Great video from Andrew Klavan explaining why conservatives are "so mean."
Sunday, September 11, 2011
The US Government: An Insurance Conglomerate Protected by a Large, Standing Army?
spending chart ), slightly understating social spending and overstating military spending, his analysis was sound. So, clearly both parties are engaging in budgetary kabuki when they claim that the budget can be balanced by cuts to discretionary spending without significantly reforming entitlements and reducing military spending. And while waste and fraud are certainly noxious, their elimination would have a negligible fiscal impact. Perhaps Mr. Klein's most insightful observation is that it's so difficult to curb the said programs because of their popularity. Any politician that dares discuss entitlement reform is accused of wanting the elderly to eat cat food. And anyone who seeks to scale back bloated military expenditures is accused of being unpatriotic and conspiring to hand the United States over to Al Qaeda. I say that if we are going to allow our federal government to become an insurance conglomerate with an army, we might as well make the Geico spokeslizard our next president. Surely he's a better choice than the other candidates!
The U.S. Government: An insurance conglomerate protected by a large, standing army
By Ezra Klein
American politics is one long argument about what government should or shouldn’t be doing, and how it should or shouldn’t be doing it. It’s rare that we step back, take in the larger picture and ask what it is doing. The release of the president’s proposed 2012 budget is a good time to do that. If you want to know what the federal government is really doing, just look where it’s spending our money.
Two of every five dollars goes to Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid, all of which provide some form of insurance. A bit more than a buck goes to the military. Then there’s a $1.50 or so for assorted other programs -- education, infrastructure, environmental protection, farm subsidies, etc. Some of that, like unemployment checks and food stamps, is also best understood insurance spending. And then there’s another 40 cents of debt repayment. Calvin Coolidge once said that the business of America is business. Well, the business of the American government is insurance. Literally. If you look at how the federal government spends our money, it’s an insurance conglomerate protected by a large, standing army.
But you wouldn’t know it to listen to the debate over the budget. When House Republicans talk about cutting spending and the Obama administration talks about freezing spending, neither group is talking about the vast expanse of the government’s commitments. They’re looking at a small corner of the budget, the 12.3 percent known as non-defense discretionary spending. The stuff that’s not Medicare, not Medicaid, not Social Security or the military. It’s the odds-and-ends, so to speak.
And it’s a bad place to focus cuts. Politicians don’t take the axe to non-defense discretionary spending because they think Teach for America or the food safety infrastructure -- both of which the Republicans are proposing to cut dramatically -- is more wasteful than the Pentagon or the health-care system. They do it because Teach for America and the food safety system is less politically powerful than the Pentagon or Medicare beneficiaries. The budget ends up like the yard of a man who owns only a lawnmower: The grass is trim, but the trees are overgrown and the ivy is everywhere and the gazebo is falling apart. Yet we keep mowing, because that’s what we feel able to do.
Cutting government spending is a grim and unpopular business, at least when you get specific about it. A Pew poll released last week asked Americans whether they’d like to increase or decrease spending in 13 areas. In all but two, Americans wanted to see spending go up, not down. And those two -- unemployment insurance and foreign aid -- are mere rounding errors in the budget. It’s like dieting by swearing off canapes: It’s something, but I wouldn’t rush out to buy smaller pants.
Politicians get this: Deficits are unpopular, and so are the specifics of deficit reduction. So they’ve developed a few ways to sound fiscally responsible without committing to anything politically damaging. The term “waste, fraud and abuse,” for instance. There is plenty of waste, fraud and abuse in the government, but there’s little agreement on what that waste, fraud and abuse is. Farm subsidies, for instance, don’t seem like waste to farmers. The defense budget looks tighter to hawks than it does to doves. Gov. Mitch Daniels was right when he told the crowd at CPAC that waste, fraud and abuse are worth little when it comes to cutting the deficit. Focusing on the three items “trivializes what needs to be done, and misleads our fellow citizens to believe that easy answers are available to us.”
Promising to freeze non-defense discretionary spending has also come into vogue. It has the dual advantages of sounding tough while remaining vague. But the single biggest chunk of that spending is on education -- and education, according to the Pew poll, is the part of the budget that Americans are least interested in cutting. As more specifics of these freezes emerge, and more of the people who depend on or favor these programs protest, we’ll see how they fare.
Either way, it’s time to admit that there’s little in the budget that’s truly unpopular. If it was unpopular, it either wouldn’t be there in the first place, or it would’ve been zeroed out when politicians went hunting for offsets to pay for programs that interested them more. Anything that’s survived Congress’s occasional spasms of fiscal responsibility and constant hunger for easy money has some sort of a constituency behind it.
And though cutting non-defense discretionary spending might buy us some time on the deficit, we’re eventually going to have to do as legendary robber Willie Sutton did when he started hitting banks: We’ll have to go where the money is. That means our social insurance programs, and our military. Of this group, Social Security is in the best shape, and is by far the most efficient. It should be last on our list. Not, as it often seems to be, first.
And though cutting non-defense discretionary spending might buy us some time on the deficit, we’re eventually going to have to do as legendary robber Willie Sutton did when he started hitting banks: We’ll have to go where the money is. That means our social insurance programs, and our military. Of this group, Social Security is in the best shape, and is by far the most efficient. It should be last on our list. Not, as it often seems to be, first.
The military remains largely untouched -- and that is true in the budgets released by both the Republicans and the Democrats. This is one case where politicians are lagging behind the public: In the Pew poll, military spending was the third-least popular category of spending, even though in Washington, it’s frequently considered politically unassailable. But perhaps we’ll see more action on this soon: A bipartisan group of legislators including Reps. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and Ron Paul (R-Tex.) created the Sustainable Defense Task Force to look at ways to reduce our military spending, and the plan they developed could save us a trillion dollars over the next 10 years.
That said, it’s Medicare and Medicaid that pose the largest long-term threat to the budget. They’re big -- about 20 percent of the budget right now -- but the real problem is the speed with which they’re getting bigger. Left unchecked, they’re projected to double in size over the next 30 years. The health-reform law makes a start on curbing their growth, namely through experiments that encourage paying for quality rather than volume and the creation of an independent board able to imposecost-controlling reforms without getting tied up in Congress. But it’s just a start, and it’s under constant threat of being undone or rolled back. The reality is we need to go further and faster. We’re an insurance company now, and we can’t continue to dither when it comes to righting our core business.
By Ezra Klein | February 14, 2011; 10:44 AM ET
Monday, September 5, 2011
The Irony File
I came across news that some Mexican officials were complaining that we were not providing them
sufficient notice about the deportation of dangerous criminals. And on a more general level they were expressing concern that a recent Supreme Court ruling would pave the way for the return of many dangerous and burdensome Mexican citizens. Considering that the Mexican government has encouraged large scale undocumented immigration and fought efforts to secure the border, this must be placed in our "Irony File."
Supreme Court Ruling On CA's Prison Population Could Impact Mexico
MARK STEVENSON
05/27/11
MEXICO CITY — Mexico's border mayors say they are worried about a possible surge in deportations of criminals to their cities after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling ordered California to reduce its prison population by 33,000.
