Grantcoulson's Blog

      Do not think about, write about or deal with  human behavior until determining the effects of incentives.

     John Brown was a social worker in Ontario who became a relentless self-promoter and government-supported “entrepreneur” who “pioneered” child treatment programs loved by the media, but of dubious value. He became a member of the provincial legislature and dedicated drainer of the public purse. At one point, he was receiving $64 per day per resident, the equivalent, in current dollars of about $120 K per year per resident. People became suspicious of his lavish life style and, before you could say, “fraud” he was convicted of siphoning funds to the equivalent amount, in today’s dollars of $5.4 Million. In government, this is known as an oversight, a bookkeeping hiccup, and Brown was sentenced to three years in jail.

    At the time of his death, the provincial legislature, with unanimous consent, remembered his contributions “fondly”. Only one member acknowledged his “troubles”, mentioning that Brown “… found himself in troubles in his later life”. By using the passive voice, this means that Brown was an unfortunate victim of chance, an innocent. Brown was not troubled, but a troubler. Remembering a fraudster fondly.

     Politicians are smart and moral–How can we not trust them?

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
Cui Bono–Cherchez les Contingencies

      A prediction about politics and economics from Conrad Black’s column in the National Post:

      “The flip-side of this controversy is the emerging U.S. economic miracle, which at this point officially promises increased taxes, faster economic growth, 50% to 100% annual increases in money supply without inflation, for a decade of trillion dollar annual federal budget deficits without seriously raising interest rates, or devaluing the dollar. All 18 wheels will come off this impossible contraption, in all directions of the compass. And all numerate people, including, presumably, the unfathomable Timothy Geithner and the fabulist President whom he serves, know it.

       I predict that in a decent interval after his confirmation as Federal Reserve chairman next month or February, Ben Bernanke will announce that the central bank will no longer buy the treasury notes that finance this orgy. The United States cannot drink itself sober. China has now passed on the pleasure of continuing to buy low yield instruments of a country that is doing the necessary to convert its currency into wall paper, if not toilet paper. The Federal Reserve is buying the treasury issues that finance the federal government’s deficit-straight additions to the money supply — the most familiar form of currency debasement and rampaging inflation, from the times of Caligula to Juan Peron and Robert Mugabe.

    and from George Jonas, who coincidentally used to be married to Lord Black’s wife, and appears on the same page:

      “Medical science is still hard at work extending life. So is public hygiene. By the 1980s there were about as many 100-year-olds living in North America as there were 65-year-olds in the 1900s, according to the doyen of Canada’s insurance agents, the late David Cowper. Now the floodgates have been opened. Nanotechnology will soon float automated probes through our veins for diagnosis and repair. Genetically engineered spares will replace worn parts. The day is approaching when there will be as many 135year-olds as there are centenarians today.

    When that day arrives, we’ ll have a problem.

and from the Book: Shadow Dancing on the Grave of Hope:

The Programmed Environment–The Cohen and Filipczak Program

    Cohen and Filipczak instituted a program with imprisoned youth, ages 14 to 18, which they called, "A New Learning Environment". B.F. Skinner described it as an experiment with 41 incarcerated adolescents in which "…students were given positive reasons for behaving well with respect to each other and for studying and learning." It used contingency management to produce academic growth which was 2 to 4 times faster than the national average for public schools. This result was particularly important because the juvenile delinquents were school dropouts who had done very poorly in school when they did attend. The contingencies in the environment were designed to support good social, working and educational behaviors. Criminal recidivism (reinstitutionalization) rates were 25% vs 85% for comparable delinquents not exposed to the program and 45% vs close to 100% for the second year. No follow-up in terms of programming after incarceration was done.

    This experiment got an endorsement from an unusual source, Buckminster Fuller who described it as an example of "…trying to reform the environment rather than trying to reform man…"

    The behavior of the offenders was measured continuously on many dimensions. Students could earn points for academic or working behavior which could be spent on a wide variety of items and privileges. The structure of the program required the student to do a lot of planning about spending money. As usual with successful programs, the procedures were minutely planned and detailed.

