Polygraph Appelate Ruling in Texas

[rogerdcook]

In view of recent rulings by various courts such as Antelope vs US
and the attached court opinion in Texas, I am wondering what treatment providers think about how this might affect their practices. Although the relevant questions on the Texas polygraph are flawed it seems that there is mounting pressure not to test on reoffense. For a long time now I have argued not to test on reoffending (except when there are good reasons to do so) for various reasons. For example, for low risk offenders due to a low base rate, there are most likely a large number of false positives.

Although the Texas case involves a maintenance test there have also been rulings asking about undisclosed crimes on Sexual History Tests. I am wondering why many therapists and POs continue testing on denial when there is evidence that denial is not a factor in recidivism?

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[jlooman]

This is an excellent question! I have had concerns about the use of polygraphs for years given the concern about false positives and the relative lack of research demonstrating that using them does anything to increase treatment/supervision efficacy.

Here in Canada we aren't allowed to use polygraphs and once I tried to propose a study using offenders in our program - we have two concurrent groups I wanted to do initial disclosures, poly one group about honesty during disclosure then do a second disclosure. The second group would do a disclosure, be interviewed about it, then do another disclosure. The rest of the program would run as usual. We would look at various measure of treatment gain and eventually recidivism outcome. I mentioned that I wanted to do this study to some of the management types and I was told not to even bother doing the proprosal. No one would support it.

Jan

[PMH]

We don't use polys as "gotcha's" in our program. The polys are mostly CSO driven. When folks are found deceptive on specific questions during the maintenance or monitoring polys it usually gives us a chance to help the offender review their thinking errors and whatever double life manipulations they've engaged in. The poly is one of the reasons I believe that outpatient treatment can be more effective than treatment in prison. We get to do some reality testing, practicing the behaviors in the real world, and re-direction when they go off-course.

The sexual history polys are not administered to detect new offenses. They are useful in helping to look at behavioral patterns and the beliefs behind them that led to the offense in the first place.

One of the problems I see with the current research is that researchers have so far been like the general public, throwing all sex offenders into the same basket.

There has been little distinction between offenders who are in parole, versus on those on probation, child molesters who prey on strangers vs those who have only family members as victims, rapists vs child molesters, statutory offenders vs any of the above.

There is a small bit of research into female offenders.

There is so much more we need to know before we start throwing our tools away.

-PMH

[rogerdcook]

I have to admit my bias, as I am a polygraph examiner. However, I went back to school at a late age because there were so many opinions and few (if any) based on empiracal research. I have not been a big fan of the Sexual History polygraph and I did not do them with one therapist who is a close friend until he started getting pressure from the state to do them.

I recently collected the data for my dissertation on 93 offenders who had a sexual history polygraph and a static99 score. The static99 outperformed the polygraph even when I used data from the sexual histories to change the scores on the 3 items of male victims, stranger victims and unrelated victims. Although this is a very small study it shows that testing on unreported victims has no predictive ability in reoffense (ROC .49), which makes sense when we consider denial is not a factor. One thing that was significant was having one victim, about 95% did not reoffend, which I noticed the Static2002 is using a similiar factor... (2 or less vics).

[jlooman]

Now that is an interesting finding!!

Are you writing that up for publication - Like in Sexual Abuse? You really should.

Jan

[rogerdcook]

This is my dissertation so that is my priority right now, but yes I hope to get a few articles out of this study.