Mayors of 14 border cities from Tijuana to Matamoros meeting in Mexico City on Friday say they already have problems because U.S. authorities often don't warn them when migrants with criminal records are deported to Mexico.
"There are indications they are going to clean out their prisons," said Manuel Baldenebro, mayor of the city of San Luis Rio Colorado, Sonora, which sits on the border with California and Arizona. "They (migrant inmates) are a burden, and if they are trying to economize in their jails, they see it as better to send them back."
Baldenebro said the notion of more criminals has caused "fear and insecurity" in cities already plagued by a stubborn wave of drug-related violence that has killed more than 35,000 people nationally since 2006.
While there are no tracking systems to determine what happens to deported criminals, at least one, Martin Estrada Luna, is accused of becoming a leader of a cell of the Zetas drug gang in the border state of Tamaulipas just 18 months after he was deported from the United States. Estrada, who had a long rap sheet of mostly theft and property crimes in Washington state, is now in custody in Mexico City, where he is accused for masterminding the killing of more than 250 people.
According to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, about 10 percent of its 162,694 inmates are from Mexico, the majority undocumented.
The supreme court ordered California on Monday to reduce its prison population to ease overcrowding. California officials say they are looking at a number of possible ways to comply with the ruling, including transferring inmates to local facilities. While there has been no mention of stepping up deportations, there are currently programs in the U.S. to actively identify migrants in the U.S. prison system and deport them upon release.
"Our plan will be submitted to the three-judge panel on June 6 on how the state plans to comply with the population reduction order," said corrections spokeswoman Terry Thornton. "It's still being worked on."
Spokesmen for Gov. Jerry Brown did not immediately return a telephone message.
Under a tough-on-crime immigration crackdown, half of the 393,000 people deported from the United States between October 2009 and September 2010 were convicted of crimes, from minor offenses to murder. While the U.S. doesn't specify their countries, the vast majority are from Mexico.
Mexicans with criminal records in the U.S. can't be detained in Mexico if they have not violated the law in their home country, and most Mexican cities don't have any way to run criminal background checks on deported inmates to see if they have pending charges in Mexico.
When Mexicans without documents finish their prison terms, they're bused to the border and freed.
The United States and Mexico are experimenting with new methods of alerting Mexico about deportations, and U.S. officials say they warn Mexico when former inmates are considered particularly dangerous.
It's not known whether they warned Mexican authorities about Estrada, who was never accused of murder in the U.S.
"What we have seen as mayors is ... that they send back migrants in the early morning hours, and sometimes they don't give us advance notice," said Everardo Villarreal, mayor of Reynosa across from McAllen, Texas.
"We have to have better coordination," added Hector Murguia, mayor of Ciudad Juarez across the border from El Paso, Texas. "It's not about throwing the fleas and cockroaches across the border. Together, we have to kill the fleas and cockroaches."
Associated Press Writer Don Thompson contributed to this report from Sacramento, California.
(This version CORRECTS contributor line and title to spokeswoman instead of spokesman)
sufficient notice about the deportation of dangerous criminals. And on a more general level they were expressing concern that a recent Supreme Court ruling would pave the way for the return of many dangerous and burdensome Mexican citizens. Considering that the Mexican government has encouraged large scale undocumented immigration and fought efforts to secure the border, this must be placed in our "Irony File."
Supreme Court Ruling On CA's Prison Population Could Impact Mexico
MARK STEVENSON
05/27/11
MEXICO CITY — Mexico's border mayors say they are worried about a possible surge in deportations of criminals to their cities after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling ordered California to reduce its prison population by 33,000.
Mayors of 14 border cities from Tijuana to Matamoros meeting in Mexico City on Friday say they already have problems because U.S. authorities often don't warn them when migrants with criminal records are deported to Mexico.
"There are indications they are going to clean out their prisons," said Manuel Baldenebro, mayor of the city of San Luis Rio Colorado, Sonora, which sits on the border with California and Arizona. "They (migrant inmates) are a burden, and if they are trying to economize in their jails, they see it as better to send them back."
Baldenebro said the notion of more criminals has caused "fear and insecurity" in cities already plagued by a stubborn wave of drug-related violence that has killed more than 35,000 people nationally since 2006.
While there are no tracking systems to determine what happens to deported criminals, at least one, Martin Estrada Luna, is accused of becoming a leader of a cell of the Zetas drug gang in the border state of Tamaulipas just 18 months after he was deported from the United States. Estrada, who had a long rap sheet of mostly theft and property crimes in Washington state, is now in custody in Mexico City, where he is accused for masterminding the killing of more than 250 people.
According to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, about 10 percent of its 162,694 inmates are from Mexico, the majority undocumented.
The supreme court ordered California on Monday to reduce its prison population to ease overcrowding. California officials say they are looking at a number of possible ways to comply with the ruling, including transferring inmates to local facilities. While there has been no mention of stepping up deportations, there are currently programs in the U.S. to actively identify migrants in the U.S. prison system and deport them upon release.
"Our plan will be submitted to the three-judge panel on June 6 on how the state plans to comply with the population reduction order," said corrections spokeswoman Terry Thornton. "It's still being worked on."
Spokesmen for Gov. Jerry Brown did not immediately return a telephone message.
Under a tough-on-crime immigration crackdown, half of the 393,000 people deported from the United States between October 2009 and September 2010 were convicted of crimes, from minor offenses to murder. While the U.S. doesn't specify their countries, the vast majority are from Mexico.
Mexicans with criminal records in the U.S. can't be detained in Mexico if they have not violated the law in their home country, and most Mexican cities don't have any way to run criminal background checks on deported inmates to see if they have pending charges in Mexico.
When Mexicans without documents finish their prison terms, they're bused to the border and freed.
The United States and Mexico are experimenting with new methods of alerting Mexico about deportations, and U.S. officials say they warn Mexico when former inmates are considered particularly dangerous.
It's not known whether they warned Mexican authorities about Estrada, who was never accused of murder in the U.S.
"What we have seen as mayors is ... that they send back migrants in the early morning hours, and sometimes they don't give us advance notice," said Everardo Villarreal, mayor of Reynosa across from McAllen, Texas.
"We have to have better coordination," added Hector Murguia, mayor of Ciudad Juarez across the border from El Paso, Texas. "It's not about throwing the fleas and cockroaches across the border. Together, we have to kill the fleas and cockroaches."
Associated Press Writer Don Thompson contributed to this report from Sacramento, California.
(This version CORRECTS contributor line and title to spokeswoman instead of spokesman)
Sunday, September 4, 2011
Psychopathy and Crime (part II)
In our previous post we explored the connection between psychopathy and crime. NPR's Morning Edition explored Kent Kiehl's fascinating research that explores the connection between psychopathology, neurology and crime. He seems to demonstrate that psychopaths process information different than most people. For example, when viewing a video of a man assaulting someone, a psychopath may logically understand that it is wrong, but on a neurological level they responds quite differently than the majority of people. He believes that even highly intelligent criminals possess abnormally low emotional intelligence. On one level this can draw us to a more "conservative" conclusion like "inborn traits play a larger role in crime than economics and environment," but on the other hand Kiehl's research leads him to the conclusion that the death penalty is not a just or effective detterent. He reasons that if we do not execute an individual with a low IQ because we presume that they do not have the capacity to determine right or wrong, that perhaps neurologically and emotionally impaired psychopaths are not as deserving as punishment. While on a practical level I reject his conclusion, his research is fascinating and will continue to shape our discourse on crime and punishment.
