V o l u m e V

M a r c h

2002

U.S. Department of Justice

Office of Justice Programs

National Institute of Justice

N ational Institute of Justice

Perspectives on

Crime and Justice:

2000–2001 Lecture Series

▼

Research Forum
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

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

National Criminal Justice Reference Service

P.O. Box 6000

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(http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij).

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

Office of Justice Programs National Institute of Justice

World Wide Web Site World Wide Web Site

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N ational Institute of Justice

▼

Perspectives on

Crime and Justice:

2000–2001 Lecture Series

Alfred Blumstein

Laurence Steinberg

Carl C. Bell

Margaret A. Berger

M a r c h 2 0 0 2

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.
iii

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
v

Preface .................................................................................. iii

Lecture 1: Why Is Crime Falling—Or Is It?

Alfred Blumstein, Ph.D. .................................... 1

Lecture 2: The Juvenile Psychopath: Fads, Fictions,

and Facts

Laurence Steinberg, Ph.D. .............................. 35

Lecture 3: Violence Prevention 101: Implications for

Policy Development

Carl C. Bell, M.D. ........................................... 65

Lecture 4: Raising the Bar: The Impact of DNA Testing

on the Field of Forensics

Margaret A. Berger, J.D. .................................. 95

Contents
1

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.
2

Why Is Crime Falling—Or Is It?

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.

Murder

Robbery*

Year

Rate per 100,000 Population

1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

Exhibit 1: Trends in Reported Murder and Robbery Rates

* Robbery rates are scaled down by a factor of 25 to put it in a scale comparable to that of murder.

Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation, Uniform Crime Reports, 1970–99, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice,

Federal Bureau of Investigation.
3

Alfred Blumstein

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
4

Why Is Crime Falling—Or Is It?

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.

Exhibit 2: Trends in Murder Arrest Rates for the Peak Ages of 18–24

Year

Rate per 100,000 Population

196519701975

198019851986198719881989

1990

1991

199219931994

19951996199719981999

18

20

22

24

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

Sources: Federal Bureau of Investigation, Uniform Crime Reports, “Age-Specific Arrest Rates and Race-Specific Arrest Rates for

Selected Offenses, 1965–1992,” Washington, D.C.: U.S. DOJ, FBI. Comparable data for 1993 and 1994 come from unpublished UCR

data. Data from 1995 through 1999 are estimated from age-specific and race-specific UCR arrest reports for each year to generate

numerators for rates and from Census Bureau estimates for each year to generate denominators.
5

Alfred Blumstein

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

Age

 Age-Specific Arrest Rates

13.5 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 27 32 37 42 47 52 57 62

1993/1985

1999/1985

0.0

0.5

1.0

1.5

2.0

2.5

3.0

3.5

Exhibit 3: Recent Age-Specific Murder Arrest Rates

Compared With 1985

Sources: Federal Bureau of Investigation, Uniform Crime Reports, “Age-Specific Arrest Rates and Race-Specific Arrest Rates for

Selected Offenses, 1965–1992,” Washington, D.C.: U.S. DOJ, FBI. Comparable data for 1993 and 1994 come from unpublished UCR

data. Data from 1995 through 1999 are estimated from age-specific and race-specific UCR reports for each year to generate numerators

for rates and from Census Bureau data for each year to generate denominators.
6

Why Is Crime Falling—Or Is It?

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.
7

Alfred Blumstein

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
8

Why Is Crime Falling—Or Is It?

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

* Relative to handgun homicides in 1985, set at an index of 100.

Source: Estimates based on data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Supplemental Homicide Reports, 1975–2000,

Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation.

19771978

19791980

19811982

1983198419851986

19871988

19891990

1991199219931994199519961997

Index Number of Homicides*

Year

Handguns

Other guns

Nonguns

0

50

100

150

200

250

Exhibit 4: Trends in Weapons Used by Youths in Homicide (18–24)
9

Alfred Blumstein

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
10

Why Is Crime Falling—Or Is 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
11

Alfred Blumstein

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

Sources: Federal Bureau of Investigation, Uniform Crime Reports, “Age-Specific Arrest Rates and Race-Specific Arrest Rates for

Selected Offenses, 1965–1992,” Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation.

18

20

22

24

Rate per 100,000 Population

Year

1965197019751980

1985

1986

1987

1988

1989

1990

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

2000

0

100

200

300

400

500

600

Exhibit 5: Trends in Arrest Rates for Weapon Offenses

for the Peak Ages of 18–24
12

Why Is Crime Falling—Or Is It?

that contributed to that. One important contributor was the aggressive stopand-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.
13

Alfred Blumstein

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
14

Why Is Crime Falling—Or Is It?

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).
15

Alfred Blumstein

■ 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

Adult

Juvenile

Ratio

Year

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

19651966 1967 1968196919701971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 19771978 1979 19801981 19821983 19841985 19861987 198819891990 1991 19921993 19941995 19961997 199819992000

Note: The values are the ratio of nonwhite arrest rate to white arrest rate for drug offenses. A ratio above 1:1 indicates that nonwhites

have a higher arrest rate than whites, and a value less than 1 indicates that whites have the higher arrest rate.

Exhibit 6: Trends in the Ratio of Nonwhite Juvenile and Adult Drug

Arrests to White Juvenile and Adult Drug Arrests
16

Why Is Crime Falling—Or Is It?

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
17

Alfred Blumstein

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 process6

 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 Cork7

 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
18

Why Is Crime Falling—Or Is It?

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
19

Alfred Blumstein

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 mid1970s. 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 Prisoners per 100,000 Population

Year

192019301940195019601970198019902000

0

50

100

150

200

250

300

350

400

450

500

Source: Cahalan, M.W., Historical Corrections Statistics in the United States, 1850–1984, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice,

Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1986, NCJ 102529.