    As B.F. Skinner said about the results, "It would be pleasant to report that the change was permanent, but after three or four years there was little evidence of any further effect. The boys had been exposed to this exceptional environment for only a few months or at most a year, which was apparently not enough to offset deficiencies in the environments to which they returned. But while they were in school, and for some time thereafter, the designed culture had its predicted effects. In a better world, they lived better lives. The world gave them better reasons for behaving well, for working to produce some of the goods they needed, and for acquiring behavior which made them successful in other ways."

    The Cohen and Filipczak demonstration, as we know from other research, would have benefited greatly from a follow-up component in which clients were shown how to apply their new-found skills to the outside world. I would add two components to any follow-up program. The first would be the Job Club component from Azrin’s community reinforcement approach for alcoholism for those who could benefit from finding a job. The second would be  proper educational upgrading based on Direct Instruction for those needing improvement in their basic education such as reading, writing and math.

    Changing the environment is an ambitious undertaking. We do this by getting criminals to change where they live and with whom they interact. This does not mean using the conventional victim terminology of racial or class discrimination, but changing the environment to provide "better reasons for behaving well" and fewer reasons for behaving badly. Naturally, this is a much more difficult proposition than is placing the criminal in a professional’s office for an hour or two per week. The problem with the traditional procedure, of course, is that it does not work because it cannot work.

Cohen, H.F., & Filipczak, J. (1989). A New Learning Environment., Boston, MA: Authors Cooperative, Inc.

Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson

     During the War for Southern Independence, the main Federal Army was twice headed by George McClellan. During both tenures, he had overwhelming numbers and logistics and twice failed to win. At Antietam, McClellan even had the battle orders of the Southern Army and didn’t know what to do. Like the overwhelming majority of practitioners in the social services, McClellan could do it until he had to. The outcomes of his hypothetical battles were successful because of his theories; the outcomes of his real battles were unsuccessful because of his theories. McClellan was a glib talker.

    Rehabilitation of criminals, as you will not find surprising, faces the same problems as George McClellan, who, by his own reports had very high self-esteem and self-confidence and maintained he was a great general even after his defeats. Social services people talk a good and reasonable game full of confidence and self-praise when their work is data-free. When they have to produce, we find them absent without leave. Rhetoric replaces results, fictional accounts predominate and most rehabilitation practices are ineffective. Worse yet, most rehabilitation practices are never evaluated and are held to be effective on the evidence of isolated "successes" which occur because of the passage of time and would have occurred without any intervention. Behavior changes over time. Sometimes it changes in the direction society wants it to. Most correctional rehabilitation efforts are based on laymen’s notion of psychodynamics and childhood causation. As is the case in all other areas of the social sciences, the most effective techniques are used least and the least effective techniques used most.

    The Ideal Prison Rehabilitation Program

    The exemplary prison program consists of four parts; 1) The clients would be chosen on the basis of need. Some inmates, although they have long sentences and have committed serious crimes, have very little risk of reoffending and do not need rehabilitation. Social workers, psychiatrists and, alas, most psychologists love to work with these people because they are generally well-spoken, polite and amenable to depth-psychotherapy nonsense. These are the YAVISS clients -young-attractive-verbal-intelligent-socially successful. Working with them is a pleasant waste of time., 2) Social and decision-making skills (sometimes called thinking) would be taught to a high level of fluency so that the most effective response will be made immediately in the situations the inmate will encounter in everyday life, 3) New behaviors would be reinforced by all the people with whom the inmate comes in contact  while imprisoned, and 4) A two year follow-up, under supervision, as a rigid condition of probation or parole, would ensure that the released inmate had to apply the skills to his out-of-prison life. This is essentially the program that Larson used, with considerable success, for her high-risk clients from the core of a large American city.

    The reasons for these steps are:

    1). If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. If it ain’t broke and you try to fix it, you’ll probably break it. Only those with high need will benefit, the others have a low chance of re-offending. People who don’t know any facts, include these offenders in their "treatment programs" (polgrams) and point to them as examples of what good programs can do. The polgrams, of course, have done nothing because the probability of reoffending was low without "treatment".