Inside A Psychopath's Brain: The Sentencing Debate
by Barbara Bradley Hagerty
June 30, 2010
Listen to the Story
Morning Edition
Second in a three-part series
Barbara Bradley Hagerty/NPR Kent Kiehl is one of the world's leading investigators of psychopathy and a professor at the University of New Mexico.
Kent Kiehl has studied hundreds of psychopaths. Kiehl is one of the world's leading investigators of psychopathy and a professor at the University of New Mexico. He says he can often see it in their eyes: There's an intensity in their stare, as if they're trying to pick up signals on how to respond. But the eyes are not an element of psychopathy, just a clue.
Officially, Kiehl scores their pathology on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, which measures traits such as the inability to feel empathy or remorse, pathological lying, or impulsivity.
"The scores range from zero to 40," Kiehl explains in his sunny office overlooking a golf course. "The average person in the community, a male, will score about 4 or 5. Your average inmate will score about 22. An individual with psychopathy is typically described as 30 or above. Brian scored 38.5 basically. He was in the 99th percentile."
"Brian" is Brian Dugan, a man who is serving two life sentences for rape and murder in Chicago. Last July, Dugan pleaded guilty to raping and murdering 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico in 1983, and he was put on trial to determine whether he should be executed. Kiehl was hired by the defense to do a psychiatric evaluation.
July 1, 2010
In a videotaped interview with Kiehl, Dugan describes how he only meant to rob the Nicaricos' home. But then he saw the little girl inside.
"She came to the door and ... I clicked," Dugan says in a flat, emotionless voice. "I turned into Mr. Hyde from Dr. Jekyll."
On screen, Dugan is dressed in an orange jumpsuit. He seems calm, even normal — until he lifts his hands to take a sip of water and you see the handcuffs. Dugan is smart — his IQ is over 140 — but he admits he has always had shallow emotions. He tells Kiehl that in his quarter century in prison, he believes he's developed a sense of remorse.
"And I have empathy, too — but it's like it just stops," he says. "I mean, I start to feel, but something just blocks it. I don't know what it is."
Kiehl says he's heard all this before: All psychopaths claim they feel terrible about their crimes for the benefit of the parole board.
"But then you ask them, 'What do you mean, you feel really bad?' And Brian will look at you and go, 'What do you mean, what does it mean?' They look at you like, 'Can you give me some help? A hint? Can I call a friend?' They have no way of really getting at that at all," Kiehl says.
Kiehl says the reason people like Dugan cannot access their emotions is that their physical brains are different. And he believes he has the brain scans to prove it.
On a crystal clear June morning at Albuquerque's Youth Diagnostic and Development Center, juveniles who have been convicted of violent offenses march by, craning their necks as a huge trailer drives through the gates. This is Kiehl's prize — a $2 million mobile MRI provided by the Mind Research Network at the University of New Mexico. Kiehl transports the mobile MRI to maximum-security prisons around the state, and over the past few years, he has scanned the brains of more than 1,100 inmates, about 20 percent of whom are psychopaths.
For ethical reasons, Kiehl could not allow me to watch an inmate's brain being scanned, so he asked his researchers to demonstrate.
Barbara Bradley Hagerty/NPR
Kiehl with the brain scanner he uses at prisons. He has scanned the brains of more than 1,100 inmates, about 20 percent of whom are psychopaths.
After a few minutes of preparation, researcher Kevin Bache settles into the brain scanner, where he can look up and see a screen. On the screen flashes three types of pictures. One kind depicts a moral violation: He sees several hooded Klansmen setting a cross on fire. Another type is emotional but morally ambiguous: a car that is on fire but you don't know why. Another type of photo is neutral: for example, students standing around a Bunsen burner.
The subjects rate whether the picture is a moral violation on a scale of 1 to 5. Kiehl says most psychopaths do not differ from normal subjects in the way they rate the photos: Both psychopaths and the average person rank the KKK with a burning cross as a moral violation. But there's a key difference: Psychopaths' brains behave differently from that of a nonpsychopathic person. When a normal person sees a morally objectionable photo, his limbic system lights up. This is what Kiehl calls the "emotional circuit," involving the orbital cortex above the eyes and the amygdala deep in the brain. But Kiehl says when psychopaths like Dugan see the KKK picture, their emotional circuit does not engage in the same way.
"We have a lot of data that shows psychopaths do tend to process this information differently," Kiehl says. "And Brian looked like he was processing it like the other individuals we've studied with psychopathy."
Kiehl says the emotional circuit may be what stops a person from breaking into that house or killing that girl. But in psychopaths like Dugan, the brakes don't work. Kiehl says psychopaths are a little like people with very low IQs who are not fully responsible for their actions. The courts treat people with low IQs differently. For example, they can't get the death penalty.
"What if I told you that a psychopath has an emotional IQ that's like a 5-year-old?" Kiehl asks. "Well, if that was the case, we'd make the same argument for individuals with low emotional IQ — that maybe they're not as deserving of punishment, not as deserving of culpability, etc."
Brian Dugan pleaded guilty last year to raping and murdering 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico in 1983, and he was put on trial to determine whether he should be executed. Neuroscientist Kent Kiehl was hired by the defense to do a psychiatric evaluation.
Courtesy of Steven Greenberg Brian Dugan pleaded guilty last year to raping and murdering 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico in 1983, and he was put on trial to determine whether he should be executed. Neuroscientist Kent Kiehl was hired by the defense to do a psychiatric evaluation.
And that's exactly what Dugan's lawyers argued at trial last November. Attorney Steven Greenberg said that Dugan was not criminally insane. He knew right from wrong. But he was incapable of making the right choices.
"Someone shouldn't be executed for a condition that they were born with, because it's not their fault," Greenberg says. "The crime is their fault, and he wasn't saying it wasn't his fault, and he wasn't saying, give [me] a free pass. But he was saying, don't kill me because it's not my fault that I was born this way."
This argument troubles Steven Erickson, a forensic psychologist and legal scholar at Widener University School of Law. He notes that alcoholics have brain abnormalities. Do we give them a pass if they kill someone while driving drunk?
"What about folks who suffer from depression? They have brain abnormalities, too. Should they be entitled to [an] excuse under the law?" he asks. "I think the key idea here is the law is not interested in brain abnormalities. The law is interested in whether or not someone at the time that the criminal act occurred understood the difference between right and wrong."
At trial, Jonathan Brodie, a psychiatrist at NYU Medical School who was the prosecution's expert witness, went further. Even if Dugan's brain is abnormal, he testified, the brain does not dictate behavior.
"There may be many, many people who also have psychopathic tendencies and have similar scans, who don't do antisocial behavior, who don't rape and kill," Brodie says.
Moreover, Brodie told the jury, Dugan's brain scan in 2009 says nothing about what his brain was like when he killed Jeanine Nicarico.
