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'I See What Is Right and Approve, But I Do What Is Wrong': Psychopathy and Punishment in the Context of Racial Bias in the Age of Neuroimaging
... Marginalization, criminal justice involvement, and trauma go hand in hand (Gold, 2018). Criticisms have been leveled about commonly used psychological assessment instruments systematically discriminating against minority and marginalized populations (Cunneen, 2006;Gutierrez et al., 2016;Lynch & Perlin, 2021). ...
The need for trauma-informed practice is well recognized across mental health and legal settings; however, relatively little has been written about its application in forensic mental health assessment. This article focuses on trauma-informed assessment of criminal justice involved individuals, given the high rates of trauma exposure and related sequelae in this population. A trauma-informed lens allows forensic mental health examiners to assess examinees in the context of their developmental histories and lived experience. Such a lens also has implications for the entire assessment process in terms of interviewing, psychological testing, diagnostic conclusions, feedback, and the provision of testimony and educating triers of fact. Being adequately compassionate is not only ethical, but also likely to enhance data quality. We identify tensions with respect to maintaining the role clarity necessary for forensic practice, and examiner self-awareness is discussed as a way to manage emotional reactions and to reduce bias and role conflict. We examine these issues through the framework of therapeutic jurisprudence; the principles of this framework and trauma-informed forensic mental health assessments are aligned and could (and should) synergistically lead to important changes to psycho-legal practice.
The need for trauma-informed practice is well recognized across mental health and legal settings; however, relatively little has been written about its application in forensic mental health assessment. This paper focuses on trauma-informed assessment of criminal justice involved individuals, given the high rates of trauma exposure and related sequelae in this population. A trauma-informed lens allows forensic mental health examiners to assess examinees in the context of their developmental histories and lived experience. Such a lens also has implications for the entire assessment process in terms of interviewing, psychological testing, diagnostic conclusions, feedback, and the provision of testimony and educating triers of fact. Being adequately compassionate is not only ethical, but also likely to enhance data quality. We identify tensions with respect to maintaining the role clarity necessary for forensic practice and examiner self-awareness is discussed as a way to manage emotional reactions and to reduce bias and role conflict. We examine these issues through the framework of therapeutic jurisprudence; the principles of this framework and trauma-informed forensic mental health assessments are aligned and could (and should) synergistically lead to important changes to psycho-legal practice.
In less than a decade, therapeutic jurisprudence, which began as a scholarly approach to mental health law, has emerged as a mental health approach to law generally. In this essay, one of the founders of this new field offers a further elaboration of the theory of therapeutic jurisprudence and a response to the key issues raised by commentators and critics. This essay discusses the relationship between therapeutic jurisprudence and other schools of jurisprudence and analyzes the approach's normative focus and its limits. It also addresses how "therapeutic" should be defined, whether the approach is paternalistic, whether the limits of social science methodology doom the enterprise, how therapeutic and other potentially conflicting values can be reconciled, and how the law should respond when such conflicts persist. Finally, the essay charts the path of therapeutic jurisprudence and analyzes new developments in the field. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
What is Psychopathy?Why Antisocial Personality Disorder Does not Qualify for Involuntary Inpatient HospitalizationShould Preventive Outpatient Commitment be Authorized for Antisocial Personality Disorder?Conclusion
References
Discusses the development of mental heath law in United States and a litigated issue involving the rights of mental patients and criminal offenders to refuse treatment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This article traces changes in the nature of legal scholarship and illustrates how therapeutic jurisprudence reflects changing conceptions of the law and legal scholarship. It argues that therapeutic jurisprudence may be regarded as a mental health law counterpart to „New Public Law,” and shows that questions asked by therapeutic jurisprudence scholars parallel closely those asked by public law scholars.
This article describes how therapeutic jurisprudence, and the therapeutic jurisprudence/preventive law model, can be imported into legal education and practice. Although the approach can (and does) find application in a broad spectrum of legal areas, the present article focuses on the criminal law clinic and on training future criminal lawyers with an expanded professional role: one that explicitly adds an ethic of care and considerations of rehabilitation. As such, it brings an interdisciplinary perspective into clinics and law practice, with particular emphasis on insights and techniques drawn from psychology, criminology, and social work. The article explores a therapeutic jurisprudence framework for thinking about criminal law competencies, and illustrates the explicit use of the expanded professional role in the area of sentencing, in juvenile parole revocation proceedings, and in a tribal reentry court project.
Two studies examined unconscious racial stereotypes of decision makers in the juvenile justice system. Police officers (Experiment 1) and juvenile probation officers (Experiment 2) were subliminally exposed to words related to the category Black or to words neutral with respect to race. In a presumably unrelated task, officers read 2 vignettes about a hypothetical adolescent who allegedly committed either a property crime (shoplifting from a convenience store) or an interpersonal crime (assaulting a peer). The race of the offender was left unstated and the scenarios were ambiguous about the causes of the crime. Respondents rated the hypothetical offender on a number of traits (e.g., hostility and immaturity) and made judgments about culpability, expected recidivism, and deserved punishment. They also completed a self-report measure of conscious attitudes about race. As hypothesized, officers in the racial prime condition reported more negative trait ratings, greater culpability, and expected recidivism, and they endorsed harsher punishment than did officers in the neutral condition. The effects of the racial primes were not moderated by consciously held attitudes about African Americans. The implications of the findings for racial disparity in the juvenile justice system and for changing unconscious stereotypes were discussed.
Johnny's in the Basement/Mixing up his Medicine
- Keri K Gould
- Levy
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Overcoming Psychological Barriers to Settlement: Challenges for the TJ Lawyer
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Spiritual Outputs Approach to Rehabilitation: Alternative Sentencing Theory, 3 FLA. COASTAL L
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Persistence and Change in the Life of the Law: Can Therapeutic Jurisprudence Make a Difference? 27 LAW &
- Claire Steinberger
Bazelon's admonition that we need to be vigilant about not "overgeneraliz[ing] about citizens whom it is easy to overgeneralize about
- David Consider Judge
Where the Winds Hit Heavy on the Borderline
- Michael L Perlin
There Are No Trials Inside the Gates of Eden": Mental Health Courts, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Dignity, and the Promise of Therapeutic Jurisprudence
- See Generally
On the importance of "voice," see also, Ian Freckelton, Therapeutic Jurisprudence Misunderstood and Misrepresented: The Price and Risks of Influence
- Amy D Ronner
observing that sex offender policy "has fluctuated between two polar approaches," subjecting sex offenders to criminal punishment under a criminal model and labeling them as "'sexual psychopaths"' under an illness model, as discussed in Shelley Ross Saxer
- Bruce J But See