Exhibit 7: Trends Over 75 Years in the U.S. Incarceration Rate
20

Why Is Crime Falling—Or Is It?

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

Source: Blumstein, A., and A.J. Beck, “Population Growth in U.S. Prisons, 1980–1996,” ed. M. Tonry and J. Petersilia, Prisons, vol. 26

of Crime and Justice, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999: 17–61.

Year

Drugs

Robbery

Burglary

Assault

Sex offenses

Murder

Prisoners per 100,000 Adult Population

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

140

160

19801981198219831984198519861987198819891990199119921993199419951996

Exhibit 8: Recent Trends in the U.S. Incarceration

Rate for Six Crime Types
21

Alfred Blumstein

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 (λ) 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. Spelman11 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
22

Why Is Crime Falling—Or Is It?

growth in the prison population. Rosenfeld12 used estimates of prisoners’

offending frequency (λ) 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,
23

Alfred Blumstein

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.

Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census data. Each year’s estimate 3-point smoothing. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2000.

Age

Number of Persons of Each Age (millions)

0

1

2

3

4

5

05

1015

2025

30

35404550556065

Exhibit 9: Age Composition of the U.S. Population in 2000
24

Why Is Crime Falling—Or Is It?

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
25

Alfred Blumstein

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
26

Why Is Crime Falling—Or Is It?

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 Beck15 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
27

Alfred Blumstein

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.
28

Why Is Crime Falling—Or Is It?

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,
29

Alfred Blumstein

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.
30

Why Is Crime Falling—Or Is It?

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 socalled crime prevention in the past 10 years or so? I think it’s fair to say there
31

Alfred Blumstein

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.
32

Why Is Crime Falling—Or Is It?

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
33

Alfred Blumstein

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.
34

Why Is Crime Falling—Or Is It?

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 (34) 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.
35

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.
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The Juvenile Psychopath: Fads, Fictions, and Facts

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.
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“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.
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The Juvenile Psychopath: Fads, Fictions, and Facts

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.
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Laurence Steinberg

Glibness/superficial charm

Grandiose sense of self-worth

Pathological lying

Conning/manipulative

Lack of remorse or guilt

Shallow affect

Callous/lack of empathy

Failure to accept

responsibility for actions

Impersonal sexual behavior

Need for stimulation/

proneness to boredom

Parasitic lifestyle

Poor anger control

Early behavior problems

Lack of goals

Impulsivity

Irresponsibility

Juvenile delinquency

Serious violation of

conditional release

Criminal versatility

Unstable interpersonal

relationships

Exhibit 1: Items From the PCL–R (Youth Version)

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 improvement5

 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
40

The Juvenile Psychopath: Fads, Fictions, and Facts

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 Monahan10 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
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Laurence Steinberg

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.
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The Juvenile Psychopath: Fads, Fictions, and Facts

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
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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
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The Juvenile Psychopath: Fads, Fictions, and Facts

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 superpredators16 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-theBeltway 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
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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 coursepersistent 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
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The Juvenile Psychopath: Fads, Fictions, and Facts

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 BinetSimon 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
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Laurence Steinberg

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.
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The Juvenile Psychopath: Fads, Fictions, and Facts

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.
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Laurence Steinberg

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.
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The Juvenile Psychopath: Fads, Fictions, and Facts

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.)
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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,
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The Juvenile Psychopath: Fads, Fictions, and Facts

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-yearold 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 Moffitt27 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
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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
54

The Juvenile Psychopath: Fads, Fictions, and Facts

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
55

Laurence Steinberg

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.
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The Juvenile Psychopath: Fads, Fictions, and Facts

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
57

Laurence Steinberg

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
58

The Juvenile Psychopath: Fads, Fictions, and Facts

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
59

Laurence Steinberg

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.
60

The Juvenile Psychopath: Fads, Fictions, and Facts

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
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Laurence Steinberg

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
62

The Juvenile Psychopath: Fads, Fictions, and Facts

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.
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Laurence Steinberg

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.
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The Juvenile Psychopath: Fads, Fictions, and Facts

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.
65

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.
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Violence Prevention 101: Implications for Policy Development

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 AfricanAmerican 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
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Carl C. Bell

Types of Violence

■ Group or mob violence.

■ Individual violence.

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

■ Institutional violence, such as preventing inmates from getting the

benefit of prophylactic medications to prevent hepatitis.

■ Hate-crime violence, such as terrorism.

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

■ Psychopathic violence.

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

■ Interpersonal altercation violence, also known as expressive or primary

violence (e.g., domestic violence, child abuse, elder abuse, and peer

violence).

■ 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).

■ Gang-related violence.

■ Violence by mentally ill individuals.

■ Lethal violence directed toward self (suicide).

■ Lethal violence directed toward others (homicide).

■ Violence by organically brain damaged individuals.

■ Legitimate/illegitimate violence.

■ Nonlethal violence.

Source: Baker, F.M., and C.C. Bell, “African Americans: Treatment Concerns,”

Psychiatric Services 50 (1999): 362–368.
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Violence Prevention 101: Implications for Policy Development

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.
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Carl C. Bell

■ 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
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Violence Prevention 101: Implications for Policy Development

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
71

Carl C. Bell

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
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Violence Prevention 101: Implications for Policy Development

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
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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, Bean24 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.
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■ 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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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often are doing such individual interventions as psychotherapy on an 8-yearold 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.
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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.
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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.
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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,
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
95

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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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?
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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
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Margaret A. Berger

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
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Raising the Bar

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.
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Margaret A. Berger

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.
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Raising the Bar

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.
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Margaret A. Berger

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://

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