| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
  A Test for Evil? ROSS COULTHART: From inside a prison cell, a notorious sexual predator reveals on tape how he intends to seduce and rape young children as soon as he's released. BRIAN KEITH JONES ('MR BALDY'): "I know what my idea would be, is getting a young...woman who may have two little children or something like that, only real bubbies or something, and put her into slavery and make her watch as the children are brought up as our own." ROSS COULTHART: Brian Keith Jones, formerly known as Brendan Meggson, but better known as Mr Baldy, secretly made these tapes in 1989 for fellow paedophiles waiting outside jail for his impending release on parole. His sordid plans even included his accomplice's own children. BRIAN KEITH JONES: "I hope you don't mind, when I come home, and if Andrew wants me to, you'll let me play around with him and love him too." ROSS COULTHART: And before his sick plot was revealed, police warned back then that Mr Baldy's release on parole was a mistake. JOHN FORD, POLICEMAN: If their decision is wrong, there's going to be another child violated and that's too high a risk. ROSS COULTHART: Sure enough, within three weeks of his release, Mr Baldy reoffended against two young boys. 15 years on, Mr Baldy was last month released on parole yet again, this time on extremely strict conditions. But there are the same fears he will reoffend. Out of sight, out of mind - across the country we lock such violent offenders behind the walls and the razorwire for as long as we can. But is there a better way, a means of predicting if a criminal is likely to hurt or kill again? For, all too often, the system sees dangerous, violent men go free, only to reoffend. JIM MCGINTY, WA ATTORNEY-GENERAL: Mr Narkle is an horrendous sex offender in this State. At least 14 known prior occasions that he has sexually assaulted predominantly young people in this State. He is one of the worst serial sex offenders that we have in Western Australia. ROSS COULTHART: In WA, serial rapist Gary Narkle walked free last year because his 14th known victim declined to testify against him for a fourth time. Earlier this year, we met his first victim, the woman he raped 20 years ago. 'GRACE', RAPE VICTIM: I have no doubt in my mind that he will continue to get more and more violent and I'm terrified that one day that he will kill. ROSS COULTHART: Today, you'll see how within weeks of her warning, Gary Narkle was charged with assaulting another two women. Professor James Ogloff is one of the Australian experts often called upon to advise whether it's safe for a particular violent criminal to be released. He and other experts argue today that that system desperately needs change. PROFESSOR JAMES OGLOFF, DIRECTOR. PSYCH. SERVICES, FORENSICARE: Decisions are being made about release and detention of people that are based on information that's inadequate. PROFESSOR PAUL MULLEN, CLINICAL DIRECTOR, FORENSICARE: What is distressing is that you have plenty of correctional services around Australasia doing things that is quite clearly proved to actually increase risk or do nothing to help these people. ROSS COULTHART: Here in New Zealand, as in Australia, there's no shortage of people who'd say it's better to lock up all violent criminals and throw away the key. But with one of the highest imprisonment rates in the world, the Kiwis are testing another solution. They're using a test they believe can predict with a high degree of accuracy if a violent offender is likely to reoffend. But is it, as the critics charge, unfairly stigmatising that most feared of violent offenders - the criminal psychopath? DR NICK WILSON, CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGIST: We're able to identify with an overall accuracy of 80% those that will be reimprisoned within a 5-year period. TONY ELLIS, NZ CRIMINAL LAWYER: Well, it's total crap. It is not the science of prediction. ROSS COULTHART: But if good science indicates a convicted psychopath like Gary Narkle is likely to hurt or kill again, do we have the right to keep such people in jail indefinitely on the basis of such tests? PROFESSOR ROBERT HARE, UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA: I would argue, yes, there are some people who are so dangerous, not only by inference from psychological tests, but by actual behaviours, that the best place for them is in prison or some sort of detention. ROSS COULTHART: Psychopaths loom large in the public imagination as the archetypal evil criminal, immortalised by the character of Hannibal Lecter. ANTHONY HOPKINS AS HANNIBAL LECTER: A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some favva beans and a nice Chianti. ROSS COULTHART: But even categorizing someone as a psychopath is controversial because, as Canadian expert Bob Hare explains, most of us display some psychopathic tendencies. Isn't psychopathy, as you call it, another name for traits that our society often values - egocentricity, a lack of concern for others, superficiality, manipulativeness? PROFESSOR ROBERT HARE: Yes, but what you're doing is you're actually making