2). If they aren’t able to do the anti-criminal behaviors fluently in ideal conditions then there’s no reason to believe they will do them when rushed and harried. Teaching to fluency makes the behaviors immediately available.

3). If they aren’t shown how to use the skills outside the learning situation and the skills aren’t reinforced there, there’s no reason to expect the behaviors will occur outside the learning situation.

4). If they aren’t taught how to transfer and required to transfer these skills outside of prison, most of them won’t.

Cheerio and ttfn,

Grant Coulson

    Thanks to marginalrevolution.com for this from Bloomberg.

       “European Union carbon-dioxide allowances for delivery in December 2010 declined 8.3 percent to close at 12.45 euros ($17.82) on the European Climate Exchange in London. Today was the first day of trading since the summit concluded Dec. 19.

       “It would be foolish to be anything other than dispirited by the outcome” of the Copenhagen meeting, the International Emissions Trading Association said today in an e-mailed statement. The climate talks were a “step backward” in terms of signals that will support carbon prices, Henry Derwent, president of the Geneva-based group, said in the statement.”

    The carbon-trading trade (trading vapours and/or the rights to name leprechauns) is a bellwether of the Global Warming scam. This is where people make money trading illusions. If this market collapses, it is a sign that Climate Change will collapse because governments have stopped legislating the treatment of Hobbits. Y2K again, I hope.

    If governments knew what they were doing, they wouldn’t be doing most of the things they do.

from the book: Shadow Dancing on the Grave of Hope:

    More on Criminal Rehabilitation

READING FROM THE BOOK OF RIGHT

1. Motivation, the situation in which the person does what the program requires, is not something which the client acquires in a flash of insight, it is something created by the program.

2. Social class is the result of  criminality, not its cause. Most criminals are poor, because a life of crime does not support the accumulation of wealth, increased training and education, career advancement, and the other behaviors required for a successful life and career.

3. Deep and lengthy psychotherapy, which gets at “the real causes of crime”, does not decrease criminal behavior. As usual, the popular method does not work and sometimes makes things worse. The least harm it does is to “crowd out” useful programs.

4. Everything we know about any kind of behavior change is applicable to criminals. Offenders must follow the same principles as other humans. Criminals are not made of different stuff nor are they from another planet.

5. All of the things that influence a criminal toward criminal behavior must be changed. This almost always includes dramatically changing the environment by having the discharged criminal change it, usually by moving to a better one.

6. There are offenders who are younger, of different gender, of different races and nationalities, but the same principles apply to their effective rehabilitation. In terms of point 4, the principles work for everyone. Programs using  elements which work for males will work for females, juveniles and members of all minorities.

7. Self-esteem, contrary to the popular media, is not the key to anything. Self-esteem improvement is irrelevant to decreasing criminality. Many criminals are arrogant in the extreme and their self-esteem is high and out of all proportion to their accomplishments. Well-grounded confidence comes from competence, not the other way around.

8. Criminality is not a result of mental illness. Criminals are as likely to suffer from “mental illness” as non-criminals. The same variables which predict criminality in the “mentally ill” are the same as those which predict criminality in those without that label.

Cheerio and ttfn,

Grant Coulson

from the book: Shadow Dancing on the Grave of Hope:

Public and Private Prisons

    Private prisons tend to be cheaper and more secure than public prisons run by public servants. This is true in spite of the hysterical ranting of the public employees unions which swings from  allegations of extreme cruelty to prisoners to extreme laxity of security. We should consider source motivation and pay no attention to these statements. There is some evidence that inmates from private prisons have a lower recidivism rate than those from public institutions, but, as usual, “more research needs to be done.”

READING FROM THE BOOK OF WRONG

1. No one will change until they’re (sic) ready for change. Motivation is something which must be generated by the program, not expected to pre-exist in the client. My experience with criminals is that almost all of them say “I’ve had enough.”, “The joke’s over.” or, the classic, “This time I mean it.” all the time. Means nothing.

2.Poverty causes crime. On the contrary, crime causes poverty. Surely you must mean that poverty causes crime. The belief that criminals come predominantly from the lower socioeconomic class has been one of the enduring myths of social sciences. This is an appealing fable because it seems reasonable that poor people will use illegal means to obtain money. Of all the predictors of criminality, social class is either absent or so weak as to be of no practical significance. Crime does not increase in times of economic hardship. The poverty-produces-crime relationship, beloved by social activists, does not exist. Crime does, however, cause poverty.

