held last year.[33] His report describes the
pieces of the puzzle needed to create both an urban and a rural
infrastructure for children's mental health services. It's a national blueprint
that can be tailored for different sized communities because the people
who came to this conference were from many different places. 

Stephanie Bryn, Codirector, Injury and Violence Prevention, Maternal and
Child Health Bureau, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services,
Washington, D.C.: Some of the success stories you mentioned in Chicago
were exciting to hear. I was wondering if you might tell a couple of stories
or give us some ideas about how to involve teenagers. You also mentioned
the difficulty in involving teachers and I wondered whether you have any
salient points on how we can do a better job of involving them.

C.B.: Part of the strategy we used in Chicago was to strengthen youth
bonds and attachments. So we are really trying to get kids involved. 

I think one of the shifts in policy--one that has been successful in
Chicago--should be to keep kids in school during the summer, a period
when delinquency increases among youths with too much time on their
hands. We also are trying to get kids connected to community resources. I
said to the head of the Chicago public schools that it's shortsighted to wait
until a child is 5 years old before anybody figures out that he or she can't
see, can't hear, or has a learning problem. He agreed, and we are trying to
incorporate a Head Start program and an early identification health
program into every Chicago grammar school. 

We've got a Schools With Pools program. We've got kids involved with
leadership training, meeting with teachers. We are really trying to
empower the kids to be part of the decisionmaking process-- again,
transforming traumatic helplessness into learned helpfulness. We have a
service learning program that pairs kids with elders. We've got the Boy
Scouts. We are feeding kids breakfast, lunch, and dinner because many
kids do not get regular meals at home. We're trying to do so much for
children. 

We are organizing baseball teams. There are actually baseball diamonds
outside of Chicago public schools now! Sports teach kids how to
communicate, how to solve problems, how to resolve conflict--all those
things that you need to learn to remove barriers to success.

A second part of the equation involves teachers and I can't emphasize that
point enough. I believe that most of the leadership in this
country--including the education system--operates through a bully system.
We must change that because principals bully teachers, and teachers bully
students. We have to change how we manage our human resources and we
have to transform our leadership style from a bully system into a
value-based system.

I always give the example of a medical student who is failing anatomy. As
his professor, you might threaten, "If you don't pass, I'm going to kick you
out of this school." That's a bully mentality, and the wrong conversation to
have. A better conversation might begin, "Why did you come to medical
school?" Hopefully the student will say, "To save lives." Now if he is a
fool, and he says, "Well I want to make a lot of money," you tell him that
despite the money to be made from the practice of medicine, even the best
physician will sooner or later make an error and he will have blood on his
hands. You have to talk to that medical student about medicine and the
practice of medicine, its spiritual and moral dimension, and ask that
student who is failing anatomy to help you understand how failing
anatomy is going to help save lives.

That is a more thoughtful level of conversation than, "I will throw you out
of here." We must engage in leadership training with doctors, with
principals, with school boards in the hope that the lessons of leadership
training will trickle down to such front-line professionals as interns and
teachers. Leadership training is too seldom emphasized in the public
sector.

As an example of what I am talking about, each quarter I have a 3-hour
meeting with my staff of 300. We provide food and raffle off an
assortment of DVDs, TVs, and VCRs on the assumption that adding
incentives helps build staff loyalty and a sense of common vision. It costs
a tiny fraction of our agency's $16 million budget, but I believe it pays off
in large ways, not only in staff satisfaction but in better patient care. Of
course, it is only one of many ways we strive to build a sense of mission.

We've got to start infusing some of these ideas about personal mastery and
common vision--all the ideas that Peter M. Senge talks about in The Fifth
Discipline--into our educational system as well, so that teachers learn
better people skills.

Richard Stana, Director, Tax Administration and Justice Issues, U.S.
General Accounting Office, Washington, D.C.: You talked about what
works. Could you elaborate a little on what doesn't work and why?

C.B.: There's a very good publication on this subject. In fact, the Justice
Department publishes a lot of this material. They put out checklists about
what doesn't work. D.A.R.E. does not appear to work. Vocational
programs coupled with education appear to work, but vocational programs
alone do not work. Boot camps have not been shown to work. Smaller
classroom sizes with additional help may have an effect. Some research
has said it works; some says it doesn't work. I believe in coaching, so I'm
inclined to believe that mentoring works, but in terms of the evidence it's
actually 50:50. 

The notion that increasing security in one community causes the problem
to go elsewhere is untrue. If you increase security, it's better all around.
That seems to work. There was some evidence that the gun buyback
program might not work. There are models in Boston (Operation
Ceasefire) that appear to work, where agencies collaborate with each
other. Fragmentation does not work. The best place to get a good checklist
is Youth Violence: A Report of the Surgeon General
(http://www.surgeongeneral.gov).[34] Del Elliott, based in Colorado, has a
good checklist in there about the kind of things that work and that don't
work. There is no evidence that individual psychotherapy works. It doesn't
work. The best interventions, in my opinion, are those pscyhosocial
interventions that people can learn through a manual. Large, systemic
things work. Intensive case management works. Family therapy works.
Medications work for kids in context with other treatments.

Michael Wiatrowski, Program Manager, Office of Juvenile Justice and
Delinquency Prevention, U.S. Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.:
Your discussion was interesting. I have a question and a comment. You
spoke about community architecture. What's a good community? A few
years ago we had a concept called crime prevention through environmental
design (CPTED). I'd like to suggest that perhaps we ought to have
something like violence prevention through community design. How are
you teaching other communities crime prevention strategies? Not so much
the programs, but the strategic thought processes so that you can change
organizational behavior and get everyone moving in the same direction.
You get a bigger bang for the buck by teaching communities how to do
this. It should be a basic part of community development.

C.B.: Yes, absolutely. There are a lot of excellent Web sites out there that
talk about this issue. Essentially, I've been trying to go from community to
community telling people to read interesting books like Max De Pree's
Leadership Jazz. De Pree was the head of one of the furniture companies,
Herman Miller, Inc. In his book, he talks about how running an
organization is like being a leader of a jazz band, because everybody's
going to play and do their own thing, but the leader has to get them to play
together harmoniously. So it's a good paradigm. More community
collaborations are beginning. We're trying to connect some dots in
Philadelphia, in Los Angeles. A small, radical group of us are trying to
move this agenda. I frequently advise nonprofits and other groups to
consult corporations about how they were able to successfully institute a
sense of common mission. That seems to work.

David Satcher provided a lot of leadership by developing a model in
which any one player can initiate the process and get other players to the
table. I've got people in Maine and Philadelphia, for example, and other
places trying to understand how do you do this. It's very teachable. If you
search community collaboration on any search engine several sites will
pop up. One site I found useful was
http://www.communitycollaboration.net. It has two-page sheets on how to
construct collaborations and gives people a map.