"I don't know with Brian Dugan what was going on in his brain" when he committed his crime, Brodie says. "And I certainly don't know what was going on from a brain scan that was taken 24 years later."
The jury seemed to zero in on the science, asking to reread all the testimony about the neuroscience during 10 hours of deliberation. But in the end, they sentenced Dugan to death. Dugan is appealing the sentence.
In the meantime, this case signals the beginning of a revolution in the courtroom, Kiehl says.
"Neuroscience and neuroimaging is going to change the whole philosophy about how we punish and how we decide who to incapacitate and how we decide how to deal with people," he says, echoing comments of a growing number of leading scholars across the country, including Princeton and Harvard.
Just like DNA, he believes brain scans will eventually be standard fare. And that, he and others say, could upend our notions of culpability, crime and punishment.
Inside A Psychopath's Brain: The Sentencing Debate
by Barbara Bradley Hagerty
June 30, 2010
Listen to the Story
Morning Edition
Second in a three-part series
Barbara Bradley Hagerty/NPR Kent Kiehl is one of the world's leading investigators of psychopathy and a professor at the University of New Mexico.
Kent Kiehl has studied hundreds of psychopaths. Kiehl is one of the world's leading investigators of psychopathy and a professor at the University of New Mexico. He says he can often see it in their eyes: There's an intensity in their stare, as if they're trying to pick up signals on how to respond. But the eyes are not an element of psychopathy, just a clue.
Officially, Kiehl scores their pathology on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, which measures traits such as the inability to feel empathy or remorse, pathological lying, or impulsivity.
"The scores range from zero to 40," Kiehl explains in his sunny office overlooking a golf course. "The average person in the community, a male, will score about 4 or 5. Your average inmate will score about 22. An individual with psychopathy is typically described as 30 or above. Brian scored 38.5 basically. He was in the 99th percentile."
"Brian" is Brian Dugan, a man who is serving two life sentences for rape and murder in Chicago. Last July, Dugan pleaded guilty to raping and murdering 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico in 1983, and he was put on trial to determine whether he should be executed. Kiehl was hired by the defense to do a psychiatric evaluation.
July 1, 2010
In a videotaped interview with Kiehl, Dugan describes how he only meant to rob the Nicaricos' home. But then he saw the little girl inside.
"She came to the door and ... I clicked," Dugan says in a flat, emotionless voice. "I turned into Mr. Hyde from Dr. Jekyll."
On screen, Dugan is dressed in an orange jumpsuit. He seems calm, even normal — until he lifts his hands to take a sip of water and you see the handcuffs. Dugan is smart — his IQ is over 140 — but he admits he has always had shallow emotions. He tells Kiehl that in his quarter century in prison, he believes he's developed a sense of remorse.
"And I have empathy, too — but it's like it just stops," he says. "I mean, I start to feel, but something just blocks it. I don't know what it is."
Kiehl says he's heard all this before: All psychopaths claim they feel terrible about their crimes for the benefit of the parole board.
"But then you ask them, 'What do you mean, you feel really bad?' And Brian will look at you and go, 'What do you mean, what does it mean?' They look at you like, 'Can you give me some help? A hint? Can I call a friend?' They have no way of really getting at that at all," Kiehl says.
Kiehl says the reason people like Dugan cannot access their emotions is that their physical brains are different. And he believes he has the brain scans to prove it.
On a crystal clear June morning at Albuquerque's Youth Diagnostic and Development Center, juveniles who have been convicted of violent offenses march by, craning their necks as a huge trailer drives through the gates. This is Kiehl's prize — a $2 million mobile MRI provided by the Mind Research Network at the University of New Mexico. Kiehl transports the mobile MRI to maximum-security prisons around the state, and over the past few years, he has scanned the brains of more than 1,100 inmates, about 20 percent of whom are psychopaths.
For ethical reasons, Kiehl could not allow me to watch an inmate's brain being scanned, so he asked his researchers to demonstrate.
Barbara Bradley Hagerty/NPR
Kiehl with the brain scanner he uses at prisons. He has scanned the brains of more than 1,100 inmates, about 20 percent of whom are psychopaths.
After a few minutes of preparation, researcher Kevin Bache settles into the brain scanner, where he can look up and see a screen. On the screen flashes three types of pictures. One kind depicts a moral violation: He sees several hooded Klansmen setting a cross on fire. Another type is emotional but morally ambiguous: a car that is on fire but you don't know why. Another type of photo is neutral: for example, students standing around a Bunsen burner.
The subjects rate whether the picture is a moral violation on a scale of 1 to 5. Kiehl says most psychopaths do not differ from normal subjects in the way they rate the photos: Both psychopaths and the average person rank the KKK with a burning cross as a moral violation. But there's a key difference: Psychopaths' brains behave differently from that of a nonpsychopathic person. When a normal person sees a morally objectionable photo, his limbic system lights up. This is what Kiehl calls the "emotional circuit," involving the orbital cortex above the eyes and the amygdala deep in the brain. But Kiehl says when psychopaths like Dugan see the KKK picture, their emotional circuit does not engage in the same way.
"We have a lot of data that shows psychopaths do tend to process this information differently," Kiehl says. "And Brian looked like he was processing it like the other individuals we've studied with psychopathy."
Kiehl says the emotional circuit may be what stops a person from breaking into that house or killing that girl. But in psychopaths like Dugan, the brakes don't work. Kiehl says psychopaths are a little like people with very low IQs who are not fully responsible for their actions. The courts treat people with low IQs differently. For example, they can't get the death penalty.
"What if I told you that a psychopath has an emotional IQ that's like a 5-year-old?" Kiehl asks. "Well, if that was the case, we'd make the same argument for individuals with low emotional IQ — that maybe they're not as deserving of punishment, not as deserving of culpability, etc."
Brian Dugan pleaded guilty last year to raping and murdering 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico in 1983, and he was put on trial to determine whether he should be executed. Neuroscientist Kent Kiehl was hired by the defense to do a psychiatric evaluation.
Courtesy of Steven Greenberg Brian Dugan pleaded guilty last year to raping and murdering 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico in 1983, and he was put on trial to determine whether he should be executed. Neuroscientist Kent Kiehl was hired by the defense to do a psychiatric evaluation.
And that's exactly what Dugan's lawyers argued at trial last November. Attorney Steven Greenberg said that Dugan was not criminally insane. He knew right from wrong. But he was incapable of making the right choices.
"Someone shouldn't be executed for a condition that they were born with, because it's not their fault," Greenberg says. "The crime is their fault, and he wasn't saying it wasn't his fault, and he wasn't saying, give [me] a free pass. But he was saying, don't kill me because it's not my fault that I was born this way."
This argument troubles Steven Erickson, a forensic psychologist and legal scholar at Widener University School of Law. He notes that alcoholics have brain abnormalities. Do we give them a pass if they kill someone while driving drunk?
"What about folks who suffer from depression? They have brain abnormalities, too. Should they be entitled to [an] excuse under the law?" he asks. "I think the key idea here is the law is not interested in brain abnormalities. The law is interested in whether or not someone at the time that the criminal act occurred understood the difference between right and wrong."
