The Accusation and Conviction Machine, Part II

The connection between economics and the study of accusations of rape and child sexual abuse might seem tenuous at best, but the current situation actually invites economic analysis. Why? Economist who look at public policies will examine the incentive structures that these policies create, and from there, it is relatively easy to analyze the behavior of the individuals who are part of that system.

Thus, as I noted yesterday, there are four federal acts that greatly have increased not only false accusations of sexual misconduct, but also have resulted in the imprisonment of perhaps thousands of innocent people, most of them men, but some females, too. For those people wrongly convicted, this has been a silent holocaust, and the damage it has done to the lives of families and especially children has been horrific.

How might a federal law contribute to false accusations? After all, I am sure that when then-Sen. Walter Mondale introduced his bill, he did not declare that what this country needed was an increase in the population of wrongly-convicted people, and that members of Congress eagerly agreed. No, Mondale saw that children were being abused, and he believed that if the federal government (using the U.S. Constitution's "Commerce Clause" as a hook) could rectify the situation by providing money to states and localities and also help "standardize" the process by which the authorities deal with these problems.

As a result of the Mondale Act and the two Victims of Child Abuse acts, a whole "child protection" network was set up, which includes Child Protective Services agencies in each state (CPS), the various Departments of Family and Children's Services (DEFACS), and the Children's Advocacy Centers. The law has given people who work for these agencies, and especially the CPS agencies, vast powers to seize children, take them out of homes, and put them into state foster care systems.

As the Rev. Dennis Austin has written, these laws almost guarantee abuse of the system, given the incentive structures that they have created:

Most states have what are called Child Protective Service Workers (CPS). These workers, along with law enforcement officers, investigate abuse reports. While the law enforcement officers have been trained to be objective, the CPS have not been and they even are called "validators" which raises a question to their role in an investigation. The CPS have authority to deny a parent the access to the children even if there is a court order which allows them to have visitation with the children. The CPS will send a child for an evaluation.

According to the Mondale Act, if an evaluator does not report suspected abuse and the child goes back to an abusive situation, the evaluator can be imprisoned. These evaluators are often either afraid of the consequences of imprisonment if they mistakenly place a child back in the home of an abuser or they may even be a validator as the CPS workers.

The indicators that these validators use to determine abuse are actually quite common behavior which even normal children sometimes exhibit. Some of these indicators include, bedwetting, acting out, nightmares, whining, temper tantrums, thumb-sucking, and compliant and fearful behavior. These validators often propitiate allegations of abuse because it puts food on their tables. It is their career and without such allegations, they could be without a job. Although this is a horrifying thought, this is a reason to ignore evidence that shows innocence and only present to the court "evidence" that substantiate the client's claims of abuse. (Emphasis mine)

To further understand how these incentive structures invite what we call "junk science" into a courtroom, one should examine how hypothesis testing works. In hypothesis testing, there is a null hypothesis and an alternative hypothesis.

According to the rules of scientific method, one should reject the null ONLY if there is a high degree of evidence that it should be rejected, with the evaluator then accepting the alternative hypothesis. In criminal court, the standard for conviction, is "guilt beyond a reasonable doubt," and if one examines such standards from the standpoint of scientific method, one can say that the "null hypothesis" is the "assumption of innocence."

Defendants charged are supposed to be viewed as "innocent until proven guilty," and that standard exists precisely because our forebears from England wanted the "Rights of Englishmen" to govern the rules of the courts. People like William Blackstone demanded that the prosecution provide a very high standard of proof to keep innocent people from being convicted and thrown into prison or even executed. Thus, Blackstone famously declared, "Better 10 guilty men go free than one innocent man convicted."

That system "worked" to a certain degree in Tonya Craft's case, as even though the prosecution worked with a corrupt judge to rig the proceedings, nonetheless the jury did not believe that "Alberto-Facebook" and "The Man" had met the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard. However, the "child protection" agencies are governed by very different standards, and because of the incentive structures that CPS, DEFACS, and CAC workers face, it should not be surprising at all that they have become a veritable false accusation industry.

Note that the Mondale Act proscribes punishment for these workers if they fail to act when a child is in an abusive system, or if they misjudge a situation and unwittingly place a child in danger, they can be prosecuted and even imprisoned. Thus, it is in their interests to assume that ALL allegations of abuse are true until absolutely proven otherwise.

In scientific terms, this would mean that the null hypothesis is not "innocence," but rather guilt, and overturning that hypothesis is almost impossible because there is no punishment proscribed for "child protection" workers who assume guilt when, in fact, the alleged abuser is innocent. Furthermore, you see the entire "child protection" industry accepting the notion that since one cannot "prove a negative," someone who is accused always has to be seen as guilty.

It works like this. I cannot prove that I did NOT kill JFK. If I present my birth certificate which shows I was 10 years old and I say that I was in a classroom at Boothwyn School during the shooting in Dallas more than a thousand miles away, someone can claim that my birth certificate is forged and that I am lying when I say I was not in Dallas. (Someone can claim that I really was on the Grassy Knoll.) In other words, a determined person always will have a rejoinder to whatever I might claim.

One can see the problem when these kinds of "guilty and never proven innocent" standards are brought into a court of law, and the courts accept them. We are looking at a meat grinder in which innocent people generally don't have a chance of being acquitted. Furthermore, we see prosecutors -- people who have sworn to uphold the law and the fairness of the courts -- accepting these "always guilty" standards and teaming with judges to run a railroad.

One could see this standard at work with the interviews of the three children. When Stacy Long interviewed Sandra Lamb's daughter, and when Suzi Thorne interviewed Tonya's child, both interviewers already had decided that Tonya Craft had sexually abused these children, and it was their job to make sure that the children "disclosed" such information. Neither person cared how she got the "disclosures," just as long as she was successful in reaching that goal.

Both prosecutors also displayed the same mentality. For example, when "The Man" asked David Craft if he "heard anything" that would signal that Tonya was molesting a child in another room, Mr. Craft said he had not. Gregor responded that the sound of a child being molested was not loud.

So, let us translate according to Len "The Man" Gregor's hypothesis testing: (A) David Craft did not hear any noises, suspicious or otherwise coming from another room; (B) if Tonya was quietly molesting a child, then David probably would not have heard anything; therefore (C) Tonya was molesting children.

This is not exactly a high standard of proof, which supposedly is required in a court of law in the United States, and one can say that Gregor's attempt at hypothesis testing was disgracefully bad. We saw the judicial version of "junk science," and it is nothing less than tragic that cowards and bullies like "Alberto-Facebook,"The Man," and "judge" Brian Outhouse are permitted to run proceedings using these counterfeit methods that really are nothing more than devices to create kangaroo courts.

Unfortunately, I am just scratching the surface of the damage that these federal acts have created. I'll have more on this issue tomorrow.