Portraying Those We Condemn with Care: Extending the Ethics of Representation

The study of crime’s images is an increasingly important endeavour. In this paper I seek to understand the impact of an image of a criminal child (the outcomes and consequences that have stemmed from its display) by examining its affect (its capacity to engage its viewers). I demonstrate how the image’s meaning emerged from encounters with both the content and the format of the image, as well as from the context in which these encounters occurred. I will demonstrate that the impacts from this image went beyond what was necessary to punish, and propose that an ethics of representation is extended to include images of the condemned. For some population groups, this extension can mitigate the influence of fantasies about criminal ‘others’ that may come into play when pictures of them are viewed.     

Prosecutor Risk,Maturation, and Wrongful Conviction Practice

In this article we rethink the connection between prosecutorial experience and conviction psychology that undergirds much of the academic literature about wrongful convictions. The conviction psychology account of prosecutorial behavior asserts that prosecutorial susceptibility to cognitive biases deepens over time, thereby increasing the risk that prosecutors will become involved in wrongful convictions the longer they stay in the profession. Our interviews with more than 200 state prosecutors call into question the basis for this asserted correlation between prosecutorial experience and risk of misconduct. The prosecutors we met consistently reported that, all else equal, prosecutors tend to become more balanced, rather than more adversarial, over time. Hence, the prosecutors who present the greatest risk of producing a wrongful conviction are those who are either inexperienced or resistant to the normal maturation process. For this reason, we suggest that wrongful conviction researchers and database designers pay closer attention to the variables associated with prosecutorial experience and resistance that might affect the development of prosecutorial maturity and the consequent risk of wrongful convictions.     

The dimensions of dangerousness revisited

In this article, we extend our previous study on clinical predictions of violence using the Dangerous Behavior Rating Scale by increasing follow-up interval from 2 to 6 years and supplying new data on prediction-outcome correlations for multidiscipline assessors. A total of 162 accused persons remanded for evaluations at METFORS were assessed using three criterion measures: subsequent violence, criminality, and general incidents. Statistical analyses revealed a range of predictive performance, contingent on several conditions including the identities of evaluators, categories of subjects, and length and context of follow-up. Even prognostications yielding the highest magnitude coefficients, reaching 53 in the case of psychometric forecasts of behavior in psychiatric hospitals, failed to account for more than 28% of the prediction-outcome covariance. Implications of the results are considered for the future role of the dangerousness construct.The research project described in this article was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Canadian Psychiatric Research Foundation, the Solicitor General Canada, the LaMarsh Research Program on Violence and Conflict Resolution, the Ontario Ministry of Health, Simon Fraser University, the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry, and the psychopathy project supported under the sustaining grant provided by the Solicitor General, Canada, to the Centre of Criminology, University of Toronto. Thanks for their perceptive commentaries to Ronald Roesch and the two anonymous reviewers ofLaw and Human Behavior. Acknowledged as well are the contributions of the many research assistants and representatives of mental health, police, justice, and correctional agencies who collaborated in the compilation of these data. Research assistance was provided by Michelle Grossman, Simon Hanbury, Lily Keoskerian, Ed Tymosiak, and Cheri Wilner. Bill Glackman offered technical help with the data analysis. A version of this paper was originally presented at the 1991 Meeting of the American Society of Criminology in San Francisco.Clarke Institute of Psychiatr     

RESPONSE TO TROXEL v. GRANVILLE

In today's world, children grow up in families that take many different forms, and society can no longer consider the traditional nuclear family the normal or optimal family structure. As a result, in cases of divorce, courts are increasingly relying on the results of psychological research when awarding custody and visitation privileges. In contrast to recent trends, however, the U.S. Supreme Court's majority decision in Troxel v. Granville favors biological parents' rights over the psychological interests of children. This article discusses the potential contributions of attachment theory to the contest between biology and psychology in America's divorce courts.