"Behavior Mod" Behind the Walls

"Behavior Mod" Behind the Walls

The convicted child molester in Connecticut's state prison at Somers reclines on a treatment table with an electrode wired to his upper thigh. Whenever pictures of naked children are flashed on a screen, he gets stinging shocks in his groin. At the Iowa Security Medical Facility, inmates who commit infractions like lying or swearing are given a shot of apomorphine, which brings on violent vomiting for 15 minutes or more. Intractable convicts transferred to the maximum-security Michigan Intensive Program Center near Marquette are put into solitary confinement for most of the time and can only "earn" better living conditions by meeting specific goals of behavior and education.

Such programs, and dozens of variations currently in use, are all based on the principle of behavior modification. Using the carrot-and-stick approach (solitary confinement v. improved treatment) or aversion therapy (the child molester associates his predilection for youngsters with discomfort for himself), the various approaches draw on B.F. Skinner's positive-and negative-reinforcement precepts and are characterized by close and expert attention to even the smallest details of behavior. The programs are all the rage--and outrage-- in U.S. penology today.

Quiet Design. "Behavior mod," as it is familiarly known, evokes flashing images of 1984 and A Clockwork Orange, complete with irresistible mind-bending techniques, drugs and, perhaps, brain surgery. In fact, the broad concept includes even the rudimentary punishment-reward systems long standard for prison guards, or, for that matter, parents, teachers and corporations. But a new legal concern rests on the fact that behavioral scientists have been quietly designing more detailed and sophisticated programs for prisons. Quietly, because behavior mod sets off something of an automatic aversion reaction of its own. Among recent legal actions:

> In December, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals declared that Iowa's use of vomit-inducing apomorphine was cruel and unusual punishment--and therefore unconstitutional--unless the inmate gives knowing, written consent, which can be revoked "at any time." Injections of apomorphine continue, but only under conditions set by the court.

> With the help of the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation, eight prisoners in the federal penitentiary at Springfield, Mo., filed a suit against what they called "human destructiveness."

They had been transferred involuntarily into START (Special Treatment and Rehabilitative Training), a standard "step movement" program with three levels of privileges. A higher level could be reached only after a prisoner's minutely monitored behavior at the preceding level passed muster. The prisoners' suit claimed unconstitutional violations of due process and privacy, among other allegations. Last month, after court-appointed investigators filed unfavorable reports, U.S. penal authorities finally caved in. The remaining START prisoners were transferred to other institutions last week. In December, the A.C.L.U. also won a court order ending parts of a federal program at Marion, Ill., that prisoners called "psychogenocide" because of its acknowledged goal of breaking troublesome inmates with psychological techniques.

>A three-judge state court in Michigan last summer blocked a brain operation planned for a criminally insane inmate who had sometimes been uncontrollably violent. Though he had "volunteered" for psychosurgery, the judges concluded that the "inherently coercive atmosphere" of confinement makes "truly informed" consent impossible.

Is the Michigan court correct in doubting the possibility of any freely given consent by an inmate? Or have the Iowa judges successfully devised rules that safeguard the volunteer? Either way it is clear that the question of consent is crucial--for both legal and pragmatic reasons. Electric-shock therapy for sex offenders, for instance, is plainly offensive and probably illegal if imposed on anyone who does not want it. On the other hand, there is some preliminary indication that the treatment may work --to the benefit of both the prisoner and society. If the voluntary program is ended, inmates who really do want to participate would lose out. Many behavior-mod programs "have some fairly good data of success with volunteers," says Norval Morris, director of the Center for Studies in Criminal Justice at the University of Chicago. But they have "a very low record of success with nonvolunteers."

One obstacle to keeping the programs genuinely voluntary is the tendency of prison administrators to see behavior mod as primarily a tool for maintaining order behind the walls. In many cases, says Illinois Legal Aid Lawyer Michael Deutsch, "the prisons take the programs over from doctors because it's a way of segregating the troublemakers." Roy Gerard, an assistant director of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, says flatly: "That's part of the consequence of committing a crime. You've automatically volunteered for the certain way an institution is run."

New Person. Some behaviorists are even less sensitive to the individual inmate's right to say no. They seem instead to have adopted an end-justifies-the-means philosophy that is inimical to, or ignorant of time-honored American values. M.I.T. Psychology Professor Edgar Schein, for example, once urged that certain of the brainwashing methods used by the Chinese Communists on American P.O.W.s in Korea should be employed on criminals. Though sometimes "cruel and coercive," he argued, "these same techniques in the service of different goals may be quite acceptable to us." James McConnell, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, is even more blunt. "I don't believe that the Constitution gives you the right to commit a crime if you want to," McConnell has written. "Therefore the Constitution does not guarantee you the right to maintain inviolable [your] personality--if and when that personality manifests strongly antisocial behavior."

Libertarian lawyers, of course, disagree. "Behavioral scientists think they are the Messiah come to deliver us," says the A.C.L.U.'S Alvin Bronstein. "I think that the Bureau of Prisons had to come up with something new, a response to the prisons blowing up all over the country." But if the right to privacy means anything, he adds, "society should not be able to say we can make you a new person." Responding to such criticism at a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing last week, Norman Carlson, director of the Bureau of Prisons, said that he had always opposed the use of psychosurgery, drugs and electroshock. Carlson does, however, favor using the expertise of behaviorists to help penologists do what they have supposedly always done--"encourage people to change their behavior."

But what are the limits? Obviously, some legal framework is needed, and quickly. The A.C.L.U.'S Bronstein estimates that some form of behavior mod is now in use in about 20 states. A majority of New England Governors last month tentatively agreed to back a new joint facility for "special offenders" that will depend on behavior modification, including "the use of drugs to control disruptive behavior." Despite canceling START, the Federal Government is building an institution at Butner, N.C., which will have a behavior-modification section for 200 volunteer inmates.

CAT House. Clear-cut administrative policy is also necessary to prevent behavior mod from simply going underground to avoid adverse publicity. Bureau of Prisons Director Carlson recently said in an interview: "We're going to start programs in all our penitentiaries' segregation units. Only they won't have titles that carry such emotion." The Law Enforcement Assistance Administration has just barred the use of its subsidies for "behavior modification," but L.E.A.A. grants can easily be salvaged by state administrators with wit enough to rechristen their programs.

If legislators and judges would produce effective guarantees of voluntariness and ban physical abuse and "excessive" psychological pressure to modify the behavior of nonvolunteers, then much of the controversy surrounding behavior mod might well dissipate. That would leave more energy for trying to turn promising programs into full-fledged successes. In Denver, for instance, 18 incorrigible delinquents inhabit the CAT house, more formally known as the Colorado Closed Adolescent Treatment Center. The kids run their own modification program, with adult guidance. It has worked astonishingly well inside the institution. But "our biggest problem is getting the kids out of here," says Psychologist Vicki Agee, who is in charge. The first five youngsters due for release all ran away shortly beforehand, then asked to return and be kept longer in the institution. That speaks highly indeed for the program but leaves it tantalizingly short of regularly turning out functioning citizens.

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