 Our next speaker is Dr. Jeff Roske, and he's an assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. Jeff's research interests cover criminological theory, correctional treatment programs, and social science research methods, and he's here to describe correctional quackery as he describes it, and particularly with their use of lie detectors. So, welcome him for his talk, The Futility of Post-Conviction Polygraph. Good morning, everyone. I want to start off by thanking Dr. Hall and especially Mr. Randy for putting on this wonderful concert, or excuse me, conference, and I'm really excited to be here, and this is one of the more humbling experiences in my life. Before I start off with the polygraph or lie detector, I wanted to briefly discuss the larger problem, and we've seen that already with the first talk that talked about quackery in veterinary medicine, but it exists within corrections also in criminal justice, and the term was coined by Ed LaTessa and Frank Cullen and Paul Gendro at the University of Cincinnati, and they call it correctional quackery, and it's this idea that these correctional interventions, these things where you're trying to go in and affect the defending pattern of convicted felons, that these are interventions that really have no empirical or theoretical support. They lack any evidence that they reduce offending or reduce recidivism, but more importantly the proponents are dismissive of any evidence that is against the intervention, so any counter evidence is not held with any regard with these folks. Now some examples of this that you may be familiar with are things like deterrence-based interventions such as Scared Straight, which actually have been shown to actually increase offending, and it always saddens me when I see shows like Beyond Scared Straight, even though we have 30 years of evidence to show that these types of programs don't work, and in fact may be dangerous, but we also have other nonsense such as pet therapy, aroma therapy, and acupuncture that are all claimed to reduce the offending pattern of folks. Now just a brief history of polygraph testing for those of you who aren't familiar with it. There are many folks who claim to be the parent or father of the modern polygraph, but really the one that is most cited is William Marston, who is a PhD psychologist out of Harvard. He was also interestingly the creator of Wonder Woman and her magic lasso that if you got caught in its grasp you had to tell the truth. Now his machine just measured rises in systolic blood pressure when asked questions and a deceptive response was assumed that there was a rise in blood pressure. Now this case or his machine was actually the basis for the Frye standard in criminal courts for over 50 years or 60 years up until the Dawbert decision in the early 90s regarding the scientific miscibility of evidence. And this case was a murder trial that was actually remanded back and the conviction reversed because of there was no or the court concluded that there was no scientific basis to polygraph but it was not a scientifically accepted procedure and it had been kept out. It has continued to be used since then. Now it's not admissible in court but it does have or is used in a lot of different arenas. Now for those of you who are not familiar with the modern polygraph it measures four different physiological reactions blood pressure breathing heart rate and sweating but there's no question that the machine is actually measuring those physiological features. We know they exist. Now what's controversial about the polygraph is whether that you can infer deception or no deception from changes in these measures but there has to be a test format and how you ask the questions and there are actually two different types of testing procedures that you could do. One is based on or is a fear based test that if you that fear of detection will cause changes in these measures and that this is how we can measure deception whereas the other side is actually not trying to measure deception it's actually trying to measure what you know and they're based on cognition. So there is some science to this cognitive based type polygraph or different procedures. Dr. Tavers talked about the fMRI. I share her skepticism with that but I think as we start moving towards this idea of rather fear of detection and moving towards cognition we might be able to root some of these procedures in science. Now polygraph testing's empirical evidence the most recent study of note was done by the National Research Council of the National Academies and they were actually trying to see or determine the evidence for polygraph screening for espionage at national laboratories and they concluded in their study that they examined over a thousand different polygraph studies and they can only find 57 of them that approached scientific credibility but even those weren't very good. But nonetheless they were able to conclude that these fear based test formats lacked any real scientific validity as they were done. But there was some evidence that the polygraph detects deception rates at rates greater than chance but well below perfection. Now that's an interesting statement to look at. Basically what they're saying is yeah it can detect deception in some instances but it's not a very accurate test and we don't know what the accuracy is. Moreover within screening applications which is the difference between sort of this idea of an incident specific test where you know a crime has occurred versus a screening where you're trying to see if a crime occurred. There's no credible accuracy estimates for these screening applications and that overconfidence in these results creates a significant risk to national security. As you can see we're nearly a decade later it's still used. Now within post-conviction polygraph testing now there was the 1988 Polygraph Act came out and since then which really banned the use of polygraph in a lot of workplace screening situations and since then polygraphers have moved into using it within the criminal justice system. Now in sex offender supervision this idea that you're trying to prevent recidivism and keep these guys adhering to their treatment and therapeutic standards and supervision standards the polygraph is used for two purposes in this arena. The first is to assess historical offending patterns and the second is to screen these offenders to see if they are adhering to these supervision and treatment standards. Now this is actually sold as an evidence-based practice and they were able to do this because they they've basically papered the known universe with literature suggesting that it increases offender reporting of past criminal history and that knowing about this past criminal history will place offenders in appropriate therapeutic outcomes and appropriate risk levels for supervision but more importantly that the sphere of detection will deter them from new by technical violations and also from new offenses and so if we actually assess the evidence with that the first is yes it actually polygraph defenders do report more deviant behavior or behavior more victims in a wider array of offenses than a comparison group but actually we know this from the psych literature as the bogus pipeline where if you hook somebody up to a fake polygraph or lie detector convince them that it works they're going to be more readily or to admit to certain things that they normally wouldn't. The literature actually doesn't mention at all this bogus pipeline effect at least in the proponent side of things. The second is this idea of improved therapeutic outcomes there are as I said they're the proponent literature and there are more than 20 articles out there that shows offenders and treatment providers think that it helps reduce risk for offending and the thing that