New Scientist 14Mar2020

14 March 2020 | New Scientist | 21

▲ Electricity

Global carbon emissions

from electricity generation

fell 2 per cent in 2019 as

coal use dived. Now if we

could just do it a bit faster?

▲ Contagion

Downloads of the film

Contagion – about the

global spread of a deadly

virus – have skyrocketed.

Can’t think why.

▲ SpaceX

Remember when Elon

Musk shot his car into

space? Wild times.

The Tesla Roadster has

now completed its first

557-day solar orbit.

▼ Voyager 2

In an extreme version

of the Wi-Fi going down,

NASA will lose the ability

to command its distant

Voyager 2 probe for

11 months due to radio

telescope maintenance.

▼ Pedometers

A pig swallowing a fellow

animal’s pedometer (wait,

what?) in North Yorkshire

caused a huge fire after

the battery reacted with

porcine excrement.

compulsory polygraph testing to

monitor released sex offenders.

A Ministry of Justice study had

shown that this technique raises

the likelihood of people telling

staff about incidents where they

breached their parole conditions.

“Polygraph testing isn’t just useful

for detecting lies, but for

encouraging offenders to tell the

truth, to reveal more information

than they might otherwise,”

said a spokesperson.

However, there is information

online about how to cheat the test,

and word is likely to get round

among offenders, says Chris

French at Goldsmiths, University

of London. “It produces too many

false positives and false negatives.”

Now, as well as introducing

the tests for those who have been

convicted of domestic violence,

the government plans to use

them for those who have been

imprisoned for terrorist offences,

such as sharing videos that

promote attacks. The prospect of

releasing people jailed for these

offences understandably triggers

alarm. But the reoffending rate

among convicted terrorists in the

UK is far lower, at around 3 per

cent, than that of other former

prisoners, which is about 40 per

cent, says Marc Sageman, a

forensic psychiatrist at the US

Foreign Policy Research Institute,

who studies Islamic radicalisation.

For domestic violence, the

UK probation service aims to

try to evaluate lie detectors in

a three-year pilot scheme of

600 offenders, half of whom will

be randomly selected to take the

test. Yet reoffending rates won’t

be measured, which is a missed

opportunity. To know whether

any intervention works, you need

randomly assigned test and

control groups, and hard scientific

data, says Sageman. “We have

learned that in medicine.” ❚

abuse similar to that found

outside jail, such as the Alcoholics

Anonymous 12 steps programme,

which at least has supporting

evidence that it reduces alcohol

use in non-offenders.

While all UK prisons are

supposed to offer these

programmes, many inmates are

unable to access them because of

overcrowding or a lack of staff to

escort prisoners from their cells,

says Peter Clarke, the UK’s chief

inspector of prisons. “That leads to

boredom and people using drugs,”

he says. “That’s counterproductive

in terms of rehabilitation.”

Frances Crook of the Howard

League for Penal Reform, a UK

charity, says even just making

prisons nicer will cut reoffending.

“If you have got the best designed

programme and it’s working really

well, delivering that to someone

sharing their cell with an open

toilet and cockroaches on the

floor isn’t going to work.”

Another problem is that

parole boards have no good way

to assess how likely people are to

reoffend. These boards tend to

place most weight on

psychologists’ ratings of how

much empathy or insight

offenders have into their crimes,

says Forde, who has acted as an

expert witness in parole hearings.

This may be why discredited

approaches like lie detector tests

are increasingly called on. Such

tests are already widely used in

police investigations in many

countries, although they aren’t

usually admissible in court

because of their known problems.

In 2014, the UK started using

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When the results were made

public in 2017, the UK dropped

that particular programme

and replaced it with two new

psychological interventions called

Horizon and Kaizen. But neither

has been tested in randomised

trials either. A government

spokesperson says the

programmes haven’t yet been

around long enough to be tested,

but evaluations are ongoing.

Other kinds of CBT scheme,

such as those aimed at reducing

violence, also suffer from a lack

of evidence. A 2007 research

summary by the Ministry of

Justice reviewed 11 studies and

concluded that the approach

is “promising” – yet six had no

effect, while the others had basic

design flaws.

That isn’t to say we should give

up on prisoner reform. Classes or

training can make it more likely

people will end up in work on the

outside. One large study in three US

states found that those who had

taken optional educational classes

as inmates had a reincarceration

rate of 21 per cent, compared with

31 per cent among those who

hadn’t. And many jails offer

counselling for drug and alcohol

Using lie detectors to

monitor ex-prisoners

may not be effective

ALLAN SWART/ALAMY

40 %

Rate of reoffending among

former prisoners in the UK

TOP: RAINER DITTRICH/GETTY, BOTTOM: SERGEIKOROLKO/GETTY