The problem is that it takes an individual who has got some personal
leadership and some sense of personal mastery to step up to the plate and
take charge. It's going to take a while, but I'm beginning to see evidence of
a slow cultural shift toward more mission-driven leadership. After all, we
are getting beat up by other international businesses because of how they
do their leadership. 

Clinton G. Turner III, Victim Witness Coordinator, U.S. Capitol Police,
Washington, D.C.: I am interested in the community policing aspect of
collaboration. I'm a Federal police officer, so you know my mind is going
to go in that direction. Also, many schools are teaching kids from the
military standpoint, using ideas about discipline borrowed from the
Marines, Air Force, and Navy. We also have kids going to a variety of
police cadet schools. These things work very well as I see it. My coworker
and I also lecture quite often at elementary and middle schools. We enjoy
talking to kids; they're very smart. I don't know how it is in Chicago, but
this is what we are doing here in Washington, Maryland, and Virginia.

C.B.: That's why I mentioned ROTC as a way to help kids find skills.
Although on one hand the military teaches management through bullying,
it also teaches leadership skills. There's always a double-edged sword.
And it's just that some emphases should shift with the context. I have been
trying to figure out how you do that, because in a war situation, if you tell
somebody to do something, you want them to it. Period. You don't have
time to explain and argue. That's fine for that context, but problems occur
when it creeps outside of the military context. 

I remember when I became the CEO of the Community Health Council;
having served in the Navy, I thought I could command my staff as if I
were still in the military. A "do this or I'll shoot you" mentality. And you
know, it doesn't work out. It's actually the easy way, but it doesn't work.

I didn't talk much earlier about the sense of resiliency, even spirituality,
that one can gain from the military. I'm very much in favor of some of the
military approaches to leadership, but some of it needs to be thrown out. 

There's a good book by David M. Fetterman, Empowerment Evaluation:
Knowledge and Tools for Self-Assessment and Accountability, that
discusses a "framework for empowerment, evaluation, and related
enabling activities." It talks about how to help communities set agendas,
implement ideas, and evaluate outcomes. Another useful reference is
"Identifying Training and Technical Assistance Needs in Community
Coalitions: A Developmental Approach."[35] The authors talk about
initial mobilization, establishing organizational structure, building
capacity for action, and planning for action, as well as implementing,
refining, and institutionalizing coalitions. The book outlines those
community development steps. There are many community psychology
resources out there that outline steps for people who want to establish
programs. 

Linda C. Brown, Program Manager, Family Advocacy, Army Community
Service, Ft. Myer, Virginia: You mentioned things like sports and
academics. I think there's a lot to be said, as well, for the value of
participation in a band or an orchestra. Are you using the arts in your
programs?

C.B.: Yes, absolutely. But I deleted half my slides in the interest of time.
All of those things are critically important to teach kids and enhance that
sense of power; sense of models; sense of uniqueness; and sense of being
connected to valued, important places, people, and things. When
adolescents participate in any of the things we discussed, they are
increasing self-esteem, learning social skills, being attached to people, and
experiencing an adult protective shield because they are safe while in
those environments.

Notes

1. Bell, C. "Community Violence: Causes, Prevention, and Intervention."
Journal of the National Medical Association 89(10): 657-662, October
1997. 

2. Bell, C., and E. Jenkins. "Prevention of Black Homicide." In The State
of Black America--1990. J. Dewart (ed.), New York: National Urban
League, 143- 155, 1990.

3. Greenfield, L.A., et al. Violence by Intimates. Washington, D.C.:U.S.
Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice
Statistics, NCJ 167237, March 1998:7.

4. Bell, C., and E. Jenkins. "Prevention of Black Homicide." In The State
of Black America--1990. J. Dewart (ed.), New York: National Urban
League, 143- 155, 1990.

5. Greenfield, L.A., and S.K. Smith. American Indians and Crime.
Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs,
Bureau of Justice Statistics, February 1999, NCJ 173386.

6. Petee, T.A., K.G. Padgett, and T.S. York. "Debunking the
Stereotype--An Examination of Mass Murder in Public Places." Homicide
Studies 1(4): 317-337, November 1997.

7. Bell, C., and D. Clark. "Adolescent Suicide." In H. Hennes and A.
Calhoun (eds.). Pediatric Clinics of North America: Violence Among
Children and Adolescents 45(2): 365-380, April 1998.

8. Phillips, D.P. "The Impact of Fictional Television Stories on U.S. Adult
Fatalities: New Evidence on the Effect of the Mass Media on Violence."
American Journal of Sociology 87(6): 1340-1359, 1982. Phillips, D.P.
"The Influence of Suggestion on Suicide: Substantive and Theoretical
Implications of the Werther Effect." American Sociological Review 39
(June): 340-354, 1974. Phillips, D.P., and L.L. Carstensen. "The Effect of
Suicide Stories on Various Demographic Groups, 1968-1985." Suicide and
Life-Threatening Behavior 18(1): 100-114, 1988.

9. Bell, C., S. Gamm, P. Vallas, and P. Jackson. 2001. "Strategies for the
Prevention of Youth Violence in Chicago Public Schools." In M. Shafii
and S. Shafii (eds.). School Violence: Contributing Factors, Management,
and Prevention. Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press, 251-272.

10. Shaw, C.R., and H. McKay. Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942.

11. Sampson, R.J., S.W. Raudenbush, and F. Earls. "Neighborhoods and
Violent Crime: A Multilevel Study of Collective Efficacy." Science 277:
918- 924, August 15, 1997. 

12. Comer, J. P. "Educating Poor Minority Children." Scientific American
259(5): 42-48, 1988; Haynes, N.M., and J.P. Comer. "Integrating Schools,
Families, and Communities Through Successful School Reform: The
School Development Program." School Psychology Review 25(4):
501-506, 1996; and Haynes, N.M., J.P. Comer, and M. Hamilton-Lee.
"School Climate Enhancement Through Parental Involvement." Journal of
School Psychology 27: 87-90, 1989.

13. Elliott, D., and P. Tolan. "Youth Violence Prevention, Intervention,
and Social Policy." In Youth Violence: Prevention, Intervention and
Social Policy. D.J. Flannery and C.R. Huff (eds.). Washington, D.C.:
American Psychiatric Press, 3-46 1999.

14. Moffitt, T.E. "Neuropsychology, Antisocial Behavior, and
Neighborhood Context." In Violence and Childhood in the Inner City.
McCord, J. (ed.). United Kingdom, Cambridge University Press, 1997,
116-170.