a mistake of looking at the individual characteristics in isolation. So many of these characteristics are valuable for all sorts of different things - in politics and business, in show biz for example, many of these features actually are worthwhile and lead to some sort of productive output. But it's the combination of these things that are particularly disastrous. ROSS COULTHART: Hare devised a test for psychopathy which he's called the psychopathy checklist, or PCL. And what he found when he used the test on prisoners who had committed violent crimes was that an extraordinary number of them scored highly for psychopathy. PROFESSOR ROBERT HARE: There's a strong correlation between psychopathy and violent offending and crime in general, particularly for violent offending. But again, the characteristics make it inevitable that these individuals are going to engage in a variety of different crimes, including violent crimes, but, more particularly, more interestingly, I think, violent crimes that are relatively cold-blooded, dispassionate, instrumental, rather than crimes of passion. ROSS COULTHART: Across in New Zealand, public outrage over a perceived failure in the parole system came to a head five years ago with the murder of a young newspaper journalist, Kylie Jones. This man, Taffy Hotene, had only been out of jail for two months before he abducted, raped and then murdered Kylie on her way home from work. JUDGE: On the murder conviction you are sentenced to serve a minimum period of imprisonment of 18 years. Stand down. ROSS COULTHART: Kylie's family and friends demanded to know why had such a dangerous man ever been let out in the first place. BARRY JONES, FATHER: But I think it has opened up the can of worms, that the justice system has something to answer for. The Parole Board... He didn't want to be on parole. So he was out there. That's just, to me, just astounding. ROSS COULTHART: New Zealand began to look at better ways to predict violent reoffending. Inside New Zealand's jails clinical psychologist Dr Nick Wilson made a startling discovery when he used the psychopathy check list test on prisoners who had been jailed for violent offences. DR NICK WILSON: Whereas 10% to 12% of the general prison population would meet the cutoff for psychopathy, and maybe 1% to 2% of the general population, be they criminal or not, when I was looking at my sample, they were ones who had sentences of seven years or more, so 38% of them actually met the criteria, which was quite sobering. ROSS COULTHART: Even more disturbing, Wilson's research revealed that 80% of the prisoners who had reoffended violently outside jail had high scores for psychopathy. DR NICK WILSON: Because when you're actually looking at the safety of the public, whether parole is something that can be used to encourage change or may just actually be something that gives them an opportunity to offend, that sort of decision is, quality information will assist you in making that. ROSS COULTHART: If it's possible now to isolate those violent offenders with a degree certainty, who are likely to reoffend, isn't there a case for locking them up and throwing away the key? DR NICK WILSON: No, because of the error rate you would necessarily then be perhaps damning people that had the ability to change. ROSS COULTHART: Here, at the Rimutaka Prison, just outside Wellington, prisoners assessed as high-risk violent offenders are put through a 9-month intensive program designed to help them to change. This prisoner is one of those in Rimutaka jail categorised as high risk. In jail for assaulting a police officer, he's committed a string of violent offences. He also tested moderate to high on the psychopathy check list test, which flagged him as a high-risk for violent reoffending once he leaves jail. You took issue with that? PRISONER: Of course I did. ROSS COULTHART: Now, if I was to describe to you the personality of people who have high degrees of psychopathy, you know, that are the risk factors for reoffending, it's lacking in empathy, not understanding emotions, glib. PRISONER: Yeah. ROSS COULTHART: Do you think you fall or fell into that category? PRISONER: Well, lack of empathy, I fall into that category, yeah. I just didn't really care about what other people thought. I went out and did my own thing, I didn't really care about the consequences. ROSS COULTHART: Emma Sutich is one of the psychologists running the violence-prevention program with high-risk prisoners. As she explains, it's pointless using conventional techniques that appeal to a prisoner's empathy or emotions when their degree of psychopathy means they lack the same capacity to feel as the rest of us. EMMA SUTICH, PSYCHOLOGIST, NZ DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS: So instead, you start talking to them about the kinds of choices that they've made, that have led them to offending, that have taken them to prison, it robs people of their freedom and dignity. And so people understand that the choices that they've made have had disastrous consequences for them. ROSS COULTHART: When we interviewed this prisoner, he was due for a parole