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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
and the honest title reveals the honest content,
By
This review is from: Assessing Sex Offenders: Problems and Pitfalls (American Series in Behavioral Science and Law) (Paperback)
If sex offender evaluations are truly based on science, it should be no surprise that the science of evaluations must be subjected to rigorous peer review checking whether their methodology complies with proper scientific principles of research and proof.
Clinical experience does not prove anything, in fact, Dr. Campbell cites to research that shows that confidence of clinical psychologists is in reverse correlation with accuracy of their findings. Therefore Dr. Campbell's lack of clinical experience with sex offenders does not make him unqualified, as the previous reviewer suggests, as an experimental psychologist to render the opinion he is rendering, on compliance of evaluations to scientific standards. In fact, that is exactly what is necessary for such evaluations - that before a clinical psychologist starts gaining any "experience" with treating sex offenders, he or she must first diagnose them properly using reliable scientific methods, which is sorely lacking. Also, a scientist providing a review of a scientific methodology is not obliged to offer solutions, it's quite a different task and one that Dr. Campbell has never promised to include in his book. Any diagnosis sounding like "not otherwise specified" or, a diagnosis where mental health professionals intentionally conceal that raping might be an uncontrollable behavior, simply to deny a patient the opportunity for a successful insanity defense in a criminal trial is a betrayal of Hyppocratic oath. If a doctor creating diagnostic guidelines would intentionally omit a symptom of a brain tumor, that it can push a person to commit violent acts, simply to subject the patient to criminal liability when he in fact does not possess the proper mental state to be culpable, which the doctor very well knows, is preposterous. Same applies to a pharmacologist who "omits" to mention on the drug label that one of the side effects of the drug is to cause involuntary violent behaviors. If a self-respecting oncologist or pharmacologist cannot omit such symptoms material to their pateint's potential criminal culpability, then what kind of public policy would justify that a self-respecting psychiatrist would do the same to his patient? Thank you, Dr. Campbell, for your honest book revealing that evaluations are mostly subjective, based on fear factor rather than on scientific methods, are contrary to relevant sex offender recidivist statistics, do not comply with APA's Standards of Educational and Psychological Testing, are not rooted even in the subjective diagnostic categories of DSM-IV and are using the factors which are not relevant to recidivism of vastly heterogenous sex offender population. Science must not be politically correct, must be very simply the journey in search of truth, and not a disguise for law enforcement.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Must-read if you perform these evaluations, or are defending someone against one,
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Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Assessing Sex Offenders: Problems and Pitfalls (American Series in Behavioral Science and Law) (Paperback)
I used to do sex offender evaluations for the State of Nebraska, and still do them in limited circumstances. For the first half of the book, I was actually angry at Dr. Campbell. "OK, you have a point, but aren't you overlooking what we actually know?" I would think. For the second half of the book, I was shaking my head in amazement. "You're absolutely right," I thought. "Son of a gun."Just how accurate are sex offender evaluations? To listen to some of the proponents of actuarial measures, we have sex offenders pegged. Yet this is far from the truth. In fact, our measures are inaccurate to an extent that would never be tolerated in any other area. Dr. Campbell demonstrates by simple math (math which any psychologist who gives testimony better have mastered) that, even in the highest-risk categories, psychologists will identify at least two people who would not have reoffended for every one that they correctly identify as going on to reoffend. This is the truth. We're obligated to tell this to the judges, juries, and boards who will make the actual decision. We're obligated not to hide this information, because it's the truth. Imagine if two out of every three death penalty verdicts were applied to an innocent person. Imagine if two out of every three prescriptions were filled incorrectly. Imagine if two out of every three X-rays got the wrong patient's name on it. That's the level of accuracy in sex offender evaluations. If you were a judge, wouldn't you want to know this? And if not, should you be allowed to wield the powers of a judge? In response to one reviewer: Dr. Campbell isn't against sex offender evaluations. In fact, he's a forensic psychologist, and this is part of his professional turf. Rather, he's in favor of us being honest about what we know, and what we do not know, whenever we testify in court. In other words, he's actually holding us up to our own ethics code. We are supposed to tell courts and juries the limits of our knowledge whenever we testify, and he's completely on-target that we have not been doing that. If society is going to lock up two innocent people for every guilty one, that's society's decision, not ours -- but they ought at least KNOW that this is what they are doing. Not have us conveniently blind them to the truth, by pretending to greater accuracy than we possess. But more than this, Campbell goes on to recommend that all the researchers in the field need to focus on using the same approach that has been successful in handling the violent mentally ill: the MacArthur-sponsored "multiple decision tree" form of classification. It permits far greater accuracy than any single big-bang measure can deliver, and is a sorely-needed antidote to the overweening self-confidence of some of the researchers who promote actuarial measures of sex offender recidivism. There's a reason that this book is now on the recommended reading list for aspiring forensic psychologists, even though it harshly criticizes many established forensic practitioners. They all recognize that Campbell's critique, although devastating, is spot-on, and deserves a wider audience. In response to another reviewer: your angry tone is, in my opinion, justified. Nonetheless, sex offender evaluations are NOT mostly subjective. In fact, they are based almost entirely on OBJECTIVE criteria, such as number of different victims, whether they were male or female, age at time of release from prison, history of substance abuse, history of mental illness, and so on and so on. As Campbell points out, sex offenders get sorted into objective risk categories. The problem is that the vast majority of captured sex offenders do not reoffend. Reoffense rates for incest offenders are in the single digits. We have not yet identified the Big-Bang factor (or factors) that allow us to say with confidence that THIS guy is one of the 10% who will reoffend, rather than the 90% who will not. As a result, even our most high-risk categories contain a large number of people who will not go on to reoffend. We raise the number of offenders from maybe 10% to maybe 35%, which is not bad, but not yet good enough. It's not that the field has been captured by law enforcement. It's that these crimes are uniquely abhored by the public, and the public pushes all public officials to abridge civil rights in the name of safety. (Think about it. Have you ever heard of a "murderer" or "burglar" evaluation? Why are there only "sex offender" evaluations? Not because they're accurate, but because of public outrage and demands for action that cannot safely be taken.) The real issue is the temptation of experts to sound more confident than they are, to which we are all vulnerable for many different reasons. Campbell's book is a good antidote to this, and I hope lots and lots of attorneys and judges read it.
9 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
If This Book Had an Honest Title...,
This review is from: Assessing Sex Offenders: Problems and Pitfalls (Hardcover)
almost no one would have bought it. It's not about assessing sex offenders at all. It's an attack on the civil commitment of sex offenders. The author spends the entire book attacking the assessment methods used in the civil commitment process. Even this attack is false, since Campbell is an ideologue who opposes committing sex offenders and has a new line of attack every year. It's not surprising that Dr. Campbell has no suggestions at all on how sex offenders should be assessed, since he has never worked with sex offenders. He's too busy writing books attacking things other people do. The ethical code of the American Psychological Association prohibits psychologists from practicing outside their area of knowledge, but apparently Dr. Campbell is above such petty rules. For anyone who needs real information about evaluating sex offenders, see Dennis Doren's book.
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