15. Klein, R.G., H. Abikoff, E. Klass, D. Ganeles, L.M. Seese, and S.
Pollack. "Clinical Efficacy of Methylphenidate in Conduct Disorder With
and Without Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder." Archives of
General Psychiatry 54: 1073-1080, December 1997.

16. Burton, D., et al. "The Relationship Between Traumatic Exposure,
Family Dysfunction, and Post-traumatic Stress Symptoms in Male
Juvenile Offenders." Journal of Traumatic Stress 7(1): 83- 92, 1994.

17. Bell, C., and D. Clark. "Adolescent Suicide." In H. Hennes and A.
Calhoun (eds.). Pediatric Clinics of North America: Violence Among
Children and Adolescents 45(2): 365-380, April 1998.

18. Isacsson, G. "Suicide Prevention--A Medical Breakthrough?" Acta
Psychiatr Scandvia 102: 113- 117, 2000.

19. Farrington, D.P. "Early Predictors of Adolescent Aggression and Adult
Violence." Violence and Victims 4: 79-100, 1989; and Tolan, P.H., and
R.P. Lorion. "Multivariate Approaches to the Identification of
Delinquency-Proneness in Males." American Journal of Community
Psychology 16: 547- 561, 1988.

20. Tolan, P.H., D. Gorman-Smith, and A. Zelli, et al. "Assessment of
Family Relationship Characteristics: A Measure to Explain Risk for
Antisocial Behavior and Depression in Youth." Psychological Assessment
9: 212-223, 1997. 

21. Borduin, C., L. Cone, and B. Mann, et al. Changed Lives: The Effects
of the Perry School Preschool on Youth Through Age 19. Ypsilanti, MI:
High Scope Press, 1985; and Henggeler, S.W., G.B. Melton, and L.A.
Smith. "Family Preservation Using Multi-systemic Therapy: an Effective
Alternative to Incarcerating Serious Juvenile Offenders." Journal of
Consulting Clinical Psychology 60: 953-961, 1992.

22. Pinderhughes, C.A. "Managing Paranoia in Violent Relationships." In
Perspectives on Violence. G. Usdin (ed.). New York, Brunner/Mazel,
1972, 111-139.

23. Resnick, M.D., P.S. Bearman, and R.W. Blum, et al. "Protecting
Adolescents From Harm--Findings From the National Longitudinal Study
on Adolescent Health." Journal of the American Medical Association
278(10): 823-832, September 10, 1997.

24. Bean, R. 1992. The Four Conditions of Self-Esteem: A New Approach
for Elementary and Middle Schools, ed 2. Santa Cruz, CA: ETR
Associates.

25. Bell, C. "Promotion of Mental Health Through Coaching of
Competitive Sports," Journal of the National Medical Association 89(10):
657-662, 1997.

26. Alexander, J., and C. Barton. "Functional Family Therapy." In F.
Kaslow (ed.). Voices In Family Psychology. Carmel, CA: Sage, 1990,
209-226; Henggeler, S.W., G.B. Melton, and L.A. Smith. "Family
Preservation Using Multi-systemic Therapy: an Effective Alternative to
Incarcerating Serious Juvenile Offenders." Journal of Consulting Clinical
Psychology 60: 953-961, 1992; and Tolan, P.H., and M.E. Mitchell.
"Families and the Therapy of Antisocial Delinquent Behavior." Journal of
Psychotherapy and the Family 6: 29-48, 1989.

27. Weissberg, R.P., and M.J. Elias. "Enhancing Young People's Social
Competence and Health Behavior." Applied & Preventive Psychology 3:
179- 190, 1993; and Weissberg, R.P., and T. Greenberg. "School and
Community Competence Enhancement and Prevention Programs." In
Handbook of Child Psychology: Vol. 4 Child Psychology in Practice (5th
ed.). E. Sigel and K.A. Renninger (eds.). New York: John Wiley, 1997.

28. Bell, C., S. Gamm, P. Vallas, and P. Jackson. "Strategies for the
Prevention of Youth Violence in Chicago Public Schools." In M. Shafii
and S. Shafii (eds.). School Violence: Contributing Factors, Management,
and Prevention. Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press, 2001,
251-272.

29. Borduin, C., L. Cone, and B. Mann, et al. Changed Lives: The Effects
of the Perry School Preschool on Youth Through Age 19. Ypsilanti, MI:
High Scope Press, 1985; Farrington, D.P.: "Early Predictors of Adolescent
Aggression and Adult Violence." Violence and Victims 4: 79-100, 1989;
and Gorman-Smith, D., et al. "The Relation of Family Functioning to
Violence Among Inner-city Minority Youth." Journal of Family
Psychology 10: 115-129, 1996.

30. Bell, C., S. Gamm, P. Vallas, and P. Jackson. "Strategies for the
Prevention of Youth Violence in Chicago Public Schools." In M. Shafii
and S. Shafii (eds.). School Violence: Contributing Factors, Management,
and Prevention. Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press, 2001,
251-272.

31. Bell, C., and E. "Community Violence and Children on Chicago's
Southside." Psychiatry: Interpersonal and Biological Processes 56(1): 46-
54, February 1993.

32. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Safe from the
Start: Taking Action on Children Exposed to Violence. Washington, D.C.:
U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile
Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 2000, NCJ 182789.

33. U.S. Public Health Service. Report of the Surgeon General's
Conference on Children's Mental Health: A National Action Agenda,
Washington, D.C.: U.S. Public Health Service, 2000.

34. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Youth Violence: A
Report of the Surgeon General. Rockville, MD: U.S. Department of
Health and Human Services, 2001.

35. Florin, P., R. Mitchell, and J. Stevenson, "Identifying Training and
Technical Assistance Needs in Community Coalitions: A Developmental
Approach," Health Education Research 8: 417-432, 1993. The table "The
Stages and Tasks of Coalition Development" from this article is of
particular interest.

-------------------

Sidebar: Types of Violence

o Group or mob violence.

o Individual violence.

o Systemic violence, such as war, racism, and sexism.

o Institutional violence, such as preventing inmates from getting the
benefit of prophylactic medications to prevent hepatitis.

o Hate-crime violence, such as terrorism.

o Multicide (e.g., mass murder, murder sprees, and serial killing).

o Psychopathic violence. 

o Predatory violence, also known as instrumental or secondary violence.

o Interpersonal altercation violence, also known as expressive or primary
violence (e.g., domestic violence, child abuse, elder abuse, and peer
violence).

o Drug-related violence, such as systemic drug- related violence (whereby
drug dealers kill to sell drugs), pharmacological drug-related violence
(whereby an individual perpetrates violence because of drug intoxication),
economic-compulsive drug- related violence (whereby a drug addict uses
violence to obtain drugs), and negligent drug- related violence (such as a
drunk driver who kills a pedestrian).

o Gang-related violence.

o Violence by mentally ill individuals.

o Lethal violence directed toward self (suicide).

o Lethal violence directed toward others (homicide).

o Violence by organically brain damage individuals.

o Legitimate/illegitimate violence.

o Nonlethal violence.