hearing in a few months. He's studying for a double university degree on the inside, including sociology. But his high psychopathy score means he'll have to convince the Parole Board he now knows how to avoid violence on the outside. PRISONER: I know I'm not going to commit another crime. I'm sure a lot of people say that. A lot of criminals say that I am not coming back to jail, but I'll be pulling out all the stops to make sure that doesn't happen. ROSS COULTHART: Could he be hiding his real nature? DR NICK WILSON: The fact that psychopathic individuals have the same IQ as the general public shows that if you bring a degree of rigour to the examination of change you will pick up - they can't keep the pretence up forever. ROSS COULTHART: The preliminary results they claim to be getting here are dramatic. Without treatment, 80% of the prisoners in this unit are likely to reoffend. Is that right? EMMA SUTICH: Correct. ROSS COULTHART: But with the treatment that you're doing, one third won't reoffend at all within five years? EMMA SUTICH: Correct. TONY ELLIS: I see a crystal ball as more reliable than these tests. ROSS COULTHART: Wellington criminal lawyer Tony Ellis is contemptuous of claims the PCL test can predict reoffending. TONY ELLIS: It's a test pretending to be scientific when it blatantly isn't. All you can really assess is this person is in a class of offenders for which there is a likelihood of somebody in that class reoffending X percent of the time if they're released, but not the individual. Nobody can yet predict how a human being is going to behave in X years time. ROSS COULTHART: Mr Ellis represented one criminal who was flagged in New Zealand Corrections' psychopathy tests as a serious risk - Richard Clarence Hunia. A twice-convicted rapist with a long history of violent and sadistic sexual crimes, Hunia had to be released from jail in 2001 on a legal technicality. The Parole Board had desperately tried to keep Hunia in jail because Dr Nick Wilson's psychopathy check list test on Hunia showed him to be a very dangerous criminal psychopath, with an extremely high risk of violently reoffending. DR NICK WILSON: He was a high level of risk and certainly high and based on his presentation would have met the criteria for being psychopathic. ROSS COULTHART: A year after Hunia got out of jail, New Zealand police took the extraordinary step of issuing a public warning, alleging Hunia was a suspect in physical and sexual assaults on several Chinese women. POLICEMAN: Our main concern at this stage is a danger to other young Asian women. ROSS COULTHART: Hunia had placed these ads, wanting to meet women. DR NICK WILSON: It's very unusual for the police to actually go public and identify an offender unless they have a prima facie case because of the possible claim down the track that they've already convicted him via media. ROSS COULTHART: Hunia eventually killed himself while on the run. DR NICK WILSON: Mr Hunia was very aware that if he was captured by the police and convicted it would be very unlikely he would have ever been released based on his previous history. ROSS COULTHART: There's little doubt, even from his past crimes, that Richard Hunia was a dangerous criminal psychopath. Even allowing for the 25% error rate the New Zealanders are working on to predict reoffending, it means they now claim a 75% accuracy, which raises a very thorny question. Are we now at the stage where you feel that there's such a high risk of reoffending they should never be released? DR NICK WILSON: This is a difficult decision. We are talking about people's lives. I've acknowledged that the measure has a degree of error. Whether that's acceptable is something that only judicial authorities, or even the society, can make that decision. I personally wouldn't fly in a plane that had a 10% risk of crashing, hopefully not the one I flew on this morning, but I certainly wouldn't fly on a plane that had a 75% risk. ROSS COULTHART: Here in Australia, the old Melbourne Jail is a grim reminder of an earlier Victorian era where politicians also scrambled to respond to public perceptions of rampant crime. This was the scene of 135 hangings, including Ned Kelly's. And his death mask and many others were preserved by 19th century scientists because of a then fashionable theory that the shape of someone's skull could indicate a criminal type. That old science of phrenology is long discredited. But now some critics level the same charge at the psychopathy check list. PROFESSOR PAUL MULLEN: There's more than a whiff of phrenology. The idea that out there are these things called criminals. If only you could recognise them, then you could lock them away from the rest of us, and you can't recognise them by feeling their bumps, nor can you recognise them by deciding whether you don't like them. And a lot of the psychopathy check list is - how much don't you like this person? DR NICK WILSON: As Paul Mullen pointed out, you are making judgments about an individual based on the predictive data from a group. ROSS COULTHART: Now isn't there the risk that your test will stigmatise individual prisoners