    A large experiment  gave money to released criminals and found it had no effect on recidivism. In fact, the recidivism rates for the poorer and enriched criminals were exactly the same, although the free money ex-prisoners tended to work less. The tap dancing of those who tried to make something of this experiment is fun to read, but the recidivism rates were the same for the money as the non-money offenders (Zeisel, 1982). If money is given freely, crime will not be affected. Money may not be the root of all evil, but it provides poor soil for virtue he said, mixing metaphors.

3. Criminals can be made into non-criminals by deep and lengthy psychotherapy which gets at “the real causes of crime.” Some programs based on these assumptions have increased law-breaking. None has decreased it. This is an example of exporting a technique which did not work in hospitals and therapist’s offices to another context, jails and penitentiaries,  where it also does not work, but continuing to use it.

4. There are techniques which are only applicable to criminals and principles applicable in other areas are not applicable to criminals. Every principle of behavior change which works with non-criminals will work with criminals.

5. The qualities which make a criminal reside inside the person, so, a person can be fixed and returned to the same environment. This is the 3-R technique – remove, repair, replace, which has been ineffective in other areas such as overuse of drugs and alcohol.

6. There are certain groups such as females, juveniles and other minorities which require special programs. There is no evidence for this, and when programs “sensitive” to these differences  have been tried, they have always failed. Culturally grounded programs attempt to give an offender “a sense of pride in his culture and greater self-esteem.” Needless to say, since these programs don’t deal with the effective components of rehabilitation, they’re uniformly unsuccessful.

     There is a belief, for example, that females require different rehabilitation programs than males. An assertion is not a fact; however, as any lawyer will tell you, regardless of how often, and how hysterically, the assertion is made. There is less evidence for this allegation than there is for the theory that the sun revolves around the earth. Such statements are always made by those for whom productivity is not required and reality is unnecessary. This is the blah-blah-blah syndrome oft heard among government workers. The mistake comes from confusing criminogenic needs with supposed societal inequities.

7. Criminals suffer from low self-esteem. Increasing this self-esteem will decrease criminality. Criminals, as a group, from personal observation, and other data, have higher self-regard than any other group and increasing self-esteem has no effect on criminality. Criminals need to learn self-control, not an increased belief in their own importance, centrality and ability.

8. Criminality is a result of mental illness. Some criminals are mentally ill but most of the mentally ill are not criminals and most criminals are not mentally ill. The fact that a particular criminal has some of the attributes of the “mentally ill” does not mean he will be more likely to reoffend.

9. Criminality results from systematic discrimination directed towards certain groups. This is a hypothetical negative cause of behavior. In fact, certain groups have a positive tendency to crime and criminality. In these groups, law-breaking is regarded as a mark of virtue. Discrimination does not cause crime. Some of the most discriminated-against groups in North America have been the most law abiding.

Tabarrok, A. (Ed.) (2003) Changing the Guard: Private Prisons and the Control of Crime,  Monterey, CA: The Independent Institute.

Zeisel, H. (1982) Disagreement over the Evaluation of a Controlled Experiment, American Journal of Sociology, 88, 378-389.

Cheerio and ttfn,

Grant Coulson

      There’s yet another article on “learning styles” which demonstrates that this concept has no usefulness in teaching. Attempts to co-ordinate learning style with teaching have come to naught. This demonstrates, once again, that if one’s livelihood  doesn’t depend on results, one can believe in, and practice, any fad. The learning styles myth is usually just a throwaway concept to demonstrate that the speaker has esoteric knowledge beyond the grasp of the unenlightened. I’m not sure what the proprietary situation is on this paper, but if anyone wants it, I will send it–my email address is grantcoulson@rogers.com. For the netbot harvesters, harvest away, my email is well-protected.