Source: Baker, F.M., and C.C. Bell, "African Americans: Treatment
Concerns," Psychiatric Services 50 (1999): 362-368.

-------------------

Raising the Bar: The Impact of DNA Testing on the Field of Forensics

Margaret A. Berger
Suzanne J. and Norman Miles Professor of Law
Brooklyn Law School
Brooklyn, NY

May 9, 2001
Washington, D.C.

Only 15 years have passed since DNA evidence was first introduced in a
criminal trial in the United States, but in that remarkably short period of
time DNA has revolutionized the criminal justice system. This impact
goes beyond DNA's effect on investigating crimes, convicting the guilty,
and exonerating the innocent. DNA testing has also brought about changes
in unrelated fields by forcing laboratories and courts to rethink how they
treat forensic evidence. These changes have consequences that we need to
think about if we are to make wise policy choices in the future.

Reasons for DNA's Spillover Effect on Other Fields

Before we look at what happened, I'd like to consider briefly why it
happened. What caused DNA testing to have such widespread
repercussions? Two factors, I think, are primarily responsible: the nature
of the DNA forensic technique and the historical moment at which DNA
entered the courtroom.  

Enter Science

DNA profiling is an offshoot of science. It is a technique that exists
beyond its forensic usefulness, such as ballistics, handwriting analysis, or
fingerprinting. Forensic DNA is a fortuitous byproduct of some of the
most highly regarded, cutting-edge research in the scientific community. 

DNA's origins in the world of science meant that from the first, scientists
whose work was far removed from the courtroom showed an interest in
issues regarding the forensic application of DNA. I suspect this attention
was due in part to scientists' fear that without adequate supervision,
lawyers untrained in forensic techniques would misinterpret evidence. For
instance, a number of eminent scientists, including Eric Lander of the
Whitehead Institute, testified in the first New York legal case about the
laboratory procedures needed to produce reliable results. In addition,
distinguished scientists from a variety of fields were happy to participate
when, at the request of various government agencies, the National
Academy of Sciences empaneled committees to make recommendations
aimed at improving laboratory work and the presentation of DNA
evidence in judicial proceedings. The first of these book-length reports
appeared in 1992--about 5 years after DNA evidence was first introduced.
From the beginning, DNA testing was seen as part of the scientific
endeavor and the participation of scientists brought new standards of
professionalism into the forensic arena. 

The Crusade Against "Junk Science"

DNA evidence made its debut at the same time that a very different kind
of scientific evidence was coming under attack. Incensed by the huge
damages awarded some plaintiffs in toxic tort and product liability cases,
critics claimed that plaintiffs' successes were attributable to venal expert
witnesses who relied on "junk science" to prove causation. The allegations
about junk science sparked considerable debate in the legal community
about proper standards for scientific expert proof. In 1993, in Daubert v.
Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc.,[1] the U. S. Supreme Court entered
the controversy. It adopted a new relevancy and reliability test for the
admissibility of scientific proof, set out nonexclusive factors that bear on
whether a theory or technique was derived by the scientific method, and
stressed the trial judge's obligation as "gatekeeper" to screen proffered
expert testimony so as to keep unreliable evidence from the trier of fact.
Since then, the Court has issued two additional opinions dealing with the
admissibility of scientific and engineering expert proof in Federal
courts.[2] 

We can only speculate on whether the advent of DNA profiling played a
part in persuading the Supreme Court to tackle the question of scientific
proof. DNA profiling certainly illustrates how important scientific
evidence can be. Furthermore, the contrast between the science in question
and some of the proof being attacked as junk may have piqued some
members of the Court's interest in defining the nature of scientific proof. 

Judicial Scrutiny of DNA Evidence

Although we cannot know what effect, if any, the advent of DNA had on
the Court, the Court's plunge into the debate on science undoubtedly led to
a heightening of judicial attention accorded DNA profiling. Even if the
jurisdiction in question had not adopted the Daubert test--which only binds
Federal courts--judges in all jurisdictions were certainly put on notice that
issues about the reliability of scientific proof were now in the spotlight.
The result, recently noted by the Research and Development Working
Group of the National Commission on the Future of DNA Evidence, was
that DNA evidence received "an intensity of scrutiny far greater than the
other methods of criminal investigation" had ever received.[3]

In the beginning, DNA evidence was routinely admitted. But when
defendants began to challenge the admissibility of DNA evidence, spurred
by the growing insistence on the need for reliable scientific proof, some
courts initially upheld these contentions. They found that insufficient
scientific work had as yet been done to satisfy their jurisdiction's test for
the admissibility of scientific evidence. The result was that DNA profiling
was placed on a much more secure footing because of additional scientific
input: The technical standards for DNA testing were strengthened, the
databases used to generate probabilities of matching became larger and
more representative, and laboratory performance was improved.

The judicial demands for more stringent science, and the resulting
response, provided a model of how scientists test a hypothesis, accumulate
data, and seek to reduce error. All players in the legal system--judges,
lawyers, law enforcement and laboratory personnel--observed and were
educated by this process, which had not been used in evaluating other
forensic techniques. Ultimately this development had a spillover effect
into other forensic fields. 

DNA Laboratories

The Problem 

One aspect of DNA's impact has been its effect on laboratory practices.
Critics had protested for decades about the sorry state of many American
crime laboratories. Scientists involved with DNA testing observed that
crime laboratory procedures fell short of standards to which scientists
adhere in conducting research. It was readily apparent that the nature of
DNA analysis lends itself to a wide variety of potential accidents and
mistakes, including mislabeling and mixing up samples, running the same
sample twice instead of running the sample from a defendant against the
crime scene sample, contaminating samples by exposure to other
biological material, and misinterpreting results.  

The Solution: Quality Assurance and Control and Accreditation

Quality assurance refers to a program conducted by a laboratory to ensure
the accuracy and reliability of the tests it performs. Guidelines for quality
assurance have been issued by two FBI-appointed groups--the Technical
Working Group on DNA Analysis Methods and the DNA Advisory Board
(DAB). DAB members include molecular geneticists; population
geneticists; an ethicist; and representatives from Federal, State, and local
forensic DNA laboratories, private-sector DNA laboratories, the National
Institute of Standards and Technology, and the judiciary. The DNA
Identification Act of 1994 provides that a forensic DNA laboratory may
not qualify for Federal laboratory improvement funds unless it satisfies the
quality assurance standards recommended by DAB and issued by the
director of the FBI. 