just because they happen to fall into a high-risk group? DR NICK WILSON: The only thing I would say is that unless you actually clearly identify them as a group, you aren't able to provide quality information to the decision-makers. ROSS COULTHART: Victoria's Professor Jim Ogloff studies mentally ill offenders in this secure facility. He cites the New Zealand research as one reason why systematic psychopathy testing is now under serious consideration in Victoria. PROFESSOR JIM OGLOFF: It's impressive work. My view is probably a bit more guarded, which is I think that psychopathy and measures of psychopathy certainly are central to assessment of risk, but they're one of the many pieces of the puzzle that we need to look at. ROSS COULTHART: One notorious case in Western Australia has recently highlighted the huge dilemma posed by high-risk psychopaths. JIM MCGINTY: I think anyone who has committed 14 previous serious sexual assaults in this State is appropriately described as a sex monster. REPORTER: But a jury isn't supposed to hear the record of an offender. JIM MCGINTY: Sorry? REPORTER: The jury isn't supposed to hear a prior record. JIM MCGINTY: Well, I think Mr Narkle's record is so well known in the public, there was no disclosures made yesterday that hadn't been printed and shown on television stations the length and breadth of the State. ROSS COULTHART: A Perth mother we'll call Grace has lived for 20 years with the consequences of a justice system that has failed to properly monitor and treat high-risk criminal psychopaths. 'GRACE': He's very small and when you initially meet him you have no idea of the violence that's in him. ROSS COULTHART: Serial rapist Gary Narkle was already on parole for another offence when he befriended Grace. As he's done at least 14 times to different people in the last 20 years, he turned on Grace, raping and beating her. 'GRACE': He told me that if I didn't shut up that they'd find me the next morning stone cold dead and that if I went to the police, if he didn't find me, other people would, and they'd make sure I never spoke again. JIM MCGINTY: In the case of Gary Narkle, despite the horrific nature of his crimes, he was a free man. ROSS COULTHART: Former policeman Wayne Goodsell investigated Narkle for the attack on Grace 20 years ago. He has watched on in despair as Narkle has continually been released from jail, only to reoffend. WAYNE GOODSELL, FORMER WA POLICE DETECTIVE: We are putting one person, his liberty, in front of two million people in Western Australia. Now, that doesn't equate to me. ROSS COULTHART: Because you're that convinced he will offend again? WAYNE GOODSELL: Absolutely. Have no questions whatsoever. Look me in the eye, I can assure you, he will offend again. ROSS COULTHART: Within weeks of us interviewing Grace and Wayne Goodsell, new allegations were made against 50-year-old Narkle. In May, Gary Narkle was accused of raping a 16-year-old girl in the car park of a church, here in Armidale. He was also later charged with indecently assaulting a 46-year-old woman, in February. Amid public outrage, WA Attorney-General Jim McGinty scrambled to provide an adequate response. JIM MCGINTY: Mr Speaker, the Government is determined to provide a comprehensive legal framework to protect the public from people like Mr Narkle. ROSS COULTHART: Just last year, Narkle had been released from jail after one of his alleged victims had refused to go through the harrowing experience of having to testify against him for a fourth time. JIM MCGINTY: I personally met this brave young woman and as a result I requested a report from the chief psychiatrist on ways to further protect the community from serial sex monsters like Gary Narkle. PHILIP URQUHART, WESTERN AUSTRALIAN DPP: Well, I described him in court as arguably the State's worst serial sex offender simply because of his long history of convictions. ROSS COULTHART: Narkle's original indefinite sentence last year was overturned on appeal because of a judge's error in directions to the jury. But psychiatric reports given in that hearing last year defined Narkle as a violent criminal psychopath with a high risk of reoffending. Prosecutor Phil Urquhart told the court that the longest time Narkle had spent out of jail since 1982 without being charged with a serious sex-related offence, was 14 months. PHILIP URQUHART: Every time he was on parole, for about the last 20 years, he's committed offences before the parole period had expired. That was one of the reasons why the prosecution submitted on this last occasion that he should be sentenced indefinitely, which necessarily meant, of course, he wouldn't be eligible for parole. JIM MCGINTY: It is a difficult area of the law, Mr Speaker. And we intend to bring into this Parliament, for passage during the course of this year, laws that will deal with these particular matters, and what we will do is to make sure that people like Gary Narkle, and others who suffer the dangerous and severe personality disorder which leads to serial offending, that those people are not exposed to the public where they can wreak havoc on the public. 