At trial, Jonathan Brodie, a psychiatrist at NYU Medical School who was the prosecution's expert witness, went further. Even if Dugan's brain is abnormal, he testified, the brain does not dictate behavior.
"There may be many, many people who also have psychopathic tendencies and have similar scans, who don't do antisocial behavior, who don't rape and kill," Brodie says.
Moreover, Brodie told the jury, Dugan's brain scan in 2009 says nothing about what his brain was like when he killed Jeanine Nicarico.
"I don't know with Brian Dugan what was going on in his brain" when he committed his crime, Brodie says. "And I certainly don't know what was going on from a brain scan that was taken 24 years later."
The jury seemed to zero in on the science, asking to reread all the testimony about the neuroscience during 10 hours of deliberation. But in the end, they sentenced Dugan to death. Dugan is appealing the sentence.
In the meantime, this case signals the beginning of a revolution in the courtroom, Kiehl says.
"Neuroscience and neuroimaging is going to change the whole philosophy about how we punish and how we decide who to incapacitate and how we decide how to deal with people," he says, echoing comments of a growing number of leading scholars across the country, including Princeton and Harvard.
Just like DNA, he believes brain scans will eventually be standard fare. And that, he and others say, could upend our notions of culpability, crime and punishment.
Psychopathy and Crime (part I)
I have always viewed the traditional liberal explanation of crime that emphasizes "poverty" and "injustice" as its primary sources as being flawed. Not to say that economic and institutional factors are insignificant, but rather their overemphasis has led to a one dimensional narrative that provides a poor foundation for creating viable solutions. Recently NPR's All Things Considered had a fascinating piece on research conducted the psychologist Robert Hare on the role of psychopathology in crime. He found that the lack of empathy and other traits displayed by psychopaths predisposed them to criminality. And he created a system of measuring an individual's level of psychopathy. Later on his student, the Forensic Criminologist Randy Kropp decided to put this connection to the test by tracking the rate of rescidivism of individuals with high, medium and low scores of psychopathy. Kropp found that the lower scoring group only had a rate of 20%, whereas the higher group's rate nearly reached 80%! In other words, an individual's psychological traits are a tremendous predictor of their propensity towards criminality. For good or for bad, his research contributed to a shift away from an almost exclusive emphasis of crime as being a product of environment towards a more nuanced view that factors in inborn traits. Of course this does not mean that we as a society should not work together to improve the social and economic environments that our fellow citizens face, but simply that the capacity of the state to alter outcomes through social engineering is more limited than we previously imagined.
Creator Of Psychopathy Test Worries About Its Use
by Alix Spiegel
May 27, 2011
Listen to the Story
All Things Considered
Psychologist Robert Hare created a test that measures whether someone is a psychopath. The test is used extensively in our criminal justice system to help decide whether inmates should get parole — and even to determine whether or not someone should be put to death. But Hare is now worried that his test isn't being properly used.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
There's a man in prison in California named Robert Dixon. He's been denied parole in large part because he took a test. It found he might be a psychopath. Dixon points out, that's a hard label to get rid of.
Mr. ROBERT DIXON: How do I convince somebody that I'm not a psychopath? I don't know.
NORRIS: The test that gave Dixon that label is called the PCL-R. It's used all over our criminal justice system to help make decisions about parole, sentencing, even whether someone should be put to death.
Yesterday, we heard Robert Dixon's story. Today, NPR's Alix Spiegel introduces us to the psychologist who created the test. He says he's now worried the test is not being used properly.
SPIEGEL: For decades, the Canadian psychologist Robert Hare worked to understand psychopathic personalities. Hare did everything. He analyzed their language. He measured their sweat glands. He even videotaped their songs.
Unidentified Man #1: (Singing)
SPIEGEL: The prisoner in this video sits in a bare room. Across the table is a graduate student. The student is there to conduct an interview but suddenly the prisoner starts to grill him. How does the prisoner know that the student is a real student? He could be a cop.
Unidentified Man #1: You could be a cop, right?
SPIEGEL: There's a pause.
Unidentified Man #1: I don't think you're a cop. I checked out the boots to see if they're black and shiny, but then that would be too easy.
SPIEGEL: This is one of more than a thousand videos recorded by psychologist Robert Hare over the course of his research. All of the interviews are with prisoners. And many, like this man, were eventually judged to be psychopaths.
Unidentified Man #1: Anyway, I was going on about justifiable murder. Someone rapes your wife, molests your kid, and then a guy's got to do that. If he doesn't, you know, that's just the way it goes. An eye for an eye, a tooth for tooth. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for I pack a .357 Magnum.
(Soundbite of laughter)
SPIEGEL: Hare began collecting these interviews in the 1960s, at a time when research on psychopaths was considered both obscure and basically irrelevant to understanding crime. You see, at that point, Hare says, there was a very clear consensus about where crime came from. Criminals were made, not born.
Dr. ROBERT HARE (Psychologist; Creator, PCL-R): In those days, social factors, environmental factors were the explanation for all crime. When you're born, just a blank - you're a blank slate and I can train you to be anything you want.
SPIEGEL: But Hare didn't really buy this. He thought inborn personality was important. He says, as a psychologist, when he looked at people he just saw these incredible differences in temperament.
Dr. HARE: Differences in impulsivity, differences in the capacity for empathy, for feeling guilt. As, you know, we have individual differences in intelligence, well, we should have individual differences in the personality traits that are responsible or related to crime.
SPIEGEL: And so, Hare set out to dissect the personality traits that might predispose people to criminality. For example, as we watched one of the videos he'd recorded, he pointed out how the prisoner was talking about his own capacity for remorse.
Unidentified Man #2: Remorse for me is a very distant word, because - me and remorse is more like a kick-myself-in-the-stomach word, where I've been there and done that and didn't like it.
Dr. HARE: He's trying to make sense out of something he really doesn't understand. What is remorse?
SPIEGEL: Now, Hare didn't just interview prisoners in order to understand psychopathic personality. He also experimented on them. For example, he recruited dozens of prisoners, put them in chairs and told them that in 30 seconds he was going to zap them with an electrical shock. Then he measured their heart rate to see if that information bothered them. And he found that the behavior of the psychopaths was different.
Dr. HARE: Most people show lots of emotional arousal - anticipatory fear, anxiety - while they're waiting for the shock to occur; psychopaths, hardly any.
Unidentified Man #1: (Singing) Look away, look away, look away, Dixieland.
SPIEGEL: In another experiment, Hare showed prisoners both highly emotional and totally neutral pictures. A picture of a rape, say, versus the picture of a table, and again measured their physical response. He found that for most prisoners, the emotional pictures prompted a very different reaction than the pictures of a table or chair.
Dr. HARE: But with psychopaths there's no difference. They treat these horrific pictures as if they were neutral pictures, no difference whatsoever between them.
SPIEGEL: This work led Hare to the conclusion that psychopaths are essentially emotionally deaf, simply do not have the capacity to feel, in a firsthand way, emotions like empathy, remorse and love.
Dr. HARE: It's sort of like trying to explain to a colorblind person what the color red is. Can we teach a colorblind person how to see red, what red is? You can have all the dictionary definitions you want, but this person will never quite get it.