In addition, DNA forensic laboratories adopted stringent quality control
protocols that require laboratories to monitor, document, and verify
laboratory performance. These quality control programs aim to ensure and
demonstrate that a laboratory is meeting its quality assurance objectives. 

There is also some movement toward laboratory accreditation. Both New
York and California require their forensic DNA laboratories to be
accredited, a function that is performed by the American Society of Crime
Laboratory Directors' Laboratory Accreditation Board (ASCLD/LAB),
which audits labs to determine whether they are abiding by quality
assurance standards. Some of the recent statutes that authorize inmate
access to postconviction DNA testing require that such testing be done by
an accredited laboratory. 

Of course, even a laboratory that abides by the numerous provisions of the
quality assurance guidelines may make a mistake. No system in which
humans are involved can be error-free, but well-thought-out protocols will
prevent many problems. Furthermore, when an error is made, it may be
easier to detect and correct because the guidelines call for extensive
documentation and records with regard to everything a laboratory does. 

The Impact on Other Laboratories

The quality assurance guidelines have not only professionalized DNA
forensic laboratories, but have had a spillover effect with regard to other
services that crime laboratories provide. The ASCLD/LAB accreditation
program requires that a laboratory be accredited only if it qualifies with
regard to all of the services it performs--not just DNA testing. This means
that as accreditation becomes more widespread, quality assurance is likely
to increase in all types of crime labs. 

Furthermore, the mere fact that a model exists on how to ensure quality
assurance and control is influential. Of course blanket standards cannot be
applied to other laboratories doing forensic work because guidelines need
to address specific problems relevant to the particular discipline. But
certainly the DNA laboratory experience has sensitized the forensic and
legal communities about the need to improve all forensic laboratories. The
degree to which that need is being met differs widely. That is hardly
surprising. There are private laboratories, as well as public laboratories at
the Federal, State, county, and municipal levels, all dependent on widely
varying sources of funding. The extent to which laboratories have
implemented reforms in procedures varies enormously, but the DNA
accreditation process makes it more likely that other laboratory issues will
be understood and addressed.

DNA's Impact on the Judicial Analysis of Forensic Evidence

The Probability of a Match

Is there a match? As with many forensic sciences, the essence of DNA
analysis is determining whether two samples match--most important, a
sample from the crime scene and a sample from a suspect or victim.
Sometimes matching is all that is needed when, for instance, the
investigator is trying to exclude samples at the crime scene that may have
been left by persons who are not under suspicion. But when DNA
evidence is offered to prove that the defendant was at the crime scene, or
that the victim's blood was found in defendant's car, the enormous
probative value of the evidence stems not from the bare fact of the match
but on the statistical frequency of the match. We can be almost certain that
a match means that the DNA at the crime scene must have come from the
person with whose DNA the crime scene sample is being compared. The
Research and Development Working Group of the DNA Commission on
the Future of DNA Evidence recently concluded that, "Evidence that two
DNA samples are from the same person is still probabilistic rather than
certain. But with today's battery of genetic markers, the likelihood that two
matching profiles came from the same person approaches certainty."[4] 

With the help of scientists and tools such as the two reports from the
National Academy of Sciences, judges became aware that they had to
analyze two separate questions in determining the admissibility of DNA
evidence: What is the scientific basis for concluding that accurate matches
of DNA samples can be made and what is the scientific basis for providing
reliable estimates of the frequency of a match? The first question raises a
host of laboratory performance and biological issues; the second question
requires consideration of population genetics. In order to calculate the
probability that the crime scene sample came from the defendant or victim,
data were needed about the frequency with which each of the loci being
matched could be found in particular populations.

Numerous other forensic techniques rely on matching samples. Ballistics,
fingerprinting, questioned document examination using such techniques as
handwriting, ink, and paper analysis, and trace evidence evaluations of
such materials as paints, fibers, and glass all have in common the
assumption that it is possible to match samples. Courts had regularly
admitted evidence derived from these disciplines without demanding
scientific proof that accurate matches could be made and, for the most
part, had completely ignored the need for a probabilistic analysis to
convey the match's significance. 

Erroneous Matches

We know that admitting proof of a match that is, in fact, erroneous can be
devastating. In many of the more than 90 cases to date in which
convictions were overturned on the basis of DNA testing, the prosecution
had relied on expert testimony about matching hair, in addition to
eyewitness testimony. Mitochondrial DNA testing has now established the
inaccuracy of the hair comparisons that courts had previously admitted.

Misunderstanding the Significance of the Frequency of the Match

We also know that the significance of a match depends on its statistical
frequency. For instance, in assessing the probative value of an expert's
conclusion that shoe prints left at the crime scene match prints made by
shoes found in defendant's closet, the value of the evidence will be much
higher if the shoes were custom-made than if the shoes were
mass-produced. And if the defendant's shoes had been repaired in a
particular way, the prints may indeed have unique characteristics that
serve to identify the defendant.

Prior to the advent of DNA evidence, lawyers often failed to analyze the
probative value of testimony about a match. This could lead to improper
inferences by jurors, especially when the match was obtained through an
impressive, seemingly infallible forensic technique, which was
unaccompanied by any proof about the frequency of the match. For
instance, in a 1970 case, United States v. Stifel,[5] the prosecution tied a
defendant to a pipe bomb that had been sent through the mail and had
killed the person who opened the package by proving that tape on the
packaging matched tape found at the defendant's place of work. The
samples had been compared by neutron activation analysis, then a new
technique. The jury was told in great detail about this process and how it
could detect and measure traces of elements in minute samples. All tape at
the defendant's workplace was part of the same batch (defined as 1 day's
production), and that batch had been distributed by the manufacturer to
only two purchasers in different U.S. cities, one of whom was the
defendant's employer. Very little other evidence, other than proof of a
possible motive and the defendant's experience with explosives, was
introduced.

The defendant was convicted and received a life sentence. It was not until
13 years later through a Freedom of Information Act request that the
defendant discovered the government had failed to provide considerable
exculpatory evidence--in violation of the Brady Act. Therefore, vacation
of his conviction was necessary. The defendant further discovered that the
government chemist, who had testified to the match between the crime
scene and workplace tapes, had also, prior to trial, tested other samples of
the same brand of tape, samples that had been manufactured after the pipe
bomb exploded. Those samples from different batches, distributed to many
locations, also matched the crime scene tape. Obviously, evidence of the
match would have had much less probative value had the jury realized that
neutron activation analysis of all the tape manufactured by Proctor &
Gamble over an extensive period of time showed an identical composition.

The court that vacated the defendant's conviction held that the prosecution
expert had not committed perjury because defense counsel never asked
him about testing other batches. Therefore, he answered truthfully when he
stated that the samples matched. Clearly, counsel did not understand that a
match and the probability of a match raise two different sets of issues, and
the trial judge and appellate court that affirmed the conviction may not
have understood this either. This is a mistake that I hope lawyers will be
less likely to make now that DNA testing has educated us about
probabilities.