    The New York Times says that the census will provide a jolt to the economy because thousands of people will be hired by the government. If this is such a good idea, why doesn’t the government hire all the unemployed? Just a minute, that’s a reason why the Great Depression was “Great”. Also, there was Roosevelt’s high-wage policy, Burlesque dancers were also prohibited from putting on too many shows in a night to give less attractive girls a chance. No, you don’t have to make this stuff up. If a government program fails, it must be repeated.

    The Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen was a failure. I hope so. “Green jobs” will also fail. One can easily win bets by going against political spin. Watch for the watermelons. Green on the outside, red on the inside–envirosocialists.

    And this makes things better:  “…federal employees making salaries of $100,000 or more jumped from 14 percent to 19 percent of civil servants during the recession’s first 18 months – and that’s before overtime pay and bonuses are counted.”

        On a local weather note, a cold front is protecting Ontario from a large winter storm which is passing South of us. Think about that in terms of Global Warming.

    Back to psychology.

    from the book: Shadow Dancing on the Grave of Hope:

                       What does work?

    The research of  Don Andrews and James Bonta shows that effective criminal rehabilitation programs are those which, (1) concentrate on criminals with a high risk  of recidivism, (2) concentrate on changing behavior which is directly related to criminality and not on unrelated hypothetical issues such as self-esteem, depression and anxiety, (3) are carried on, after release, in the world outside of custody and, (4) adhere closely to program protocol. All of these stages must be backed with sanctions that “bite” such as return to prison or loss of “good time” for failure to adhere to the program.

    The real life (outside of incarceration) component of correctional rehabilitation, known as follow-up, is vitally important because correctional programs must take into account competing reinforcers “on the street”. One of my most poignant memories of my time in corrections comes from an offender named Therese. She said, “You don’t know what it’s like to be a ‘happenin’ person’.” It was exciting to be the center of attention as a drug dealer when “everyone wanted you. You get calls at four in the morning. There’s always somethin’ goin’ on.” That statement was a vivid reminder of  reinforcers in direct competition with those of a law-abiding life . Alas, Therese was found in a stairwell with a bullet in her head a few years later. And no, I don’t make up these examples, even the poignant ones.

            This Is Too Easy, But I’ll Do It Anyway

    At a conference to examine causes of a riot in a woman’s prison, one of the participants, a tenured professor, insisted that all would be well if the people in the prison were called residents rather than prisoners, convicts or inmates. Rehabilitation is merely a question of renaming. Labelling theory, where this nonsense comes from, had a great influence on Canada’s Young Offender Act. A person  under the age of eighteen who commits a crime, however heinous, is not allowed to be named, except under rare, special circumstances, lest they be tainted for life. This is what passes as effective programming in academia and is another example of what happens when continued employment is independent of productivity in publically funded organizations. Symbolism and intention are emphasized and accomplishment ignored

Really Hard Time–Boot Camps

    It seems very satisfying to some that convicts should be yelled at during all their waking hours, worked hard and continuously, and be demeaned in all they do. This is the basis of the “boot camp” type of rehabilitation based on the early training routine of many armies. During this basic training, the theory is that all of the trainee’s “personality” is removed so that a new, more manageable type of soldier can be created. A conceptual problem with this procedure in corrections is the assumption that a manageable person will make a more law-abiding citizen. Regardless of theoretical strengths and shortcomings, boot camps are, according to the evidence, no more effective than ordinary incarceration. One sleight of hand in boot camp publicity is selection of low-risk offenders, who are more amenable to all kinds of discipline, and then pointing to their low recidivism rates as evidence of the success of the boot camp training. For example, criminals with a low recidivism rate of .13 (13% of inmates reoffend in a year, for example) go through a boot camp program and have a recidivism rate of .13 upon release from boot camp. This rate is then compared to the overall rate of .72 of general offenders and the conclusion is  that the large difference is due to boot camp programming. In reality, the .13 should be compared to .13 and the conclusion drawn that being in a boot camp has no effect. The failure of boot camps does not affect the appearances on TV talk shows of people insisting that, “Boot camp saved my life.”

    Andrews, D.A. & J. Bonta (2003). Psychology of Criminal Conduct. Cincinnati, OH: Anderson Publishing Co.

Cheerio and ttfn,

Grant Coulson