2020-03-14_New_Scientist

(Grace) #1
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

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