Matches in Forensic Fields Other Than DNA

To date, the insistence on stringent standards governing scientific proof
has been more pronounced in civil cases involving money than in criminal
cases involving life and liberty. However, that is beginning to change as
criminal defense counsel absorb the lessons about assumptions that must
be validated when proof is offered that samples match. Defense counsel
are beginning to challenge some traditional forms of forensic expertise. 

Handwriting Analysis

One of the earliest attacks on scientific evidence began in 1989 when four
law professors wrote an article criticizing handwriting analysis as a species
of junk science.[6] A dozen years later, this challenge is beginning to bear
fruit. A recent NIJ publication concluded that "Questioned document
examination, which encompasses forgeries, tracings, and disguised
handwritings, is currently in a state of upheaval."[7] 

Courts have begun to cite weaknesses in scientific reliability, such as "no
known error rate, no professional or academic degrees in the field, no
meaningful peer review, and no agreement as to how many exemplars are
required to establish the probability of authorship."[8] Consequently, some
courts have expressed doubt about the ability of a document examiner to
reach an accurate conclusion about a match between writings that a
defendant is known to have authored and the writings in question, which
the defendant denies having written. Although judges will allow the expert
to point out similarities and differences in the handwriting, some will not
allow the expert to express an opinion about authorship. One court has
gone so far as to exclude a prosecution expert as a witness on the ground
that no scientific studies established that an expert could match samples of
block printing under the circumstances of that case in which the defendant
had learned to print in English as a second language.[9]

Few defense counsel are as yet moving to exclude testimony by document
examiners, but this will undoubtedly change as they become aware of the
newer cases.

Fingerprints

Until very recently, it would have been heretical to suggest that an expert
might be prevented from testifying that a fingerprint at a crime scene could
have come only from the accused. The uniqueness of fingerprints was
assumed, and indeed early commentators on DNA often stressed that
fingerprinting could conclusively establish identity, while DNA profiling
had the capacity to yield only a probabilistic conclusion. Now, we have
been told that this assumption about the uniqueness of fingerprints has
never been validated. Nobody really thinks there is a problem when full
sets of fingerprints are compared. But what if the crime scene sample is
only a partial, latent print? Although an expert may be able to match such
a print to a print from a defendant, virtually no scientific work has as yet
been done on the significance of such a match. How likely is it that only
the defendant and no one else could leave such a partial print?

Defense counsel have begun to challenge the admissibility of testimony by
fingerprint experts who claim that they can conclusively identify the
defendant on the basis of a partial print. Thus far all court challenges have
been unsuccessful. But the issue is unlikely to disappear because the
academic community and the media have become interested and public
defenders are well aware of this controversy. It may be, however, that
DNA will have the final word. It is becoming possible to extract DNA
from latent fingerprints, and it may be that a shift to DNA analysis rather
than fingerprinting will mean that issues relating to fingerprint validation
can be bypassed. Other forensic matching techniques will undoubtedly be
questioned as well. 

Policy Implications for the Future

I hope you can see the impact DNA has had on producing more accurate
laboratory results and more reliable evidence in the courtroom. All this, of
course, has a cost. Even though the cost of running a DNA test may be
decreasing, quality assurance and control programs require hiring
additional personnel. Ultimately, improving laboratory performance costs
more money--whether the laboratory in question is doing DNA analyses or
other types of forensic testing. It is also expensive to devise and
implement studies designed to validate the accuracy with which various
kinds of samples can be matched. 

Although DNA testing has helped us see deficiencies in forensic proof,
priorities will have to be set in funding laboratories and research.
Decisions will have to be made about the relative importance of different
forensic techniques, and choices will have to be made even within the field
of DNA testing. For instance, how much DNA must be collected at a
crime scene? Does every piece of evidence have to be checked to
determine whether DNA is present, regardless of the other evidence in the
case and the nature of the crime? Will defendants be able to claim that
they were deprived of a valid defense because insufficient evidence was
subjected to DNA testing?

Murder and rape, the two crimes we probably fear the most, are
particularly likely to result in evidence that is susceptible to DNA analysis.
But what about other crimes? The British, whose databanks are more
extensive than ours, claim that DNA is solving many of their property
crimes because perpetrators leave items such as cigarette butts at crime
scenes. However, as criminals become more sophisticated about DNA
analysis, will they avoid leaving any biological samples behind, just as
they now know to wear gloves to avoid fingerprint analysis? These and
numerous other questions will play a role in how we expend resources on
training law enforcement personnel and in how we choose to allocate
funding for the development of new forensic techniques. 

In brief, DNA testing has shown us ways to raise the bar so that the
forensic sciences can better withstand scientific scrutiny. But we have not
yet come to terms with the consequences of this heightened sensitivity in
how we allocate resources. This hesitation is understandable because we
do not yet know how far courts will go in rejecting proffered prosecution
expertise. In the case of questioned document examiners, we can see that
the "handwriting" is on the wall. The number of judges who are restricting
the use of such evidence as not satisfying scientific standards is gradually
increasing. Although challenges to fingerprint evidence are currently being
rejected, they will undoubtedly be renewed, particularly because the issues
are being discussed more intensely. These are probably only the
forerunners of future attacks on other forms of traditionally admitted
forensic evidence. At this point, what we can say with confidence is that
DNA testing has raised a host of questions for the future. It has also
greatly improved the prospects of justice in the criminal justice system.

Question-and-Answer Session

Ted Gest, Senior Fellow, Criminal Justice Journalists, University of
Pennsylvania: Professor Berger, could you bring us up to date on
jurisdictions that have considered taking DNA samples from every felony
arrestee? I think that has been proposed in many jurisdictions. Could you
summarize the arguments for and against that?

M.B.: I think I am going to field that question to Chris Asplen, whom I see
sitting right there, who I am sure has a more accurate count than I do. 

Chris Asplen, National Commission on the Future of DNA Evidence,
Washington, D.C.: I am the executive director of the National Commission
on the Future of DNA Evidence. The national trend is certainly toward the
inclusion of a greater scope of offenses. By now, there are well over 20
States (probably closer to 30 or 32) that either have, or are considering,
felony legislation including all felons. It literally changes weekly as
different legislatures grab hold of the idea. In terms of pending legislation
regarding arrestees, there are probably well over 12 by now that are
actually considering that kind of approach. New York, Michigan, and
California entertain the idea every now and then. But I can get you a
specific list afterwards if you can give me your card. 