SPIEGEL: Now, while Hare was making progress on understanding psychopaths, his work was still regarded as marginal, in part because the field of psychopath research in general was missing something really, really important. You see, there was simply no good way for researchers involved in this work to figure out who was a psychopath and who wasn't. The field had no way to measure. And Hare says this was a huge problem.
Dr. HARE: The science cannot progress without reliable and accurate measurement of what it is they're trying to study. Simple as that.
SPIEGEL: And so, Hare decided to make a test for psychopaths. He sat down with his research assistant and together they wrote down all of the personality traits they'd consistently seen in the psychopaths they studied. Hare reads from their list.
Dr. HARE: (Reading) Lack of sincerity, lack of remorse or guilt, lack of affect, lack of empathy, egocentricity, grandiose sense of self-worth.
SPIEGEL: And so on. Then Bob Hare designed, basically, an interview given by a psychologist that would find out whether someone had these traits. And he even made a way to score whether the traits were strong or weak or not there at all. Any score over 30 on his test certified the person as a psychopath. Voila, the test was born.
(Soundbite of flipping pages)
SPIEGEL: So this is literally - this is literally it.
Dr. HARE: This is it. This is the first thing that people saw - 17 pages, double-spaced.
SPIEGEL: Then one of Hare's students, an undergraduate named Randy Kropp, had an idea for another way to use the test.
Dr. RANDY KROPP (Forensic Criminologist): I just sort of posed the idea for him. I said, you know, do you think it would be a good idea to maybe follow up psychopaths?
SPIEGEL: What Kropp did was select a group of prisoners with high, low and moderate scores on the test. Then he followed what those prisoners did after they were released from prison. He wanted to figure out if people with high scores were more likely to commit crimes than people with low scores. Turns out, they were. Bob Hare.
Dr. HARE: Those who had low scores on the PCL-R, about 20 or 25 percent would be reconvicted within four or five years. The high group was 80 percent.
SPIEGEL: So, score high and there was an 80 percent chance you would re-offend; low, 20 percent. In other words, Hare's test...
Dr. HARE: Did an excellent job of predicting who would commit another offense within the next couple of years.
SPIEGEL: This was incredible. Now remember earlier, I pointed out that Hare was working at a time when people believed criminal behavior was really the result of poor environments. Then suddenly, here was this test of personality that seemed to identify the world's most serious chronic criminals.
Steve Hart, a former student of Bob Hare, who's now a leader in the field, says his colleagues were stunned.
Dr. STEVE HART (Psychologist): Here we are using a diagnosis of personality disorder to predict criminal behavior, and it's working.
SPIEGEL: Steve Hart remembers that shortly after the paper went public in the mid-'80s, Hare's lab got a visit from Canada's National Parole Board. They wanted the test.
Dr. HART: They said quite literally: What we want to do is give everybody this test and then have the test score written in big red numbers on the front of the file. No parole board should be able to make a decision without having some knowledge about whether or not somebody is psychopathic.
SPIEGEL: But at least initially, Bob Hare was deeply worried about letting people in the criminal justice system use his test - worried that this test he'd made for pure research purposes might be used incorrectly in the real world and hurt people.
So Steve Hart says Robert Hare told his students he would not give it out to certain people.
Dr. HART: I'm never giving the checklist to somebody who works in the criminal justice system. I'm just going to give it to scientists who do nothing.
SPIEGEL: But Hart says Hare's students argued with him, until ultimately Hare reconsidered, which is how the test ended up being used all over the criminal justice system in America, to help decide what kind of sentence a criminal should get, to help make parole decisions, for all kinds of decisions that radically affect people's lives.
But as use of his test has spread, Robert Hare has come to feel that some of his initial fears about how it might be misused have actually come to pass.
Dr. HARE: I feel ambivalent about it.
SPIEGEL: You see, while Hare is a strong believer that his test works well for the kind of basic lab research that it was originally designed for, he, like others, have begun to wonder if it does as good a job outside the lab.
Mr. DANIEL MURRAY (Professor, University of Virginia): Once you get into the real world, there does seem to be some lessening of reliability.
SPIEGEL: This is Daniel Murray, a professor at the University of Virginia, and about four years ago, Murray decided to study the real-world reliability of the test. Reliability is really important. It's when two people testing the same person get the same
So to do this study, Murray found court cases where a psychologist working for the prosecution tested the same person as a psychologist working for the defense. Then he looked at whether or not those psychologists got the same score. The answer: definitively no.
Mr. MURRAY: Ten-, 15- even 20-point score difference we found. And overall, there was about an eight-point difference in scores.
SPIEGEL: The question was why. One possibility, says Murray, is that the psychologists using the tests in prisons and courts might not be well-trained.
Mr. MURRAY: You know, we don't know if people giving it in the field have received formal, rigorous training or if they've just sort of bought the manual and maybe read a couple papers and decided they're going to start using it.
SPIEGEL: But Murray thinks it's also something else. He says that in his study, psychologists hired by the prosecution consistently scored higher than psychologists employed by the defense, probably, Murray says, because they're being paid for those opinions, and that money influences them.
As for Robert Hare, he sees both this bias and the lack of training as serious problems. He says it really bothers him.
Mr. HARE: I'm very concerned about the inappropriate use of this instrument for purposes that have serious implications for the individual and for society.
SPIEGEL: Still, use of the test continues to spread. It's now even mandated in several states. And the test has helped cause a shift in our ideas about where crime comes from, as well.
The idea that criminal behavior is primarily a product of poor environments has much less power today, in part because Hare's work seemed to teach us that crime resides inside the person, that inborn personality traits like empathy can influence whether people participate in crime. Bob Hare.
Mr. HARE: Empathy is highly genetic in origin, modified and shaped by the environment, of course. But if you've got an adult who has virtually no empathy in the normal sense of the term, you're not going to send him to school to learn empathy, Empathy 101. It's just not going to work.
SPIEGEL: And when you think about criminals in this way, as people who are almost genetically predisposed to crime, you are much less likely to invest in their rehabilitation than if you saw their acts as a product of unfortunate environmental circumstances.
This is why it's so important to figure out if bias and bad training are affecting Hare's test to the point that it is potentially mislabeling people. After all, once someone is labeled as a psychopath, what can you do with him? Nothing but lock him away.
Alix Spiegel, NPR News, Washington.
Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio®. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.
Creator Of Psychopathy Test Worries About Its Use
by Alix Spiegel
May 27, 2011
Listen to the Story
All Things Considered
Psychologist Robert Hare created a test that measures whether someone is a psychopath. The test is used extensively in our criminal justice system to help decide whether inmates should get parole — and even to determine whether or not someone should be put to death. But Hare is now worried that his test isn't being properly used.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
There's a man in prison in California named Robert Dixon. He's been denied parole in large part because he took a test. It found he might be a psychopath. Dixon points out, that's a hard label to get rid of.
Mr. ROBERT DIXON: How do I convince somebody that I'm not a psychopath? I don't know.
NORRIS: The test that gave Dixon that label is called the PCL-R. It's used all over our criminal justice system to help make decisions about parole, sentencing, even whether someone should be put to death.
Yesterday, we heard Robert Dixon's story. Today, NPR's Alix Spiegel introduces us to the psychologist who created the test. He says he's now worried the test is not being used properly.