'GRACE': He needs to be taken out of society because he doesn't believe he's done anything wrong. My concern is that he's getting more and more violent each time. He needs to be locked up somewhere for society's safety. ROSS COULTHART: If the WA Government had the legal power to lock Narkle up before these latest alleged offences, it probably would have done, but existing mental health laws just didn't allow Narkle to be detained indefinitely to protect the public. Because his psychopathy is not a treatable mental illness, Narkle can't be detained under the law. He's a classic illustration of the dilemma with the psychopathy check list test. At best, it can only say if an offender is likely to reoffend, or not. All the experts agree - it can be wrong. JIM MCGINTY: It is something which no government in this State before has attempted to be able to resolve, and that is the question, when you have somebody suffering from a serious mental health condition, in the case of Mr Narkle it was a dangerous and severe personality disorder, in those circumstances, unrelated to any offending, whether that person could be detained against their will, using either the criminal justice provisions or the Mental Health Act. PROFESSOR ROBERT HARE: I'm concerned that we're so concerned about it, quite frankly. Because if I say that somebody has, say, a 50% chance of committing a violent offence within the first 2-3 years of release from prison, that means there's somebody out there who's a potential victim. I'm just as concerned about the false negatives - saying that this person doesn't pose a risk to society when, in fact, he goes out and he rapes or kills or assaults somebody else - that's a false negative. The consequences of a false negative are borne by some innocent victims in society. The consequences of a false positive, though regrettable, are borne by the offender himself. ROSS COULTHART: Where there is agreement among the experts is in the importance of much tighter monitoring of violent offenders if we do let them out of jail. JIM OGLOFF: If you were to look, there would be a small percentage of repeat offenders who would probably be psychopathic and who aren't being monitored carefully enough. ROSS COULTHART: In NSW, Rhonda Booby is one of the Corrective Services executives overseeing prisoner treatment programs. She admitted to Sunday that she personally believes there is a case for some highly psychopathic offenders to be kept in jail indefinitely precisely because of the risk they will reoffend. Are there prisoners who are so highly psychopathic that even though they've finished their time in jail you'd have reservations about seeing them on the outside? RHONDA BOOBY, NSW CORRECTIVE SERVICES DEPARTMENT: Yes, there would be some of those inmates. PRISONER: I had a sort of revenge attitude against society. ROSS COULTHART: Here, in NSW's Long Bay jail, a group of prisoners are in therapy with a psychologist, in a program aimed at stopping them from reoffending when they get out of jail. PSYCHOLOGIST: What about this, that Trevor was talking about, getting in touch with the empathy, really looking at people as people and the effect of that on you reoffending? Do you think that's... ROSS COULTHART: It's too early yet to say if such treatment works, but programs like this are not targeted at the highly psychopathic violent offenders. And there is a concern that there's currently no law that allows any such prisoner to be kept in jail in NSW even if the experts agree his psychopathy means he's still a threat to society. Is there a case for the power to have indeterminate sentencing for people who are highly psychopathic? RHONDA BOOBY: As a personal view I'd say that there would be a case for having the power. Practically, I think it would need to be exercised very carefully and very much on an individual basis. And I think one of the issues that we should always keep into account is that often these people can be managed on the outside, but they need to be managed intensively. ROSS COULTHART: Back in Victoria, new laws will now allow notorious paedophile Mr Baldy to be monitored outside jail for up to 15 years. Professor Jim Ogloff believes the major lesson from the New Zealand research is that violent psychopaths and other high-risk offenders need to be monitored on parole for far longer than they are at the moment. What's the maximum period that we monitor prisoners who have been released into the community in Australia? JIM OGLOFF: I think in practice it's typically under a year, perhaps a couple of years. ROSS COULTHART: Is that a mistake? JIM OGLOFF: I think for high-risk people, yes. PROFESSOR PAUL MULLEN: What we actually need is longer periods of parole for people who present a risk to the community. But, of course, there are many community pressures that say we shouldn't have any parole, they should serve every moment of their sentence. If punishment is what you want, that's the way to go. If safety is what you want, then you need longer periods of rehabilitation on parole. Click here for a printer-friendly version. |
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
