Year: 2011

Planning to be Down Under in August? Dr. Franklin will present a keynote address, “Global containment and escape: Alternate visions for forensic psychology,” as well as a full-day training workshop, “Diagnosis in flux: Best practices in forensic deployment of the DSM-5 and ICD-11.” Noosa is a stunning coastal town on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast; register early

On All Things Considered, NPR’s Alix Spiegel explores the controversial PCL-R instrument, designed to ferret out psychopaths, and its great influence over one prisoner’s parole fate. Here, a panel of experts — Karen Franklin among them — debates the test’s role in the criminal justice system. Plus, Dr. Franklin reviews Jon Ronson’s new book on

If you’re going to be up in the Pacific Northwest in May and want to get your Continuing Education in a picturesque setting, you’re invited to my full-day workshop on forensic diagnosis, sponsored by the Eastern Oregon Psychological Association. The event is their 26th annual Wallowa Lake Conference, at the Eagle Cap Chalet in scenic

That’s the title of my “Ethics Corner” column in California Psychologist, discussing some of the quagmires as well as opportunities for ethical practice behind bars. I’ve also uploaded a companion resource page here on my website. Here’s the way the column starts: A recent photo in the Los Angeles Times pictured a psychologist administering therapy

Witness – Psychology Today: Analyzing the analyzers . . . There will always be the next rare event to fuel a cycle of knee-jerk response, ostensibly aimed at protecting us from every remote contingency. Hindsight bias is a powerful heuristic that obscures an unfortunate truth: It is very hard to accurately predict — much less

Desistance from Sex Offending: Alternatives to Throwing Away the Keys by D. Richard Laws and Tony Ward Reviewed in the online journal Open Access Journal of Forensic Psychology If one set out to design an intervention program to encourage criminals to reoffend,what would it look like? It should include the converse of what helps offenders

AfroDaddy.com, “The Black Man’s Survival Guide,” picked up my Psychology Today review of The Protest Psychosis: How the Black Man Became Schizophrenic: Once upon a time, a strange thing happened at the Ionia State Hospital in Michigan: A diagnosis of schizophrenia exited the body of a white housewife, flew across the hospital, and landed on

Journalist Ethan Watters masterfully evokes the heady admixture of moral certainty and profit motive that drives U.S. clinicians and pharmaceutical companies as they evangelically push Western psychiatry around the globe. Amazon review Reading Crazy Like Us left me with a nightmare image of a homogeneous future world with McDonald’s and Starbucks on every corner, obesity

The competency training page showcases legal cases with publicly available teaching tools, most of them free and online. Resources include reports, videos and transcripts of hearings and evaluations. Featured cases include: Competency Cases Online Theodore Kaczynski Colin Ferguson Ralph Tortorici Scott Panetti Mike Tyson Steven Hayes John Salvi III José Padilla Thomas A. Shay Lynette

José Padilla, the suspected “dirty bomber,” was detained for almost four years in a military prison as an “enemy combatant.” His attorneys claimed that during those years he was tortured, subjected to stress positions and forced hypothermia, and administered mind-altering drugs. They argued that as a result of his torture, he suffered from posttraumatic stress