SPIEGEL: For decades, the Canadian psychologist Robert Hare worked to understand psychopathic personalities. Hare did everything. He analyzed their language. He measured their sweat glands. He even videotaped their songs.
Unidentified Man #1: (Singing)
SPIEGEL: The prisoner in this video sits in a bare room. Across the table is a graduate student. The student is there to conduct an interview but suddenly the prisoner starts to grill him. How does the prisoner know that the student is a real student? He could be a cop.
Unidentified Man #1: You could be a cop, right?
SPIEGEL: There's a pause.
Unidentified Man #1: I don't think you're a cop. I checked out the boots to see if they're black and shiny, but then that would be too easy.
SPIEGEL: This is one of more than a thousand videos recorded by psychologist Robert Hare over the course of his research. All of the interviews are with prisoners. And many, like this man, were eventually judged to be psychopaths.
Unidentified Man #1: Anyway, I was going on about justifiable murder. Someone rapes your wife, molests your kid, and then a guy's got to do that. If he doesn't, you know, that's just the way it goes. An eye for an eye, a tooth for tooth. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for I pack a .357 Magnum.
(Soundbite of laughter)
SPIEGEL: Hare began collecting these interviews in the 1960s, at a time when research on psychopaths was considered both obscure and basically irrelevant to understanding crime. You see, at that point, Hare says, there was a very clear consensus about where crime came from. Criminals were made, not born.
Dr. ROBERT HARE (Psychologist; Creator, PCL-R): In those days, social factors, environmental factors were the explanation for all crime. When you're born, just a blank - you're a blank slate and I can train you to be anything you want.
SPIEGEL: But Hare didn't really buy this. He thought inborn personality was important. He says, as a psychologist, when he looked at people he just saw these incredible differences in temperament.
Dr. HARE: Differences in impulsivity, differences in the capacity for empathy, for feeling guilt. As, you know, we have individual differences in intelligence, well, we should have individual differences in the personality traits that are responsible or related to crime.
SPIEGEL: And so, Hare set out to dissect the personality traits that might predispose people to criminality. For example, as we watched one of the videos he'd recorded, he pointed out how the prisoner was talking about his own capacity for remorse.
Unidentified Man #2: Remorse for me is a very distant word, because - me and remorse is more like a kick-myself-in-the-stomach word, where I've been there and done that and didn't like it.
Dr. HARE: He's trying to make sense out of something he really doesn't understand. What is remorse?
SPIEGEL: Now, Hare didn't just interview prisoners in order to understand psychopathic personality. He also experimented on them. For example, he recruited dozens of prisoners, put them in chairs and told them that in 30 seconds he was going to zap them with an electrical shock. Then he measured their heart rate to see if that information bothered them. And he found that the behavior of the psychopaths was different.
Dr. HARE: Most people show lots of emotional arousal - anticipatory fear, anxiety - while they're waiting for the shock to occur; psychopaths, hardly any.
Unidentified Man #1: (Singing) Look away, look away, look away, Dixieland.
SPIEGEL: In another experiment, Hare showed prisoners both highly emotional and totally neutral pictures. A picture of a rape, say, versus the picture of a table, and again measured their physical response. He found that for most prisoners, the emotional pictures prompted a very different reaction than the pictures of a table or chair.
Dr. HARE: But with psychopaths there's no difference. They treat these horrific pictures as if they were neutral pictures, no difference whatsoever between them.
SPIEGEL: This work led Hare to the conclusion that psychopaths are essentially emotionally deaf, simply do not have the capacity to feel, in a firsthand way, emotions like empathy, remorse and love.
Dr. HARE: It's sort of like trying to explain to a colorblind person what the color red is. Can we teach a colorblind person how to see red, what red is? You can have all the dictionary definitions you want, but this person will never quite get it.
SPIEGEL: Now, while Hare was making progress on understanding psychopaths, his work was still regarded as marginal, in part because the field of psychopath research in general was missing something really, really important. You see, there was simply no good way for researchers involved in this work to figure out who was a psychopath and who wasn't. The field had no way to measure. And Hare says this was a huge problem.
Dr. HARE: The science cannot progress without reliable and accurate measurement of what it is they're trying to study. Simple as that.
SPIEGEL: And so, Hare decided to make a test for psychopaths. He sat down with his research assistant and together they wrote down all of the personality traits they'd consistently seen in the psychopaths they studied. Hare reads from their list.
Dr. HARE: (Reading) Lack of sincerity, lack of remorse or guilt, lack of affect, lack of empathy, egocentricity, grandiose sense of self-worth.
SPIEGEL: And so on. Then Bob Hare designed, basically, an interview given by a psychologist that would find out whether someone had these traits. And he even made a way to score whether the traits were strong or weak or not there at all. Any score over 30 on his test certified the person as a psychopath. Voila, the test was born.
(Soundbite of flipping pages)
SPIEGEL: So this is literally - this is literally it.
Dr. HARE: This is it. This is the first thing that people saw - 17 pages, double-spaced.
SPIEGEL: Then one of Hare's students, an undergraduate named Randy Kropp, had an idea for another way to use the test.
Dr. RANDY KROPP (Forensic Criminologist): I just sort of posed the idea for him. I said, you know, do you think it would be a good idea to maybe follow up psychopaths?
SPIEGEL: What Kropp did was select a group of prisoners with high, low and moderate scores on the test. Then he followed what those prisoners did after they were released from prison. He wanted to figure out if people with high scores were more likely to commit crimes than people with low scores. Turns out, they were. Bob Hare.
Dr. HARE: Those who had low scores on the PCL-R, about 20 or 25 percent would be reconvicted within four or five years. The high group was 80 percent.
SPIEGEL: So, score high and there was an 80 percent chance you would re-offend; low, 20 percent. In other words, Hare's test...
Dr. HARE: Did an excellent job of predicting who would commit another offense within the next couple of years.
SPIEGEL: This was incredible. Now remember earlier, I pointed out that Hare was working at a time when people believed criminal behavior was really the result of poor environments. Then suddenly, here was this test of personality that seemed to identify the world's most serious chronic criminals.
Steve Hart, a former student of Bob Hare, who's now a leader in the field, says his colleagues were stunned.
Dr. STEVE HART (Psychologist): Here we are using a diagnosis of personality disorder to predict criminal behavior, and it's working.
SPIEGEL: Steve Hart remembers that shortly after the paper went public in the mid-'80s, Hare's lab got a visit from Canada's National Parole Board. They wanted the test.
Dr. HART: They said quite literally: What we want to do is give everybody this test and then have the test score written in big red numbers on the front of the file. No parole board should be able to make a decision without having some knowledge about whether or not somebody is psychopathic.
SPIEGEL: But at least initially, Bob Hare was deeply worried about letting people in the criminal justice system use his test - worried that this test he'd made for pure research purposes might be used incorrectly in the real world and hurt people.
So Steve Hart says Robert Hare told his students he would not give it out to certain people.
Dr. HART: I'm never giving the checklist to somebody who works in the criminal justice system. I'm just going to give it to scientists who do nothing.