Daniel A. Cunningham, Counsel, Office of Legislative Affairs,
Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, Washington, D.C.: When
requests are made for postconviction forensic DNA testing, could you give
us your opinion as to how courts, both State and Federal, are dealing with
those requests and whether or not there is a need for legislation such as the
Innocence Protection Act of 2001 (H.R. 912 S.486)? 

M.B.: That is a very difficult question to answer because we really have
very little empirical evidence on how many requests have been made in
the past. Until very recently, only New York and Illinois had statutes that
allowed one to make a request for access to DNA testing postconviction,
without some kind of a time bar being applied. Most States, if you asked
them formally, would tell you that this was governed by their statutes on
access to newly obtained evidence and those statutes had time bars in
them. 

That didn't mean, however, that judges in those States didn't grant requests
for DNA testing. They did. They found all kinds of mechanisms for doing
so. Sometimes it was done simply because the prosecutor cooperated with
the defense counsel. In other words, there was an unofficial way of doing
things that obviously led to results in many cases.

At this point something like 30 or 40 States have either passed, or are
thinking of passing, legislation that would regulate this area of requests for
postconviction DNA testing. Some of those statutes have stringent
requirements. Tennessee and Washington, for instance, basically limit
their statutes to people who are on death row. Under those statutes
someone like the person in Oklahoma who was sentenced to 65 years
would not have had a right to apply for DNA testing. Would that have
meant that if he had been imprisoned in those States, he would have been
helpless to get testing done? Not necessarily. There might well have been
a judge who said, "I've got inherent powers; this is an absolute injustice. I
am going to order the prosecutor to look for the sample and test." So I
think it is very hard to answer this question. 

What I do think is very useful about such legislation, as opposed to the
informal system that we have had, is that it is generating public attention
to the issue and making people aware of how arbitrary and impossible, at
times, the legal system has been about correcting errors. It is focusing
attention on the factors that are important and need to be taken into
account. I think we need to educate people about the issues out there. A
legislative initiative does that better, probably, than piecemeal judicial
adjudications.

Manuel B. Suber, Metropolitan Police Department, Washington, D.C.: In
the Oklahoma case, was the problem with the technician who was
conducting the hair analysis or with the recovery of hair from the scene?

M.B.: From what I have read in two articles from the New York Times, it
sounds as though the problem may well have been with the technician
because the articles quote from a number of people who say that they
knew there was a problem for years with some of the results in her cases.
The Times reported that when the FBI investigated, it couldn't come up
with the kinds of matches she had come up with using the techniques that
she allegedly was using at the time. This case goes back 15 or 16 years.
The defendant has served 15 years of his sentence.

But I think that this case points out what has happened since Daubert and
since DNA. That defense counsel 15 or 16 years ago could have
challenged some of these forensic techniques on the basis of "what makes
you think that you can match?" After all, the four professors who
challenged handwriting analysis in their piece 15 years ago did. But that
somehow wasn't being done. I think we have all become more
sophisticated. Not just, as I said, with regard to DNA testing, but with all
kinds of forensic testing. We are living in a different climate now.

Ellen J. Goldberg, Editor, Bureau of Justice Assistance, U.S. Department
of Justice, Washington, D.C.: Last night on "60 Minutes," Dan Rather
interviewed the technician in Oklahoma City. One of the things brought up
that I had never thought about was the role of the forensic scientists when
labs are linked with police departments, and how the scientists viewed
themselves as working as extensions of the police department rather than
as scientific investigators maintaining their objectivity. I was wondering
what you thought about that.

M.B.: Well I think that is certainly a problem. I think it is very difficult at
times for the police to retain objectivity when they are investigating a
horrendous, horrendous crime and are convinced that they know who did
it. And that conviction conveys itself to everyone else working on the
case. It is very hard to think of ways to divorce the crime labs from their
interaction with the police. Obviously, independence is needed in many
instances, but it has been hard to achieve. With regard to proficiency
testing of DNA technicians, I've been told that it is very hard to develop
proficiency tests because when you give a lab a made-up sample that
purports to come from a case, the first thing that the technician will do is
call up the police and ask, "Is there such a case around?" In other words,
it's very hard to keep walls between them because they discuss ongoing
cases among themselves. I think this issue needs to be studied. One
possibility might be to have more than one lab working on a crime to
validate the techniques that are used, but, of course, that would cost more
money. 

This is one of the questions that we are going to have to consider in the
future.

Victor Stone, General Counsel, Office of the Corrections Trustee of the
District of Columbia, Washington, D.C.: One case that you haven't
mentioned, that attained more public renown than any other case is the
O.J. Simpson case. I would like to know your views on whether or not the
challenges made to the DNA evidence in that case were appropriate and
something you think we will see more of, or whether you think there were
inappropriate obfuscations that the judge let get out of hand and that other
judges will attempt to contain. What are your views as to how that fits in
with the future of DNA's admission at trial.

M.B.: Of course, the attack in that case was not on the validity of the DNA
evidence or on the validity of the laboratory analysis. It was really on how
the evidence was gathered at the crime scene, and everything else followed
from that. If the evidence had been planted or moved then even though the
analyses were correct, you were going to have error. This is going to be a
problem on both the prosecution and the defense sides. I had mentioned a
Texas murder-rape case where the prosecution argued that although the
semen found on the victim did not contain the defendant's DNA but that of
someone else, that did not prove that the defendant was innocent, because
the victim might have had consensual sex with another man, and the
defendant might not have ejaculated. 

This tactic on the prosecution side is very similar to tactics on the defense
side in the O.J. Simpson case. We have very ingenious lawyers in the
United States. I think that we increasingly are going to see attempts by
both prosecution and defense to come up with scenarios like, "But if this
happened, it doesn't prove what the DNA evidence purports to prove."
And don't forget that finding the defendant's DNA evidence at a crime
scene means only that something associated with that person at some point
in time arrived at the crime scene. It does not mean that that evidence was
not planted; it does not mean that it wasn't dropped there 6 months earlier.
All it means is that at some point that person had contact with that object. I
think that the possibility that sophisticated burglars will plant their
enemies' cigarette butts at a crime scene is something that we will see.
Which is why I think that we really need to beware of putting all of our
resources into DNA profiling as if it were a magic bullet and to think as
well about other techniques for proving crimes. 

The O.J. Simpson case also points out that we have to give careful
attention to police training and perhaps to developing more specific
protocols of what has to be documented at a crime scene. Certainly we
know that all kinds of things went wrong in that L.A. investigation, and
we know that all kinds of things seem to have gone wrong with the L.A.
police department. Just as one can develop standards for the labs, I think
that one could develop better standards at the crime investigation scene,
which might eliminate some of these problems. But I do not think that we
can ever have a failsafe system that will make everything that investigators
do wrong, accidentally or deliberately, go away. 