they keep claiming in this is that the offenders and the therapists and treatment providers claim that it holds up or the offenders more accountable yet when we look at this idea of what what do we mean by accountable there's only one study that actually examined behavior outcomes ie recidivism did these guys actually reoffend or not and if we look at that study it was out of Vermont it was a very small study but it was actually for for some of the social work literature this is a pretty solid experiment and this was a McGrath and colleagues out of the Vermont they work for Department of Corrections there they say or had a sample of 104 polygraph defenders they matched them with a non polygraph group of sex offenders and followed them for five years and they found one statistically significant difference in new violent offending and that's actually P less than 0.05 if you're wondering what the level was at with three new offenses in the polygraph group versus 12 in the control group the thing they don't mention in their article is that actually this may be actually do rather than to the polygraph maybe due to what we call plea bargaining effect where rather than plead guilty to a violent offense you plead guilty to a non violent offense to get a lesser sentence or the system just revoked them back to prison rather than go through the expense of a trial so these seem to be more credible explanations for that effect that they saw than anything the polygraph might claim but more importantly when you look at sex offenses there was no difference in offending so it did not actually show any effect in the arena that it was really trying to affect but also that the polygraph group had higher they were not significant but they were higher across the board in total new convictions new non violent convictions field violations in prison returns which goes against the deterrence hypothesis so when we look at this this idea of polygraph testing as correctional quackery it lacks scientific validity as it's currently implemented there's no evidence for reduction in sexual recidivism that doesn't mean that it's not there it's just that the evidence there's no evidence except for one study and there's also no evidence for a deterrent effect so but treatment providers and offenders think it's useful but when we actually look at these articles in greater detail we find out that they have multiple methodological problems in research design and analytic strategy and they they are unable to remove the confounding from other treatment effects they don't have randomized selection there are often they're just convenience samples so there are a lot of methodological flaws for the evidence but also they the literature dismisses validity accuracy and utility concerns and I have one article that that I found that actually claimed that accuracy was unimportant and and it's that kind of thing that that they're able to use and leverage to claim that this is an evidence-based tool now despite this lack of evidence the proponents have been very very good at selling this nearly 80% of adult sex vendor programs and 50% of adolescent sex vendor programs reported its use in 2010 now to wrap up the things I'm doing to sort of trying to counter correctional quackery is this idea of using their own findings and I have a paper coming out in sexual abuse which is the journal for people who deal with sex offenders and I call it the futility of post-conviction polygraph testing and so it took a lot to get this paper accepted it was a very difficult process but I'm happy to say it's coming out we also we also now we also need to counter correctional quackery with solid evidence and I'm currently working on a large study post-conviction polygraph using recidivism data from multiple state correctional agencies I've had a good fortune to having worked in the Montana, Colorado, Washington and Florida systems and so I'm going to get their data I'm going to use propensity score matching which is a statistical method for replicating randomization and I'm going to more importantly I'm going to use better analytic tools to frailty models to account for first of all there's repeated measures these guys don't just offend once and there's also a heterogeneity of offending that the polygraph people don't mention is that a pedophile is not the same as a rapist is not the same as a boy and that these differences in offending may contribute to whether or not certain types of tools work effectively or not and lastly we need to inform practitioners about the dangers of correctional quackery and I got this from Frank Cullen out of the University of Cincinnati but I send my work to administrators I email them my work just to let them know what's out there because these guys are busy they don't have time to really go through the research sometimes and they're unaware that some of the stuff that they're implementing within their own agencies is nonsense and so this is sort of my tack for trying to attack this so and with that are there any questions? We will take a couple questions. Got this gentleman here. Thank you. Is there any data with regard to the actual polygraph the admissions under the post-conviction polygraph as to the veracity of the admissions during that polygraph? Are you saying or is there any way to check? Are you talking about false convection? Yes. Some of the literature actually talks about this a false confession actually is a wider problem beyond polygraph in any kind of psychotherapy or treatment that you're trying to do and typically with this with the therapist I'm not sure how they use false confession they talk about certain types of personalities being more prone to it but this idea of inducing a false confession is not really something of concern and if you're more importantly if you're like a probation officer or a parole officer what are you going to believe? What are you going to take the chances on? This guy admitted to do something or to doing something? I'm not going to worry whether it's false or not I'm going to take action so that's sort of it's glossed over it is discussed though. Good morning. I have a couple of friends at work at the Department of Justice for the State of Wisconsin and I've talked with them a little bit about polygraph testing they've undergone it themselves for employment and so on. The question I have is that they're firmly convinced that it's a very reliable tool and this is in the last year or so despite your admission. Is it that the officers and those using it are trained to believe that it works so that they convey a sense of reality when they go into interview with someone? They're sort of whistling in the graveyard as I'm looking at it because they're hoping it works and these guys believe it sincerely. What's interesting is Kim English who is the proponent of post-conviction polygraph I used to work for her and she is a firm believer that it actually works and I tried to no avail to show her the literature beyond her circle of polygraph friends and basically it is they sort of tune out anything that's contrary to what they believe and sort of there's this seduction of technology I really think that happens with the polygraph you're hooking them up to a machine and the machine seems to be working and when they're lying there seems to be changes it has to work and so this idea I'm not sure how to answer that question fully because there's a lot of different things that play here and it's something difficult that we have to address in a lot of different arenas you know the folks that do homeopathy believe that it works you know and trying to convince them that it doesn't is difficult especially when they've dedicated their profession to it they don't want to hear that Any other questions for Jeff? Well, let's thank him once again for having us.