SPIEGEL: But Hart says Hare's students argued with him, until ultimately Hare reconsidered, which is how the test ended up being used all over the criminal justice system in America, to help decide what kind of sentence a criminal should get, to help make parole decisions, for all kinds of decisions that radically affect people's lives.
But as use of his test has spread, Robert Hare has come to feel that some of his initial fears about how it might be misused have actually come to pass.
Dr. HARE: I feel ambivalent about it.
SPIEGEL: You see, while Hare is a strong believer that his test works well for the kind of basic lab research that it was originally designed for, he, like others, have begun to wonder if it does as good a job outside the lab.
Mr. DANIEL MURRAY (Professor, University of Virginia): Once you get into the real world, there does seem to be some lessening of reliability.
SPIEGEL: This is Daniel Murray, a professor at the University of Virginia, and about four years ago, Murray decided to study the real-world reliability of the test. Reliability is really important. It's when two people testing the same person get the same
So to do this study, Murray found court cases where a psychologist working for the prosecution tested the same person as a psychologist working for the defense. Then he looked at whether or not those psychologists got the same score. The answer: definitively no.
Mr. MURRAY: Ten-, 15- even 20-point score difference we found. And overall, there was about an eight-point difference in scores.
SPIEGEL: The question was why. One possibility, says Murray, is that the psychologists using the tests in prisons and courts might not be well-trained.
Mr. MURRAY: You know, we don't know if people giving it in the field have received formal, rigorous training or if they've just sort of bought the manual and maybe read a couple papers and decided they're going to start using it.
SPIEGEL: But Murray thinks it's also something else. He says that in his study, psychologists hired by the prosecution consistently scored higher than psychologists employed by the defense, probably, Murray says, because they're being paid for those opinions, and that money influences them.
As for Robert Hare, he sees both this bias and the lack of training as serious problems. He says it really bothers him.
Mr. HARE: I'm very concerned about the inappropriate use of this instrument for purposes that have serious implications for the individual and for society.
SPIEGEL: Still, use of the test continues to spread. It's now even mandated in several states. And the test has helped cause a shift in our ideas about where crime comes from, as well.
The idea that criminal behavior is primarily a product of poor environments has much less power today, in part because Hare's work seemed to teach us that crime resides inside the person, that inborn personality traits like empathy can influence whether people participate in crime. Bob Hare.
Mr. HARE: Empathy is highly genetic in origin, modified and shaped by the environment, of course. But if you've got an adult who has virtually no empathy in the normal sense of the term, you're not going to send him to school to learn empathy, Empathy 101. It's just not going to work.
SPIEGEL: And when you think about criminals in this way, as people who are almost genetically predisposed to crime, you are much less likely to invest in their rehabilitation than if you saw their acts as a product of unfortunate environmental circumstances.
This is why it's so important to figure out if bias and bad training are affecting Hare's test to the point that it is potentially mislabeling people. After all, once someone is labeled as a psychopath, what can you do with him? Nothing but lock him away.
Alix Spiegel, NPR News, Washington.
Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio®. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.
Have The Democratic & Republican Parties Become Outdated?
The Economic Freedom Alliance would be focused on promoting limited federal intervention in the marketplace, greater fiscal responsibility and a more moderate tax burden. In order to not risk becoming another "conglomerate," it would remain neutral on social issues, allowing its members to turn to other parties to express their social visions. They may be able to cooperate with social democrats on pursuing the elimination of corporate welfare (subsidies and selective tax breaks).
The Social Democratic Party, would be a rallying point for those who believe in greater government intervention in the private sector and a more robust welfare state. By remaining neutral on social issues, it might draw in working class Evangelical Christians who used to form a key component in progressive economic movements.
The Christian Democratic Party would be a rallying point for those who promote social conservative positions and seek to reaffirm the role of Christian values in American society.
The Progressive Social Front would represent citizens focused on issues of gay rights, women rights, etc. Both economic libertarians and social democrats could overlook their sharp differences in economic issues to curb the role of the state in regulating individual social choice.
The Nanny Dearest Party would be an alliance between the social conservatives and "nannyocracy" progressives who look to maintain the war on drugs, tight control of gambling and other federal efforts to protect us from ourselves.
The Legalize It Party is the arch nemesis of the Nanny Dearest Party.
The Neoconservative Movement.would provide a home for those who still believed that the federal government should engage in nation building and an interventionist foreign policy. I suspect that this faction never enjoyed wide spread popular support and was only able to survive by gaining the support of the upper echelon of the Republican Party. Lacking broad popular support, I anticipate that they would wither in a relatively short period of time.
The Thomas Jefferson (Non-Intervention) Party would provide a voice for the many Americans who are deeply opposed to the bi-partisan support of nation building, excessive foreign intervention and militarism. A great many Americans who sharply disagree on cultural and economic issues would lend their support to this party.
The Afro-American Alliance and Hispanic People's Party would create formal parties for those whose focus is on narrow ethno-identity politics, rather than broad national welfare. I predict that the strength of these factions were primarily derived from their participation in the broad Democratic Party coalition. A surprisingly large number of Democrats support the enforcement of existing immigration laws, but were willing to overlook their party elite's support of amnesty in order to maintain the cohesiveness of their coalition. Especially considering that many African-Americans and Hispanics are patriotic Americans whose focus is on broad national interests, I am confident that outside of the protective confines of a progressive coalition, these factions would shrivel.
The 10th Amendment (State's Right) Movement would provide a voice for those who believe that greater good occurs when the majority of divisive social and economic issues are resolved at a local and state level. In most cases they would rally against intrusive law suites from the left and right that thwarted the will of local communities to determine their destiny.
Having observed Israeli Politics for many years, I do not harbor illusions about multi-party systems, for they possess their own fundamental defects. In heavily divided, coalition systems, small factions are often able to exercise a disproportionate influence. For example, in order to form a working coalition, Israel's larger secular parties have to acquiesce to the demands of religious parties, such as exemption from military service for the Haredim. But, a system that offers greater flexibility and choice may be more conducive towards addressing the fiscal and political ills that beleaguer us.
Monday, August 29, 2011
Paul Krugman And The Alien Invasion?
During an interview with Fareed Zakaria, Paul Krugman suggested (in jest) that if were to fake a space alien invasion, the resulting surge in government spending and the monetary expansion would end the recession within 18 months. The flaws in his position are so glaring that even Stevie Wonder could see them! Have we not already engaged in profligate government spending via the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan? Estimates place the total cost as high as $3.7 trillion! And to no avail, the federal reserve has already presided over an aggressive expansion of the money supply via quantitative easing.
Krugman cites World War II as an example of massive government spending pulling the United States out of the Great Depression. But, he fails to consider the unique set of circumstances that allowed us to quickly pay off our war time debt. Specifically, in 1945 we were the only advanced, industrial nation that was not completely devastated by the war. And we did not face staunch competition from and massive trade deficits with China, Indian and other resurgent nations. Were we to follow his recommendations, the costs (increased debt and inflation) would be certain, while the benefits would be dubious. But, if we were invaded by aliens, the only consolation would be that as one of earth's biggest a**holes, Krugman would surely be one of the first earthlings subject to an intergalactic anal probing.
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