Chris Asplen: Professor Berger, we now have a number of elected district
attorneys who are proactively investigating postconviction cases, for
example, elected DA's in San Diego, Texas, Minnesota, New York, and
the Attorney General's office in Michigan. Even the U.S. Department of
Justice has reviewed its death row cases. Given the advent of DNA
evidence becoming the predominant focus of these investigations and
given the extent to which the adversarial nature of our system is its
bedrock, do you see any downsides to prosecutors taking ownership of
postconviction review?

M.B.: I see some. I know, of course, the DA in San Diego, Woody Clark,
who was on the National Commission, and his staff have been reviewing
all the cases in San Diego of people who were convicted and incarcerated
before 1992--the time when they really started doing DNA testing
actively. They are reviewing those convictions to see whether any of them
might be cases in which DNA testing of biological evidence (if they can
find it) can possibly clear the person who is convicted.

One thing has disturbed me about these case reviews--although I really
don't know to what extent his staff is insisting on the following
factor--Clark has said that his office screens only those cases in which the
inmate has made a continual claim of innocence throughout the entire
period of being incarcerated. That worries me, because we have a fair
amount of evidence of false confessions to crimes in the United States. We
have a lot of people (as we can see from many of these cases) who are of
borderline intelligence who are arrested in these cases. We have enormous
pressures at times being brought to bear on suspects. We have confessions
that are taken and not recorded. And for all of those reasons, I am a little
suspicious that because someone may have said at one point, "OK. OK. I
did it," and then has recanted or has never said anything again that that
confession should preclude review. Because we know that in some cases
there have been vacations of convictions when there were previous
confessions or self-incriminatory statements. I don't know if there are
other issues like that that might affect DA review; perhaps someone
outside the office of the DA should look at these cases as well.

Thomas M. MacLellan, Policy Analyst, Center for Best Practices, National
Governors' Association, Washington, D.C.: With the cost of DNA testing
decreasing, a number of States are looking at testing not just felonies but
misdemeanors, and some States are considering testing all arrestees. Could
you talk about the difference between doing DNA testing at time of arrest
and fingerprinting? They are both fairly intrusive but I understand with
swabs, DNA testing is a fairly quick procedure; it is not drawing of blood.
Could you talk about some of the legal differences or potential differences
that you see?

M.B.: In terms of maintaining these huge databanks? 

Thomas M. MacLellan: Yes, in terms of databases, if I were arrested for
DWI, I'm fingerprinted and my information is uploaded. Police can
obviously do the same with DNA evidence. 

M.B.: That is a huge issue that I don't think we have time to get into, but
certainly one of the differences is, at the moment, there have been huge
backlogs in analyzing the DNA that has been taken from convicted felons.
Adding arrestees to that backlog would obviously overload the system
even more. There are many other concerns about privacy, about racial
profiling's impact on who gets arrested in the United States, and what
those databanks would then look like, which raise a host of very important
issues that need to be kept in mind. But we really do not have time to
touch on all of this today.

Notes

1. 509 U.S. 579 (1993).

2. General Electric v. Joiner, 522 U.S. 136 (1997); Kumho Tire Co. v.
Carmichael, 526 U.S. 137 (1999).

3. National Commission on the Future of DNA Evidence. 2000. The
Future of Forensic DNA Testing: Predictions of the Research and
Development Working Group 7. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of
Justice, National Institute of Justice, NCJ 183697. 

4. Id. at 1.

5. 433 F.2d 431 (6th Cir. 1970).

6. Risinger, D. Michael, et al., 1989. "Exorcism of Ignorance as a Proxy
for Rational Knowledge: The Lessons of Handwriting Identification
'Expertise.'" University of Pennsylvania Law Review 137: 731.

7. National Institute of Justice. Forensic Sciences: Review of Status and
Needs. Issues and Practices. 1999. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of
Justice, National Institute of Justice, NCJ 173412.

8. United States v. Van Wyk, 83 F.Supp. 2d 515, 523 (D.N.J. 2000), aff'd,
___ F.3d ___ (3d Cir. 2001).

9. United States v. Fujii, 2000 WL 1468736 (N.D.Ill. 2000).

-------------------

Other Titles in the Perspectives Lecture Series

Perspectives on Crime and Justice: 1996-1997 Lecture Series, Volume I,
November 1997, NCJ 166609

What, If Anything, Can the Federal Government Do About Crime? by
James Q. Wilson

Why Can't We Make Prohibition Work Better? Some Consequences of
Ignoring the Unattractive, by Peter Reuter

The Legitimation of Criminal Justice Policies and Practices, by Mark H.
Moore

Child Victims: In Search of Opportunities for Breaking the Cycle of
Violence, by Cathy Spatz Widom

Crime, the Media, and Our Public Discourse, by Norval Morris  

Perspectives on Crime and Justice: 1997-1998 Lecture Series, Volume II,
November 1998, NCJ 172851

Crime Control, the Police, and Culture Wars: Broken Windows and
Cultural Pluralism, by George L. Kelling

Race, the Police, and "Reasonable Suspicion," by Randall Kennedy

The American Experience With Stimulants and Opiates, by David F.
Musto

A Decade of Experimenting With Intermediate Sanctions: What Have We
Learned? by Joan Petersilia

The Epidemic of Youth Gun Violence, by Philip Cook

Perspectives on Crime and Justice: 1998-1999 Lecture Series, Volume III,
November 1999, NCJ 178244 

Getting Deterrence Right: Applying Tipping Models and Behavioral
Economics to the Problems of Crime Control, by Mark A.R. Kleiman

Men and Fathers in the Community, by Felton Earls

Violence, Free Speech, and the Media, by Sissela Bok

Dilemmas of Corruption Control, by James B. Jacobs

Perspectives on Crime and Justice: 1999-2000 Lecture Series, Volume IV,
March 2001, NCJ 184245

The New Politics of Criminal Justice: Of "Three Strikes,"
Truth-in-Sentencing, and Megan's Law, by Franklin Zimring

Does the Booming Economy Help Explain the Fall in Crime? by Richard
B. Freeman

A Profile of Crime, Violence, and Drug Use Among Mexican Immigrants,
by William A. Vega

Reducing Gun Violence: What Works, What Doesn't, What's Promising,
by Lawrence W. Sherman

Reinventing Evaluation to Build High-Performance Child and Family
Interventions, by Heather B. Weiss

-------------------

To obtain copies, contact the National Criminal Justice Reference Service
(NCJRS): e-mail askncjrs@ncjrs.org; call 800-851-3420; or write to
NCJRS, P.O. Box 6000, Rockville, MD 20849-6000. Include the NCJ
number. Copies may be downloaded from the NIJ Web site:
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij (in Publications and Products).